The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear Friends,

I had intended to make a few remarks from the artistic point of view about the scenes from “Faust” which were to have been performed today. Since, however, on account of illness, the performance is not taking place and the lecture can therefore be independent of it, I shall arrange matters rather differently. My lecture will have to do with the scene to be given next Sunday, but I wish to stress the fact that I shall not be speaking from the standpoint of art, but from quite another point of view. It is more that to the presentation of the scene as Goethean achievement I shall add some Spiritual-Scientific observations that will also in some respect link up with what has already been said here during the autumn.

Anyone allowing this scene—“On the Upper Peneus as Before” to pass before his soul, has an opportunity to look deeply into Goethe's soul, in that this scene—as also the following one which leads to the phantasmagoria of Helen—specially shows how Goethe divined and felt the truths of Spiritual Science even though these truths did not yet come to him in clearly defined ideas. A poet whose understanding did not reach up to the truths of Spiritual Science would certainly never have created these scenes in the way Goethe has done. It would lead us too far even to speak briefly of the path by which Goethe arrived at his insight into Spiritual Science. I can do this some other time. I shall only say enough to make it clear to you that Goethe must have seen certain things in the spiritual world to be able to give this scene the form it has. It is true that what I was explaining to you a few days ago about the evolution of man as a physical-temporal being could not have been known to Goethe in definite ideas. Nor can it be said that there is anything in the course of Goethe's development pointing to definite knowledge that not until the middle of life man first gains, through his bodily organism, the capacity for self-knowledge. From our studies during the past weeks we know that it is only at about the end of his twenties that man, through the forces he develops out of his own bodily organisation, becomes capable of achieving self knowledge. If we wish to learn the truth about these matters, we have to bear in mind that man is really a complicated being. We only understand man by first becoming clear to what extent he is a creature—if I may use a term much assailed by modern science—and that this creature points us back to his creators, his spiritual creators.

Now, by a kind of spiritual chemistry, so to say, we can extract from man what he is solely by virtue of his dependence on his own particular spiritual creators, on those beings among the hierarchies of the cosmic order whose special mission in the universe reaches its culmination in the creation of man, on those beings with whom man, as man, must therefore feel himself quite specially connected. If we separate man out in this way—(we wish our understanding of these things to be exact) we can show him diagrammatically as follows:

Let us suppose that this circle represents man at a given point in his evolution; if we then trace the human being indicated by this circle backyards in the line of his emergence from his spiritual creators we have this stream which I will colour orange. Were we to go back and examine now man has evolved through Moon, Sun and Saturn ages and later through the Earth age, we should find the special characteristics of the several beings of the higher hierarchies, as they are made known to you in my book “Occult Science”. We should discover the working-together, the mutual relations, of these hierarchies; and were we to look deeply enough into this connection of man with the hierarchies, we should perceive how he is, in a sense, the goal of divine creation. I have shown how this is so in a conversation between Capesius and the Hierophant, in the first scene of the second Mystery Play, “The Soul's Probation.” I have also pointed out there the hazardous side of such knowledge for those who are insufficiently prepared.

But suppose we go on to ask what man would be like in the course of his physical development between birth and death if he were only subjected to the influence of these creators of his? He would then be the being who only becomes ripe for self-knowledge in the physical world at the end of his twenties. For these creative beings set themselves the task of so forming man that in the course of his earthly development he should attain what is to be attained on the basis of his bodily organisation, that organisation that is itself derived from the earthly and thus is akin to earthly substances and to the interplay of earthly forces. I mean that these divine beings intended to give man the opportunity through his bodily organisation to go through a period of sound, all-round preparation for self-knowledge and for the knowledge of the world derived from self-knowledge right up to the end of his twenties. Then, in the second half of his life, they intended to give him the opportunity to pursue this self-knowledge in a very different measure from that in which man, as he now is as earthly man, can pursue it. If man had only first awakened to self-knowledge at the time that the spirits of the hierarchies concerned with him intended, at the end of his twenties, it would admittedly have been late, but he would have attained self-knowledge and the world-knowledge bound up with it in enhanced splendour. He would have been able from his innermost being to give a solution to the question: What am I as man? This under ordinary conditions at the present time he cannot do. e would have had this self-knowledge as insight, as vision, he would not have had to acquire it through abstract concepts.

Neither of these things has come about. In the first half of life we do not find that state of subdued consciousness. If he had it, man, rayed through by higher intelligences and not by his own, in a life not of sleep but of twilight, would build up his bodily organisation in a very different way, in order then to awaken to self-knowledge. But such a twilight condition does not exist. On the contrary, a certain self-knowledge appears comparatively early in man, though not with the radiance originally intended by his creators. Again, the self-knowledge that arises after the middle of life is not the self-knowledge that man's creators intended. And when we ask where the blame lies for this, we come to the other currents influencing man. We come to a stream that does not actually belong to man's nature, but which is, so to say, for the time being associated with him; we come to the Luciferic stream (yellow in diagram), we come to that stream which makes it possible for man to have a certain self-knowledge in the first half of his life, although it is not the luminous self-knowledge just described.

As you know, there is another current which unites for a time with man somewhat later; it is the Ahrimanic stream (blue). This stream prevents man, as he is on earth at present, from attaining in the second half of his life that luminous self-knowledge to which his creators had destined him. According to their intentions, the consciousness of man should have been in a much more enlightened state than the one he actually enters upon during the second half of his life, which is dimmed by ahrimanic influences. Naturally we need not think that luciferic influences are present only in the first half, ahrimanic influences only in the second half of life; they both persist throughout the whole of life. But these two influences are respectively concerned at the times in human life I have mentioned, with what I have just been describing. At other periods they have to do with something else. It is very important that no wrong conclusions should be drawn from what has been said. For instance, no one ought to say he has been told here that in the first half of his life man is luciferic, in the second half, ahrimanic. That would be completely untrue. Such misunderstandings often arise and it is important that no one should be misled by them. That is why over and over again I emphasise that in Spiritual Science we shall strive to speak accurately. Much harm is done by the way in which accurately given information about Spiritual Science is then repeated in public in another form, changed through preference or carelessness.

Thus, man stands in a threefold stream, to only one of which he really belongs. The other two were not originally in human evolution but have united themselves with it for a time. We can even say exactly when these influences entered in; you will find it in my “Occult Science”—the luciferic influence in the Lemurian age, the ahrimanic in the Atlantean age.

Now we cannot say that Goethe definitely knew anything of that phase of development, peculiar to man, beginning in the middle of his life. But he felt, he divined—divined very clearly—that through impulses inherent in the world-order man is a different being in the second half of his life from what he is in the first. And if we look into Goethe's soul-life more deeply than modern superficiality generally desires to do, we see his intense longing to gain something quite exceptional for his own life from the culture of the south—the culture of Italy. And if we follow up what he himself records of the benefits he reaped from the Italian tour, for himself, for his knowledge, for his art, we begin to feel hoe Goethe wished to make the transition into the second half of his life fruitful for himself through a deeply penetrating influence which he believed it impossible to experience by always remaining in his old surroundings. Goethe was conscious that in the forties something takes responsibility for the human soul which throws a very different light upon the nature of man than a man can gain through the human forces of the first half of life. And this knowledge, so clearly divined, flowed into the creation of the second part of his “Faust”. It was always particularly difficult for Goethe to approach the question: How does one acquire self-knowledge? If we follow his development aright, we may see his struggle for self-knowledge in a most interesting, most significant light. And little by little—not in the beginning, when he was still writing the youthful part of Faust, but later, gradually—the creation of Goethe's Faust-figure, and the whole poem, acquired such a stamp that the struggle for human self-knowledge may be said to find in “Faust” its most outstanding expression.

It was in this connection that Goethe thought out the figure of Homunculus, As I said before, I am not speaking to-night from the artistic standpoint but am relating to “Faust” a few remarks out of the essence of Spiritual Science. Thus Goethe thought out the figure of Homunculus in connection with his endeavour to depict in Faust man struggling towards self-knowledge. And what did the Homunculus-figure become under the influence of this preoccupation? The answer is that it came to represent all that man knows about man. What can we know about man by collecting together that knowledge which we have about the substances and forces of the earth? How can anyone imagine that those ingredients of earth-existence surrounding us in the kingdoms of nature can combine to form man? How is it possible to think that? For Goethe this became a burning question.

Remember how, when Schiller made friends with Goethe, he wrote him a most significant letter. I have often quoted this letter because it is characteristic both of the friendship between Goethe and Schiller and of the whole character of Goethe's soul. Schiller writes

“Though from some distance, I have for a long time been watching, with ever increasing admiration, the nature and course of your spiritual life. And I have seen that you are striving, so to say, to gather together all that is offered by the rest of nature, in order at length in your mind to put together man out of the sum-total of nature's works. This is a heroic undertaking before which any other intellect would have quailed. Had you been born a Greek, or even an Italian, an imaginative force enabling you to think of man as made up of the various ingredients of nature would have lived within you from your earliest youth. Since, however, you were born as a Northerner, you have been obliged to produce a spiritual Greece in your soul, and to supply by means of your imagination what did not exist in your surroundings.”

Thus Schiller attributes to Goethe this striving to obtain a knowledge of man by piecing together all the details to be gleaned from a knowledge of the kingdoms of nature. And that is actually the ideal which Goethe had before him. What can man know about man? But then there came to him at certain times the thought that the knowledge of man possible to acquire by earthly science is in truth small, that'll is no scan that comes into being through,this knowledge—only a manikin, a Homunculus. And Goethe was often assailed by the burning, tormenting thought: “We are in the world as men, feeling, thinking and willing as men, but we really only know something about Homunculus, not about Homo. The ideas we form concerning man bear as little relation to what man is in truth as does a little manikin in a glass test-tube”.

And for Goethe this burning question was associated with another: How can that element in knowledge which does not correspond to nature, to cosmic existence, be quickened so that it may, in knowledge at least, grow near to what in reality man is—of which he knows so little that actually it only amounts to knowledge of a Homunculus. That is why Goethe makes Wagner produce this manikin, Homunculus. Then, in the further development of his poem, he undertakes to show what sort of experience a man can have whereby his knowledge of man is widened, so that out of Homunculus there may grow something at least approaching Homo.

Now it was a belief of Goethe's that the only ideas which could be acquired in his day, the ideas which could be acquired from the culture of the North, were not sufficiently pliant and flexible to carry the Homunculus-knowledge further. Goethe believed that one could do better by endeavouring to clothe the knowledge of man that it,was still possible to acquire in one's soul life in such ideas as existed in an age that was nearer nature—such as the Greek age. It, was Goethe's firm belief that, by entering into the style and the form of Greek thought, one receives a deep, significant and vivifying impression, one's ideas acquire an added truth. This feeling lies at the root of his taking Faust to Greece, of his wanting to take him to Greece, to live there as a human being and to acquire Greek culture. Had Goethe been asked to state on his honour—I put it thus strongly on purpose—what he believed the men of his circle actually thought and felt, or had thought and felt, about the Greeks, he would probably have answered: “Oh, I should think more rubbish! They talk of Greek life, but have no ideas with which to grasp it. All that our pundits”—this is the sort of thing Goethe would have said—“all that our pundits think, write and print about Helen of Greece in modern times is just philistine trash, for in spite of it all they know nothing of Helen, nor of any other Greek, man or woman, as the Greeks really were”. But that was precisely what Goethe was striving after—to get nearer Greece in his soul. Hence his Faust had to get nearer Greece and had to live as a man among Greek men. Helen—as a Greek and the most beautiful of Greek women, as an outstanding Greek about whom so much strife and discord had arisen—Helen only supplied the point of contact for this. It the heightening, widening, strengthening of the knowledge of man, of the conception of man, that Goethe wants to accomplish in Faust.

Now in that Goethe kept all this clearly before him, (but as a kind of dim apprehension that became at the same time a torment for him) he was conscious that the abstract, philosophical path to knowledge, the path of science, regarded by many as the only right one, is all the same only one way of knowledge, and he dimly felt that there are many ways,. And whoever believes that Goethe was a rationalistic philistine—as really all upholders of modern science must be, otherwise they would not be genuine scientists, for science in the modern sense is itself pedantic, philistine, and rationalistic—whoever believes that Goethe was this kind of pedantic, rationalistic, philistine, understands nothing of him. He understands nothing at all of Goethe, my dear friends, who believes that he could for a single instant have supposed that, through ordinary scientific reflection any real knowledge could be acquired of the nature of man in his fulness. Goethe knew well that the human soul cannot discover truth merely on the path of thought or even on the path of that activity which takes place on the physical place; he knew that the soul of man has to find its way into reality and truth by several paths. Goethe was well acquainted with that approach to truth which takes a deeper course than the ordinary life of waking consciousness. This conscious, waking life in which our bright ideas run round, this life so highly valued by all the pedants, lies fundamentally very far from all that lives and weaves in the world as the basis of existence. In a certain respect man approaches nearer what lives and weaves below the surface of existence if—but this must not be misunderstood—out of his subconscious he sees and feels the arising, however chaotically, however sporadically, of significant dreams. In former years I have often told you that the content of dreams is of little importance; what is of importance is the inner drama, the connection between dream-life and deep human reality.

In a pamphlet, called “Dream-Fantasy”, a philosopher, Johannes Volkelt, in the seventies of last century, ventured timidly to suggest that man in his dreams comes near the riddle of the worlds. If only he had not later rectified this terrible professorial error by respectable pedantic works on the theory of knowledge! But then he never would have become Professor Johannes Volkelt, nor been allowed to teach philosophy in Basle, Würzburg, Jena, Leipzig. For it is a heinous sin against modern science to hint such a thing as that during his sleep-life man sinks into a real, cosmic stream, and that out of this experience things emerge which to be sure show themselves only in pictures, chaotically, and are therefore not to be accepted in their immediate form, but which nevertheless reveal how man, in the weaving of his sleep, is in a sphere that brings him nearer to the fulness of the living and weaving from which the physically visible springs than do his waking moments.

Now when a man plunges into this world—a world that the man of today only comes to know through his dreams, which do interpret it for him, even if badly—his situation within the entire world-order is different from what it is in ordinary waking consciousness. Of course the dream-life alone does not enable us to perceive the difference between the life in waking consciousness and the life we live down there in the sphere whence the dreams arise. But spiritual science can guide us into this sphere. Down there even language ceases to have its correct significance. That is why it is so difficult to come to an understanding. Down there in that sphere the words which we have formed for use in the sense-world cannot be properly applied to what takes place down there. Take for instance what used to be called the elements. Today we call them physical conditions describing them rather differently, But we can quite well understand if the old names earth, water, air, fire or warmth are used. We know these things from “Occult Science”; we can call what is solid, a solid physical condition, the earthly; what has a fluid physical condition, water; what has such a physical condition that, when it is not enclosed, it expands, we call air; whereas what permeates these three substances we call warmth or fire. Yes, my dear friends, we may call them so when, from the point of view of our waking consciousness, we speak here about our surroundings, because, if I may so express it, the things we denote by these words—earth, air, fire, water—are present with us. But if we plunge into the world out of which dreams are working, there are no such things as earth, air, fire, water, they do not exist; these words applied in the same way as for the world in which we are with our waking consciousness, no longer have meaning. As soon as we enter a different sphere of existence, a sphere that has to be grasped by a different consciousness, we see at once the relativity of these things. There—the things regarded by the ordinary materialistic consciousness as absolute—no longer exist. There earth is not earth. It has no meaning at all to talk of such things when we immerse ourselves in the world that, although also a reality, must be grasped by a quite different consciousness. To be sure, there is something there which may be said to stand midway between air and water; it is experienced in this different consciousness, through quite different forms of thought. Air is not air, water is not water, but there is something midway between air, and water; we might call it a sort of watery vapour, (German – Rauch) still called Ruach in the old Hebrew language. It does not mean the physical vapour or the mist we have now, but this intermediary something between water and air.

And another intermediary thing is there between earth and fire. This you must picture as though our metals were gradually to become so glowing and fiery that at last they become actually nothing but fire, fire through and through. And these things—intermediary between earth and fire and between air and water—are down there in the world out of which dreams come whirling. As you will easily understand we could not exist in that world in our physical body, we could not breathe in that world; we have to enter it with our souls, between falling asleep and waking. With our physical body we could not breathe in that world for there is no air. I have pictured in one of my Mystery Plays (“The Guardian of the Threshold”) a being who can breathe in this world, a being having no need of air, for he breathes light. Such beings may indeed be pictured by one who knows them. But no man may take his physical body into this world, for he could not breathe there and would be consumed by the fire. Nevertheless, man is united with this world, from falling asleep to waking, and out of it spring dreams.

Now this world that man encounters beneath the threshold of his consciousness is quite unlike the world we see today during our waking hours but it is not so unlike those worlds from which the present one has evolved. Former worlds, certainly the Sun-world—and this you can gather from the description in my “Occult Science”the Sun-world was even so formed as a physical world that in it fire-earth, earth-fire and water-air whirled and simmered together, not conveniently separated as they are today. Thus, if we are to grasp world-evolution cosmically and historically, we must picture earlier conditions of our evolution as similar to what we find today when we dive down into the world to which we belong between falling asleep and waking.

These worlds, however, that were formerly physically present, just as now our world is physically present, can only be experienced today in sleep, and no one can penetrate to them unless he imagines what is no longer visible in our present world to be visible and manifest. You cannot think of water-air in the same way as today you have to think of water and air as existing side-by-side. Today you think of water and air as separate. That has come about because the water-air, substantially one in former times, has now been differentiated. Water-air is now separated into the two polaric opposites—water and air. Formerly it was a unity, water-air, but was permeated instead by another pole. Today, man has so to say descended, and has completely lost the other pole of the water-air, instead the water-air has itself separated into the two poles—water and air. If we want to get an idea of what the other pole of the water-air was, we must imagine something having reality also experienced in the world where man is between falling asleep and waking, the world from which dreams arise. But too if we go back to the old Sun-existence, we have to think of the water-air as having had side by side with it something of a spiritual nature, something of the essence of the elemental spirits. You still find the elemental spirits belonging to the water-air in mythology, where echoes of ancient truths still remain. And among the beings associated with the water-air are those that in Greek mythology—or indeed in any ancient mythology—are called Sirens. So that when out of real knowledge we say of the world we are referring to that there are in it water-air and Sirens—that it is composed of water-air and Sirens—we are speaking with as much truth as when we say of our external world that it contains water and air. Thus the Sirens belong to those elemental beings who are the other pole of water-air.

The other thing in the old Sun existence was earth-fire or fire-earth, Whereas today we have earth that has been pushed down below the level of the water, with fire or heat above it, formerly these two were one. And among those beings who were related polarically to the earth-fire as are fire or warmth to earth today, is that being whom Goethe, following the Greeks, called Seismos. By bringing Sirens into the relevant scene, Goethe points at the same time very clearly to their connection with water; not however with water as it is today, for that has grown denser and is only one pole of the old water-air. The Sirens feel themselves related to water only in a spiritual way. If we think of water as the old water-air, the Sirens belong to that water as air belongs to the water of today. And as the air produces chaotic sounds in the wind, so the spiritual element in the Sirens produces what belongs to water or water-air; the spiritual element is combined with water-air as air is with our water. And the activity of the Seismos, regarded as cosmic force, is the part played by fire in nature's economy. This is what the myth means, this is what Goethe means. And his presentation of the matter makes everyone acquainted with the reality feel that Goethe had a dim apprehension of these things. He knew that things are thus in the world we enter between falling asleep and waking, the world we find again if with understanding we turn our gaze back to the primal sources of our present existence.

But consider, my dear friends, what a shock you would have if you were suddenly in full consciousness—not as in dreams but quite consciously—transported into an element, into a sphere, where you had no solid earth beneath your feet, a sphere where everything that should be earth was fire, and where there was no earth! There you could even melt if you wished, and become hot or cold in the element of fire. And in the water-air, where you could not breathe but only experience alternations of light and darkness—think how alarmed you would necessarily be at first by the insecurity into which you had plunged, in all this surging and whirling. What then entered into man in those cosmic epochs when the earth solidified (as must once have happened, for at one time men had been living in this surging and weaving element I have described) so that he too could stand firm? What was it that took hold of man? The Sphinx-nature! This gives the firm centre of gravity in the surging element. The same force that gave to the earth the form whereby it has become this solid planet on which man can stand, at the same time wove into man what can be described, pictured, as the nature of the Sphinx.

Now in this scene Goethe introduces what can actually only be experienced between falling asleep and waking. And he believed this can best be presented not in the concepts of our modern waking consciousness, but in Greek concepts. He finds them more flexible and more suitable. Therefore he transfers the whole scene to Greece, thinking that with ideas taken from Greek nature he will be better able to characterise all that man experiences today between falling asleep and waking, all that he experienced in ancient times when air was not opposed to water, nor fire to earth, but when the Sirens formed the opposite pole to water-air, and some being like the Seismos formed the opposite pole to earth-fire or fire-earth.

So now he allows this world to make its appearance in his “Faust”. And why does he do this? It is all a question of proceeding from Homunculus to Homo, the point is that Homunculus should be given a prospect of not remaining merely Homunculus but of becoming Homo—of understanding enough to become man. Therefore his experience of the world has to be enlarged. And so aptly does Goethe bring this about that when he introduces Homunculus to this ancient cosmic world he at once places Sphinxes in it. “The Sphinxes have taken their seat”, and these form the solid element. There is a surging all around that, in these days, could not be suffered, for mortal terror would assail mankind. Everything is surging. But though the whole of hell break loose when the spirits behave as the Sirens and Seismos are doing it is pointed out that man has found his foothold—his centre of gravity:

“What a sickening thrill hereunder!”

Here is pictured the world of which I have been speaking,

“What a dire and dreadful thunder!
What a heaving, what a quaking,
Rocking to and fro and shaking,”

Were you to plunge into this world you would soon experience the ‘rocking to and fro’.

“What unbearable annoy.”

But now comes the reflection:

“Yet we” (the the Sphinxes) “budge not, though the nether
Hell should all burst forth together.”

Into the ideas of men something of such a conception perpetually flows. Men do not know it, but their ideas are influenced by what dwells at the foundations of existence. And this is the cause of many fanciful theories. The theory that the mountain ranges were formed by fire, is quite right for more ancient epochs of cosmic evolution, but this was earth-fire, fire-earth, not fire as we know it. This has introduced an element of confusion into modern ideas. And from a higher point of view, most modern ideas are confused. They can only be understood—however strange this may sound, my dear friends, it is true—these ideas, these theories can often only be understood if they are translated. They are heard in the ordinary, common-place, philistine language of men; they first begin to have meaning when translated into the language that must have been used between falling asleep and waking, for then it becomes clear that these theories bear within them faint indications of earlier earth-epochs. And the only way to understand the scene beginning here, is to realise that Goethe wanted to show the experience man would have were he conscious from falling asleep to waking, an experience that would develop in him a consciousness of a former cosmic condition of the earth.

Think how clearly Goethe must have foreseen the knowledge of Spiritual Science, to have presented these things so correctly. And that is not all. Homunculus is to be introduced to this world. Goethe seems to say—if once more I may be permitted to express it rather strongly—“Now when I turn to the ideas of philistine science, I naturally find nothing able to make a Homo of Homunculus; I can get nothing from that quarter. But if I make use of such ideas as can be acquired when a man consciously experiences the world he enters between falling asleep and waking, and, absorbing them into my soul, embody them into the scene of ‘Faust’, then perhaps I shall be more successful in acquiring, a wider knowledge of man, so that Homunculus may become Homo.”—Therefore Goethe makes Homunculus plunge, not into the philistine, scientific world experienced by man today, but into another world, introduced here, the world man experiences from the time he falls asleep to the time he wakes. In that world a man experiences so many things; curiously enough, he experiences something of how unequal in their evolutionary stages are the beings who live close to us in the cosmos. We understand nothing, literally nothing, of this world, when we consider these beings side-by-side, giving them all an equal value. When we observe ants or bees, or the whole unique insect-world in general, then, my dear friends, we arrive at the conclusion (I have put this before you at other times, in other places, as the view of Spiritual Science) that these are either forms left behind from former epochs, or forms anticipating what is to come later—like the bees, the hive of bees; they are beings projected into our epoch, though by their form they actually belong to another.

You see, when scientific nit-wits describe the world—as for instance Forel who made such a study of ants, then one finds most amazing things said. For if these people cling to their crude scientific methods, and never come to Spiritual Science, of course they are unable to give any explanation of what is really to be wondered at in this world—this world permeated everywhere by reason; not over the single ant, but over the ant-hill as a whole, over the whole ant-world, over the whole bee-world, cosmic reason, so much wiser than brain reason, is outpoured. And, in a certain respect these all really belong to a former world. Just think how aptly Goethe describes it when he brings in the ants, the emmets; and when he makes a mountain arise, as it was in an earlier cosmic evolution, and as one sees it in another sphere of reality, during the time between falling asleep and waking, he makes ants appear and begin to busy themselves with what the mountain has brought into existence. But, as companions for these ants, he makes other strange beings. For in fact the ants together with pretty well the whole of the insect-world constitute a race that does not properly belong to the earth as it is at present. This world of the ants feels itself as an anachronism in the present world. The ants have not much in common with it and have no real companions. The other animals are of quite another kind. There are tremendous differences between the soul-spiritual quality of the insect-race, for example, the ants, and that of other animals. The companions of the ants are actually not the physical animal-forms of today, but spiritual elemental beings that Goethe introduces as Pygmies, as dwarfs, as Dactyls; though the ants have succeeded in acquiring a physical nature on earth, the pygmies and the dactyls are more closely akin to them than to the beings of the present day. Thus, Goethe knows of this ant-race belonging to an ancient cosmic epoch, and introduces it covertly into this scene.

Now how has this world of ours arisen? As you know, its present condition has developed out of the old. We have now spoken of the old condition, and the present one only needs to be mentioned, for it is all that surrounds us on the physical earth. But this present earth has not come about without a struggle. It was through a mighty cosmic conflict that the old developed into the new. And the question arises: Can one observe this struggle? The answer is that we observe it when we can become conscious of waking from a very vivid dream to a condition of half-wakefulness; when we are aroused from a state of deep sleep to one less deep, and though not quite awake, are on the way to being so. We are approaching the sense-world but have not completely left the world below, and we find ourselves in a struggle closely resembling the conflict that went on when the old world was changing into the new. Again Goethe presents it all so faithfully that, while to express the old world-order he makes a dream arise, he also represents the waking from the dream by describing a struggle in the cosmos. The present comes into conflict with all that belongs to the past. The pygmies belonging to the old world come into conflict with the herons belonging to the waters of the present. The sight of this conflict as it takes place is at the same time an awakening. And Goethe makes it so clear that we are concerned with an awakening that he even alludes to what often happens on waking: one hears something that appears to be still in the dream spiritually, in imaginative picture form, and which then passes over into external reality—the coming of the cranes of Ibycus that appear in this scene. In the first part of the scene, Goethe shows us what can be experienced in dream-consciousness when it is fully developed, something which points to earlier earth-conditions; and this he believed he could more easily accomplish with Greek ideas than with those of the present day.

And now, for Homunculus. He has not yet got so far as this, for the man of today is not able to become fully conscious of what takes place in that lower sphere. Goethe intimates this quite clearly. Man today is hampered by fear, by anxiety, even though these may be unconscious. I have often spoken of this. Homunculus will not venture into that world and says so quite clearly. When he makes his re-appearance in the scene, he declares that he will not go in; he wishes to rise, that is, he wishes to become Homo, but into that world he refuses to enter.

“From place to place I flit and hover,
And fain would I in the best sense exist.
Impatiently I long my glass to shiver.
To risk me though I do not list
in aught I yet have seen. ...”

Thus it is a dangerous world into which Homunculus will not plunge. He would like to take the step from Homunculus to Homo in a less perilous world.

Now, had someone asked Goethe “Then you don't think much use can be made of the dream-world, the sleep-world, in changing Homunculus to Homo in the human head; but what about philosophy? Philosophers reflect upon the riddle of the world. What about philosophy? How would it be if Leibnitz or Kant were asked about true manhood?” Then Goethe would have put on a very sceptical expression—very sceptical indeed. He ascribed all kinds of good qualities to modern philosophers, but he did not believe them capable of penetrating into the being of man, of contributing anything to enable Homunculus to become Homo in a human life-time. Here too he thought one would get nearer by using Greek ideas. Goethe was well acquainted with the life of ancient Greece, with the times in which Anaxagoras and Thales lived. Their ideas came nearer the old Mystery outlook, they still retained some knowledge of those spiritual worlds from which for man only dreams arise. For this reason he makes Homunculus meet two ancient Greek philosophers, of whom the one, Anaxagoras, still knew a great deal of the old Mystery-wisdom, especially of the secrets of the fire-earth. Into the thinking, into the wise philosophy of Anaxagoras, ideas still rose up of the ancient Mysteries connected with what happened in the fire-earth.

With Thales, too, there were still recollections of old ideas, associated with the secrets of the water-air; but at the same time Goethe makes it clear that the conceptions of Anaxagoras though loftier, are becoming superseded, and that with Thales the new age is beginning. The history of the new philosophy, the history of philosophy in general, begins rightly with Thales. I have mentioned this in my “Riddles of Philosophy”. He is, it may be said, the original philistine, as Goethe's shows him here; he has to introduce the philistine outlook of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch that indeed in a certain, but only shadowy, way is connected with the secrets of the water-air.

Thus, in the first part of this scene in which he is describing things out of experiences of the dream-world,the world of Seismos, to which the pygmies belong, Goethe is describing all that is associated with the creative forces of Seismos. And the element of water that he uses to make the transition to the present time, describing it not as water-air, but as water, with herons and so on—this element of water he places in contrast to fire; water versus fire, actually water-air versus fire-earth. And water and fire come into conflict—pygmies versus herons. And it is the same battle, only in another sphere, transferred into the sphere of reason, that takes place between Anaxagoras, the philosopher of fire, and Thales, the philosopher of water, as has previously taken place between the pygmies as representing the earth or earth-fire, and the herons, as representing the water or water-air.

So good is the parallelism that, in this second stage of his representation, Goethe correctly shows how Homunculus, who has not ventured himself below into the subconscious element with a view to becoming man now takes refuge above in the conscious. He wants to learn how to become Homo from the philosophers, from those who would still preserve in consciousness much that should be experienced in the subconscious. But it turns out that, because the philosophers derive their impulses from different spheres of experience, they do not agree, and themselves come into conflict, the same conflict of ideas as those that lie at the foundation of cosmic conflicts. There is the same conflict between the views of Anaxagoras and those of Thales as between the pygmies and the herons—the very same.

And what is Goethe doing? He first pictures what goes, on down in the unconscious world, and then leads up to the world of consciousness but associates this world with the recollections arising from the unconscious, recollections specially clear in Anaxagoras. This is why Thales looks upon Anaxagoras as a visionary.

But we have already had to do with a second stratum, with the sphere in which the waking consciousness too is intermingled, albeit in a more or less spiritual fashion, or as I have described it, half-asleep and half awake. This is the second layer of experience that Goethe has shown. And it is very significant that he gives what is experienced in this sphere in a different form from that in which he gave the first. He makes the scene open with the Sirens. We are in the world of sleep, the world of dreams; to be in this world, there is no necessity to do anything; Goethe, therefore, simply places it before us. Then we wake up out of this world, and in waking come to our ordinary-consciousness. For a special reason Goethe has combined Lucifer and Ahriman into the one Mephistopheles. This waking he shows in the experience of Mephistopheles, and it is interesting that, as long as Mephistopheles represents the condition of being but half-awake, he is still down below, experiencing it through the Greek Lamiae. Then the scene rises into conscious life, But if Homunculus-Mephistopheles is now to enter fully conscious life, the life of reason, the man must rouse himself, he must pull himself together, and wake out of dreams to reality. Hence, when he wakes, Mephistopheles meets the Oread, who indicates very clearly in Goethe's language that this is so,

“Up hither,up; My mount is old,
And still loth keep its primal mould,
Honour the rude cliff-stair ascending,
Last-spur of Pindus, far extending.
Already thus firm-stablished
I stood as Pompey o'er me fled.
That fabric of a dream will fade
At cockcrow with the nightly shade.”

While sleep-consciousness is being shaken into waking consciousness, the Oread points out that a transition is now taking place from the world called the world of illusion—though in one way it is, as I have shown, a world of reality—a transition to the world where mountains stand firm, and everything does not rock up and down. And Goethe does not hesitate to indicate quite clearly how one wakes out of this world. Think how often we are wakened out of the world from which dreams surge by the crowing of a cock. Goethe makes it perfectly clear that we are coming up into the waking world where philosophers have to hold forth, where through what they have to say it is expected that Homunculus will become man.

There is much I could add, perhaps tomorrow. In the meantime I shall only draw your attention to the fact that, after we have done with this world, Goethe still points us to a third. And just as it was the mountain nymph, the Oread, who gave the first indication of this waking world, so now it is another nymph, that is, an elemental being, who does the arousing. The tree nymph, the Dryad, leads Mephistopheles to a third layer of consciousness, in which understanding and clairvoyance are united: unconscious, conscious, super-conscious. And, in a certain respect, Goethe already points to the world we also would point to through Spiritual Science. Only, he does so in a quite unique way. The beings whom Mephistopheles finds next are the Phorkyads.

From our coming performance you will see what pleasant, beautiful beings these Phorkyads are, and particularly what an impressive, heart-stirring language they speak! And yet, anyone realising what experiences a man must be prepared to meet, on consciously winning through to the spiritual world, will understand this meeting of Mephistopheles with the Phorkyads.

This matter cannot be completely dealt with in one lecture; we will speak further about it tomorrow.

[ 1 ] Sleep and Waking has been a theme frequently discussed in our anthroposophical studies, and from various points of view. But with the facts of life such as these, the understanding of them requires to be carried to a new depth every time, after studying a different aspect of the world. All that has been said about the Earth as life-seed of a new rising Macrocosm, makes it possible now to bring a deepened understanding to our views of sleeping and waking.

[ 2 ] In this waking state, Man lives in the thought-shadows cast by a dead and dying world, and in will-impulses into whose inner being he as little sees in ordinary consciousness, as he sees what is going on in deep dreamless sleep.

[ 3] With the inflow of the sub-conscious will-impulses into the thought-shadows arises the free, self-directed consciousness of the individual Self. In this Self-consciousness lives the I.

[ 4 ] Whilst Man is in this state, awake to the life of the world around him, through all the feelings that inwardly arise in him there run non-earthly, cosmic impulses that reach from a far distant cosmic Past into the Present. He is not conscious of this. A being can be conscious of that alone, in which it takes part through its own dying forces, not through the forces of growth which feed its life. Thus Man comes to Self-realization through the loss from his mind's eye of that which is the very basis of his own inner being. This however is precisely what enables him, whilst in the waking state, to feel himself utterly immersed in the thought-shadows. No flicker of life disturbs the inner state of participation in the world of the dead and dying. This ‘life amid the dead and dying’ conceals however the essential characteristic of the Earth-world, namely that it is the life-seed of a new Universe. Man in his waking state does not perceive the Earth as the Earth truly is; her first beginnings of new cosmic life escape him.

[ 5 ] So Man lives in that which the Earth gives him as basis for his Self-consciousness. He loses sight in his mind's eye of the true form of his own inner impulses, during this age of self-conscious Ego-development; and loses sight, too, of the true form of his surroundings. But it is just in this hovering above the stable reality of the World that Man realizes the stable reality of his I, realizes himself as a self-conscious being. Above him is the non-earthly, extra-terrestrial Cosmos; beneath him, in the Earth-region, is a world whose real being remains concealed; between the two the free being of the I becomes revealed, radiant in the fullness of perceptive knowledge and free will.

[ 6 ] In sleep it is otherwise. Here Man lives in his astral body and I amid the young seed-life of Earth. The most intense ‘will to life’ is all about Man during his dreamless sleep. Through his dreams also runs this stir of life; though not so strongly but that the man can be aware of them in a sort of half-consciousness. And in this half-conscious dream-panorama are seen the forces by whose means the human being is woven out of the Cosmos. In the passing flash of the dream can be seen the astral power as it flows into the ether-body and quickens the man to life. In the surging life and light of dreams, Thought is living still. Only after awakening, is Thought hemmed in by those forces which bring about its death—reduce it to a shadow.

[ 7 ] This connection between the dream-picture and the waking thought is of great significance. Man thinks with the same forces as those which enable him to grow and to live; only, for Man to become a Thinker these forces must be every dying.

[ 8 ] Here is the point where true understanding may dawn upon the mind, of why it is that Man in his Thinking grasps reality. He has in this thoughts the dead likeness of that by which he himself is formed and created out of a living, life-giving reality.

[ 9 ] The dead likeness! But this dead likeness is the life-work of the greatest of all painters, the Cosmos itself. From the likeness the life indeed is gone. Were the life not gone, Man's I could not evolve. Nevertheless this likeness contains the whole content of the Universe in all its glory.

[ 10 ] So far as was possible at the time, within the general lines of the book, I pointed out this inner relation between Thinking and World-Reality long ago, in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom;’ {Published in English under the title ‘The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity’} it is indicated in the place where I speak of a bridge leading from the depths of the thinking I to the depths of Nature's reality.

[ 11 ] The reason why sleep acts upon the ordinary consciousness as an extinguisher, is because it leads into the teeming life of Earth, shooting and sprouting up into the new, growing Macrocosm. When the Imaginative consciousness puts an end to this extinguishing action of sleep, the Earth which then presents itself to the human soul is not one of sharp outlines, in mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms; it is rather a living process that the soul has then before her—a living process kindled in the Earth and flaming out into the Macrocosm.

[ 12 ] Thus Man has to raise himself with the reality of his own ‘I am’ out of the world's reality in his waking state, in order to arrive at free and independent self-consciousness. In his sleeping state he unites himself once more with world-reality.

[ 13 ] Such, at the present cosmic moment, is the rhythm of Man's earthly life; outside the inner being of the world, but with the conscious experience of his own being; and within the inner being of the World, whilst the consciousness of his own being is extinguished.

[ 14 ] In the state between death and a new birth, the I of Man is living within the beings of the spirit-world. There, everything comes to consciousness, that escaped consciousness during the waking life of earth. There the macrocosmic forces pass across the scene, from all their fullness of life in the far distant Past, down to their dead and dying existence in the Present. But the Earthly forces too display themselves, which are the life-seed of the growing Macrocosm that is to be. And Man looks there into his sleeping states, as during Earth-life he looks at the Earth shining in the sunlight.

[ 15 ] Only because the Macrocosm, such as it is in the present, has become a thing of the dead, is it possible for the human being between death and new birth to lead a life which, compared to the waking life on Earth, signifies a higher awakening—an awakening which enables man completely to master the forces of which but a transitory flicker is seen in dreams. These are forces filling the whole Cosmos. They permeate everything. From them the human being draws the impulses with which, on his descent to Earth, he fashions his own body—the masterpiece of the macrocosmic artist.

[ 16 ] What in dreams is but a brief sun-abandoned glimmer, lives in the spirit-world transfused with spiritual sunlight, waiting until the beings of the higher Hierarchies, or Man himself, shall call it forth in creative work to the moulding of new life and being.

Leading Thoughts

[ 17 ] In the waking state, in order to gain living knowledge of himself in full and free Self-consciousness, Man is obliged to forgo the living knowledge of Reality, in its true form, both in his own existence and in Nature's. He lifts himself out of his sea of Reality, so that in his Thought-shadows he may make his own I his own real experience.

[ 18 ] In the sleeping state, Man lives with the life of the Earth around him, but this life extinguishes his consciousness of Self.

[ 19 ] In dreams, there flickers up in half-consciousness that forceful World-Reality of which Man's being is woven, and from which he fashions his body when he comes down out of the Spirit-world. In Earth-life this forceful World-Reality is reduced to death in shadow-thoughts, since only thus can it give the basis for Self-conscious Man.

[ 1 ] From the foregoing considerations it follows that by investigating the content of our observation it is impossible to prove that our perceptions are representations. This proof is supposed to follow from the fact that if the process of perception takes place in the way it is imagined, according to the naive-realistic suppositions as to man's psychological and physiological constitution, then we are dealing, not with things-in-themselves, but merely with our representations of things. Now if naive realism, when consistently thought through, leads to results which directly contradict what it presupposes, then one must regard its presuppositions as unsuitable for the foundation of a world view and discard them. It is certainly inadmissible on the one hand to reject the presuppositions and yet, on the other, to regard their outcome as valid, as does the critical idealist when he bases his assertion, The world is my representation, on the so-called proof indicated above. (Eduard von Hartmann gives a full account of this line of argument in his work, Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie, The Basic Problem of a Theory of Knowledge.)

[ 2 ] The correctness of critical idealism is one thing, the power of conviction of its proof another. How it stands with the former will be seen later in the course of our discussion. But the power of conviction of its proof is nil. If one builds a house and the first floor collapses while the second floor is being built, then the second floor collapses also. As first floor is related to second floor, so is naive realism related to critical idealism.

[ 3 ] For the one holding the view that the whole world we perceive is only a world that we represent to ourselves and, indeed, only the effect on our soul of things unknown to us, the essential problem of knowledge is naturally concerned, not with the representations present only in the soul, but with the things which lie outside our consciousness and are independent of us. He asks: How much can we indirectly learn about them, since they are not directly accessible to our observation? From this point of view he is concerned, not with the inner connection of his conscious perceptions, but with their causes, which lie beyond his consciousness and exist independently of him while the perceptions disappear as soon as he turns his senses away from things. From this point of view, our consciousness acts like a mirror from which the pictures of things also disappear the moment its reflecting surface is not turned toward them. He who does not see things themselves, but only their reflections, must obtain information about their nature indirectly by drawing conclusions from the behavior of the reflections. This is the standpoint of modern natural science, which uses perceptions only as a means of obtaining information about the processes of matter which lie behind them, and alone really “are.” If the philosopher, as critical idealist, acknowledges a real existence at all, then his sole aim is to gain knowledge of this real existence indirectly by means of his representations. His interest skips over the subjective world of representations and instead pursues what produces these representations.

[ 4 ] But the critical idealist may go as far as to say: I am confined to the world of my representations and cannot get beyond it. If I think that there is something behind my representations, then again this thought is nothing but my representation. An idealist of this kind will then either deny the thing-in-itself entirely or, at any rate, say that it has no significance for human beings, that it is as good as non-existent since we can know nothing of it.

[ 5 ] To this kind of critical idealist the whole world seems a dream, in the face of which all striving for knowledge is simply meaningless. For him there can be only two kinds of men: those who are victims of the illusion that their own dream-pictures are real things, and the wise ones who see through the nothingness of this dream-world and therefore must gradually lose all desire to trouble themselves further about it. From this point of view, even one's own personality may become a mere dream phantom. Just as during sleep, among our dream-images an image of our self appears, so in waking consciousness the representation of the I is added to the representations of the outer world. We then have in consciousness not the real I, but only our representation of the I. Now, if the existence of things is denied or at least it is denied that we can know anything of them, then the existence or the knowledge of one's own personality must also be denied. The critical idealist then comes to maintain: “All reality transforms itself into a wonderful dream—without a life which is dreamed about, and without a spirit which dreams—into a dream which hangs together in a dream of itself.” ³⁵

[ 6 ] It does not matter whether the person who believes that he recognizes life to be a dream assumes nothing more behind this dream, or whether he refers his representations to real things: in either case, life must lose all scientific interest for him. But whereas all science must be meaningless for those who believe that the whole of the accessible universe is exhausted in dreams, for others who believe they can draw conclusions about the things from the representations, science will consist in the investigation of such “things-in-themselves.” The first world view could be described as absolute illusionism, the second is called transcendental realism by its most consistent exponent, Eduard von Hartmann.³⁶

[ 7 ] Both these views have this in common with naive realism that they seek to establish themselves by means of an investigation of perceptions. However, nowhere within this sphere can they find a firm foundation.

[ 8 ] An essential question for an adherent of transcendental realism must be: How does the I bring about, out of itself, the world of representations? Insofar as it would be a means of investigating indirectly the world of the I-in-itself, an earnest striving for knowledge could still be kindled by a world of representations that was given us, even if this disappeared as soon as we shut our senses to the external world. If the things we experience were representations, then everyday life would be like a dream, and recognition of the true situation would be like an awakening. Our dream pictures also interest us as long as we are dreaming and, consequently, do not recognize them as dreams. The moment we awaken we no longer look for inner connections between our dream-pictures, but for the physical, physiological and psychological processes which caused them. In the same way a philosopher who considers the world to be his representation cannot be interested in the inner connection of the details within it. If he allows for the existence of an I at all, then he will not ask how his representations are connected with one another, but what takes place in the soul that exists independently of him while his consciousness contains a certain content of representations. If I dream that I am drinking wine which makes my throat burn, and I wake up coughing,³⁷ then the moment I awaken I cease to be interested in what the dream was about; now my attention is concerned only with the physiological and psychological processes by means of which the irritation which caused me to cough comes to be symbolically expressed in the dream picture. Similarly the philosopher, as soon as he is convinced that the given world consists of nothing but representations, would at once turn from them to the real soul behind them. Things become worse when illusionism completely denies the existence of the I-in-itself behind representations, or at least holds it to be unknowable. One may easily arrive at such a view through the observation that in contrast to dreaming there exists the waking state, in which we have the opportunity to see through the dream and to refer it to the real connections of things, but that we have no condition which is related similarly to our waking conscious life. To adopt this view is to fail to see that in fact there is something which is related to mere perceiving as waking experience is related to dreams. This something is thinking.

[ 9 ] The naive man cannot be considered to lack the insight referred to here. He takes the world as it is and regards things as real in the sense in which he experiences them to be so. The first step, however, which is taken beyond this standpoint can only consist in asking: How is thinking related to perception? Whether or not the perception, in the form given me, continues to exist before and after my forming a representation of it,—if I want to say anything whatever about it, I can do so only with the help of thinking. If I say: The world is my representation, I have expressed the result of a thinking process, and if my thinking is not applicable to the world, then this result is erroneous. Between a perception and any kind of assertion about it, thinking slips in.

[ 10 ] It has already been indicated why, in our consideration of things, we usually overlook thinking (See p. 61f.). This is due to the fact that we direct our attention only toward the object about which we think, but not toward our thinking at the same time. Naive consciousness treats thinking as something which has nothing to do with things, but stands altogether aloof from them and contemplates them. The picture which the thinker makes of the phenomena of the world is considered, not as something belonging to them, but as something existing only in men's heads. The world is complete, even without this picture The world is finished and ready-made with all its substances and forces, and of this ready-made world man makes himself a picture. Whoever thinks along these lines should be asked: What gives you the right to declare the world to be complete without thinking? Does the world not produce thinking in the heads of men with the same necessity as it produces the blossom on a plant? Plant a seed in the earth. Root and stem will grow. It will unfold leaves and blossoms. Then place the plant before you. In your soul it connects itself with a definite concept. Why should this concept belong to the entire plant any less than leaf and blossom? You say: The leaves and blossoms are there without the presence of a perceiving subject; the concept, however, does not appear till a human being confronts the plant. Quite true. But leaves and blossoms appear on the plant only if there is soil in which the seed can be planted, and light and air in which the leaves and blossoms can unfold. In just this way does the concept of the plant arise when a thinking consciousness confronts it.

[ 11 ] It is quite arbitrary to regard as a totality, as a thing in its entirety, the sum of what we experience through mere perception, and to regard as a mere addition, which has nothing to do with the thing itself, what reveals itself through thinking observation. If I receive a rosebud today, the picture that offers itself to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into water, tomorrow I shall get a quite different picture of my object. If I do not turn my gaze away from the rosebud, then I shall see today's state gradually change into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance section of an object which is in a continual process of becoming. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states, which as possibilities lay within the bud, will not be evolved; or tomorrow I may be prevented from observing the blossom further and therefore will have an incomplete picture of it.

[ 12 ] That opinion is quite subjective which, on the basis of a chance picture of a thing, declares: This is the thing.

[ 13 ] It is equally inadmissible to declare the sum of perceptions to be the thing. It could well be possible for a being to receive the concept at the same time as, and undivided from, the perception. To such a being it would never occur that the concept did not belong to the thing. He would ascribe to the concept an existence indivisibly bound up with the thing.

[ 14 ] Let me make myself clearer by an example. If I throw a stone horizontally through the air, I see it in different places, one after the other. I connect these places to form a line. In mathematics I learn to know various kinds of lines, one of which is the parabola. I know the parabola to be a line produced by a point moving according to certain laws. If I investigate the conditions under which the stone moves, I find that the path traversed is identical with the line I know as a parabola. That the stone moves just in a parabola is a result of the given conditions and necessarily follows from them. The form of the parabola belongs to the whole phenomenon as much as does any other feature of it. The being described above, who did not have to make the detour of thinking, would be given not only a sum of visual aspects at different points but, undivided from the whole occurrence, also the parabolic form of the path which we add to the phenomenon by means of thinking.

[ 15 ] It is not due to the objects that they are given us at first without the corresponding concepts, but to our intellectual organization. Our being as a totality functions in such a way that from every reality the elements belonging to it flow to us from two directions: from the direction of perceiving and from that of thinking.

[ 16 ] How I am organized for grasping them has nothing to do with the nature of things. The breach between perceiving and thinking is not present until the moment I, the one who contemplates them, confront the things. Which elements do, and which do not belong to the object, cannot at all depend on the manner in which I arrive at knowledge of these elements.

[ 17 ] Man is a limited being. To begin with, he is a being among other beings. His existence is bound up with space and time. Because of this, it is always only a limited section of the total universe that can be given him. But this limited section links itself in all directions, both in time and in space, to other sections. If our existence were so bound up with the surrounding world that every process would be a process in us as well, then the distinction between us and things would not exist. But then neither would there be any individual events for us. All events would pass over into one another continuously. The cosmos would be a unity, a totality enclosed within itself. Nowhere would there be a break in the stream of events. It is because of our limitations that things appear to us as if they were separate, when in reality they are not separate at all. Nowhere, for example, is the singular quality of red present by itself, in isolation. It is surrounded on all sides by other qualities, to which it belongs and without which it could not subsist. For us, however, to lift certain sections out from the rest of the world and to consider them by themselves, is a necessity. Our eye can take hold of only single colors, one after another, out of a totality of many colors, our understanding, of only single concepts out of a coherent system of concepts. This separating off is a subjective act, and it is due to the fact that man is not identical with the world process, but is a being among other beings.

[ 18 ] Now all depends on our defining how the being of man is related to other beings. This definition must be distinguished from merely becoming conscious of ourselves. This latter depends on the act of perceiving, just as does our becoming conscious of anything else. Self-perception shows me a number of qualities which I comprise in the unity of my personality in the same way as I comprise the qualities yellow, metallic, hard, etc., in the unity “gold.” Self-perception does not take me beyond the sphere of what belongs to myself. This perceiving myself is to be distinguished from defining myself by means of thinking. Just as I insert a separate perception of the external world into the connection of things by means of thinking, so do I insert the perceptions derived from myself into the world process by means of thinking. When I perceive myself, then I see myself as enclosed within certain limits, but my thinking has nothing to do with these limits. In this sense I am a twofold being. I am enclosed within the sphere which I perceive as that of my personality, but I am also the bearer of an activity which, from a higher sphere, determines my limited existence. Our thinking is not individual like our sensing and feeling. It is universal. It receives an individual stamp in each separate human being only because it becomes related to his individual feelings and sensations. Through these particular colorings of the universal thinking, single persons differ from one another. A triangle has only one single concept. For the content of this concept it is quite immaterial whether the human bearer of consciousness who grasps it is A or B. But it will be grasped by each of the two bearers of consciousness in an individual way.

[ 19 ] This thought conflicts with a common prejudice which is very hard to overcome. Those who have this prejudice cannot reach the insight that the concept of triangle which my head grasps is the same concept as that which my neighbor's head grasps. The naive man considers himself to be the maker of his concepts. He therefore believes that each person has his own concepts. It is a fundamental requirement of philosophic thinking to overcome this prejudice. The one undivided concept, triangle, does not become a multiplicity because it is thought by many. For the thinking of the many is itself a unity.

[ 20 ] In thinking, we are given that element which embraces our particular individuality and makes it one with the cosmos. In that we sense and feel (and also perceive), we are single entities; in that we think, we are the All-One Being that pervades everything. This is the deeper foundation of our twofold being: We see within us a simply absolute force come into existence, a force which is universal, but we learn to know it, not as it issues from the center of the world, but at a point of the periphery. Were the former the case, as soon as we came to be conscious, we should know the whole world riddle. But since we stand at a point on the periphery and find that our own existence is confined within definite limits, we must learn to know the region which lies beyond our own being with the help of thinking, which penetrates into us out of the general world existence.

[ 21 ] Through the fact that the thinking in us reaches out beyond our separate existence and relates itself to the general world existence, there arises in us the urge for knowledge. Beings without thinking do not have this urge. When other things confront them, this gives rise to no questioning within them. These other things remain external to such beings. But the concept rises up within thinking beings when they confront external things. It is that part of things which we receive not from outside, but from within. It is for knowledge to bring about the agreement, the union of the two elements, the inner and the outer.

[ 22 ] The perception therefore is not something finished, not something self-contained, but one side of the total reality. The other side is the concept. The act of knowledge is the synthesis of perception and concept. Only perception and concept together constitute the whole thing.

[ 23 ] The above explanations give proof that it is meaningless to seek for any common factor in the separate entities of the world, other than the ideal content to be found in thinking. All efforts must fail which seek to find any other world unity than this internally coherent ideal content which we gain by thinking consideration of our perceptions. Neither a humanly personal God, nor force, nor matter, nor idea-less will (Schopenhauer), is acceptable as the universal world unity. All these entities belong only to a limited sphere of our observation. Humanly limited personality we perceive only in man, force and matter in external things. As regards the will, it can be considered only as the expression of the activity of our finite personality. Schopenhauer ³⁸ wants to avoid making “abstract” thinking the bearer of the world unity, and instead seeks something which seems to him to be immediate reality. This philosopher believes we can never approach the world so long as we regard it as an external world.

“In fact, the meaning sought for in the world that confronts me solely as my representation, or the transition from it, as mere representation of the cognizing subject, to whatever it may be besides this, could never be found if the investigator himself were nothing more than the pure cognizing subject (a winged cherub without a body). But he himself is rooted in that world, he finds himself in it as an individual; this means that his knowledge, which is the necessary bearer of the whole world as representation, is yet always given through the medium of a body, whose affections are, as we have shown, the starting point from which the intellect forms a view of that world. For the pure cognizing subject as such, this body is a representation like every other representation, an object among objects; in this respect its movements and actions are known to him in no other way than the changes in all other objects which he can contemplate, and would be just as strange and incomprehensible to him if their meaning were not revealed to him in an entirely different way. ... For the subject of cognition, who appears as an individual through his identity with the body, this body is given in two entirely different ways: It is given as a representation for intelligent consideration, as object among objects and subjected to their laws; but also, at the same time, in quite a different way, namely, as that which is directly known to everyone, and which is called will. Every true act of his will is also at once and unfailingly a movement of his body: he cannot will the act without perceiving at the same time that it appears as a movement of the body. The act of will and the action of the body are not two different conditions objectively recognized, connected by the bond of causality; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect; they are one and the same, but are given in two entirely different ways: once quite directly, and once again for the intelligence that considers it.” ³⁹

By these arguments Schopenhauer believes himself entitled to see in the human body the “objectivity” of the will. In his opinion one feels in the actions of the body a direct reality, the thing-in-itself in the concrete. The objection to these arguments is that the actions of our body come to our consciousness only through self-perceptions, and that, as such, they are in no way superior to other perceptions. If we want to learn to know their nature, we can do so only by thinking investigation, that is, by fitting them into the ideal system of our concepts and ideas.

[ 24 ] Rooted most deeply in the naive consciousness of mankind is the opinion: Thinking is abstract, empty of all concrete content. At most it can give an “ideal” mirror-picture of the world, but nothing of the world itself. To judge like this is never to have become clear about what perception without the concept, is. Let us look at this realm of mere perceptions: it appears as a mere juxtaposition in space, a mere succession in time, an aggregate of disconnected entities. None of the things which come and go on the stage of perception have any direct, perceptible connection with any others. From this aspect, the world is a multiplicity of objects of equal value. None plays any greater part in the hustle and bustle of the world than any other. If it is to become clear to us that this or that fact has greater significance than another, we must consult our thinking. Without the functioning of thinking, the rudimentary organ of an animal which has no significance in its life appears to us as equal in value to the most important limb. The separate facts appear in their own significance, as well as in their significance for the rest of the world only when thinking spins its threads from one entity to another. This activity of thinking is one filled with content. For it is only through a quite definite, concrete content that I can know why the snail belongs to a lower level of organization than the lion. The mere sight, the perception, gives me no content which can inform me about the degree of perfection of an organization.

[ 25 ] Thinking brings this content to the perception from man's world of concepts and ideas. In contrast to the content of perception given to us from outside, the content of thought shines forth in the inner being of man. The manner in which the content of thought first appears, we will call intuition. Intuition is for thinking what observation is for perception. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge. An observed object or event is foreign to us as long as we do not have in our inner being the corresponding intuition which completes for us that part of reality which is missing in the perception. To someone who lacks the ability to find intuitions corresponding to things, the full reality remains inaccessible. Just as the color-blind sees only differences of brightness without any color qualities, so the one who lacks intuition can observe only disconnected fragments of perceptions.

[ 26 ] To explain a thing, to make it intelligible, means nothing other than to place it into the context from which it has been torn owing to the nature of our organization as described above. Something cut off from the world whole does not exist. Isolation in any form has only subjective validity for our organization. For us the world unity divides itself into above and below, before and after, cause and effect, object and representation, matter and force, object and subject, etc. What appears to our observation as single entities, combines, bit by bit, through the coherent, undivided world of our intuitions, and through thinking we again fit together into a unity everything we had divided through perceiving.

[ 27 ] The enigmatic aspect of an object is due to its separate existence. But this separation is brought about by us and, within the world of concepts, can be canceled again.

[ 28 ] Except through thinking and perceiving, nothing is given to us directly. The question now arises: What significance has perception according to our line of thought? We have, it is true, recognized that the proof which critical idealism brings forward for the subjective nature of perceptions, collapses, but the insight that the proof is wrong does not necessarily mean that what is asserted is incorrect. Critical idealism does not base its proof on the absolute nature of thinking, but relies on the fact that naive realism, when followed to its logical conclusion, contradicts itself. How does the matter stand when the absoluteness of thinking is recognized?

[ 29 ] Let us assume that a certain perception, for example, red, appears in my consciousness. Continued consideration will show the perception to be connected with other perceptions, for example, a definite form, certain perceptions of temperature, and of touch. This combination I call an object of the sense world. I can now ask: Over and above the perceptions just mentioned, what else is there in that section of space where they appear? I shall find mechanical, chemical and other processes in that section of space. I now go further and investigate the processes I find on the way from the object to my sense organs. I can find movements in an elastic medium, and their nature has not the slightest thing in common with the original perception. I get the same result when I go on and investigate the further transmission between sense organs and brain. In each of these spheres I gather new perceptions, but the connecting medium permeating all these perceptions standing side by side in both space and time, is thinking. The air vibrations which carry sound are given me as perception, just as is the sound itself. Thinking alone links all these perceptions to one another, showing them in their mutual relationships. Beyond what is directly perceived, we cannot speak of anything except what can be recognized through the ideal connections of perceptions (that is, what can be discovered through thinking). That relationship between the perceptual object and the perceiving subject, which goes beyond what can be perceived, is therefore a purely ideal one, that is, it can be expressed only by means of concepts. Only if I could perceive how the perceptual object affects the perceiving subject, or, the other way round, if I could observe the building up of the perceptual pictures by the subject, would it be possible to speak as does modern physiology and the critical idealism based on it. This view confuses an ideal relation (that of the object to the subject) with a process which we could speak of only if it were possible to perceive it. The principle, “No color without a color-seeing eye,” is therefore not to be taken to mean that the eye produces the color, but only that an ideal relationship, recognizable by thinking, exists between the perception, color and the perception, eye. Empirical science will have to establish how the nature of the eye and the nature of colors are related to one another, that is, by what means the organ of sight transmits the perception of colors, etc. I can trace how one perception succeeds another and how one is related to others in space, and I can formulate this in conceptual terms, but I cannot perceive how a perception originates out of the non-perceptible. All attempts to seek any relations between perceptions other than thought relations must of necessity fail.

[ 30 ] What, then, is a perception? When asked in general, this question is absurd. A perception always appears as a quite definite, concrete content. This content is directly given and is completely contained within the given. The only question one can ask concerning this given is, What is it apart from being a perception; that is, What is it for thinking? The question concerning the “what” of a perception, therefore, can refer only to the conceptual intuition which corresponds to it. Seen in this light, the question of the subjectivity of perceptions, in the sense of critical idealism, cannot be raised at all. Only what is perceived as belonging to the subject can be termed “subjective.” No real process, in a naive sense, can form a link between the subjective and the objective, that is, no process that can be perceived; this is possible only for thinking. For us, then, that is objective which, to perception, lies outside of the perceptual subject. My perceptual subject remains perceptible to me when the table which stands before me has disappeared from my field of observation. My observation of the table has caused in me a change which likewise remains. I retain the ability to reproduce a picture of the table later. This ability to produce a picture remains connected with me. Psychology describes this picture as a memory representation. However, it is the only thing which can correctly be called the representation of the table. For it corresponds to the perceptible change in me, caused through the presence of the table in my field of vision. And indeed, it is not a change in some “I-in-itself” standing behind the perceptual subject, but a change in the perceptible subject itself. A representation, then, is a subjective perception, in contrast to the objective perception which occurs when the object is present in the field of vision. The confusing of the former subjective with the latter objective perception leads to the misunderstanding of idealism: The world is my representation.

[ 31 ] The next step must be to define the concept of representation more exactly. What we have so far described of it is not its concept; what we have described has only pointed the way to where in the perceptual field representations are to be found. The exact concept of representation will also then make it possible for us to gain a satisfactory explanation of the relationship between representation and object. This will also lead us over the border-line, where the relationship between the human subject and the object belonging to the world is brought down from the purely conceptual field of knowledge into concrete individual life. Once we know what to think of the world, it will also be easy to adapt ourselves to it. We can only be active with our full human forces when we know the objects belonging to the world to which we devote our activity.

Addition to the Revised Edition, (1918):

[ 32 ] The view I have characterized here can be regarded as one to which man is led at first, as if by a natural instinct, the moment he begins to reflect upon his relation to the world. He then finds himself caught in a thought formation which dissolves for him while he frames it. This thought formation is such that a purely theoretical refutation of it does not suffice. One has to live through it and experience it in order to recognize how far it leads one astray, and then to find the way out. It must be a feature of any discussion concerning man's relation to the world, not for the sake of refuting others whose view about this relation one believes to be wrong, but because one must oneself experience to what confusion every first reflection about such a relation can lead. One must gain that insight which will enable one to refute oneself with respect to such a first reflection. The above discussion is meant in this sense.

[ 33 ] When one tries to work out a view about man's relation to the world, one becomes conscious of the fact that man himself creates this relation, at least in part, by forming representations about the things and events in the world. This draws his attention away from what is present outside in the world and directs it to his inner world, to his life of forming representations. He begins to say to himself: It is impossible for me to have a relationship to any thing or event unless a representation of it appears in me. From noticing this fact, it is but a step to the opinion: All that I experience is, after all, only my representation; I know about a world outside me only insofar as it is representation in me. With this opinion, man abandons the standpoint of naive reality which he has before he begins to reflect about his relation to the world. From the naive standpoint, he believes that he is dealing with real things. But reflection about his own being drives him away from this standpoint. This reflection does not allow him to turn his gaze toward a real world such as naive consciousness believes it confronts. This reflection turns his gaze only toward his representations; his representations slip in between his own being and that real world the naive standpoint believes in. Man no longer can look through the intervening world of representations to any such reality. He has to assume that he is blind to this reality. So the thought arises of a “thing-in-itself” which is inaccessible to knowledge.—As long as one considers only the relationship to the world into which man appears to enter through his life of forming representations, one cannot escape from this line of thought. But one cannot remain at the naive standpoint of reality except by artificially curbing the thirst for knowledge. The fact that in man the need is present for knowledge about his relation to the world indicates that the naive standpoint must be abandoned. If the naive standpoint gave us anything that could be acknowledged as truth, then we should not feel this need.—But one does not arrive at anything else that could be considered as truth if one merely abandons the naive standpoint, but retains—without noticing it—the kind of thought which it imposes upon us. This is the mistake that is made when it is said: I experience only my representations, and while I believe that I am dealing with reality, I am actually conscious only of my representations of reality; I must, therefore, assume that genuine reality, the “thing-in-itself,” exists only outside the boundary of my consciousness and that I know nothing of it directly, but that it somehow approaches me and influences me in such a way that my representations come about. To think in this way is only to add in thought, to the world before us, another world; but one must begin the whole thinking process over again with regard to this second world. For the unknown “thing-in-itself,” in its relation to man's being, is thought of in exactly the same way as is the known thing of the naive standpoint of reality.—One only escapes the confusion that arises in one's critical reflection concerning this standpoint when one notices that inside everything we can experience by means of perceiving, be it within ourselves or outside in the world, there is something which cannot succumb to the fate that a representation inserts itself between event and contemplating human being. And this something is thinking. With regard to thinking, man can remain at the naive standpoint of reality. If he does not do so, it is only because he has noticed that he has to abandon this standpoint in regard to other things, but overlooks the fact that this insight, which is true for other things, does not apply to thinking. When he notices this, he opens the portal to yet another insight, that in thinking and through thinking that must be acknowledged to which man appears to blind himself because he has to place between himself and the world the life of representations.—A critic highly esteemed by the author of this book has objected that this discussion of thinking remains at naive realism in regard to thinking, as it must if the real world and the world of representations are held to be one and the same. However, the author believes he has shown in just this discussion this fact: that an unprejudiced observation of thinking inevitably shows that “naive realism” is valid for thinking, and that naive realism, insofar as it is not valid for other things, is overcome through the recognition of the true nature of thinking.

• 35. J. G. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, The Vocation of Man, Berlin, 1800, “a book which for richness of content, beauty of style, elevation of thought reminds one of Descartes' Meditations.”
• 36. Note by Rudolf Steiner: Transcendental knowledge, in the sense of this world-view, is a knowledge by means of which—although no direct insight into the thing-in-itself is believed to be attainable—indirect inferences are drawn from the subjective which is known, to the unknown which lies beyond the subjective (Transcendental). The thing-in-itself, according to this view, is beyond the sphere of the directly recognizable world, that is, it is transcendent. However, our world can be transcendentally related to the transcendent. Hartmann's view is called realism because it goes beyond the subjective, the ideal, to the transcendent, the real.
• 37. See Weygandt, Entstehung der Träume, Appearance of Dreams, 1893. (Reference given by Rudolf Steiner.)
• 38. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung The World as Will and Representation, Four Books, publ. 1819 by Brockhaus, Leipzig. (English translation by Haldane & Kemp, 1883) Ref. Book I, par. 1, Ger. ed. Biographical data and translations of Schopenhauer's works, as well as extensive commentaries on his ideas have been published in English translation. Consult any standard encyclopedia for details. Rudolf Steiner edited a collected edition of the writings of Schopenhauer, 12 vols. with introduction by Steiner, publ. 1894.
• 39. Schopenhauer, op. cit. supra, Book II, par. 18.

[ 1 ] It follows from the preceding consideration that it is impossible, through investigation of the content of our observation, to prove that our perceptions are mental pictures. This was supposedly proven by showing that if the process of perception does take place in the way one pictures it in accordance with the naive-realistic assumptions about the psychological and physiological constitution of our individuality, then we do not have to do with things-in-themselves, but merely with our mental pictures of the things. Now if naive realism consistently pursued, leads to results which represent the exact opposite of its presuppositions, then these presuppositions must be deemed unfit for founding a world view and must be dropped. In any case it is inadmissible to reject the presuppositions and to allow what follows from them to hold good, as does the critical idealist, who bases his assertion that the world is my mental picture upon the line of argument above. (Eduard von Hartmann, in his book The Basic Problem of Epistemology, gives a detailed presentation of this line of argument.

[ 2 ] The correctness of critical idealism is one thing; the power of its proofs to convince in another. How matters stand with respect to the former will be shown later in the course of our considerations. But the power of its proof to convince is nil. If someone builds a house, and with the addition of the second floor, the ground floor collapses, the second floor falls along with it. Naive realism and critical idealism relate to each other as this ground floor to the second floor.

[ 3 ] Whoever is of the view that the entire perceived world is only a mental picture, and indeed the effect upon my soul of things unknown to me, for him the real question of knowledge has to do of course not with the mental pictures which are only present in my soul, but rather with the things which lie beyond our consciousness and are independent of us. He asks how much we can know indirectly about the latter, since they are not directly accessible to our observations. Someone taking this standpoint does not bother himself about the inner connection of his conscious perceptions, but only about their no longer conscious causes, which have an existence independent of him, while, in his view, the perceptions disappear as soon as he turns his senses away from the things. Our consciousness functions, from this point of view, like a mirror, whose images of specific things also disappear the moment its reflecting surface is not directed toward them. Someone, however, who does not see the things themselves, but only their mirror images, must, from the behavior of the latter, inform himself indirectly be inferences about the nature of the former. This is the stand-point of modern science, which uses perceptions only as a last resort to obtain information about the processes of matter which stand behind our perceptions and which alone truly exist. If the philosopher as critical idealist allows any real being to exist at all, then his striving for knowledge, using mental pictures as a means, directs itself only to this real being. His interest skips over the subjective world of mental pictures and goes straight for what produces these mental pictures.

[ 4 ] But the critical idealist can go so far as to say that I am closed off in my world of mental pictures and cannot get out of it. If I think a thing behind my mental pictures, this thought is also, after all, nothing more than my mental picture. Such an idealist will then either deny the thing-in-itself completely, or at least declare it to have absolutely no significance for human beings, which means that it is as good as not there, because we can know nothing about it.

[ 5 ] To a critical idealist of this sort, the whole world appears as a dream, in the face of which any urge for knowledge would be simply meaningless. For him there can be only two types of people: deluded ones, who consider their own dream-spinnings to be real things, and wise ones, who see into the nothingness of this dream world and who, by and by, must lose all desire to bother themselves further about it. From this standpoint even one's own personality can become a mere dream image. In exactly the same way as our own dream image appears among the images of our sleep-dreams, the mental picture of my own “I” joins the mental picture of the outer world within waking consciousness. We are given in our consciousness then, not our real “I,” but only our mental picture “I.” Now, whoever denies that things exist, or at least denies that we can know anything about them, must also deny the existence—or, at least the knowledge—of his own personality. The critical idealist comes then to the declaration, “All reality transforms itself into a wonderful dream, without a life that is dreamt, and without a spirit who is having the dream; into a dream that hangs together with a dream about itself.” (See Fichte, The Vocation of Man.)¹

[ 6 ] It does not matter whether the person who believes that he knows our immediate life to be a dream imagines there to be nothing behind this dream, or whether he relates his mental pictures to real things: life itself must lose all scientific interest for him. But while all science must be total nonsense for the person who believes that the universe accessible to us is limited to a dream, for the person who believes himself able to draw inferences about the things from his mental pictures, science will consist in investigating these “things-in-themselves.” The first view can be called absolute illusionism; the second view is called transcendental realism by Eduard von Hartmann, its most consequential proponent.²

[ 7 ] Both these views have in common with naive realism that they seek to gain a footing in the world through an investigation of perceptions. But within this realm they are nowhere able to find firm ground.

[ 8 ] A major question for the proponent of transcendental realism would have to be how the “I” brings about the world of mental pictures out of itself. A serious striving for knowledge about a world of mental pictures given to us, which disappears as soon as we close our senses to the outer world, can kindle itself only to the extent that such a world is a means of investigating indirectly the world of the “I”-in-itself. If the things of our experience were mental pictures, then our everyday life would be like a dream and knowledge of the true state of affairs would be like waking up. Our dream pictures also interest us as long as we are dreaming and therefore not recognizing them in their dream character. The moment we wake up we no longer ask about the inner connections of our dream pictures, but rather about the physical, physiological, and psychological processes that underlie them. Just as little can the philosopher, who considers the world to be his mental picture, interest himself in the inner connections of the details of this world. If he admits to an existing “I” at all, he will not then ask how one of his mental pictures relates to another, but rather what occurs, within the soul existing independently of him, while his consciousness contains a certain train of mental pictures. If I dream that I am drinking wine which causes a burning in my throat, and then wake up with an irritation in my throat that makes me cough (see Weygandt, How Dreams Arise, 1893),³ then the moment I wake up, the dream event ceases to have an interest for me. My attention is now directed only toward the physiological and psychological processes through which the irritation in my throat brings itself symbolically to expression in the dream picture. In the same way, as soon as he is convinced that the world given him has the character of mental pictures, the philosopher must skip over this world into the real soul existing behind it. The situation is far worse, to be sure, if illusionism totally denies the “I”-in-itself behind the mental pictures, or at least considers it to be unknowable. One can very easily be led to such a view by the observation that, in contrast to dreaming, there is indeed the waking state, in which we have the chance to see through our dreams and to relate them to real circumstances, but that we have no state which stands in a similar relationship to our life of waking consciousness. Whoever adopts this view lacks the insight that there is something which in fact does relate to mere perceiving in the same way that experience in the waking state relates to dreaming. This something is thinking.

[ 9 ] The naive person cannot be accused of the lack of insight referred to here. He gives himself over to life and takes things as real in the form they present themselves to him in experience. But the first step which is undertaken to go beyond this standpoint can only consist in the question of how thinking relates to the perception. Regardless of whether or not the perception continues to exist in the form presented to me before and after my mental picturing: if I want to say anything at all about the perception, this can happen only with the help of thinking. If I say that the world is my mental picture, I have expressed thereby the result of a thought process, and if my thinking is not applicable to the world, then this result is an error. Between the perception and any kind of statement about it, thinking presses in.

[ 10 ] We have already given the reason why, during the contemplation of things, thinking is for the most part overlooked (see page 28). The reason lies in the fact that we direct our attention only upon the object we are thinking about, but not at the same time upon our thinking. The naive consciousness therefore treats thinking as something which has nothing to do with the things, but which stands completely apart from them and carries on its contemplation of the world. The picture of the phenomena of the world that the thinker sketches is regarded, not as something which belongs to the things, but rather as something existing only in man's head; the world is also complete without this picture. The world is set and complete in all its substances and forces; and of this complete world man sketches a picture. One must only ask those who think in this way, what right they have to declare the world complete without thinking. Does not the world bring forth thinking in the head of man with the same necessity as it brings forth the blossom from the plant? Plant a seed in the earth. It puts forth root and stem. It opens into leaves and blossoms. Set the plant before you. It unites in your soul with a definite concept. Why does this concept belong any less to the whole plant than leaf and blossom do? You say that the leaves and blossoms are there without a perceiving subject; that the concept appears only when the human being stands before the plant. Quite so. But blossoms and leaves also arise on the plant only when earth is there, into which the seed can be placed, when light and air are there, within which leaves and blossoms can unfold. The concept of the plant arises in exactly the same way when a thinking consciousness approaches the plant.

[ 11 ] It is entirely arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through mere perception as a totality, as a complete whole, and to regard what results from thinking contemplation as something merely added on which has nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the picture presented to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I set the bud in water, then I will be given a completely different picture of my object tomorrow. If I do not turn my eye from the rosebud, then I will see its present stage pass over continuously into tomorrow's through innumerable intermediary stages. The picture presented to me at any specific moment is only a chance part taken from an object that is continuously becoming. If I do not set the bud in water, then it will not bring to development a whole series of stages which lie in it as potential. Likewise I can be prevented from further observation of the blossom tomorrow, and thus have an incomplete picture.

[ 12 ] It is a completely unfounded opinion, bound to chance happenings, which would declare with reference to the picture presented at one particular time, that that is the thing.

[ 13 ] Just as little is it admissible to declare that the sum total of a thing's perceptual characteristics is the thing. It could very well be possible that a spirit was able to receive the concept at the same time as, and unseparated from, the perception. It would not occur at all to such a spirit to regard the concept as something not belonging to the thing. He would have to ascribe to the concept an existence inseparably bound up with the thing.

[ 14 ] Let me make myself even clearer through an example. If I throw a stone horizontally through the air, I see it in different places, one after another. I connect these places into a line in mathematics I learn to know different line forms, among them the parabola I know the parabola to be a line that arises when a point moves in a certain lawful way. When I investigate the conditions under which the thrown stone moves, I find that the line of its motion is identical with that which I know as a parabola. That the stone happens to move in a parabola is the result of the given conditions and follows necessarily from them. The form of the parabola belongs to the whole phenomenon just as much as everything else about it which comes into consideration. The spirit described above, who did not have to take the roundabout way of thinking, would not only be given a sum of sight sensations at different places, but also, unseparated from the phenomenon, the parabolic form of the trajectory, which we only then add to the phenomenon through thinking.

[ 15 ] It is not due to the objects that they are given to us at first without their corresponding concepts, but rather it is due to our spiritual organization. Our total being functions in such a way that, for each thing within reality, the elements which come into consideration about the thing flow to us from two sides: from the sides of perceiving and of thinking.

[ 16 ] How I am organized to grasp things has nothing to do with their nature. The split between perceiving and thinking is first present the moment I, the observing person, approach the things. Which elements do or do not belong to the thing cannot depend at all upon the way I arrive at knowledge about these elements.

[ 17 ] Man is a limited being. First of all he is a being among other beings. His existence belongs to space and time. Because of this fact there [is] only a limited part of the total universe can be given him. But this limited part connects on all sides, both in time and in space, with other things. Were our existence joined to things in such a way that every happening in the world would be at the same time our happening, then there would not be a distinction between us and things. But then there would also be no individual things for us. Then all happening would merge together into a continuum. The cosmos would be a unity and a self-enclosed whole. The flow of happening would be interrupted nowhere. Because of our limitations something appears to us as individual which is not in truth an individual thing. Nowhere, for example, is the individual quality of red present all by itself. It is surrounded on all sides by other qualities, to which it belongs, and without which it could not exist. For us, however, it is necessary to lift certain parts out of the world and to look at them in their own right. Our eye can grasp individual colors only one by one out of a complex of many colors; our intellect can grasp only individual concepts out of a system of interrelated concepts. This separating out is a subjective act, and is due to the fact that we are not identical with the world process, but are one being among other beings.

[ 18 ] Everything depends now on determining the place of that being, which we ourselves are, in relationship to the other beings. This determination must be distinguished from the mere becoming conscious of ourselves. This last is based on the act of perceiving, just as is our becoming conscious of every other thing. The perceptions of myself shows me a sum of characteristics, which I bring together into my personality as a whole, in the same way that I bring together the characteristics of yellow, metallically-shiny, hard, etc., into the unity “gold.” The perception of myself does not lead me out of the realm of what belongs to me. This perception of myself is to be distinguished from what I determine, thinking, about myself. Just as, through my thinking, I incorporate an individual perception of the outer world into the whole world complex, so do I incorporate the perceptions I have about myself into the world process through thinking. My perceiving of myself encloses me within definite limits; my thinking has nothing to do with these limits. In this sense I am a twofold being. I am enclosed within the region which I perceive as that of my personality, but I am the bearer of an activity which, from a higher sphere, determines my limited existence. Our thinking is not individual the way our experiencing and feeling are. It is universal. It receives an individual stamp in each single person only through the fact that it is related to his individual feeling and experiencing. Through these particular colorings of the universal thinking, individual people differ from one another. A triangle has only one single concept. For the content of this concept it is a matter of indifference whether the human bearer of consciousness who grasps it is A or B. But the content of this concept will be grasped in an individual way by each of the two bearers of consciousness.

[ 19 ] This thought is opposed by a preconception people have which is difficult to overcome. This bias does not attain to the insight that the concept of the triangle which my head grasps is the same as the one comprehended by the head of my neighbor. The naive person considers himself to be the creator of his concepts. He believes, therefore, that each person has his own concepts. It is a fundamental requirement of philosophical thinking that it overcome this preconception. The oneness of the concept “triangle” does not become a plurality through the fact that it is thought by many. For the thinking of the many is itself a oneness.

[ 20 ] In thinking we have given to us the element which fuses our particular individuality into one whole with the cosmos. Inasmuch as we experience and feel (and also perceive), we are separate beings; inasmuch as we think, we are the all-one being; which permeate all. This is the deeper basis of our twofold nature: we see an utterly absolute power come into existence within us, a power which is universal; but we learn to know it, not where it streams forth from the center of the world, but rather at a point on the periphery. If the first were the case, then the moment we came to consciousness, we would know the solution to the whole riddle of the world. Since we stand at a point on the periphery, however, and find our own existence enclosed within certain limits, we must learn to know the region which lies outside of our own being with the help of thinking, which projects into us out of the general world existence.

[ 21 ] Through the fact that the thinking in us reaches out beyond our separate existence and relates itself to universal existence, there arises in us the drive for knowledge. Beings without thinking do not have this drive. When other things confront them, no questions are aroused thereby. These other things remain external to such beings. With thinking beings, when confronted by an outer thing, the concept wells up. The concept is what we receive from the thing, not from without, but rather from within. Knowledge is meant to yield the balance, the union of the two elements, the inner and the outer.

[ 22 ] A perception⁴ is therefore nothing finished, closed off, but rather it is the one side of total reality. The other side is the concept. The act of knowledge is the synthesis of perception and concept. The perception and the concept of a thing, however, first constitute the entire thing.

[ 23 ] The preceding considerations yield proof that it is nonsensical to seek something which the individual entities of the world have in common beyond the ideal content with which thinking presents us. All attempts must founder which strive for any world unity other than this self-coherent ideal content which we acquire for ourselves through thinking contemplation of our perceptions. Not a human personal god, nor force or matter, nor will without idea (Schopenhauer) can be considered by us to be a valid universal world unity. These beings all belong to only one limited region of our observations. Humanly limited personality we perceive only with respect to ourselves, force and matter only with respect to outer things. With respect to the will, it can only be considered to be what our limited personality manifests as activity. Schopenhauer wants to avoid making “abstract” thinking into the bearer of world unity, and seeks, instead of it, something which presents itself to him directly as real. This philosopher believes that we will never really get at the world as long as we regard it as an outer world. “In actuality, the sought-for meaning of the world which confront me solely as my mental picture, or the transition from this world, as mere mental picture of the subject knowing it, over to what it might still be besides mental picture, could nevermore be found, if the researcher himself were nothing more than purely knowing subject (winged angel's head without body). But now he himself has roots in that world, finds himself in it, namely, as an individual, which means that this activity of knowing, which is the determining bearer of the whole world as a mental picture, is after all given entirely through the medium of a body, whose sensations, as shown, are the starting point for the intellect in viewing the world. For the purely knowing subject as such, this body is a mental picture like any other, an object among objects: the motions, the actions of it are known to him in that respect no differently than the changes in all other observable objects, and would be just as foreign and incomprehensible to him, if the significance of his own motions and actions were not disclosed to him somehow in a completely different way. ... To the knowing subject, which arises as an individual through its identification with the body, this body is given in two completely different ways: one is as a mental picture when the body is viewed intellectually, as object among objects, and subject to the laws of these objects but then at the same time in a completely different way also as that something, known directly by everyone, which the word “will” characterizes. Every true act of his will is immediately and unfailingly also a movement of his body; he cannot really will an act, without at the same time perceiving that it manifests as a movement of his body. The act of will and the action of the body are not two objectively known different states, connected by the bond of causality; they do not stand in the relationship of cause and effect; but they are rather one and the same, only given in two completely different ways: one completely direct and one for the intellect in contemplation.” By this train of thought Schopenhauer believe himself justified in finding the objectivity of will within the human body. He is of the opinion that, in the actions of the body, he feels directly a reality, the thing-in-itself in concrete. Against these arguments it must be objected that the actions of our body come to consciousness only through self-perceptions and as such have nothing over other perceptions. If we want to know their nature, we can do this only through thinking contemplation, that means through incorporating them into the ideal system of our concepts and ideas.

[ 24 ] Most deeply rooted in the naive consciousness of mankind is the opinion that thinking is abstract, without any concrete content. It can give at most an “ideal” reflection of the world whole, but definitely not this world whole itself. Whoever judges in this way has never made clear to himself what a perception is without its concept. But let us look at this world of perception: it appears as mere juxtaposition in space and succession in time, an aggregate of particulars without interconnection. Not one of the things which come and go there upon the stage of perception has anything, which can be perceived, to do directly with any other. There, the world is a multiplicity of objects of equal value. None plays a role greater than any other in the functioning of the world. If we want to become clear about whether this or that fact has greater significance than the other, then we must consult our thinking. If our thinking is not working, we see an animal's rudimentary organ, which has no significance for its life, as of equal value with its mot important bodily member. The individual facts come forth in their significance, both for themselves and with respect to the other parts of the world, only when thinking weaves its threads from being to being. This activity of thinking is one full of content. For only through an altogether definite and concrete content can I know why the snail stands at a lower stage of development than does the lion. Mere sight, mere perception gives me no content which could instruct me as to the level of organization.

[ 25 ] Thinking, out of man's world of concepts and ideas, brings this content to meet the perception. In contrast to the content of perception, which is given us from outside, the content of thought appears within us. Let us call the form in which it first arises, “intuition.” Intuition is for thinking what observation is for the perception. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge. We confront an observed thing in the world as foreign to us, as long as we do not have within us the corresponding intuition which fills in the piece of reality missing in the perception. For someone who does not have the ability to find the intuitions which correspond to the things, full reality remains closed. Just as the colorblind person sees only differences in brightness without the qualities of color, so the person without intuition can only observe unconnected perceptual fragments.

[ 26 ] To explain a thing, to make it comprehensible, means nothing other than to set it into the context out of which it has been torn through the configuration of our organization described above. There is no such thing as an object separated off from the whole world. All separating off has only subjective validity for our organization. For us the whole world breaks down into above and below, before and after, cause and effect, thing and mental picture, matter and force, object and subject, etc. The single things which confront us in observation join themselves together, part by part, through the interconnected, unified world of our intuitions; and through thinking we join together again into oneness everything which we have separated through our perceiving.

[ 27 ] The puzzling aspect of an object lies in its separate existence. This puzzling aspect, however, is evoked by us, and can, within the conceptual world, also be dispelled again.

[ 28 ] Other than through thinking and perceiving, nothing is given us directly. The question now arises as to how things stand, in the light of these considerations, with respect to the significance of the perception. We have, to be sure, recognized that the proof which critical idealism brings of the subjective nature of our perceptions collapses; but along with this insight into the incorrectness of its proof, it is still not yet determined that the view itself is based on error. Critical idealism, in marshalling its proof, does not take its start form the absolute nature of thinking, but rather bases itself upon the fact that naive realism, consistently pursued, cancels itself out. How does the matter present itself if the absoluteness of thinking is recognized?

[ 29 ] Let us assume that a certain perception, red for example, arises in my consciousness. The perception shows itself, as I continue looking, to be connected with other perceptions, for example with that of a certain shape, with certain temperature and tactile perceptions. This combination I designate as an object of the sense world. I can now ask myself what else is to be found, besides this object, in that section of space within which the above perceptions appear to me. I will find mechanical, chemical, and other processes within this part of space. Now I go further and investigate the processes that I find on the way from the object to my sense organ. I can find processes of motion within an elastic medium which, by their very nature, do not have the least thing in common with the original perceptions. I get the same result when I investigate the further transmitting from sense organ to brain. In each of these areas I have new perceptions, but what weaves as a connecting medium through all these spatially and temporally separated perceptions is thinking. The vibrations of the air which transmit the sound are given to me as perceptions in exactly the same way as the sound itself. Only thinking joins all these perceptions to each other and reveals them in their mutual interrelationships. We cannot say that anything other than what is directly perceived exists except what is known through the ideal interconnections of our perceptions (ideal in that they are to be discovered through thinking). The relationship, going beyond what is merely perceived, of the object of perception to the subject of perception, is therefore a purely ideal one, that means, expressible only through concepts. Only in the event that I could perceive how the object of perception affects the subject of perception, or, the other way round, that I could observe the building up of the perceptible entity by the subject, would it be possible to speak as does modern physiology and the critical idealism founded upon it. This view confuses an ideal relationship (of the object to the subject) with a process which could only be spoken of if it were perceivable. The sentence: “No color without a color-sensitive eye,” therefore cannot mean that the eye brings forth the color, but rather only that an ideal connection, knowable through thinking, exists between the perception “color” and the perception “eye.” Empirical science will have to determine how the characteristics of the eye and those of colors relate to each other; through which configurations, the organ of sight transmits the perception of colors, etc. I can follow how one perception follows upon another, how it stands spatially in relationship with other perceptions; and I can bring this then into a conceptual formulation; but I cannot perceive how a perception comes forth out of the unperceivable. All endeavors to seek relationships between perceptions other than thought relationships must necessarily founder.

[ 30 ] What, then, is a perception? This question, when asked in a general way, is absurd. A perception always arises as an entirely specific one, as a definite content. This content is directly given, and is all that is in the given. One can only ask with respect to this given, what it is besides perception, i.e., what it is for thinking. Thus, the question about the “what” of a perception can only refer to the conceptual intuition that corresponds to it. From this point of view the question the question as to the subjectivity of the perception in the sense of critical idealism cannot be raised at all. Only that may be labeled as subjective which is perceived as belonging to the subject. To form the bond between subjective and objective is not the task of any real process in the naive sense, i.e. of any perceptible happening; rather, it is the task of thinking alone. For us, therefore, something is objective which presents itself to perception as situated outside of the perceiving subject. My perceiving subject remains perceptible to me when the table now standing in front of me will have disappeared from the circle of my observations. The observation of the table has called forth in me a change, which likewise remains. I retain the ability to create a picture of the table again later. This ability to bring forth a picture remains connected with me. Psychology calls this picture a memory picture. It is, however, that which alone can rightly be called the mental picture of the table. This picture corresponds, namely, to the perceptible change of my own state through the presence of the table within my field of vision. And indeed, this change does not refer to any “I-in-itself” standing behind the perceiving subject, but rather the change of the perceptible subject himself. The mental picture is therefore a subjective perception in contrast to the objective perception when the object is present on the horizon of perception. The confusing of the subjective with the objective perception leads to the mistaken view of idealism: that the world is my mental picture.

[ 31 ] It will now be our next task to determine more closely the concept of the mental picture. What we have brought forward so far about the mental picture is not its concept, but only indicates the path along which it is to be found within the field of perception. The exact concept of the mental picture will then also make it possible for us to gain a satisfactory explanation of the relationship of mental picture and object. This will then also lead us over the boundary where the relationship between human subject and the object belonging to the world will be led down from the purely conceptual field of knowing activity into our concrete individual life. Once we know what to make of the world, it will be an easy matter also to orient ourselves accordingly. We can be active with our full strength only when we know the object, belonging to the world, to which we are devoting our activity.

Addendum to the Revised Edition of 1918

[ 32 ] The view characterized here can be regarded as one to which man is at first as though naturally impelled when he begins to reflect upon his relationship to the world. He seems himself entangled in a thought configuration which unravels for him as he is forming it. This thought configuration is of such a kind that everything necessary for it is not yet fulfilled with its merely theoretical refutation. One must live it through in order, out of insight into the aberration into which it leads, to find the way out. It must appear within an investigation of the relationship of man to the world, not because one wants to refute others whom one believes to hold an incorrect view about this relationships, but rather because one must know what perplexity every first reflection upon such a relationship can bring. One must gain the insight as to how one can refute oneself with respect to these first reflections. This is the point of view from which the above line of argumentation is put forward.

[ 33 ] Whoever wants to develop for himself a view about the relationship of man to the world becomes conscious that he brings about at least a part of this relationship through the fact that he makes mental pictures for himself about the things and occurrences of the world. Through this, his gaze is drawn away from what is outside in the world and directed upon his inner world, upon his life of mental pictures. He begins to say to himself, “I can have a relationship to no thing and to no occurrence, if a mental picture does not arise in me.” From noting this fact, it is only a step to the opinion that I do, after all, experience only my mental picture: I know of a world outside of me only insofar as it is a mental picture within me. With this opinion the naive standpoint of reality is abandoned which the human being takes before any reflecting about his relationship to the world. From this standpoint, he believes he has to do with real things. Self-reflection forces him away from this standpoint. It does not let him look at all upon a reality such as naive consciousness believes to have before itself. It lets him look merely upon his mental pictures; these interpose themselves between one's own being and a supposed real world such as the naive standpoint believes itself justified in affirming. The human being can no longer look through the intervening world of mental images, upon a reality such as that. He must assume that he is blind to this reality. In this way there arises the thought of a “thing-in-itself” which is inaccessible to knowledge.—So long as one goes no further than to contemplate the relationship to the world into which man seem to enter through his life of mental pictures, one will not be able to escape this thought configuration. One cannot remain at the naive standpoint of reality if one does not want to close oneself off artificially to the desire for knowledge. The fact that this desire for knowledge about the relationship of man and world is present, shows that this naive standpoint must be abandoned. If the naive standpoint offered something which one can acknowledge as the truth, then one could not feel this desire.—But one does not arrive at something different which one could regard as the truth, if one merely abandons the naive standpoint, but—without noticing it—retains the kind of thinking which this standpoint imposes. One falls into just such an error when one says to oneself, “I experience only my mental pictures, and although I believe that I am dealing with realities, I am only conscious of my mental pictures of realities; I must therefore assume that only outside of the circle of my consciousness do the true realities, the ‘things-in-themselves,’ life, of which I know absolutely nothing directly, which somehow approach me and influence me in such a way that my world of mental pictures arises in me.” Whoever thinks in this way only adds in thought, to the world lying before him, another one; but, with respect to this world, he would actually have to start all over again from the beginning with his thought work. For the unknown “thing-in-itself” is thereby thought to be no different at all in its relationship to man's own being than the known thing of the naive standpoint of reality.—One escapes the perplexity into which one comes through pondering this standpoint critically only when one notices that there is something—within what a person can experience and perceive inside himself and outside in the world—that absolutely cannot suffer the fate of having the mental picture interpose itself between the occurrence and the contemplating human being. And this is thinking. With respect to thinking, the human being can remain upon the naive standpoint towards reality. If he does not do so, it is only because he has noticed that for something else he must abandon this standpoint, but does not become aware that the insight thus gained is not applicable to thinking. If he becomes aware of this, then he opens the way for himself to the other insight, that within thinking and through thinking, he must come to know that element to which man seems to blind himself through the fact that he must interpose his life of mental pictures between the world and himself.—The author of this book has been reproached by someone highly esteemed by him for remaining, in his consideration of thinking, at a naive realism of thinking like the sort which exists when one regards the real world and the mentally pictured world as one. But the author of these considerations believes that he has in fact shown that the validity of this “naive realism” for thinking does necessarily follow out of an unprejudiced observation of thinking; and that the naive realism which is otherwise not valid is overcome through the knowledge of the true being of thinking.

• 1. Die Bestimmung des Menschen
• 2. In terms of this world view, knowledge is called transcendental which believes itself to be conscious of the fact that nothing can be directly stated about the things-in-themselves, but which draws indirect inference, from the known subjective, about the unknown lying beyond the subjective (the transcendental). According to this view, the thing-in-itself is beyond the sphere of the world directly knowable for us: i.e., it is transcendent. Our world, however, can be related to the transcendental transcendentally. Hartmann's view is called realism, because it goes out beyond the subjective, the ideal, to the transcendental, the real.
• 3. Entstehung der Träume
• 4. By “perception” Rudolf Steiner still means the object of perception, not the act of perceiving. See pages 32–34.

Human existence is at a number of different levels of consciousness today. The ordinary state is the one in which we are from waking up to going to sleep. In this state we perceive things through the senses and develop ideas based on our sensory perceptions. The physical world exists for us because of this, and our powers of soul, our thinking, feeling, will intent and actions relate to this world.

Two other states of consciousness regularly take the place of the one above—dream-filled sleep and deep, dreamless sleep. These are often referred to as ‘unconscious’, but the term masks the true situation. In reality they are merely different kinds of consciousness. We might call them dimmer forms of consciousness.

Dream-filled sleep does not present objects, the way waking daytime consciousness does, but images which arise in the soul and pass away again. In the light of our ordinary consciousness, these images may seem highly confusing, yet if we gain clarity about their essential nature they can take us more deeply into the nature of the world. The way they present themselves in the soul’s night-time life cannot provide a proper basis for perceptive insight into them. This only arises for someone who develops his higher powers of insight, as described in this book,¹ which will give him insight into the worlds that lie beyond the one perceived by the senses. In this chapter, a description will be given of the true facts relating to those higher worlds. Anyone who follows the way that leads to insight into these regions will then also find these facts to be true.

The first thing to strike one when it comes to the world of dreams is the allegorical character of its images. This can emerge clearly if we pay reasonably subtle attention to the colourful richness and variety of dream events. This world, which passes fleetingly through the soul, offers all intermediate stages from simple allegory to dramatic event. You dream of a conflagration; you wake up and find that you had gone to sleep by the lamp. The light of the lamp was perceived in your dream, not the way it appears to the senses in the ordinary world but as an allegorical conflagration. Or you dream that you hear a group of horsemen ride past. You wake up, and the sound of the horses’ hooves merges into the striking of the clock which has thus found an allegorical form. You dream of an animal scratching the side of your face. You wake up and find that you feel pain in that area; this pain had found its own allegory in your dream. A longer dream might be something like this. Someone dreams he is walking through woods. He hears a sound. As he moves on, someone emerges from some bushes and attacks him. A struggle ensues and the attacker shoots. At that moment the dreamer wakes up and finds that he has just knocked over the chair beside his bed. The chair hitting the floor had been transformed into the allegorical action in his dream consciousness. External events or also internal ones, as in the example of the scratching animal, may be perceived as allegories through the dream. Affects and moods may also take this form. Thus someone may have an oppressive feeling that something unpleasant is going to happen during the next few days. In his dream the feeling comes to expression in that he finds himself in danger of drowning.

The above examples characterize two qualities of dream-level consciousness—an image nature and something creative within this. Our daytime consciousness does not have this creative quality. It presents the objects that surround us the way they are in the physical world outside. Consciousness at dream level adds something which comes from a different source.

What causes this source to open up? Nothing else but that the function of the senses, on which daytime consciousness depends, has ceased in sleep. It has fallen silent, which is evident from the fact that the human being no longer has self awareness. This self-awareness is bound up with the function of the physical senses; when these fall silent, it goes down into an abyss. In the science of the spirit we refer to this by saying that the human soul has withdrawn from the physical world. Unless you want to insist that human beings cease to exist on going to sleep and are recreated on waking up, you will not find it difficult to realize that in their sleep human beings exist in a world which is not the physical world. This world is called the astral world. For the moment readers may take this term to be a name for the world of which human beings get something of an idea through their dreams. Other chapters in this book will give the term its full justification.²

In their dreams, human beings are in the astral world. The realities and entities of this world appear in images. The conscious mind perceives these images; but human beings have no self-awareness. An analogy from everyday life can give an idea of what the situation is. Human beings only perceive the world around them in so far as they have the organs for doing so. If they had no ears there’d be no world of sound for them, nor a world of light and colour without eyes, and so on. If human beings were to develop a new organ in their bodies, something completely new would also appear in their environment, just as light and colour appear as something completely new for someone who was born blind and has had an operation.

Just as the human physical body perceives the physical world through its organs, so does another body—a soul body—perceive the other, astral world through its own organs when we dream. It is merely that there is no self-awareness with this body. self-awareness is outside the human sphere when we are in this state.

If it were impossible for human self-awareness to arise in this state as well, we would never be able to see through the conditions which pertain here. It is however possible with the higher training, also called initiation, which has been mentioned above and is described in this book. With it we learn to develop organs in the astral body when we are in the dream state, and these are similar to the organs our physical body has for the perception of the physical world. Once these organs have developed, a self-awareness arises during the dream which is similar to the self-awareness we have in our waking life. Once this level of existence is reached the whole world of our dreams will also change to a considerable degree. It will lose the confusing richness of variety which it has in the ordinary sleeper, with an inner order and harmony taking its place which is not just the equal of our ordinary physical world but goes well beyond it with regard to these qualities. Human beings then realize that another world has always existed around them, just as the world of light and colour exists around someone who is blind. They merely were not able to see it because they did not have the organs for it, just as a blind person cannot see the world of light and colour before his operation. The significant moment when the astral organs of perception begin to function in a person is called the ‘awakening’ or ‘rebirth’ in occult science.

At this moment of awakening the individual finds himself surrounded by a higher world where things he knew before in the world of the senses have different qualities and, what is more, facts and entities exist that were unknown to him before. He will now also realize that this other world holds the images out of which the objects in the world perceived through the senses take form. It is not a bad idea to compare the way in which the physical world arises from the astral world with the way ice forms in water. Just as ice is transformed water, so the physical world is transformed astral world. And just as water is always in a state of flux, so we have the astral world as a constantly changing world of images which lies behind the physical world. The astral forms do not have the firm definition and contours we know in the ordinary world. Everything is in flux and changing. And a physical object or entity only arises as if such a flowing image were to be frozen, in a way, for a moment. Anyone wanting to apply the ideas of the physical world with its clearly defined outlines to the astral region would merely show that he does not have real insight into this world, which is of a completely different kind.

Just as the entities of the physical world are embodied in a physical body, so are the astral images a reflection of entities which do not enter into the physical world. They come to expression in a different kind of matter than does the human being living in the physical world and coming to expression in flesh and blood.

What is the nature of this astral matter? It is indeed a form of matter which human beings also have in them. It is merely that in waking everyday life it is covered over, as it were, by ideas based on the world of the senses. Human desires, wishes and dislikes, sympathies and antipathies relate to the things perceived through the senses. People desire one object and reject another. It is nowhere else but in these desires, wishes and dislikes that the source must be sought on which the state of consciousness we have in our dreams also draws when objects are transformed into allegories. The self-awareness we have by day gives our desires and wishes the nourishment they require, taking it from perceptions gained in the outside world. If the activities of the outer senses fall silent, a different, creative power comes into play and creates the images from material consisting of wishes and desires. In occult science it is said that the dreaming human being is in an astral body woven of wishes and desires and that the physical body is then without self awareness. As to initiates, or those who have been awakened, they, too, have left their physical bodies, but their self-awareness resides in their astral bodies. Just as the physical body is able to convey perception of physical things because its organs are made of the same material as the physical world, so is the initiate able to perceive the entities of the astral world because he has organs made of the material of the wishes and desires in which those entities come to expression.

The difference between non-initiates and initiates is that the astral world does not become visible to the former as an outside world, whilst it does so for the latter. This astral world remains mere inner world for those who are not awakened; they live it in their wishes and desires; but they do not see them. The initiate does not merely feel a wish; he perceives it as an object in the outside world, just as someone who is not awakened perceives tables and chairs.

The ordinary world of dreams is, however, only a faint echo of the world perceived by the initiate. This is inevitable, as there is no self-awareness involved. Yet where is our self-awareness during a dream? It has withdrawn to a higher world where initially the human being does not exist as such. Our relationship to that world may be shown in an analogy. Think of a human hand and a tool held in that hand. For as long as the hand is holding the tool the two are a whole, as it were. The latter does what the former decides. However, as soon as the hand puts the tool aside, this is left to itself; the movements of the hand merely express the will of the individual to whom the hand belongs. The physical body in daytime waking life should thus be seen as the tool of a limb belonging to a higher spiritual entity. If this extends a limb, as it were, into the physical body, sensory functions and hence self-awareness arise in that body. self-awareness ceases when the limb leaves the body. The inmost essential spirit of the human being, which is capable of self-awareness, is thus a part of a higher spirit which is extended, as it were, for periods of time and clothed in the physical body. We can get an even better idea of this if we consider the extension to go hand in hand with a tying-off process, as if a drop were to separate out from the higher spirit in our waking hours which is then absorbed again during sleep. In their waking hours, human beings are not aware of their connection with a higher spirit; they are thus truly cut off from it. During sleep, they have to be without self-awareness, for it then withdraws into the higher spirit; this absorbs it, and it rests within it.

The world of images vanishes in dreamless sleep. The physical body then seems to be lying there wholly without conscious awareness; in reality, however, its state of conscious awareness is merely one that is dimmer than the one it had in dream-filled sleep. The power to produce images has also left the physical body. Because of this, only the insights gained by individuals who have been awakened can provide insight into this state. Those who have not been awakened lack perceptions of it. For someone who has been awakened, however, the image-producing body, which before this was still loosely connected with the physical body, shows itself to have been lifted out of it. And it is not inactive now but serves to restore the energies of the physical body, which show themselves to have been exhausted when we are tired, doing so to the required level. This explains the refreshing effect of sound sleep. Tired, the physical body falls asleep. At this moment it hands its self awareness over to higher spirits. In the in-between state of dream-filled sleep the soul is still loosely connected with the physical body. The characteristic aspect of this soul is its creative nature. From the moment of waking up, it begins to use its creative powers to make perceptions mediated through the senses part of our inner life. On falling asleep, there are no more sensory perceptions of the outside world. In the in-between state of dreaming the creative element is still active, transforming itself into the allegorical images I have described; then the allegorical images also cease to develop; the soul turns the whole of its creative power to the body, on which it now works from the outside.

Anyone wishing to set the insights presented in occult science aside, would have to realize the nature of the soul’s night-time activity simply from the fact that we feel refreshed when we wake up in the mornings. Daytime life has inharmonious, chaotic qualities. Things from the physical surroundings influence human beings from all sides. First one thing enters into their inner life and then another. This brings the inner creative powers out of the order which is theirs by nature. Order and balance is restored during the night. The soul restores order and harmony. With the life we live by day the physical body gradually comes to look like a body of air with wind currents passing through it from all sides, with different parts of that body of air showing irregular relative movements. On waking up, the physical body may be compared to a body of air set in regular oscillation by the rhythm and harmony of a piece of music. And initiates do indeed perceive the work the soul does on the body during sleep as though it were a penetration with sound. In their sleep, human beings enter into the harmony of the inner life. This is the very harmony out of which they were created. Before the physical body first opened up to the outside world through its sense organs, it was wholly under the influence of this harmony which differentiated it. This is the harmony of soul, the music of the soul, which passes through the whole world. Human beings are surrounded by its sounds just as they are surrounded by the images of which I spoke earlier. This image world is the perceived real environment for those who achieve awakening through inner training, and at an every higher level this is also true for this third world. Sounds begin to arise around them. And in these sounds, the meaning of the world becomes apparent to them. Just as the form of the physical world has arisen from the images, so were these forms given their inner meaning and nature out of the sounds I have described. From this point of view all things are sound become form.

When awake, therefore, the human being is made up of three bodies:

1. the physical body, which perceives the physical world through organs implanted in it from the outside world and which encompasses self-awareness;

2. a body which has an inwardly mobile image character; its images are at the same time the archetypes of the physical body, the firmly defined forms of which have arisen, as it were, by becoming still and frozen out of the continually changing images of the second body;

3. both the physical body and the image body are filled with a harmony of sound, which is a third body. In dream-filled sleep the soul withdraws from the physical body; it remains connected with the other two bodies, sounding throughout the sound body and filling the image body with images. The latter influence the physical body and impart to it dream images that are like shades. In dreamless sleep the soul is connected only with the sound body; the part of it which was in the physical body during waking hours is now outside it and works on it from the outside. This activity which flows from the soul to the physical body produces a level of consciousness which is so dim that the human being does not perceive it.

These in fact are three states of consciousness for the physical body—daytime waking consciousness, the dream state and the dreamless sleep state. The dimness of the last two clears for the initiate; thanks to this he lives in higher worlds just as the unawakened live in the physical world around them in daytime waking life. This gives us five states of consciousness, and in progressive order of clarity they may be listed as follows:

1. the dreamless sleep state
2. the dream-filled sleep state
3. daytime waking consciousness
4. the initiate’s image level of conscious awareness
5. the initiate’s level of conscious awareness in sound

If we consider that initiates reach the last two levels as a stage of higher human development with their training in occult science, we realize that daytime waking consciousness is a level which is higher than the two which lie below it and has therefore developed from them. This is taught in occult science. There we learn that in a far distant past the human being went through a stage of evolution where he had only a dim sleep level of consciousness without any dream images; he then rose to a dim state of dream-filled consciousness before he finally arrived at the daytime waking consciousness he has today. Someone preparing for initiation takes this line of evolution further. He develops the two higher forms of conscious awareness.

There is an even higher level of conscious awareness which an initiate may reach. It is evident from the above that at the level of awareness of sound the soul is still connected with the human body. This connection may, however, cease altogether. The soul can leave the body altogether. An initiate learns to do this. If he still wants to perceive something at that point he must have developed organs of a still higher kind. When that is the case, the meaning of the world comes to direct expression in his environment, without sound to mediate it. This level of awareness, which for the time being we’ll call the highest, is called spiritual awareness, or consciousness in pure spirit. If we go back to the list above, this level would have to correspond to a state for the human being where consciousness is even duller than in dreamless sleep. This is in fact the case, in general terms. Human beings of the present age are not yet able to live out this state in reality. The soul would have to be completely out of the body; a wholly soulless state would have to interrupt dreamless sleep. This would in fact mean that the physical body was completely given over to itself, that is, temporarily dead. This is something to which the physical body must not be exposed lest it run the risk of being no longer capable of receiving the soul into itself.

In evolution, however, this state did indeed precede the level of dreamless sleep consciousness. The complete sequence of human levels of consciousness is thus the following:

1. a low level of consciousness, the dimmest of all
2. the dreamless sleep state
3. the dream-filled sleep state
4. daytime waking consciousness
5. the initiate’s image level of conscious awareness
6. the initiate’s level of conscious awareness in sound
7. spiritual awareness

At the present time, the living human body has only advanced to the fourth level. Initiates can reach the higher kinds of consciousness. These also take them into higher worlds. Human evolution should be thought of, however, as the physical body itself evolving in the first three stages, having now reached a level where it still shows two other forms of conscious awareness in sleep which are remnants of earlier stages. The first stage has become completely obscured in the course of evolution. The three higher stages for initiates cannot yet come to expression in the physical body at the present time because it cannot develop organs for it. They are prophetic advance evidence of forms which the physical body will assume in future.

If we take the above as our basis for getting a real picture of the world as it is today, it is seen to be fourfold—firstly the physical world perceived by the physical senses, then a world of images which surrounds and penetrates this, furthermore a world of sound which is present in every part of those other two, and finally a spiritual world which lies behind it all.

This world was preceded by one in which man lived as in a dream. At that time the condition of his physical body was like the one in which he finds himself in his dream-filled sleep today. His surroundings were like a panorama of shifting images. Nothing was clearly outlined. This condition was at the time interrupted by another which is like our dreamless sleep today, and this in turn gave way to one which can no longer be realized today and was filled with the level of conscious awareness given as the first in the list above.

In a world that existed even earlier, man could not rise to living experience of dream images. The highest level of consciousness was that of dreamless sleep. This condition was interrupted by the lower and most dim consciousness which today has already become obscured; this in turn by a condition which has lost all significance where present-day evolution is concerned.

In the first world of which we hear in occult science, man also did not have the dull consciousness of sleep; the first of the states described above was then the highest; two others which do not come into consideration today, alternated with it.

Thus we look back to evolution in a far distant past; we perceive four stages which the human physical body has gone through. We also look into the future, when the three levels of higher consciousness which today can be reached by initiates will come to realization in the physical world. Our world will yield to a future world where human physical bodies will have organs by which a human being will be able to perceive an forever shifting world of images whilst also having self awareness, and will indeed see himself as such a world. Beyond this we perceive a world where the images will be filled with harmonious sounds expressing their inner nature. Finally we perceive a world that is spiritual by nature but will have poured its spirit out into physical nature.

This is how the evolution of the world is presented in occult science, a world in which humanity goes through its consecutive stages.³ These stages are given names which have also been applied to the planets which surround the world.⁴ The stage of development where man was still at the dimmest level of consciousness is called Saturn evolution; the second stage, when man lived in a dreamless sleep level of consciousness, Sun evolution; the third, when the dream level of consciousness arose, the Moon stage; the fourth, which is the present one, with man having fought his way through to clear daytime conscious awareness, Earth evolution. And the stages for the future, when the levels of higher consciousness which initiates are able to reach now will come to physical expression, are consecutively called Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolution.

The distinction between the levels of consciousness initiates have and those which humanity will have during those future Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan evolutions lies in the fact that the former must rise to higher worlds in order to live in those states of conscious awareness, whilst future humanity will have them in the physical world. This is because in the case of present-day initiates appropriate organs of perception are created out of the powers of those higher worlds; in future, organs which will be their equal will arise for physical bodies out of the physical environment. The human being can perceive the world around him which provides the material for his organs. In future the physical environment will have creative powers which at present belong only to the higher worlds. We can therefore see the evolution of the world to be such that higher and higher worlds are physically embodied in succession. The Earth is the fourth embodiment. Its physical differentiation is such that it is able to impress the organs for clear daytime consciousness in the organism. In the terms of occult science it evolved from a different physical state where it was only able to impress organs for dream-level consciousness in the body. This state is given the name ‘Moon’. The Earth thus developed out of this Moon by acquiring a new faculty, and that is to develop the organs for daytime waking consciousness. The ‘Moon’ had arisen from the ‘Sun’. What has now become ‘Earth’ was therefore ‘Sun’ at that time. In occult science the term ‘Sun state’ is used for the state where the cosmic body which is in that state is able to create only the organs for dreamless sleep consciousness in a human body. And before the Earth was ‘Sun’ in this sense, it was at the ‘Saturn stage’.

What gives such a cosmic body the power to create the requisite organs in the human body? It would never be able to do this if it were not that these organs were first created in human beings who were ahead of their time with regard to higher worlds. By developing Jupiter organs in advance, today’s initiates are creating the possibility for the image world around us to assume physical character. Images become rigid and assume physical bodily nature because the forms they will assume exist first of all in the spirit. Initiates thus come to reshape the cosmic body on which they dwell. The creative powers which later on will call the objects of humanity’s physical surroundings into existence shine out from them, as it were.

This is how the initiates of the Moon stage created the physical form of the Earth in the spirit before it became physical earth. They perceived the Earth as their object of a higher world.

In occult science, seven great world cycles or periods are known through which the entity is going which at its fourth level is Earth. Each period has to do with a higher development of the human body. From this insight, occult scientists see 'four-foldness’ as something which characterizes the present stage of world evolution.⁵ This refers, for instance, to the ‘four elements’ known to Pythagoras and his school. Four is the number of the ‘macrocosm’, that is, the world which humanity presently inhabits. This has raised humanity to the fourth level of conscious awareness.

The human being is seen as ‘microcosm’ in relation to this ‘macrocosm’ in occult science. His soul already holds the potential for the future physical ‘macrocosm’. He is therefore in the process of expanding his inner ‘microcosm’ into ‘macrocosm’. The creative womb for the latter lies in him. From this point of view, the soul is seen in occult science as a creative seed for the future, an ‘inner’ principle which seeks to come to realization in something that will be something ‘outer’.

To be able to be creative in the outer world this soul must first grow mature. It must have living inner experience of the things to which it will later give outward form. Before the soul had the ability, for instance, of impressing organs for clear daytime consciousness on the physical body, it had to go through a sequence of developmental stages where it gradually acquired this ability. Thus it had to have living experience of the first state of consciousness in itself before it was able to create it; and the same holds true for the other levels of conscious awareness. These stages of development which precede the creation of the different kinds of conscious awareness in the soul are called levels of life in occult science. There are therefore seven levels of life, just as there are seven levels of consciousness. Life differs from conscious awareness in that the former has inner character, whilst the latter depends on a relationship to the outside world.

With reference to the Earth we can say that before the clear daytime state of consciousness developed on it in the human body, this cosmic body had to go through four states which may be seen as four states of life

The levels of the soul’s living experience are found if we think of the outside world as it is perceived in the states of consciousness, being made part of inner life. First we have the dimmest state of consciousness which comes before dreamless sleep. In the latter, the soul works on the body to harmonize it; the corresponding state of life is harmonization of one’s own inner life. It therefore fills itself with a world of sounding movement. Before, in the dimmest state of living experience, it was within an unmoving inner life of its own. It entered wholly into feeling this in an indifference that knew no differentiation. This lowest state of life is called the first elemental world.⁶ Here, matter is experienced in its original nature. Matter begins to stir and move in all kinds of different directions. Self experience of this mobility is the first level of life and the first elemental world. The second level is reached when rhythm and harmony arise in those movements. The corresponding level of life consists in inwardly becoming aware of rhythm as sound. This is the second elemental world. The third level develops as the movements become images. The soul then lives within itself as though in a world of images that take form and dissolve again. This is the third elemental world. At the fourth level the images assume definite form; individual elements emerge from the shifting panorama. This means that it is no longer only inner living experience, but can be perceived outside. It is the world of outer bodies.

In this world we have to distinguish between the configuration which it has for man’s clear daytime consciousness and the configuration which it experiences within itself. The body truly has living experience within itself of its form, that is, of matter in regular configurations. At the next level, this mere experience of form is overcome; its place is taken by living experience of changing form. Configuration arises and changes. It would be reasonable to say that at this level the third elemental world shows itself in a higher configuration. In the third elemental world the movement from one configuration to another can only be experienced as image; in this, the fifth world, image progresses to becoming a solid external object, but this external object does not come to an end in the form, for it keeps the ability to change. This is the world of growing bodies that reproduce themselves. Its capacity for change shows itself in that very growth and reproduction. In the next world the ability is also gained to have living experience of the way the outer influences the inner. It is the world of sentient entities. The final world to be considered is one with not only inner experience of things outside but of sharing in their inner experience. This is the world of shared inner experience. The sequence for the levels of life is thus as follows:

1. dim living experience of matter
2. living experience of inner movement
3. living experience of inner configuration
4. living experience of definite boundaries
5. living experience of changing form
6. living experience of influence of the outside world as sentience
7. sharing in the living experience of the outside world

The living inner experience of the soul has to be preceded by the creation of this life. For we cannot have living experience of anything unless it exists. If living inner experience is called soul element in occult science, then the creative element is referred to as spiritual. The [physical body] perceives by means of organs; the soul experiences itself inside; the spirit directs creative activity to the outside. Just as seven soul experiences preceded the seven levels of conscious awareness, so do seven kinds of creative activity precede these experiences in the soul. What corresponds to the dim experience of matter in the creative sphere is the creation of matter. Matter is flowing into the world there in an indifferent way. This sphere is called the sphere of formlessness. At the next level matter differentiates and its parts enter into relationship with one another. We then have different forms of matter which combine and separate. This is called the sphere of form. At the third level matter no longer needs to relate to matter itself; instead, forces develop in matter, forms of matter attract or repel one another, and so on. This is the astral sphere. At the fourth level matter is configured by forces around it; at the third level these had merely regulated external relationships, and now they work into the inner aspect of entities. This is the physical sphere. An entity which is at this level reflects the world around it;⁷ the forces of that world work on its differentiation.

Further progress means that the entity not only becomes differentiated inwardly in tune with the forces of the surrounding world but also gives itself an outer physiognomy which bears the imprint of this surrounding world. Whereas an entity of the fourth level was a mirror reflection of its surroundings, an entity of the fifth level expressed this surrounding world in its physiognomy. At the sixth level, physiognomy becomes something that flows out. An entity at this level creates things in its surroundings just as it first created itself. This is the level of configuration. At the seventh level configuration becomes creation. The entity which has reached this level creates forms around itself which are on the small scale what that surrounding world is on the large scale. It is the level of creative work.

The evolution of the spiritual principle thus proceeded like this:

1. formlessness
2. giving form
3. embodying strength
4. configuration in accord with the forces of the surrounding world
5. capacity for physiognomic expression
6. power of configuration
7. creative ability

When Saturn evolution began, the human body was at the level of formlessness. It had to struggle through to creative ability before a soul was able to have its first, living experience of matter in it. This means that the body had to evolve through the seven levels of creative activity; after that, its soul was able to live in all parts of it. The soul then had to reach a point where it can impart its inner movement to the seven forms of the body. The first time the body went through its seven forms it was still quite lifeless itself. It was only at the seventh level, where the body became creative, that its life awoke. And it had to awaken now, for the body expended matter in the process of creation. This the soul had to replace. Then a second cycle started. The matter flowing into the body as a replacement itself went through the seven levels from formlessness to creative ability. Once it had reached that point, the soul no longer limited itself to the living experiences that came with the movement of the matter as it came flowing in but began a new level of life. Having become creative itself, the matter flowing in began to fill the body inwardly. Before, it had always only replaced what had been expended; now it settled in the body. And once again it went through all levels from formlessness to creative ability. It would first be formless when deposited in the body, and then gradually progress to forms, develop powers, configuring structures, giving them physiognomic expression, and so on. During the whole of this cycle the soul went through its third level of life. It harmonized this inner differentiation and made good any disorder that had arisen through the inner processes. Having thus created inner configuration, matter then let the outside world influence it at the fourth level. It was able to do this, for the soul which dwelt in it had now become ready to live with dim awareness in impressions coming from outside and thus restore to order any disorder caused by the outside world. In the next cycle the body no longer just differentiated itself; it assumed a new configuration under the influence of the outside world. The soul had gained the ability to regulate the process of transformation. Then a cycle came where the body perceived the influences of the outside world by being sentient of them. The soul was again the regulator at this level of existence. The body had then reached its final level; it was able to have living experience of the outside world. The soul had reached the point where it anticipated a future level, which would be the next level of conscious awareness in what for Saturn existence was a higher world. It was thus going through the dreamless sleep state in this last Saturn cycle. And in the first Sun cycle it transferred this to the physical body.

It can be seen that during the Saturn period the physical human body went through a physical stage seven times. Each time it arrived at such a stage, the soul had reached a higher level in its living experience. At the seventh stage it went beyond Saturn evolution, so that its inner experience pointed to the Sun stage.

When the Sun cycle began, the physical body had reached the point where it was able to take its own configuration in hand. Before, the soul had regulated configuration; now the body had its own configurer in it. This we call the ether body. The soul was then no longer in direct connection with the physical body; between them was the ether body, acting as a mediator. The soul’s experiences were now the ether body’s, just as before they had become the physical body’s. This ether body now must first of all go through the seven form states from formlessness to creative activity. Working to configure the physical body, the ether body was all the time losing tone. And this was continually regulated by the soul. Sun evolution went through seven physical stages in this way. At each stage, the soul had reached a higher level; at the seventh it began to anticipate a new state of conscious awareness. Still sharing the experience of the ether body as it became the creator of new structures which were in the image of the whole Sun world, it did already sense inwardly a world of images surging up and down within it.

In the first Moon cycle it transferred this world of images to the ether body and this then configured the physical body according to those soul images. Whereas at the Sun level the ether body came between physical body and soul as a configurer, so the body of images I have characterized now found its place between ether body and soul. In occult science it is known as the sentient body. For as human inner sentience of the outside world flows inward, as it were, thus making the contents of the outside world something the inner world possessed, so did the images in the body of images act from the inside to the outside, impressing their contents on the ether body which in turn transferred them to the physical body.

During Moon evolution the human being again went seven times through all the form states, letting the soul mature to a higher level in each of them. During the seventh level the soul had the ability to give its images the more perfect form; it was able to enter into the living experience of everything that happened around it on the cosmic body, and its world of images thus reflected the whole Moon world. At the same time it anticipated experience of the highest level of consciousness which would come at the next level; it began to have vision of solid forms within its changing world of images. This made it ready to influence the ether body so that it was able to develop organs in itself that were of a more lasting nature.

With this, it became possible to make the transition to the first Earth cycle. The physical body now received the solid image forms into itself; they became its organs. A fourth body then began to develop in the human being. Perceptions of external objects came in between image body and soul. In a way, the body had now outgrown the soul; it had become independent. Before that the fruits of the images which the soul had gained from the outside world had developed in it. Now the outside world was bringing out direct perceptions in the body. The inner life of the soul then became a sharing of those perceptions. This independent activity on the part of the body came to be reflected in self-awareness. This, however, only matured slowly. First the human being had to go through a cycle of forms during which only a dim life of matter was sensed in his organs; in a second cycle the influence of matter caused internal movement; the ether body was able to share in the experience of the outside world through this, and it transformed the organs to make them living instruments of the physical body. In a third cycle the image body, too, grew able to recreate the outside world. It stimulated the organs to such effect that they themselves produced images which lived in this, though they were not yet reflections of external things. It was only in the fourth cycle that the soul itself became able to enter into every part of the bodily organs; it thus separated the images from those organs and clothed the external things in them. It then had an outside world with which it came face to face as an inner, independent entity.

Now the time had also come when the organs of the body which the soul was using would from time to time become exhausted. The possibility of being connected with the outside world would then cease. Sleep would come, in which the soul would again act to harmonize the physical body via the image and the ether body, the way it had done before. In occult science, therefore, sleep appears as something left behind from earlier stages of evolution. At the present time, the human being has gone some way beyond the middle of the fourth Earth cycle. This is reflected in the fact that he is perceiving not only external objects, doing so in clear daytime consciousness, but also the laws that are behind them. The soul has begun to experience the inner reconfiguration of things.

During Saturn evolution the human body was at the level of dimmest consciousness. One should not assume, however, that other levels of consciousness did not exist in entities which at that time existed in connection with that early embodiment of the Earth. Above all one entity existing at that time had a form of consciousness equal to the waking daytime consciousness human beings have today. Conditions in the Saturn environment were however very different from those we have on Earth, and this meant that that level of consciousness also had to function in a very different way.

On Earth, the human being has minerals, plants and animals around him as objects for sensory perception. These he considers to be at a lower level, with himself at a higher level than they are. The opposite was the case with that spirit on Saturn. It had three groups of entities above itself and had to consider itself to be the lowest of the entities it was able to perceive. In occult science, those three groups of higher spirits are given different names, depending on the language a people have and the age to which their occult teachers belonged. The terms used in Christian occult science are, going from below upwards: Dominions (Kyriotetes), Mights or Virtues (Dynamis) and Powers (Exusiai).⁸ The fourth and lowest spirit followed, just as on Earth the human being is the highest entity above the mineral, plant and animal worlds.

Conditions being so very different, the nature of perception also differed. An initiate knows this from experience. For it is like the spiritual consciousness he achieves as his third level, going beyond waking daytime consciousness. There it seems that impressions do not come to the senses from external objects but move towards the senses from inside, flowing into the outside world from them and out there coming upon objects and life forms, to be reflected in them and then appear to the conscious mind in the reflection.

This is how it was for that spirit on Saturn. It let its vital energy flow to the things on the planet, and their reflection came back to it from all sides in infinitely many ways. It perceived its own life as mirror image reflected from all sides. And the things which reflected its nature back to the spirit were the beginnings of the human physical body. For the planet consisted of these. Anything else that was perceived appeared not on the planet but in its surroundings. The spirits called Exusiai (Powers) appeared as shining spirits which illuminated the cosmic body from all sides. Saturn as such was a dark body; it received its light not from dead sources of light but from those spirits which dwelt around it and shone out to give it light. Their light was revealed to the perception of that Saturn spirit just as today an animal body makes itself perceptible to the human being. The spirits called Dynamis (Mights) revealed themselves in a similar way from the outer periphery by resounding in spirit, and the Kyriotetes (Dominions) through something called ‘cosmic aroma’ in occult science, a kind of impression which we may compare with an odour today.

Just as the human being on Earth rises beyond perception of external things to ideas which live only within him, so that spirit on Saturn knew not only the above-mentioned spirits, which revealed themselves to it as if from inside, but also others which it perceived from the outside; in Christian occult science these are known as Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.⁹ Nothing in the compass of earthly human experience can compare with the sublime characteristics in which they showed themselves at that time.

Finally this spirit on Saturn also knew a third group who also dwelt on the planet. They populated the inner part of the planet. This was entirely made up of human bodies at the level which they had reached at the time. To get an idea of these bodies, we may compare them with automatons consisting of the most subtle etheric matter during the periods when they took physical form. They reflected the life of that Saturn spirit; they themselves were wholly lifeless and had no sentience whatsoever. Two kinds of spirits dwelt in them, however, and these developed their own life and capacity for sentience in them. They needed a basis for such development. For they did not have a physical body of their own and yet were made in such a way that they could only develop their higher faculties in a physical body. They therefore made use of the human physical body.

The bodily, soul and spiritual element was thus present on Saturn in a way similar to the one in which it exists on Earth. Only on Earth it makes up the threefold nature of the human being—his body, his soul and his spirit. Each of these is threefold in turn, with the body consisting of physical, ether and sentient body; the soul of sentient soul, rational soul and spiritual soul; the spirit of Spirit Self, life spirit and spirit human being. On Saturn, the bodily, soul and spiritual elements were not parts of one entity but existed as independent entities, the physical bodily part being the first beginnings of the human body and the actual material basis of the planet itself, the ether body being Angel, the sentient body Archangel; the sentient soul was represented by those Saturn spirits I have characterized, the rational soul by the Powers, the spiritual soul by the Mights, the Spirit Self by the Dominions, the life spirit by the Thrones, the spirit human being by the Cherubim, with the Seraphim above them all.

During the time when it was at its physical level, therefore, Saturn had a differentiated body consisting of subtle ether bodies; Angels and Archangels were active in this just as vital and nerve energies are active in the human body today. And where the latter has its sensory instruments on the outside, so Saturn was covered, as it were, with nothing but senses on its surface; these were not receptive, however, but reflective. They mirrored everything which made an impression in the surroundings of the cosmic body. The luminous Powers shone on to the surface of Saturn, and their light was reflected in many ways by that surface. Sound came to Saturn from the Mights and then went out again into space as a manifold echo; finally the aroma of the Dominions radiated to the Saturn surface, which reflected it in many changed ways. The soul life of that spirit on Saturn consisted in the perception of all those reflections.

We can call that spirit the actual spirit of the planet Saturn. For only one of its kind existed, just as in a human being on Earth there may be a rich variety of parts, senses and so on but only one self-awareness. The whole of Saturn was the body of that planetary spirit.

Saturn evolution proceeded in seven cycles in which soul life unfolded. In each of the seven cycles the planet went through the seven forms from formlessness to creative ability.

In the first cycle the Thrones were the soul element that gave direction, in the second cycle the Dominions, in the third the Mights, in the fourth the Powers and in the fifth the planetary spirit of Saturn itself. This did not have full clear consciousness from the beginning of Saturn evolution but only gained it in the fourth cycle. It was also only then that it was actually able to experience events on the planet as a soul. During the fifth cycle it was then able to be active as soul itself. During that cycle the Archangels developed into an inner life of the soul, the contents of which were taken from Saturn events. They were able to do so by using the human bodies which had by that time developed into appropriate instruments for them. This then enabled them to guide events as independently active souls in the sixth cycle. The same was then the case for the Angels in the seventh cycle.

In the fifth cycle the planetary Saturn spirit would have been unable to be active as soul in the way described if it had remained within the Saturn body. The consistency of that body would not permit this. The Saturn spirit therefore had to leave the Saturn body and act on it from the outside. A separation of Saturn into two cosmic bodies thus occurred in this cycle, though one of them, the one which had gone out, must be called Saturn soul. It was, as it were, a prophetic foretelling of the next planetary embodiment—the Sun. In its fifth, sixth and seventh cycles, Saturn was thus orbited by a kind of Sun, just as Earth is today by its Moon.

Something similar had to happen for the Archangels in the sixth cycle. They left the Saturn mass and orbited it as a new planet, known as Jupiter in occult science. In the seventh cycle something similar happened for the Angels. They withdrew their mass from that of Saturn and orbited it as an independent planet. This is called Mars in occult science.

Similar processes had already occurred during preceding Saturn cycles. In the third cycle the Powers guided soul development. In the fourth, they left the planet and orbited it as a bright, independent planet which is called Mercury in occult science. In the third cycle the same situation occurred for the Powers, who became independent as a planet called Venus. In Sun evolution, the human body which had been automatic came alive in itself. This happened because the light which previously shone on to Saturn from the luminous spirits in the periphery was now being taken up into the constituents of the Sun body itself. The Sun became a luminous planet. The perfected human bodies were developing luminous life. Sound now came in from the surroundings and the cosmic aroma was flowing from the spirits connected with aroma.

A transformation had come for the spirit of the planet Saturn. It had multiplied. One had become seven. Just as a seed is one, and there are many seeds in the ear of corn that grows from it, so did seven scions come from the one spirit of the planet Saturn during the transition to the Sun level. And its life also changed. It developed the ability to gain perceptions of a region that was one level lower. This became possible because a number of human bodies had remained behind in their development, staying at the Saturn level. This made them unable to receive the luminous life of the Sun. They became dark spots within the radiant Sun planet. The seven Sun spirits which had evolved from the spirit of the planet Saturn perceived them as a world of nature which was below them. Thus the seven spirits lived on the Sun’s surface; beneath them they beheld a world with entities which had bodies, only these were one level lower than the human bodies on Sun. The latter, however, gave them the nourishment they needed through the light they radiated. Where the Saturn bodies had only been reflecting the Saturn spirit’s own essential nature back to it, the Sun bodies held the position relative to the Sun spirits which today the Sun with its light holds for the plant world. With regard to bodily organization the human being was at the level of plant nature during Sun evolution. It would not be right to say that he actually went through the plant stage himself at that time. For the kind of plant world we have today could only develop under the specific conditions which we have on Earth. To use an analogy we may think of the Sun human body as a plant form which was turning organs towards its own planet that were similar to those which plants today develop as their flower. And just as today’s plant receives its light from an outside sun, so did the human Sun plant receive its light from its own planet, which, of course, was Sun. Today a plant puts its root down into the soil; on the Sun body this aspect was turned towards the sounds and odours that were coming in; the human being took these in and processed them inwardly. We might call today’s plant a human body which has remained at the Sun level and turned round completely. It is therefore chastely extending its organs of growth and reproduction upwards to the Sun, whilst the human being today hides them and lets them face downwards.

The human body only developed fully in this way during the fourth Sun cycle. The three preceding cycles had been preparatory. The first cycle was really only a recapitulation of Saturn existence. Its seven form levels were seven recapitulations of the levels of life on Saturn. It was only during the second Sun cycle that life flashed up in the human body. This life was not yet so fully developed that the Archangels which on Sun took the place which the planetary spirit had held on Saturn, were able to take satisfaction in it. It was rather the Powers which now sucked the energy which can flow from this life; during the third cycle the seven spirits developed from the Saturn spirit took that place; and during the fourth Sun cycle the Archangels lived in the life of the Earth bodies the way the planetary spirit had been mirrored in the bodies on Saturn. During the fifth Sun cycle the Archangels rose to a higher level of existence, and the Angels took their place on the planet. During the sixth Sun cycle the Angels, too, had developed to a level where they no longer needed the physical parts of the human body; all they still used for their own purposes was the light streaming out and in, and in this they then lived. The human physical body had become an independent entity, a model for the present-day human physical body. It behaved entirely like a physical apparatus at this level; except that it was an apparatus the parts of which were living. It was, as it were, a living instrument for the senses, though it did not take their perceptions into itself, not having the necessary degree of consciousness for this. The body was in a plant-like sleep, as it were, and that was its highest level of consciousness. Any sensory perceptions composed in it went into the consciousness of the Angels, Archangels and so on, depending on the sequence of the different Sun cycles. Those higher spirits were keeping watch over the sleeping human body.

What were the causes, the influences under which Sun evolved from Saturn? We perceive them if we take a look at the final states in Saturn evolution. Let us assume the seventh cycle had reached the fourth form level, which would be the physical one. The human body had developed so far that it was able to serve the Angels as the sense organs which mirror their essential nature for them. These have a kind of human consciousness at this level, though only by using the senses of the human body. They successively developed the higher levels of conscious awareness. The moment the Angels, too, developed to such higher forms of conscious awareness they could no longer use the human body. They therefore left it. It had to die. This meant, however, that that physical Saturn body disintegrated before the physiognomic form of the seventh cycle developed. This physiognomic level was therefore not the least bit physical any more. The planet existed only as a soul planet then. The physical form went down into the abyss. In the soul planet the Angels lived in an image consciousness that was beyond the physical. And the higher spirits were working on it with correspondingly higher forms of consciousness. At the point in time where the Angels, too, had grown beyond image consciousness, the soul planet also had to disintegrate. Its place was taken by another, where the configuring form was developed. It only floated in the world in which an earthly initiate is when he has entered into higher consciousness connected with sound. For the same reasons another planet evolved from this one at the end of the seventh Saturn cycle and this belonged to a yet higher world. The creative form of existence had been brought to realization in this.

It has been shown that as the higher spirits rose to corresponding forms of conscious awareness, satellites of Saturn always separated off and these had to float in higher worlds, for the main form of Saturn was unable to accommodate such forms of conscious awareness. Then, however, Saturn itself rose to such higher worlds. The consequence was that each time it arrived in such a higher world it would unite with whichever satellite was in that world. By the end of the seventh Saturn cycle, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury and Sun had therefore reunited with Saturn. All was one world again.

In that one world, the creative form of Saturn’s vital energy existed. Through it, the world, which had become spiritual in the way shown, was taken down again to the lower levels of existence. This was what happened as the Sun evolved. In the course of its cycles the planets that had originally developed on Saturn emerged again. Each was now, however, closer by one degree to physical existence.

If a human observer gifted with senses in their present form were able to follow the evolution of the planet I have described, he would see the cosmic body emerge from the darkness at certain times, disappearing again from the sight of such an observer for long intervals. During these, it would only be perceptible to an observer whose consciousness was able to be present in higher worlds. Distinction is thus made between twilight or night-time states of planetary existence in physical terms. Do not think, however, that the planet and its spirits grow inactive during those intervals. It merely falls into higher worlds then and thus comes to expression in an existence which is much more real than mere physical existence.

When Sun had completed its seven cycles, a time came when the human body had developed so far that it was not only able to receive the incoming light into itself and be enlivened by it, but gained the ability to let the world of sound created from the Mights continue to influence it and also to reproduce it in sounds. At this level of existence, which is called Moon evolution, the human body itself produced sounds. At the Saturn level, a sound reflected to the surrounding world by the planet was merely an echo of its surroundings; now the sound had changed as it went out into those surroundings. It had changed to such effect that it reflected in a wide variety of ways what was happening in human bodies. These human bodies had thus made the sentient body fully part of their essential nature as a third body. For it was their inner nature, their world of feelings, which was expressed in sound.

The seven spirits which had evolved out of the Saturn spirit during Sun evolution had now become seven times seven. The world surrounding them had become such that they had living experience of their own world of feeling in the sentient bodies which had developed. They then felt themselves surrounded by two worlds which were at a lower level and one which was above them. The world above them made itself felt as cosmic aroma coming from cosmic space; they experienced themselves as entities giving sound, and the two realms which were at a lower level had arisen because a region of human bodies had remained at the Saturn level and another at the Sun level. These Moon spirits were thus surrounded by entities that were like automatons and were continuing their Saturn maturation on Moon under conditions which were very different from those which existed on Saturn, and also by plant-like Sun bodies which were in a similar position.

Three kinds of entities were thus present in the actual Moon mass. The entities which were like automatons, dark in themselves, had still retained the ability from Saturn to let life shine out around them. They were not lifeless the way today’s minerals are. There was no mineral basis on Moon like the one we have on Earth. Instead there was a basis consisting of those entities. You can get an idea of them if you think of them endowed with a life that is present in every part of them, so that the mineral soil of our fields would have been a living, porridge-like mass on Moon; woody parts in this mass were like the rock masses found in softer mineral matter here on Earth. In this living basis, the parts of which may be called vegetable minerals, the Sun entities I have characterized who were at a level between present-day animals and present-day plants, had taken root. The freely moving entities dwelling on Moon were the human bodies, developmentally halfway between animal and human. They provided dwelling places for the scions of the planetary spirit of Saturn. This spirit would not have been able, however, to develop waking daytime consciousness in them. The entities always had to go out of the body to live in such a consciousness. When in the body and therefore sharing its life, they only had a consciousness filled with dream images. In this state of consciousness they would not see anything of their physical surroundings, but they let their inner experiences go out into the surrounding world in sound. The passions and desires of the Moon entities were then coming alive as sound during their sleep.

To consider just one example of this living experience, it should be noted that what we call our love life today, which is the basis of procreation, happened during dream-filled sleep on Moon. Waking daytime life was free from desire and, it has to be said, also loveless, given wholly to vision of the surrounding world. The human ancestor on Moon knew nothing of sexual relationships as yet in his daytime life. The place of the feelings people have in sexual love today was taken by dream images which only showed today’s factual reality in allegorical form.

On Moon, therefore, it was not the human ancestor who lived in the world of images when awake but the spirits who came immediately above human beings—the Angels. The dream world of the human being was clear daytime reality to them, as it were. They watched over the dreaming human world just as the Archangels had been watching over the Sun world when it was in plant-like sleep.

The first two Moon cycles were recapitulations of the preceding states of evolution. The seven forms of the first cycle recapitulated the seven Saturn cycles, and the seven forms of the second the seven Sun cycles.

During the third Moon cycle the human body had developed so far that the spirits which were at the Archangel level were able to experience its dream images as their environment; in the fourth cycle this was then the case for the Angels. The scions of the spirit of the planet Saturn were able to use the human body during this cycle to such a degree that enveloping it from outside they were able to use it to gain clear daytime consciousness. By the fifth cycle these spirits had risen to a level where they no longer had need of the physical human body; this then perceived its environs for itself but only reached a lower level of consciousness for these perceptions. Those spirits only had need of the ether body and the sentient body during this time. In the sixth cycle they also left the ether body to itself and in the seventh the sentient body.

The Moon was a re-embodiment of the Sun planet. At the time when the stage of Sun evolution was recapitulated on Moon, that is, in the second cycle, the Sun body separated from the Moon mass. This separate Sun body was inhabited by the spirits which had assumed a level of consciousness and of life, the conditions for which could not be found on the Moon itself. During the second cycle these spirits were the Powers; they had shared the life of the physical human body during Sun life. Now, on Moon, this Sun level had a limited, retarded existence in the above-mentioned animal-plants. The Powers could not live in them. Instead they gave those animal-plants life from outside by sending the light they needed to them from the Sun. During the third Moon cycle the scions of the Spirit of the planet Saturn had also reached a level where they could no longer exist on Moon. The Archangels therefore left the Moon in the fourth cycle, and in this space of time this was also the dwelling place of the Angels, as the Earth was later to be in its fourth cycle for human beings.

The other planets had emerged step by step during Sun evolution and did the same now during Moon evolution. Only they were closer to physical existence by another level now, when the Moon was at the height of its evolution, that is from the physical form of its fourth cycle onwards. With the fifth cycle, Mars, then inhabited by the Angels, reached a subtle, etheric and physical form; with the sixth cycle this happened for Jupiter, dwelling place of the Archangels. Finally in the seventh Moon cycle the same also happened for Mercury. Mars and Jupiter had grown even denser by then, the density of the former being such that it became possible to develop heat by moving its constituents and letting it flow out into cosmic space.

Earth evolution received the fruits that had ripened on Moon. The human body had by then gone through three levels of evolution. At the first it was able to be like a physical instrument that served as an organ of perception for spirits which had advanced so far at Sun level that they could dispense with any such apparatus. They were spirits already able to dedicate their work as creators to the Sun planet from outside. The spirits of the planet Saturn had had their bodily organization not in the Sun planet but in the creative powers that maintained Sun life.

On Moon, the Archangels had become the creative powers. The Angels of the Moon, which had clear daytime consciousness at the time, were able to look up to their creators and admire their bodily organization.

These three levels of planetary evolution were first of all recapitulated in the first three Earth cycles. This was to prepare the human body so that it could gain living experience in itself of the images which had evolved during Moon consciousness. It had to grow able to have not only a life and an image body in itself but also to reflect the surrounding world inwardly in its images. On the Moon it had come so far that the Angels were able to behold its images. The human Moon body was the world surrounding the Angels. And they had also advanced themselves in beholding the Moon human being; they had won through to a point where they were able to do at a higher level what they had been perceiving on the Moon. Apart from the two worlds which were below them, they also had spirits who were their equal around them. When Moon evolution had come to an end, they were able to impress the nature of those spirits into the human body. Earthly human beings were then able to see in their physical environment, whilst they dwelt in their bodies, what the Angels had only been able to behold on Moon when they rose to a higher world—those of their own kind.

The human body could only be guided upwards to this ability in stages. And this happened during the three Earth cycles. In the first, the human being was able to perceive himself as he had been on Saturn, in the second as on Sun, in the third as on Moon. During the first Earth cycle other human beings were nothing but walking automatons to him; during the second they appeared as plant-like entities; during the third they had animal character.

When the fourth cycle began, the human being was able to perceive the creations of the Angels, of his own kind, around himself. The Angels were three levels of consciousness above him. They were able to create what he perceived.

The human body now had four parts—the physical [body] which became a mirror for the surrounding world, the living [body] which was able to transform things perceived in the surrounding world into inner movement, the image body which was able to transform the inner movements and give them the character of allegories, and finally the body which became the bearer of clear daytime consciousness. This harmonized the inner images with the impressions gained of the surrounding world and thus made the connection between inner experience and the events outside.

Clear daytime consciousness was, however, limited to the physical outside world; vital processes and the images of the image body were inwardly enlivened but not perceived as outside world. The human image body remained the object of the Angels, at the next higher level, and the human life body actually that of the Archangels. All things connected with the human life body, the laws governing its growth and reproduction, were thus hidden from the human being; with regard to them his conscious awareness was at the level of dreamless sleep. For the Archangels, on the other hand, these processes were objects in their outside world on which they acted, which was like the situation a human being faces with regard to working on a physical machine. Everything connected with image consciousness, the laws which are more of a mystery to the human being, giving a particular character and mien to his countenance, specific form to his walk, and so on; everything which came to expression in his character, temperament and so on, was thus governed by the Angels. Only the things he brought about in his outer environment were subject to his own laws.

The human being developed into an entity which we may characterize like this in the fourth Earth cycle.

The Angels, having developed to creative consciousness at the Moon level, were no longer able to find a place for themselves on Earth when the image body began to belong to the human being himself, that is, from the time when the second cycle had passed its midpoint. They then withdrew to a higher community with new conditions of life; the Sun again separated from the Earth and from then on sent its powers to it from the outside.

In the third Earth cycle, the human bodies which had not reached the point in the second cycle where they could have their image body cared for by the powers gathered on the Sun had to fall into a lower form of existence. They went down from the animal and human to the purely animal level. Where could they now find the powers needed for their image body? They were not open to the Sun powers of the perfected Angels. Entities do, however, lag behind in their development at every level. Up to the third cycle, Angels had fallen behind in their evolution which were then unable to find a place on the Sun. During the second half of the third Earth cycle they were not yet able to find the capacity to ascend to the Sun. Yet they also were not able to continue to influence the image bodies of human beings who were advancing in perfection. They therefore withdrew from the Earth mass to become our present-day Moon. This is therefore a cosmic body representing an earlier part of Earth evolution in something of a hardened state. It is the dwelling place of spirits who did not want to be creators of the perfect human body. We find them active in the image bodies of animals; yet they do all the time also direct their attacks against the image body of the human being—though this is a region that has grown beyond them. As soon as the human being deviates just a little from being dedicated to his higher nature, which comes to him through impressions gained through the senses, as soon as he becomes subject to powers that influence his image body, those spirits will be able to influence him. Their activities are evident in dissolute dreams which reflect the animal desires that come from lower human nature.

When the third Earth cycle had passed its midpoint, the Earth having grown physical for the third time, conditions did not exist for a form of the physical human body that was able to take in perceptions from the outside. The physical died off. The result is that the laggard Angels’ sin of omission was no longer felt to be so painful by the entities that had ascended into Sun existence. The Moon was therefore incorporated into the Earth’s body again. When the whole Earth had gone beyond image existence and into a higher world as the cycle continued, it also united with the Sun again. The powers in the human body which in the third cycle were only able to see the image-enlivened body in the surrounding world then gained creative ability. This enabled them to enter into the fourth cycle. There they were initially still in the world which is only perceptible to spiritual awareness, but were descending to progressively lower worlds in stages. Finally the human body had developed so far that it was able to develop organs for the perception of others of his own kind; these had a subtle etheric form. The physical body thus gained the abilities for its earthly form. This was also the time when Earth could no longer be the arena for the perfected Angels; the Sun separated from the Earth with them and shone on it from outside. The physical body continued to develop. The images of the image body developed a liveliness they did not have before; the organs of the physical body provided nourishment for them in the reflected images of external objects. The time had come when the outer Earth environment was taking these images away from the Angels that had lagged behind. These then had to draw the part of the Earth that would be their dwelling place out of the Earth. The Moon once more separated from the Earth, orbiting it as a satellite.

How far had the human body come by this time? It had developed its fourfold nature. Its organization was such that it could support an ether or life body and give a home to an image body. Its sense organs also allowed the earthly surroundings to be reflected in those images. The human physical body had therefore reached a completely new level. It reflected inwards, just as on Saturn it reflected the essential nature of the Spirit of the planet Saturn to the outside. Because of this, the part of that spirit which was then its lowest principle was now able to live in it. This principle had become tied off from the spirit of the planet Saturn; it had lost the ability to receive the revelations of the upper realms and becomes the vehicle for human self awareness. The human being learned to see himself as an ‘I’. From now on he had the nature in which the planetary spirit on Saturn had revealed like an outer environment of the planet.

The human being had thus reached a level where the Archangels revealed themselves in his ether body, the Angels in his image body, and the planetary Saturn spirit in his self awareness. He was then able to advance to the level where the Saturn spirit in him would be able to relate to the image body in a way similar to the way the Saturn spirit itself did when it gradually grew out of its own planetary existence and became an inhabitant of Jupiter. The human being continued to inhabit the Earth, however, and because of this such powers could only influence him from outside. It means that the Earth came into the sphere of influence of Jupiter powers. A similar process occurred at a later level with regard to spirits which were then at a level where they only influenced the ether body from outside, from Mars.

When Sun, Earth and Moon were still one body, the human body was made of a material on that planet which was like air. Apart from human bodies, only the descendants of the human-animals from Moon were present in bodies which were in a fluid state. The descendants of the Moon creatures which had lived there as plant-minerals had reached the solid state. Apart from the liquid human-animals, there were also animal plant-like creatures [at that time] which had evolved from the lunar plant-animals. Yet whilst the former were more watery in appearance, the animal-plant-like creatures consisted of a dense porridge-like mass which when it grew more substantial came close to the material of which mushrooms are made today.

When the Sun withdrew its substance from the Earth, so that the latter had only the Moon mass in it, all conditions changed on the planet. The material of which human bodies were made condensed to become a liquid form of matter which may be compared to our blood today. Creatures which before had been liquid became solid, and the solid plant-minerals had a very dense consistency. Before the Sun separated, the life of the human body consisted essentially in a kind of breathing, taking in and giving off air-like matter. After the separation a form of nutrition evolved out of the liquid surroundings. And reproduction was also connected with this nutrition. The viscid human body was impregnated out of the reproductive material in its surroundings and divided under the influence of that impregnation. Whilst the Moon substance was still within the Earth, the development of the body was such that semi-solid parts developed in the liquid mass, gaining cartilage-like density. It was not yet able to develop solid, bone-like limb inclusions, for the Earth mass was not suitable for this for as long as it still had the Moon in it. It was only when the Moon departed, with the most substantial form of matter removed, that the beginnings of solid skeletal structures developed in the human being.

This was also the time when it became no longer possible to take impregnation material from the surroundings. With the departure of the Moon mass, Earth substances had also lost the ability to impregnate the human body. In the time that had gone before, the human body did not have two genders. The human being was female by nature, with the male principle present in its earthly surroundings. The whole Moon Earth was male in character. When the Moon departed, some of the human bodies changed into bodies of male character. They thus took the impregnating powers into themselves which before had been present in the sap of Earth itself, as it were. The female nature of the human body underwent a transformation which made it possible for the male, which had now arisen, to impregnate it.

All this happened because a form of double-sexed human body changed to become single-sexed. The earlier human body had impregnated itself with substances it took in. Now the one kind of human body, the female one, only had power to let the impregnated principle ripen. The way this happened was that the male power in this body lost the ability to prepare impregnating substances. This power remained only for the ether or life body, which had to effect the ripening process. The male kind of human body lost the potential of doing something with the impregnating material inside itself. Its female principle was limited to the ether body. This is why in present-day human beings the situation is such that in males the ether body is female, whilst in females it is male.¹⁰ A solid bony skeleton developed at the same time.

Another important process came first, however. When the human body changed from airy to liquid consistency, the first beginnings of an organ started to develop which would take in airy matter. This was the beginning of respiration as a separate process. At the time, substances which would later separate out from the general mass and be liquid and solid were still airy, they were part of the air. And when the liquid form of matter began to develop, the human body was not living on solid ground but in a fluid element. Its locomotion was a swimming kind of floating. And the air which was above the fluid element was much denser then. It contained not only everything which later came to be water, but many other substances were dissolved in it. The whole human breathing apparatus was therefore also different.

Before the Sun departed, the function of the whole breathing process was still different. It was to receive and give off heat from and into the environment. We may say that the warmth which human beings still prepare in themselves with their blood circulation was at that time inhaled and exhaled from and into the environment. Once the Sun had departed the process changed so that air will only produce warmth through its activity in the body after it has been inhaled. By breathing air the way it does today, the human body came to generate warmth internally.

This major change in the human body was connected with a cosmic event which in occult terms is called the withdrawal of Mars from the Earth. Mars is the planet which before that withdrawal had with the powers inherent in it brought about the process in the human body that was later taken over by the blood circulation. With the blood taking over the Mars activity in this way, the spirits concerned were able to go outside the Earth, and the influence of Mars on the human being was then such that it influenced him from outside. The way it happened physically was that iron became an important constituent of the blood; iron is the form of matter on which Mars powers have a specific influence. Respiration as it is today thus has to do with the withdrawal of Mars. All this gave the human being something which we may call the inner power of the blood. Ensoulment had become possible. The human being did indeed breathe in his soul when he breathed air.

For as long as Earth was connected with Sun, it was the Sun’s power which regulated the other influences in the human body. In the Sun’s power lay the principle which acted as male and at the same time female principle in the human body. Under its influence, law and order also came into the Mars process of taking in and giving off of heat. When the Sun had departed some human bodies changed and became infertile. These were the precursors of future male bodies. For as long as Moon powers were still connected with the Earth, the rest were still capable of self-fertilization. They lost this when the Moon departed. From then on the Sun took effect, with the spirits that dwelt on it influencing the capacity for reproduction. The male’s ether body came under the influence of these Sun spirits. The female’s ether body, being male, retained its relationship to the spirits who had made the Moon their arena. The female physical body was correspondingly under the influence of the Sun powers. It had developed the form it now had when the Sun was already shining on the Earth from outside. The male physical body on the other hand came under the Moon influence because under the influence of that planet when it was still united with the Earth it had assumed a form which with regard to reproduction was infertile. While all this was going on, the senses also developed, bringing the sentient body’s image world under the influence of the earthly environment and thus the human being under the influence of the scions of the planetary body of Saturn. The pulsating power of the blood also evolved in the body, this led to ensoulment and made it possible, with sensory perceptions available, to develop an inner life and sympathy and antipathy towards the surrounding world.

The human being had reached this level when the Earth emerged as an independent physical planet in its fourth cycle, having separated from sun, moon and mars.

By that time human beings had achieved the division into two sexes. They looked into the surrounding world through the senses. They knew sympathy and antipathy with regard to their surroundings. And by distinguishing themselves from those surroundings they were endowed with the beginnings of self awareness. The human body had become fourfold. And inwardness of soul had arisen in the fourth principle of that body through the blood, for this allowed mars powers to come in.

Human beings had thus developed everything they were able to have as the fruits of the first three levels of planetary evolution. A fourth principle had arisen in their bodies because other influences, which could not play a role in its development, had withdrawn from the Earth.

In occult terms this humanity is called the third main race on Earth.¹¹ We can really only speak of races developing from this time onwards. For it was only then that human reproduction existed and hence also differences within humanity brought about by human beings influencing one another. The principle we may call heredity or blood relationship developed. The Earth as the fourth planetary form of evolution did not yet have an influence. Perceptions of the surrounding world had first taken hold of the images in the sentient body. The ether body was not yet under the influence of the earthly surroundings. The fourth planet did not yet influence hereditary conditions. Only the first three did so. This is why the race where this was the case is called the ‘third’.

It was followed by the fourth, and here the earthly environment began to influence the ether body itself. This could only happen if spirits were able to influence the human being whose evolution was at a level where they did not have the creative ability to influence the ether body to the effect of impregnating it, yet had nevertheless gone beyond merely receiving impressions from the perception of the physical surroundings. These were spirits who had not advanced to creative ability on the Moon, that is, during the Earth’s previous embodiment, which would have enabled them to populate the Sun; yet they had gone beyond the level where inner life depended wholly on the images of the human body. Within Earth evolution they do have the ability to perceive things through the human being’s senses, but not the ability to create those senses. There these spirits can ... the human being ... [manuscript ends here]

• 1. This was not included in the fragment. Instead, a series of essays on ‘How to Know Higher Worlds’ (published in book form in 1909) began to appear in Lucifer Gnosis in June 1904; the inner training is also described in Occult Science.
• 2. Those other chapters were never written.
• 3. Conscious awareness - life - form. These three basic principles, each in 7 stages or metamorphoses, were mentioned here for the first time. See also Cosmic Memory. Atlantis and Lemuria (GA 11), and lectures and lecture courses in the years that followed, up to 1907/08. In a lecture given in Dornach on 27 August 1915, Rudolf Steiner referred to them as follows: ‘Very early on, I drew attention to the fact that to gain an overview of world evolution one must above all consider seven states of conscious awareness—I listed them at the time—as well as seven states of life and seven states of form. There are questions relating to life which can be answered by merely considering changes in form; there are questions we can answer by considering just the metamorphosis of life; but some phenomena, certain facts of life, cannot be answered except by rising to a point where one considers the different states of conscious awareness which apply’ [see Chance, Providence and Necessity, tr. M. Spock; New York: Anthroposophic Press 1988]. See also the lectures given at the end of December 1918, in which the principles of conscious awareness - life - form as shown as stages of initiation. Rudolf Steiner also referred to the way in which the attempt was made to show this in the forms of the First Goetheanum [How Can Mankind Find the Christ Again? tr. 0. D. Wannamaker, F. E. Dawson, G. Hahn; New York: Anthroposophic Press 1984],
• 4. These terms are taken from Rosicrucian occultism. See lecture given in Munich on 20 May 1907 in Bilder okkulter Siegel und Saeulen. Der Muenchner Kongress Pfingsten 1907 und seine Auswirkungen (English in Anthroposophical News Sheet 1948; 16:19-22). In the Theosophical Society people spoke only of seven spheres, rounds and globes. See also Note 18.
• 5. See Special Note (follows), also lecture given in Berlin on 28 January 1907 (in GA 96; The Lord’s Prayer, tr. A. M. W., rev. M. Cotterel; Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1958).
• 6. See chapter on the physical world and its connection with soul land and spirit land in Theosophy, also lecture given in Berlin on 11 November 1903 (in German) in Über die astrale Welt und das Devachan (GA 88) and lecture given in Munich on 4 December 1907 (GA 98; Engl.: The Elemental Kingdoms publ. in Anthroposophical News Sheet 1946; 4: 13-16).
• 7. The image of the mirror (see also lecture given in Cologne on 29 December 1907, publ. in German in GA 101) is one of the most important symbols of the spiritual world. It is used many times in the whole of Rudolf Steiner’s works.
• 8. The terms go back to Dionysius the Areopagite (1st century AD) who is mentioned as a disciple of Paul in Acts 17: 34. Treatises On the Heavenly and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies appeared in Syria in his name in the 5th century; John Scotus
• 9. Middle English cherubin and seraphin later became cherubim and seraphim. The early plural in -ins later became -im (= Hebrew plural). Cherub and in analogy to it seraph, was introduced by Wyclif. Rudolf Steiner used different spellings, often side by side.
• 10. See Steiner’s autobiography (GA 28), chapter 37.
• 11. The Lemurian age. Concerning the term ‘race’, Rudolf Steiner wrote in essays published in 1904 - 1908 (in GA 11, see Cosmic Memory. Atlantis and Lemuria; Tr. K. E. Zimmer; New York: Rudolf Steiner publications 1971), chapter on the life of the earth: ‘We have to be utterly clear about it that the evolutional forms of the far distant past and those of the future are completely different from those of the present time, so much so that the terms we use at present may only serve as emergency solution and really lose all meaning when it comes to those distant ages. Basically we can only begin to speak of ‘races’ when evolution had more or less reached its second third in the third main state (Lemurian). Only then did the principle we call ‘race’ today begin to develop. ... Yet very soon now, at the end of our fifth age, the word ‘race’ will lose all meaning again. Humanity will in future be differentiated into groupings we will no longer be able to call ‘races’. The usual theosophical literature has caused a great deal of confusion in this respect.’ See also lecture given in Berlin on 9 November 1905 (in German) in Die Weltraetsel und die Anthroposophie (GA 54).

This lecture-cycle deals with a subject which concerns Man very closely, namely, the exact nature and life of Man himself. Although so close to man, because it concerns himself; the subject is a difficult one to approach. For if we turn our attention to the challenge ”Know thyself!”, a challenge that has forced itself upon man through all the ages, as we may say, from mystic, occult heights, we see at once that a real, true self-knowledge is very hard of attainment. This applies not only to individual, personal self-knowledge, but above all to knowledge of the human being as such. Indeed it is precisely because man is so far from knowing his own being and has such a long way to go in order to know himself, that the subject we are about to discuss in the course of these few days will be in a certain respect something alien to us, something for which much preparation is necessary. Moreover it is not without reason that I myself have only reached the point where I can at last speak upon this theme as the result of mature reflection covering a long period of time. For it is a theme which cannot be approached with any prospect of arriving at a true and honest observation unless a certain attitude, often left out of account in ordinary scientific observation, be adopted. This attitude is one of reverence in the presence of the essential nature and Being of Man. It is, then, of vital importance that we maintain this attitude as a fundamental condition underlying the following reflections.

How can one truly maintain this reverence? In no other way, than by first disregarding what he appears to be in everyday life, whether it be oneself or another is of no consequence, and then by uplifting ourselves to the conception: Man, with all that he has evolved into, is not here for his own sake; he is here as revelation of the Divine Spirit, of the whole World. He is a revelation of the Godhead of the World! And, when a man speaks of aspiring after self-knowledge, of aspiring to become ever more and more perfect, in the spiritual-scientific sense which has just been indicated, this should not be due to the fact that he desires merely from curiosity, or from a mere craving or knowledge, to know what man is; but rather that he feels it to be his duty to fashion ever more and more perfectly this representation, this revelation, of the World Spirit through Man, so that he may find some meaning in the words, “to remain unknowing is to sin against Divine destiny!” For the World Spirit has implanted in us the power to have knowledge; and, when we do not will to acquire knowledge, we refuse what we really ought not to refuse, namely, to be a revelation of the World Spirit; and we represent more and more, not a revelation of the World Spirit, but a caricature, a distorted image of it. It is our duty to strive to become ever increasingly an image of the World Spirit. Only when we can give meaning to these words, “to become an image of the World Spirit”; only when it becomes significant for us in this sense to say, “We must learn to know, it is our duty to learn to know,” only then can we sense aright that feeling of reverence we have just demanded, in the presence of the Being of Man. And for one who wishes to reflect, in the occult sense, upon the life of man, upon the essential quality of man's being, this reverence before the nature of man is an absolute necessity, for the simple reason that it is the only thing capable of awakening our spiritual sight, our entire spiritual faculty for seeing and beholding the things of the spirit, of awakening those forces which permit us to penetrate into the spiritual foundation of man's nature. Anyone who, as seer and investigator of the Spirit, is unable to have the very highest degree of reverence in the presence of the nature of man, who cannot permeate himself to the very fibres of his soul with the feeling of reverence before man's nature, must remain with closed eyes (however open they may be for this or that spiritual secret of the world) to all that concerns what is really deepest in the Being of Man. There may be many clairvoyants who can behold this or that in the spiritual environment of our existence; yet, if this reverence is lacking, they lack also the capacity to see into the depths of man's nature, and they will not know how to say anything rightly with regard to what constitutes the Being of Man.

In the external sense the teaching about life is called physiology. This teaching should not here be regarded in the same way as in external science but as it presents itself to the spiritual eye; so that we may look beyond the forms of the outer man, beyond the form and functions of his physical organs into the spiritual, super-sensible foundation of the organs, of the life-forms and life processes. And since it is not our intention here to pursue this “occult physiology,” as it may be called, in any unreal way, it will be necessary in several cases to refer with entire candour to things which from the very beginning will sound rather improbable to anyone who is more or less uninitiated. At the same time, it may be stated that this cycle of lectures, even more than some others I have delivered, forms a whole, and that no single part of any one lecture, especially the earlier ones—for much that is to find expression in the course of this cycle will have to be affirmed without restraint—should be torn from its context and judged separately. On the contrary, only after having heard the concluding lectures will it be possible to form a judgment with regard to what really has been said. For this reason, therefore, it will be necessary to proceed in a somewhat different way, in this occult physiology, from that of external physiology. The foundations for our introductory statements will be confirmed by what meets us at the conclusion. We shall not be called upon to draw a straight line, as it were, from the beginning to the end; but we shall proceed in a circle so that we shall return again, at the end, to the point from which we started.

It is an examination, a study, of Man, that is to be presented here. At first he appears before our external senses in his outer form. We know, of course, that to what in the first place the layman with his purely external observation can know concerning man, there is to-day a very great deal which science has added through research. Therefore, when considering what we are able to know of the human being at the present time through external experience and observation, we must of necessity combine what the layman is in a position to observe in himself and others with what science has to say, including those branches of scientific observation which come to their results through methods and instruments worthy of our admiration.

If we bear in mind first, purely as regards external man, all that a layman may observe in him (or may perhaps have learned from some sort of popular description of the nature of man), then it will perhaps not seem incomprehensible if, from the very beginning, attention is called to the fact that even the outer shape of man, as it meets us in the outside world, really consists of a duality. And for anyone who wishes to penetrate into the depths of human nature, it is absolutely necessary that he becomes conscious of the fact, that even external man, as regards his form and stature, presents fundamentally a duality.

One part of man, which we can clearly distinguish, consists of everything that is to be found enclosed in organs affording the greatest protection against the outside world: that is, all that we may include within the region of the brain and the spinal cord. Everything belonging in this connection to the nature of man, to the brain and spinal cord, is firmly enclosed in a secure protective bony structure. Taking a side view, we observe that what belongs to these two systems may be illustrated in the following way. If a in this diagram represents all the super-imposed vertebrae along the whole length of the spinal cord, and b the cranium and the bones of the skull, then inside the canal which is formed by these super-imposed vertebrae, as well as by the bones of the skull, is enclosed everything belonging to the sphere of the brain and the spinal cord. One cannot observe the human being without becoming conscious of the fact that everything pertaining to this region forms a totality complete within itself; and that the rest of man (which we might group physiologically in the most varied ways, as the neck, the trunk, the limb-structure) keeps its connection with all that we reckon as brain and spinal cord by means of more or less thread-like or ribbon-shaped formations, pictorially speaking, which must first break through this protective sheath, in order that a connection may be brought about between the portion enclosed within this bony structure and the portion attached to it as exterior nature of man. Thus we may say that, even to a superficial observation, everything constituting man proves itself to be a duality, the one portion lying within the bony structure we have described, the firm and secure protective sheath, and the other portion without.

At this point we must cast a purely superficial glance at that which lies within this bony structure. Here again we can quite easily distinguish between the large mass embedded within the skull-bones in the form of a brain, and that other portion which is appended to it like a stalk or cord and which, while organically connected with the brain, extends in this thread-like outgrowth of the brain into the spinal canal. If we differentiate between these two structures we must at once call attention to something which external science does not need to consider, something of which occult science, however, since its task is to penetrate into the depths of the being of things, must indeed take note. We must call attention to the fact that everything which we consider as the basis of a study of man refers, in the first place, only to Man. For the moment we enter into the deeper fundaments of the separate organs, we become aware (and we shall see in the course of these lectures that this is true) that any one of these organs, through its deeper significance in the case of man, may have an entirely different task from that of the corresponding organ in the animal world. Or, to put it more exactly, anyone who looks upon such things with the help of ordinary external science will say: “What you have been telling us here may be just as truly affirmed with reference to the animals.” That which is said here, however, with reference to the essential nature of the organs in the case of the human being, cannot be said in the same way with regard to the animal. On the contrary the occult task is to consider the animal by itself, and to investigate whether that which we are in a position to state regarding man with reference to the spine and the brain, is valid also for animals. For the fact that the animals closely related to man also have a spine and a brain does not prove that these organs, in their deeper significance, have the same task in both man and animal; just as the fact that a man holds a knife in his hand does not indicate whether it is for the purpose of carving a piece of veal or in order to erase something. In both cases we have to do with a knife; and he who considers only the form of the knife, that is, the knife as knife, will believe that in both cases it amounts to the same thing. In both cases, he who stands on the basis of a science that is not occult will say that we have to do with a spinal cord and a brain; and he will believe, since the same organs are to be found in man and animal, that these organs must therefore have the same function. But this is not true. It is something that has become a habit of thought in external science, and has led to certain inaccuracies; and it can be corrected only if external science will accustom itself gradually to enter into what can be stated from out of the depths of super-sensible research regarding the different living beings.

Now, when we consider the spinal cord on the one hand, and the brain on the other, we can easily see that there is a certain element of truth in something already pointed out more than a hundred years ago by thoughtful students of nature. There is a certain rightness in the statement that when one observes the brain carefully it looks, so to speak, like a transformed spinal cord. This becomes all the more intelligible when we remember that Goethe, Oken, and other similarly reflective observers of nature, turned their attention primarily to the fact that the skull-bones bear certain resemblances of form to the vertebrae of the spine. Goethe, for example, was impressed very early in his reflections by the fact that when one imagines a single vertebra of the spinal column transformed, levelled and distended there may appear through such a reshaping of the vertebrae the bones of the head, the skull-bones; thus, if one should take a single vertebra and distend it on all sides so that it has elevations here and there, and at the same time is smooth and uniform in its expansions, the form of the skull might in this way be gradually derived from a single vertebra. Thus we may in a certain respect call the skull-bones reshaped vertebrae.

Now, just as we can look upon the skull-bones which enclose the brain as transformed vertebrae, as the transformation of such bones as enclose the spinal cord, so we may also think of the mass of the spinal cord distended in a different way, differentiated, more complex, till we obtain out of the spinal cord, so to speak, through this alteration, the brain. We might likewise, for instance, think how out of a plant, which at first has only green foliage, there grows forth the blossom. And so we might imagine that through the reshaping of a spinal cord, through its elevation to higher stages, the entire brain could be formed. (Later on, it will become clear how this matter is to be considered scientifically.) We may accordingly imagine our brain as a differentiated spinal cord.

Let us now look at both of these organs from this standpoint. Which of the two must we naturally look upon as the younger? Certainly not that one which shows the derived form, but rather the one which shows the original form. The spinal cord is at the first stage, it is younger; and the brain is at the second stage, it has gone through the stage of a spinal cord, is a transformed spinal cord, and is therefore to be considered as the older organ. In other words, if we fix our attention upon this new duality which meets us in man as brain and spinal cord, we may say that all the latent tendencies, all the forces, which lead to the building of a brain must be older forces in man; for they must first, at an earlier stage, have formed the tendency to a spinal cord, and must then have worked further toward the re-forming of this beginning of a spinal cord into a brain. A second start, as it were, must therefore have been made, in which our spinal cord did not progress far enough to reach the second stage but remained at the stage of the spinal cord. We have, accordingly, in this spine and nerve system (if we wish to express ourselves with pedantic exactness) a spine of the first order; and in our brain a spinal cord of the second order, a re-formed spinal cord which has become older—a spinal cord which once was there as such, but which has been transformed into a brain.

Thus we have, in the first place, shown with absolute accuracy just what we need to consider when we fix our attention objectively upon the organic mass enclosed; within this protective bony sheath. Here, however, something else must be taken into account, namely, something which really can confront us only in the field of occultism. A question may suggest itself, when for instance we speak as we have just been doing about the brain and the spinal cord, taking perhaps the following form: when such a re-formation as this takes place, from the plan of an organ at a first stage to the plan of an organ at a second stage, the evolutionary process may be progressive, or it may be retrogressive. That is, the process before us may either be one which leads to higher stages of perfection of the organ, or one which causes the organ to degenerate and gradually to die. We might say therefore, when we consider an organ like our spinal cord as it is to-day, that it seems to us to be at the present time a relatively young organ since it has not yet succeeded in becoming a brain. We may think about this spinal cord in two different ways. First, we may consider that it has in itself the forces through which it may also one day become a brain. In that case, it would be in a position to pass through a progressive evolution, and to become what our brain is to-day; or secondly, we may consider that it has not at all the latent tendency to attain to this second stage. In that case its evolution would be leading toward extinction; it would pass into decadence and be destined to suggest the first stage and not to arrive at the second. Now, if we reflect that the groundwork of our present brain is what was once the plan or beginning of a spinal cord, we see that that former spinal cord undoubtedly had in it the forces of a progressive evolution, since it actually did become a brain. If, on the other hand, we consider at this point our present spinal cord, the occult method of observation reveals that what to-day is our spinal cord has not within itself, as a matter of fact, the latent tendency to a forward-directed evolution, but is rather preparing to conclude its evolution at this present stage.

If I may express myself grotesquely, the human being is not called upon to believe that one day his spinal cord, which now has the form of a slender string, will be puffed out as the brain is puffed out. We shall see later what underlies the occult view, so as to enable us to say this. Yet, through this simple comparison of the form of this organ in man and in the lower animals, where it first appears, you will find an external intimation of what has just been stated. In the snake, for example, the spine adds on to itself a series of innumerable rings behind the head and is filled out with the spinal cord, and this spinal column extends both forward and backward indefinitely. In the case of man the spinal cord, as it extends downward from the point where it is joined to the brain, actually tends more and more to a conclusion, showing less and less clearly that formation which it exhibits in its upper portions. Thus, even through external observation, one may notice that what in the case of the snake continues its natural evolution rearward, is here hastening toward a conclusion, toward a sort of degeneration. This is a method of observation through external comparison, and we shall see how the occult view affects it.

To summarise, then, we may say that within the bony structure of the skull we have a spinal cord which through a progressive development has become a brain, and is now at a second stage of its evolution; and in our spinal cord we have, as it were, the attempt once again to form such a brain, an attempt, however, which is destined to fail and cannot reach its full growth into a real brain.

Let us now proceed from this reflection to that which can be known even from an external, layman's observation, to the functions of the brain and the spinal cord. It is more or less known to everyone that the instrument of the so-called higher soul-activities, is in a certain respect, in the brain, that these higher soul-activities are directed by the organs of the brain. Furthermore, it is recognised that the more unconscious soul-activities are directed from the spinal cord. I mean those soul-activities in which very little deliberation interposes itself between the reception of the external impression and the action which follows it. Consider for a moment how you jerk back your hand when it is stung. Not very much deliberation intervenes between the sting and the drawing back. Such soul-activities as these are in fact, and with a certain justification, even regarded by natural science in such a way as to attribute to them the spinal cord as their instrument.

We have other soul-activities in which a more mature reflection interposes itself between the external impression and that which finally leads to action. Take, for example, an artist who observes external nature, straining every sense and gathering countless impressions. A long time passes, during which he works over these impressions in an inner activity of soul. He then proceeds to establish after a long interval through outward action what has grown, in long-continued soul-activity, out of the external impressions. Here there intervenes, between the outer impression and that which the man produces as a result of the outer impression, a richer activity of soul. This is also true of the scientific investigator; and, indeed, of anyone who reflects about the things that he wishes to do, and does not rush wildly at every external impression, who does not as it were, in reflex action fly into a passion like a bull when he sees the colour red, but thinks about what he wishes to do. In every instance where reflection intervenes, we encounter the brain as an instrument of soul-activity.

If we go still deeper into this matter we may say to ourselves: True, but how then does this soul-activity of ours, in which we use the brain, manifest itself? We perceive, to begin with, that it is of two different kinds, one of which takes place in our ordinary waking day-consciousness. In this consciousness we accumulate, through the senses, external impressions; and these we work over by means of the brain in rational reflection. To express it in popular language—we shall have to go into this still more accurately—we must picture to ourselves that these outer impressions find their way inside us through the doors of the senses, and stimulate certain processes in the brain. If we should wish, purely in connection with the external organisation, to follow what there takes place, we should see that the brain is set into activity through the stream of external impressions flowing into it; and that what this stream becomes, as a result of reflection, that is the deeds, the actions, which we ascribe to the instrumentality of the spinal cord.

Then, there also mingles in human life as it is to-day, between the wide-awake life of day and the unconscious life of sleep, the picture-life of dreams. This dream-life is a remarkable intermingling of the wide-awake life of day, which lays full claim to the instrument of our brain, and the unconscious life of sleep. Merely in outline, in a way that the lay thinker may observe for himself, we will now say something about this life of dreams.

We see that the whole of the dream-life has a strange similarity, from one aspect, to that subordinate soul-activity which we associate with the spinal cord. For, when dream-pictures emerge in our soul they do not appear as representations resulting from reflection, but rather by reason of a certain necessity, as, for instance, a movement of the hand results when a fly settles on the eye. In this latter case an action takes place as an immediate, necessary movement of defense. In dream-life something different appears, yet likewise because of an immediate necessity. It is not an action which here appears but rather a picture upon the horizon of the soul. Yet, just as we have no deliberate influence upon the movement of the hand in the wide-awake life of day, but make this movement of necessity, even so do we have no influence over the way that dream-pictures shape themselves, as they come and go in the chaotic world of dreams. We might say, therefore, that if we look at a man during his wide-awake life of day, and see something of what goes on within him in the form of reflex movements of all sorts, when he does things without reflecting, in response to external impressions; if we observe the sum-total of gestures and physiognomic expressions which he accomplishes without reflection, we then have a sum of actions which through necessity become a part of this man as soul-actions. If we now consider a dreaming man we have a sum of pictures, in this case something possessing the character not of action but of pictures, which work into and act upon his being. We may say, therefore, that just as in the wakeful life of day those human actions are carried out which arise and take shape without reflection, so do the dream-conceptions, chaotically flowing together, come about within a world of pictures.

Now, if we look back again at our brain, and wished to consider it as being in a certain way the instrument also of the dream-consciousness, what should we have to do? We should have to suppose that there is in some way or other something inside the brain which behaves in a way similar to the spinal cord that guides the unconscious actions. Thus, we have, as it were, to look upon the brain as primarily the instrument of the wide-awake soul-life, during which we create our concepts through deliberation, and underlying it a mysterious spinal cord which does not express itself; however, as a complete spinal cord but remains compressed inside the brain, and does not attain to actions. Whereas our spinal cord does attain to actions, even though these are not brought about through deliberation; the brain in this case induces merely pictures. It stops midway, this mysterious thing which lies there like the groundwork of a brain. Might we not say, therefore, that the dream-world enables us in a most remarkable way to point, as in a mystery, to that spinal cord lying there at the basis of the brain?

If we consider the brain, in its present fully-developed state, as the instrument of our wide-awake life of day, its appearance for us is that which it has when removed from the cavity of the skull. Yet there must be something there, within, when the wakeful life of day is blotted out. And here occult observation shows us that there actually is, inside the brain, a mysterious spinal cord which calls forth dreams. If we should wish to make a drawing of it, we could represent it in such a way that, within the brain which is connected with the world of ideas of the life of day, we should have an ancient mysterious spinal cord, invisible to external perception, in some way or other secreted inside it. I shall first state quite hypothetically that this spinal cord becomes active when man sleeps and dreams, and is active at that time in a manner characteristic of a spinal cord, namely, that it calls forth its effects through necessity. But, because it is compressed within the brain, it does not lead to actions, but only to pictures and picture-actions; for in dreams we act, as we know, only in pictures. So that because of this peculiar, strange, chaotic life that we carry on in dreams, we should have to point to the fact that underlying the brain, which we quite properly consider to be the instrument of our wide-awake life of day, is a mysterious organ which perhaps represents an earlier form of the brain—which has evolved itself to its present state out of this earlier form—and that this mysterious organ is active to-day only when the new form is inactive. It then reveals what the brain once was. This ancient spinal cord conjures up what is possible, considering the way it is enclosed, and induces, not completed actions, but only pictures.

Thus the observation of life leads us, of itself, to separate the brain into two stages. The very fact that we dream indicates that the brain has passed through two stages and has evolved to the wide-awake life of day. When, however, this wakeful day-time life is stilled, the ancient organ again exerts itself in the life of dreams. Thus we have first made types out of what external observation of the world furnishes us, which shows us that even observation of the soul-life adds meaning to what a consideration of the outer form can give us, namely, that the wide-awake life of day is related to dream-life in the same way as the perfected brain at the second stage of its evolution is related to its groundwork, to the ancient spinal cord which is at the first stage of its evolution. In a remarkable way, which we shall justify in the following lectures, occult, clairvoyant vision can serve us as a basis for a comprehensive observation of human nature, as it expresses itself in those organs enclosed within the bony mass of the skull and vertebrae.

In this connection you already know, from spiritual-scientific observations, that man's visible body is only one part of the whole human being, and that in the moment the seer's eye is opened the physical body reveals itself as enclosed, embedded, in a super-sensible organism, in what, roughly speaking, is called the “human aura.” For the present this may be here affirmed as a fact, and later we shall return to it to see how far the statement is justified. This human aura, within which physical man is simply enclosed like a kernel, shows itself to the seer's eye as having different colours. At the same time, we must not imagine that we could ever make a picture of this aura, for the colours are in continual movement; and every picture of it, therefore, that we sketch with pigment can be only an approximate likeness, somewhat in the same way that it is impossible to portray lightning, since one would always end by painting it only as a stiff rod, a rigid image. Just as it is never possible to paint lightning, so is it even less possible to do this in the case of the aura, because of the added fact that the auric colours are in themselves extraordinary unstable and mobile. We cannot, therefore, express it otherwise than to say that at best we are representing it symbolically.

Now, these auric colours show themselves as differing very remarkably, depending upon the fundamental character of the whole human organism. And it is interesting to call attention to the auric picture which presents itself to the clairvoyant eye, if we imagine the cranium and the spine observed from the rear. There we find that the appearance of that portion of the aura belonging to this region is such that we can only describe the whole man as embedded in the aura. Although we must remember that the auric colours are in a state of movement within the aura, yet it is evident that one of the colours is especially distinct, namely around the lower parts of the spine. We may call this greenish. And again we may mention another distinct colour, which does not in any other part of the body appear so beautiful as here, around the region of the brain; and this in its ground-tone is a sort of lilac-blue. You can get the best conception of this lilac-blue if you imagine the colour of the peach-blossom; yet even this is only approximate. Between this lilac-blue of the upper portion of the brain, and the green of the lower parts of the spine, we have other colour nuances surrounding the human being which are hard to describe, since they do not often appear among the ordinary colours present in the surrounding world of the senses. Thus, for instance, adjoining the green is a colour which is neither green, blue, nor yellow, but a mixture of all three. In short, there appear to us, in this intermediate space, colours which actually do not exist in the physical world of sense. Even though it is difficult to describe what is here within the aura, one thing may nevertheless be stated positively: beginning above with the puffed-out spinal cord, we have lilac-blue colour and then, coming down to the end of the spine, we have a more distinctly greenish shade.

This I wish to state as a fact, along with what has been said to-day in connection with a purely external observation of the human form and of human conduct. Following this, we shall endeavour to observe also that other part of the human being which is attached to the portion we have discussed to-day, in the form of neck, trunk, limbs, etc., as constituting the second part of the human duality, to the end that we may then be able to proceed to a consideration of what is presented to us in the complete interaction of this human duality.

You will have noticed that all my lectures for years past have stressed the importance, both for the spiritual and social evolution of humanity, of the spread of what we spiritual scientists call the results of initiation research. You know also that by the word initiation, to use an ancient term, we understand a seeing into a spiritual world separated from our physical-sensible world by a kind of veil; a veil which may very easily lead to illusions. What is first given to man is the physical-sensible world, and he makes use of this either for the concerns of ordinary life or in pursuit of what today is called science. He combines his perceptions in the physical world with all kinds of concepts, ideas and so on; but all that does not lead him beyond the world of the senses; and we may say that the only means through which in ordinary life the human being can to a certain extent look beyond and above the sensible is in dreaming. The dream, as we experience it today in ordinary life, is only a poor imitation of what may be called experience in the super-sensible world. The super-sensible world has to be perceived not only with the same degree of consciousness that one has in ordinary life, a degree of consciousness which is not there in the dream condition, but with a consciousness of even higher degree. In order to experience the super-sensible world, one must enhance one’s consciousness, to come to a state which bears a similar relation to that of ordinary life, of ordinary consciousness, as that of ordinary consciousness bears to sleep consciousness, or at any rate to dream consciousness. Thus a kind of awakening out of the ordinary consciousness has to take place. Hence the dream is, of course, only a poor imitation of what is experienced in that other condition.

But really the dream differs far less from ordinary thinking than is believed to be the case. When you become aware of the picture world of an ordinary dream, it is actually in its content essentially the same as what underlies one’s thoughts, only that in thinking the human being enters into the outer world through his senses; and therefore what is arranged in the dream by mere analogy, is in thinking ordered in accordance with quite external relationships, is ordered by the perception of the outer sense world, in accordance with what this world says to us. You can have a kind of proof of this if you sit down and shut your eyes, or let us say if you are lazy and just allow your thoughts to wander, and then notice how they have wandered, notice that as you recall them in your mind you can hardly find between them any more connection than one finds in the events of a dream. The ordinary uncontrolled flow of man’s ideas is in a certain sense subject to the same law as that of the dream. It is only through our senses that we are torn out of our dreams. And as soon as we silence our senses, then we really begin to dream. This dream activity has to be intensified. It has to be so organized that it becomes permeated by a higher consciousness than that which our ordinary senses confer. Then imaginative consciousness arises, and then by degrees comes inspired consciousness, of which I told you yesterday in my public lecture, that it is recognized by Thomism as a justified source of cognition.

In our initiation science, then, we have the results of such an intensified condition of consciousness. The difficulty in the present evolution of humanity and in that of the near future is that humanity will most certainly need this science of initiation, and will not be able to get on without it, for if only the materialistic knowledge that has been developed in the last three to four centuries should continue to permeate human evolution, conditions such as we are now experiencing in the present social chaos of the civilized world will repeatedly recur, broken only by short intervals. What science has been able to give to humanity since the middle of the Fifteenth Century has certainly been sufficient for the making of technical discoveries; has been sufficient to spread over the earth a network of commerce and business intercourse, but it does not suffice for the creation of social arrangements really adapted to the consciousness of present-day humanity. That is something which has gradually to be realized. As long as the science of our universities, our recognized public education, rejects the science of initiation, as long as an external, material science is alone recognized, so long will humanity be perpetually in the grip of chaotic social conditions, such as we are now having. The science of initiation will alone be able to save humanity of the future from such chaotic social conditions. Above all, the science of initiation will be able to give those human beings who can approach it a consciousness of the fact that the life here on earth, which we enter through the gate of birth, is the continuation of a spiritual life which we have spent in the super-sensible world between the last death and this present birth. Now you know that this spiritual life which precedes our birth or conception is not spoken of in the churches of our modern civilized world. It is never spoken of, and for a quite definite reason. Because at a certain point of time, which coincides with that of the Greek evolution between Plato and Aristotle, all consciousness of a pre-natal spiritual life was lost. Plato speaks clearly of that life, but Aristotle vehemently defended the theory that every time a human being is born on the earth, a quite new soul unites with his physical body. The Aristotelian doctrine is that for each physically-born human being a new soul is created.

Now if one holds such a view, one cannot say otherwise than that the life which begins with death, which a man begins by throwing off his physical body—and of this Aristotle also speaks—continues to exist and does not again descend to earth. For, of course, unless one can speak of a prenatal existence, one has no justification for believing otherwise than that after his death man remains forever in a spiritual world. That had already led Aristotle to draw some very weighty conclusions. For instance, he argued that if anyone between birth and death here on earth has led a life which burdens his soul with evil, that human being is for all eternity forced to look back on that evil, which can never again be blotted out or overcome. So that according to Aristotle’s view, when the man dies, he has to look back eternally on the one earth life for which he has to pay.

This doctrine of Aristotle was taken over in its entirety by the Catholic Church, and when in the Middle Ages the Church sought for a philosophy which could carry its theology, it took over, as regards the life of the soul, this Aristotelian doctrine, and one can still today recognize its echo in the idea of eternal punishment in hell.

Now, after having for thousands of years had this doctrine of the origin of the soul with the body impressed upon them, how is it conceivable that people can free themselves from it again and arrive at the truth? They can only do so by receiving a new spiritual science. Without this renewal of spiritual science mankind will not be able to accept a life before birth as a justified belief or, rather, before conception. Just think what it signifies for the whole evolution of humanity not to speak of a prenatal life. When in the churches of today we are told only of a life after death, that simply arouses instincts connected with man’s egotistical desire not to be extinguished at death.

My dear friends, an essay, a thorough-going study is needed—“On the Cultivation of Human Egotism by the Churches”—In such a study one would have to explore the real motives which are worked upon in the sermons and doctrines of all the usual religious denominations, and one would everywhere find that appeal is made to the egotistical instincts of man, especially to the instinct for immortality after death. One could extend this study to cover more than a thousand years, and one would see that these religious denominations, by eliminating the life before birth under Aristotelian influence, have fostered in the highest degree the egotism in human nature. Churches, as cultivators of the deepest egotistical instincts, is a subject well worthy of study. By far the largest part of the religious life of the modern civilized world today panders to human egotism. This egotism can be felt in pronouncements which I could quote by the dozen. Again and again it is written, especially in pastoral letters, “that spiritual science busies itself with all kinds of knowledge about super-sensible worlds, but man does not need that. He only needs to have the childlike consciousness of his connection with Christ Jesus.” That is said both by pastors and by the faithful; this childlike connection with Christ Jesus is always emphasized. It is brought forward with immense pride against what is, of course, far less easy to attain—penetration into the concrete details of the spiritual world. It is preached over and over again. Again and again man is led to believe that he can be most Christian when he least exercises his soul forces, when he least strives to think something clear with what he calls his Christ consciousness. This Christ consciousness must be something which man attains by absolute childlikeness—so say these easy-going ones. And best of all they like to be told that Christ has taken all the sins of mankind on Himself, and has redeemed mankind through His sacrificial death, without men having to do anything themselves. All this points to the belief that through the sacrificial death of Christ, immortality is guaranteed after death; but that merely tends to nourish in humanity the most extreme egotism. By this cultivation of egotism on the part of the churches, we have finally brought about what is dawning today over all the civilized world. Because this egotism has been so widely cultivated, mankind has become what it is today. Just think if the human being, not merely theoretically with ideas and concepts, but with the whole inner life of his soul were to grasp the truth that this earthly life as he enters it through birth lays upon him the obligation of fulfilling a mission which he has brought with him from a life before birth! Just think how egotism would vanish if that thought were to fill our whole souls, if this earthly life were regarded as a task which must be fulfilled because it is linked to an over-earthly life through which we have previously passed! Egotism is combated by the feeling that stirs in us when we look upon life on earth as a continuation of an over-earthly life, just as it is fostered by the religious denominations which speak only of life after death. That is what is important for man’s social well being, to restore the fact of his pre-existence to the consciousness of mankind of the present and of the future, and of course the idea of reincarnation is inseparable from that of the pre-existence of the human soul.

Thus we can say that the Catholic Church itself accepted the Aristotelian doctrine and made it into a dogma of her own; but this dogma must now be replaced by the higher knowledge of repeated earth lives, of pre-existence, which Aristotle was clearly the first to leave out of account.

You see, if you can estimate what importance it has for mankind to absorb certain elements into its inmost life of soul, then you will recognize what it means for man’s life of feeling in its widest sense. It means that the human being gets quite another consciousness of himself. Now, my dear friends, let us add to what has just been said, the words of St. Paul, that this ordinary consciousness must become permeated more and more by the consciousness, “Not I, but Christ in me.” When we look upon ourselves as something different, Christ will also become different within us. If we look upon ourselves as something which, even as regards the soul-spiritual, has only originated at birth, then of course the Christ can only be in what has come into existence with this present birth, and will only have the task of carrying our souls through the gate of death and further through all eternity. But if we know that we have had a prenatal life, we can know also that it is the Christ Himself Who has laid on us a mission for this life on earth, that we have to develop our own forces, that we have to find Him in our forces, that we have to seek Him as the best we can have in us, the best in our spirit and soul.

The Catholic Church, by doing away with the spirit in the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in the year 869 has always taken care that those belonging to it should never think about the real psycho-spiritual nature of man. The Church laid down in that Council that man consists only of body and soul, though the soul has a few spiritual attributes; but that to regard man as consisting of body, soul and spirit is heretical, and when the Jesuit Zimmerman brought forward certain reproaches against spiritual science, he reckoned as its deepest sin that it seeks to re-establish the validity of trichotomy, by declaring that man consists of body, soul and spirit. For thereby the true nature of man and also his real relationship to the Christ must inevitably come to light. But what the Church worked for more and more was that man should not come to a true understanding of his real relationship to Christ. We may say, my dear friends, that the development of the western churches consists really in drawing an ever denser and denser veil over the real secret of Christ.

You see, fundamentally, all institutions are built on external abstractions. When a state is young it has but few laws and people are relatively unfettered by them. The longer a state exists, and especially the longer the various parties in the state apply their clever arguments, the more laws are made until finally no one knows where he is, for there is no longer only one law, but everything is entangled in the meshes of intertwining laws from which one has the greatest difficulty in freeing oneself.

That is the case also with the churches; when a church begins to make its way through the world, it has relatively few dogmas; but men must have something to do, and just as the statesman is always making laws, so do Churchmen create more and more dogmas, until finally everything becomes dogma, dogma becomes consolidated. It is only since the time when Scholasticism was at its height that this consolidation of dogma has been especially noticeable in modern civilization. Anyone who really studies thoughtfully the Scholasticism of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas will find that in their time everything to do with dogma was still fluid, still a matter for discussion, that discussion was still taken as a matter of course. True, in the Scholastic period there was already a certain opposition within the western church. There was the opposition between the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominican Order, of which Scholasticism was the flower, developed its knowledge through strictly logical ideas. The Franciscan Order declined to do that; the Franciscans wanted to achieve everything through a childlike feeling. I will not now enter into the relation between Dominican and Franciscan teaching, but I should like you to imagine what it would be like if people fought as vigorously today about the content of Dominican and Franciscan doctrine as they did in the Middle Ages, when they discussed dogma so freely. Of course, the Roman bishop even at that time declared people to be heretics; and he could have gone on doing so for a long while, had not the secular governments come to his assistance and burnt the people whom he merely wanted to condemn. In this matter one has to admit that greater blame falls on the secular rulers. All this did not prevent there being free discussion in the Catholic Church at that time. This free discussion has gradually been completely eliminated. Free discussion was something which the Catholic Church, as time went on, could not stand. And why not? Because a quite new consciousness was arising in humanity. This was the transformation of consciousness in man, which took place, as I have often explained to you, in the middle of the Fifteenth Century. The human being wants ever more and more to form his own judgment from the depths of his own soul. In the Middle Ages that was not so. Man then had a kind of communal consciousness, and only a few learned people, the real scholars, could get beyond that. They were able to evolve out of this common uniform folk consciousness because they had been trained in Scholasticism. This also applies to a certain number who were trained in the Rabbinical teaching. In general, however, man’s consciousness was uniform. It was a community consciousness, a family consciousness. But the individual consciousness was developing more and more.

Now, one thing that the Catholic Church had always had, because it had attracted highly educated people, was historical foresight. The Catholic Church knows quite well what I am now saying, that the principle of modern development is to foster the individual consciousness of man—but the Catholic Church is unwilling to let this individual consciousness arise. She wants to maintain that dull communal consciousness, from which only those will stand out who have received a scholastic education. Now, my dear friends, there is a very good way of maintaining this dull communal consciousness—it is always a dull one. And this is to damp down the ordinary consciousness which a person has whenever he makes use of his sense organs, to subdue it thoroughly. Just as the dream damps down the ordinary consciousness, similarly the consciousness is subdued for the purpose of making of it a dull communal consciousness. Now one of the many characteristics of the dream is that in many respects it is a liar. Or would you deny that the dream is a liar, that it represents things which are not true? It is, however, not due to the dream but to the subdued consciousness that when we dream we cannot test what is true and what is untrue. Hence it is one of the properties of this subdued consciousness that it takes away from human beings the possibility of distinguishing truth from untruth. Now if one is versed in these matters, what does one do? One relates to people under authority things which are not true, and one does this systematically. Thereby one subdues their consciousness to the dim state of the dream consciousness. Thereby one succeeds in undermining what since the middle of the Fifteenth Century has been seeking to emerge as individual consciousness in the souls of men. It is a fine undertaking so to work under authority as to write articles such as are now appearing in the “Katholischen Sonntagsblatt”; for thereby one succeeds in preventing men from developing in the way they should since the middle of the Fifteenth Century! Although the individual may not know it, the whole hierarchy is behind what happens in this respect, and has organized things extremely well. If one believes that these things happen out of mere naivety or purely from rancor, one is making a great mistake. Naturally, we must fight lying and untruth with all the means at our disposal, but we must not believe that these lies proceed out of simplicity or even out of the belief that what is said is the truth; for if these people spoke the truth, they would not attain what is their purpose to attain, which is to subdue consciousness by deliberately telling men lies, and that is a mighty and diabolical undertaking.

Now, my dear friends, this, too, must be said quite frankly. The simplicity is entirely on the other side. Simplicity today is not on the side of the Catholic Church but on the side of their opponents. They do not believe that the Catholic Church is great in the direction I have described; they do not believe that the Catholic Church long ago foresaw that the social condition which has now come over Europe would some day come about, and that the Catholic Church took her own measures to make her influence felt in those social conditions. What the Catholic Church intends is to create a bridge between the most radical socialism, Communism, and its own domination.

You see, this magnificent foresight is something one has to recognize in everything which has a real spiritual basis, a spiritual foundation that is rooted in a real spiritual life, and not in mere abstraction. You see, with all this modern enlightenment one arrives at nothing which can have a far-reaching significance in the course of human evolution. But the ceremonies practiced in the Catholic Mass are of far greater significance than all the sermons from evangelical pulpits, because they are deeds accomplished in the sensible world, and in their form they are at the same time something which enchants the spiritual world into the sensible world. For that reason the Catholic Church has never been willing to deprive herself of magical means of working on human beings. These magical means do exist. And we must not believe that anything other than re-entry into the spiritual world in all true inner sincerity and uprightness can be effective against these things. And as what one might call an external sign that the Catholic Church has always had a connection with the spiritual world, you can take something which I have already told a few of you.

In the first decade of the Twentieth Century a Papal Encyclical was issued which declared various things to be heretical. Papal Encyclicals speak in such a way that they always adduce the doctrine in question and then say: “Whoever believes that is anathema.” Thus it quotes some doctrine taken from one of the books of Haeckel or someone, and then says: “Whoever believes that is anathema.” It does not state what is true, but says: “Whoever believes that is anathema.”

Now, you see, the science of initiation makes it always possible to investigate such things, and I set myself the task of making certain investigations concerning this Encyclical. I am bound to say that here, as in so many other things, what was promulgated by the Pope “ex cathedra” at that time was really drawn from out of the spiritual world. I mean that what has flowed into that Encyclical did come down from the spiritual world. But in an extraordinary way it was completely reversed! Everywhere where there should have been a ‘yes’ there was a ‘no’, and vice-versa. That is something—and I could give other instances—which shows that the Roman Church has today some sort of real connection with the spiritual world but one that is extraordinarily harmful for mankind. Therefore, we need not be surprised that it sees in the rise of modern spiritual science something which it wishes at all costs to get rid of, for, my dear friends, what is the effect of this new spiritual science? It brings about a consciousness of a prenatal life, of pre-existence. That may not be! Under no circumstances shall that happen! So spiritual science must be condemned; for spiritual science calls man’s attention to his own being, makes him aware that he consists of body, soul, and spirit. Under no circumstances may that be; therefore spiritual science must be condemned. People would see, for example, that the dogma of eternal damnation in hell is an Aristotelian consequence of the creation of the soul at physical birth. Suppose a Catholic theologian today studies the connection between Aristotle and Scholasticism, and perceives that the Scholastics derived their proof of the origin of the soul together with the physical body from the philosophy of Aristotle! He would see behind the scenes of the origin of dogma. What is done to prevent this? The theologian is made to take the oath against Modernism. He is made to swear that it is part of his creed that he can never come to a historical conclusion contrary to dogmas which are given out from Rome. The fact that he has taken this oath works so strongly on his feelings that he is confused in his sober research and can never come to see that dogma is bound up with the historical evolution of humanity. Now things cannot remain in this state if the science of initiation arises, and therefore this science of initiation must under all circumstances be condemned.

Why am I telling you these things, my dear friends? So that you may not take the matter too lightly. For in our anthroposophical spiritual science it is verily not a question of the sort of things which go on, for instance in the Theosophical Society. That the Theosophical Society is not to be taken seriously is clearly to be seen from the fact that one day it came to accept by a majority the whole farce of Krishnamurti as the reborn Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Such a comedy is only based on hypocrisy, even though this hypocrisy be taken seriously by many. But what should grow on the soil of Anthroposophy, of spiritual science, should be a search for truth, sincere through and through. It is therefore something which, as the Catholic Church is well aware, penetrates behind the scenes, to what must not be discovered if that church is to maintain the dominion in the world to which she lays claim.

All that I am now saying is simply to show you that these things may not be taken lightly. For it must be recognized that the Catholic Church has shown great foresight. Though the individual sheep follows the lead and merely obeys orders, though he may be ignorant of what this systematic lying means for the whole evolution of mankind—though the individual knows nothing and does as he is told, the whole system is thoroughly well established, for the lying will be believed by large numbers.

On the other side there is the naïve belief that all the external fabrication of natural laws which today forms the subject of our university education can be of significance for the further development of humanity, that all that nonsense about the conservation of matter and energy can be of significance for the further development of mankind! Today people cannot even look with an unprejudiced eye upon the snow which is spread before them every winter (if they are living in the temperate zone), yet through the covering of the forces of growth by the snow crust one part of the earth goes through a complete transformation; and folk consciousness which speaks of the purity of the snow knows far more than our modern science which talks of the conservation of matter and energy. Of course I can only say what I am now saying because I have spent many weeks in showing you how ill-founded are the modern laws of the conservation of matter and energy, how in fact in every human being matter and energy are destroyed, as they work up towards the head, and new matter and new energy arise. All these things are bound to be fiercely contested in some quarters, and the only thing which can help is for as many people as possible to become conscious of the present task of mankind—to be aware that the individual consciousness must lay hold of the world. It will do so, but it can either lay hold of the wisdom of the world or of the blind instincts. If it seizes hold of the blind instincts there will come about a completely antisocial condition, such as is now being prepared in Russia. That, my dear friends, will gradually evoke an antisocial condition against which the English or North American governments, not to speak of the French or any other, will be absolutely defenseless. It would be childish to believe that the English Parliament will be able to deal with what will then lay hold of humanity if the individual consciousness works merely by instinct. But there is one power which will be ready to deal with it, and that is the power of Rome. It is only a question of how it will be done. Rome can establish a dominion; it has the necessary means for this. Thus the only real question is not whether Bolshevism or the Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie will get the upper hand; the question is whether there will be antisocial chaos, Roman domination, or the resolve on the part of mankind to fill itself with that spirit which in 869 at the Council of Constantinople the western Church declared it heretical to recognize.

There is no other alternative than that mankind determine not to go on living in the way which is natural when there are only materialistic thoughts about the world. How does mankind live in a materialistic world? People earn their living in accordance with the fluctuations of the market; there is no other measurement for the social order. After that they may perhaps have a philosophy of life, as a sort of luxury, but only as a luxury. Those supposed to be still more profound say that one must raise oneself into the spiritual world and leave the evil material world behind; a really profound nature can have nothing to do with the material world; he must understand nothing about the material world, but become a mystic and live in the higher world! But even these profound natures as well as the less profound have children and have the notion that these children must “earn,” that it would be very, very wrong if the children were not sent to schools where they would be trained in present-day methods of earning a living. Thereby they have already come to terms with the existing state of things; thereby they hand on this materialism to the next generation.

Now when someone talks like this he is an inconvenient person, and it is best simply to revile him, for to hear what I have just been telling you is for most people as if they were being irritated by vermin. Now people do not like being irritated in this way by psychic vermin and so they cover themselves with a thick skin which makes them impervious to what spiritual science has to say about our present culture. It is on this side then that the naivety lies; and when the Catholic Church saw that people were becoming so one-sided, they took care to have people specially trained, and in this they really were indirectly guided by spiritual impulses. And the foundation of the Jesuit Order by Ignatius Loyola as a result of fundamental influences from the spiritual world is one of the most significant events of metahistory, and in it one has to do with a strong spiritual efficacy.

Now, my dear friends, we must, of course, among ourselves be able to speak frankly; hence I have been obliged to speak of the grand but questionable training of the Jesuits. I also dealt with this theme in the cycle From Jesus to Christ, which some misguided member has now delivered into the hands of a mudslinger and fabricator of nonsense. You know that in the Karlsruhe cycle I discussed the fundamental basis of Jesuit training. What, may I ask, is the use of stating in each cycle that it is printed as a manuscript for members only, when mudslingers have the cycle at their disposal and can use it for the preparation of all sorts of lies? This incident bears out in a remarkable way what I have already often said, that the time would come when one could no longer count on these cycles being restricted to a small circle, for mankind is not at present fit to be entrusted with anything. Of course, everything written in that quarter is rubbish and untrue, but it is written not on the basis of my public writings, but of private cycles which have been passed on, and I have good reason to believe that one of the first cycles given into the hands of the Catholic clergy was that very Karlsruhe cycle on the Jesuits. For they on their part are not inclined to let the truth about Jesuit training be known. The world must know nothing of how Jesuits are trained; the world must know nothing of their powerful discipline.

Modern mankind in its simplicity is merely retarding its own consciousness. On the subject of the Jesuits there are absolutely no true ideas. There are numerous men within that Order of such spiritual capacity that if they were scattered about the world and did not spend their time in the way they do but were working at external science or painting or poetry, they would be honored as individual geniuses; they would be recognized as the great minds of mankind. Within the Jesuit Order there are countless men who would be great lights if they were to appear as individuals and were busy with something different—with, for instance, materialistic science. But these men suppress their very names; they submerge themselves in their Order, and one of the conditions of their strength is that the world should know nothing of the way in which many a head, clothed in black cassock and Jesuit cap, has been trained.

These things are intended to show you how fundamentally different the whole form of consciousness is in different categories of human beings. But our modern simpletons, who consider themselves enlightened, will not take these things seriously. That must be emphasized again and again, and that, my dear friends, is what I had to speak to you about today.

Now for the next two weeks while I am away we can have no more lectures here. In conclusion to what I have said, partly in public, partly in these private lectures, I had to add all that I have said here today in order that you should not ignore the importance of this misuse of our lecture cycles by our own members. Of course, when the cycles were given, I thought I had to do with people who would respect the undertaking which in a certain sense they had been given. But I was mistaken, and it is quite clear from the rubbish that appears in articles today who has all the cycles at his disposal!

Verse for Saturday. My dear sisters and brothers! In ordinary day consciousness we know nothing about what's behind what we sense, imagine, think, feel and will. In our dream life we're in this living weaving that's the background of our day consciousness. One part of this world of which we can otherwise perceive nothing extends into our chaotic dream pictures. If we could awaken out of our dreams half way we would experience a flowing wave around us in which our soul lives from the beginning of sleep. And then if we woke up completely we would bring a memory of living, weaving dream experiences into our day consciousness. However it's physically impossible to wake up half way; we must go into sense consciousness completely right away. That's why we know nothing about that other world. But we're really always dreaming. This living, weaving dream world is always around us and we're in it—we just don't know it. The strange thing about dreams is that it's easy to forget them, much easier than anything we experience with day consciousness. Most people only think about what they experience with their day consciousness, and their dreams reflect this. It's only when one fills one's soul with ideas and feelings that go beyond daily life that one can dream about something that has its origin in the spiritual world. A man who's immersed in his everyday consciousness knows nothing about this spirituality that's behind all of his thinking, feeling and willing. We can become aware of this spirituality from another side. A spiritual stream pours into the physical body at birth or conception as it's getting built up and gradually pulses through the whole organism. The life of the new soul core, the germ for the next life, that which survives death becomes created in the course of a life. But we know nothing of the spirit from the previous life that streams into physical existence or about the soul core that's the seed for the next life. So what do we know?

Our life consists of two parts, one from birth to our earliest memory and another from this moment until death. If one is in one's 31st year and remembers back to that point, one then arrives at the boundary of the spirituality that's streaming in there. One perceives this boundary; one becomes aware of this boundary by bumping into it. Such collisions remain in our memory during our life and form our memories. Our memories collect in there. And that's our consciousness in physical life.

Just as the seed of the new plant develops in a plant, so we work at the forces that shape our new life for the future. Happy are they who have stored up nice memories. The spirituality from the past life that streams and goes through the new body from birth on gradually dissipates during life.

As was often said, a great memory tableau appears after death. On leaving the physical body one first arrives at this boundary where all the memories are stored up; we then see them as a great tableau before us. The memory of some experience can be forgotten all life long until it's suddenly drawn up into consciousness again. It was always there. It's as if one put salt in water and it falls to the bottom. This can be brought up again by stirring. Likewise our memories are a sediment that we can bring up again. If we pour seltzer into a glass we see little bubbles rising. The water, the actually real thing we don't see but only where there is nothing, the carbon dioxide bubbles. We see that, that seems to be reality to us. Likewise we only become aware of the boundary between the new soul core and the old spirituality; we become aware of something where they bump into each other. And this makes up our day consciousness. Consciousness arises through the contact between past and future. We can also make ourselves aware of this spirituality from a third side. It's not only men who think and their memories and thoughts remain as a sediment, but spiritual beings have thought and are still thinking. What high hierarchies thought in times long past, the memories that remained behind of these thoughts are what we perceive around us here as mountains, clouds, streams or in short nature. The physical sun is the remaining memory of the sun leader, of Christ, of the earth spirit who later went into the earth at the event of Golgotha. And the memories of what high beings on Moon thought are plants, animals and men's physical bodies. Spiritual beings there thought errors—which was appropriate there—but then didn't realize them. When we men think good and noble things they continue to exist; we see them in the distance, in the future as imperishable existential values. The errors, lies and dissolute things we think also survive and we see them standing before us in the distance as a waste product that serves as food for the seeds that emerge from well thought things—just as we feed ourselves from the erroneous thoughts of Moon spirits. The waste product in itself is unproductive, but it serves as food for the seeds developing out of good things, just as the mineral kingdom provides soil for plants and just as one thing always feeds on other things. Good feeds on evil like a sprouting seed that consumes corrupt things and perpetuates itself. But we should only think bad and evil things and mustn't let them be realized as deeds, for then they are always luciferic and ahrimanic. Lucifer is about at the stage where the Elohim were on old Moon and he still wants to carry out erroneous thinking in the way that those beings did back then while it was appropriate but is now wrong. But he can only let errors be thought in men. That's why there are errors and deceptions here, and we should become ever more aware of this.

We become aware of something where the “memories” of those high hierarchies are. Through the fact that we bump into a wall that's the “memory” of Gods with our hand that's also a memory, the boundaries of these realities bump into each other, and we thereby become aware of this object. We feel reality, matter in day consciousness where this real thing ceases, and we feel the other thing as nothing. We feel neither our hand nor the wall, but only the boundary in between. A table isn't a reality—it's a hole in the spiritual world that's filled with wood. It's only in our ordinary consciousness that we look upon the table as a reality. If we could make ourselves strong enough through meditation and dampen this day consciousness so that we became completely aware of the nothingness of the surrounding world, then we with our souls would always experience the fact that we're in the spiritual world. Three meditation verses were given to us for this strengthening of our soul. It's a matter of meditating them correctly, of not simply saying the words but of hearing the expression that has to be placed into them if they are to work on our soul in the right way. (The verse in the lesson from March 5th 1914 in Stuttgart, is included here for reference.)

The first two lines in verse one are descriptive, then—resistance. Then descriptive again, and at the end is a request. Beginners can meditate this verse in the evening after the retrospect; those who already have an exercise can do it in their spare time. Special attention should be given to the question in the fourth line of the second verse. There's an entreaty at the end. Beginners should do it in the morning; others can do it at any musing time. A third verse is given us as a test to ask oneself once in a while whether one already feels the spiritual world as a reality.

Everything that's inspired out of the spiritual world is revealed in numbers. The being who let these 7-lined verses flow in thereby helped people to distinguish between real and unreal things. By letting these verses pass through our soul repeatedly we give this being an opportunity to speak to our soul; thereby we get the right effect of the verses.

These verses are expressed briefly in EDN, ICM, PSSR and also in: In the spirit lay the germ of my body ...

In a dream the soul comprehends itself in a fleeting form, which is really a mask. In dreamless sleep it apparently loses itself entirely. In spiritual self-contemplation [Anschaung], which is achieved through circumspect reconstruction [besonnen] of the dream-state, the soul comes into its own as a creative being, of which the physical body is the reflected image.

A dream, however, arises out of sleep. Whoever undertakes to raise the dream up into the clear light of consciousness must also feel the incentive to go still further. He does this when he tries consciously to experience dreamless sleep.

That seems to be impossible, precisely because in sleep consciousness ceases. The desire consciously to experience unconsciousness seems like folly.

The folly, however, takes on another light when one confronts the memories one can follow from a given point of time backward to one's last awakening. To do so one must proceed in such a way as to connect the memory pictures vividly with that which they recall. Then, if one tries—working backward—to proceed to the next conscious memory picture before that, this will be found before the last falling asleep. If one has really made the connection vivid with what is recalled, there arises an inner difficulty. One cannot join up the memory picture after awaking with the one before falling asleep.

Ordinary consciousness gets one over this difficulty by not vividly connecting what is recalled, but simply placing the waking image next to the image one has on falling asleep. The person who has raised his consciousness to a high degree of sensitiveness, however, through conscious imitation of the dream, finds that the two images fall apart from one another [fallen ausenander]. For him an abyss lies between them, but because he notices this abyss it already begins to fill itself up. For his self-awareness the dreamless sleep ceases to be an empty passage of time. Out of it there emerges like a memory a spiritual content of the “empty time,” like a memory, it is true, of something that ordinary consciousness had not contained before. Even so this memory points to an experience of one's own soul like an ordinary memory. The soul, however, really looks thereby into that which in ordinary experience—in dreamless sleep—occurred unconsciously.

On this path the soul looks still more deeply within than it does in the condition that arises as a result of the conscious dream imitation. In this condition the soul beholds its own body-forming being. Through the conscious penetration of dreamless sleep, the soul perceives itself in its own being, completely detached from the body.

Now, however, the soul beholds not only the forming of the body but also, beyond that, the formation of its own willing [Wollen].

The inner nature of the will remains as unknown to ordinary consciousness as the events of dreamless sleep. One experiences a thought that contains the intention of the will. This thought sinks into the obscure world of the feelings and disappears into the darkness of the bodily processes. It emerges again as the external bodily process of an arm movement that is comprehended anew through a thought. Between the two thought contents there lies something like the sleep between the thoughts before falling asleep and those after waking.

Now as the inner working of the soul upon the body becomes comprehensible to the first level of vision, so does the will over and above the body to the second. The soul can follow the path to behold its inner working upon the body's organic development; and it can take the other path by which it learns to comprehend how the soul works on the body in such a way as to extract the will from it.

And just as dreaming lies between sleeping and waking, so feeling lies between willing and thinking. On the same path that leads to the illumination of the will process lies the illumination of the world of feeling also.

In the first kind of vision the soul's inner working on the organism is revealed. In the second the soul penetrates to the will. But an inner activity must precede the outward manifestation of the will. Before the arm can be raised, the creative current must flow into it so that in its metabolic processes, which run on quietly, processes are inserted that are clearly the result of feeling. Feeling is a willing that remains enclosed within the human being, a willing that is arrested at its inception.

The processes inserted into the body for feeling and willing reveal themselves for the second stage of vision as processes that are in opposition to those that support life. They are destructive processes. In the constructive processes life prospers; but the soul withers in them. The life of the body, which itself is built up by the soul, must be broken down so that the nature and activity of the soul can unfold out of the body.

To spiritual vision the working of the soul on the body is like a memory of something that the soul had first to accomplish before it could exist in its own activity.

Thereby, however, the soul experiences itself as a purely spiritual being that has let the forming of the body take precedence to the soul's own activity in order to have the body become the basis for the soul's inherent, purely spiritual development. The soul first devotes its creative effort to the body so that, after this has been done sufficiently, the soul can manifest itself in free spirituality.

And this development of the soul begins already with thinking that results from the perception of the senses. When one perceives an object, the soul commences its activity. It shapes the corresponding part of the body in such a way that it becomes adapted for developing, in the form of thought, a mirror image of the object. In experiencing this mirror image, the soul beholds the result of its own activity.

One will never find the spiritual nature of the soul by philosophizing about the thoughts that arise before ordinary consciousness. The spiritual activity of the soul does not lie in these thoughts but behind them. It is true that the thoughts which the soul experiences are the result of the brain's activity. The brain's activity, however, is first the result of the spiritual activity of the soul. In misunderstanding this fact lies what is unsound in the materialistic world view. This view is right when it demonstrates from every possible scientific presupposition that thoughts are the result of the brain's activity. Any other view that seeks to contradict this will always run up against the claims of materialism. The activity of the brain, however, is the product of the activity of the spirit. To realize this it is not sufficient to look back into the inner being of man. In doing so one encounters thoughts. And these contain only a pictorial reality. This pictorial reality is the product of the physical body. In observing retrospectively one must bring to life reinforced and strengthened soul capacities. One must wrest the dreaming soul from the twilight of the dream; then it will not evaporate into fantasies, but rather lay its mask aside so as to appear as a being active spiritually in the body. One must wrest the sleeping soul from the darkness of sleep; then the soul does not lose sight of itself but faces itself as an actual spiritual entity, which in the act of willing, by means of the bodily organism, creates above and beyond this body.

[ 1 ] From the foregoing considerations it follows that it is impossible to prove by investigating the content of our observation that our percepts are mental pictures. Such proof is supposed to be established by showing that, if the process of perceiving takes place in the way in which—on the basis of naïve-realistic assumptions about our psychological and physiological constitution—we imagine that it does, then we have to do, not with things in themselves, but only with our mental pictures of things. Now if naïve realism, when consistently thought out, leads to results which directly contradict its presuppositions, then these presuppositions must be discarded as unsuitable for the foundation of a universal philosophy. In any case, it is not permissible to reject the presuppositions and yet accept the consequences, as the critical idealist does when he bases his assertion that the world is my mental picture on the line of argument already described. (Eduard von Hartmann gives a full account of this line of argument in his work, Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie.)

[ 2 ] The truth of critical idealism is one thing, the force of its proof another. How it stands with the former will appear later on in the course of this book, but the force of its proof is exactly nil. If one builds a house, and the ground floor collapses while the first floor is being built, then the first floor collapses also. Naïve realism and critical idealism is related as ground floor to the first floor in this simile.

[ 3 ] For someone who believes that the whole perceived world is only an imagined one, a mental picture, and is in fact the effect upon my soul of things unknown to me, the real problem of knowledge is naturally concerned not with the mental pictures present only in the soul but with the things which are independent of us and which lie outside our consciousness. He asks: How much can we learn about these things indirectly, seeing that we cannot observe them directly? From this point of view, he is concerned not with the inner connection of his conscious percepts with one another but with their causes which transcend his consciousness and exist independently of him, since the percepts, in his opinion, disappear as soon as he turns his senses away from things. Our consciousness, on this view, works like a mirror from which the pictures of definite things disappear the moment its reflecting surface is not turned toward them. If, now, we do not see the things themselves but only their reflections, then we must learn indirectly about the nature of things by drawing conclusions from the behavior of the reflections. Modern science takes this attitude in that it uses percepts only as a last resort in obtaining information about the processes of matter which lie behind them, and which alone really “are.” If the philosopher, as critical idealist, admits real existence at all, then his search for knowledge through the medium of mental pictures is directed solely toward this existence. His interest skips over the subjective world of mental pictures and goes straight for what produces these pictures.

[ 4 ] The critical idealist can, however, go even further and say: I am confined to the world of my mental pictures and [cannot] escape from it. If I think of a thing as being behind my mental picture, then thought is again nothing but a mental picture. An idealist of this type will either deny the thing-in-itself entirely or at any rate assert that it has no significance for human beings, in other words, that it is as good as non-existent since we can know nothing of it.

[ 5 ] To this kind of critical idealist the whole world seems a dream, in the face of which all striving for knowledge is simply meaningless. For him there can be only two sorts of men: victims of the illusion that their own dream structures are real things, and the wise ones who see through the nothingness of this dream world and who must therefore gradually lose all desire to trouble themselves further about it. From this point of view, even one's own personality may become a mere dream phantom. Just as during sleep there appears among my dream images an image of myself, so in waking consciousness the mental picture of my own I is added to the mental picture of the outer world. We have then given to us in consciousness, not our real I, but only our mental picture of our I. Whoever denies that things exist, or at least that we can know anything of them, must also deny the existence, or at least the knowledge, of one's own personality. The critical idealist then comes to the conclusion that “All reality resolves itself into a wonderful dream, without a life which is dreamed about, and without a spirit which is having the dream; into a dream which hangs together in a dream of itself.”¹

[ 6 ] For the person who believes that he recognizes our immediate life to be a dream, it is immaterial whether he postulates nothing more behind this dream or whether he relates his mental pictures to actual things. In both cases life must lose all academic interest for him. But whereas all learning must be meaningless for those who believe that the whole of the accessible universe is exhausted in dreams, yet for others who feel entitled to argue from mental pictures to things, learning will consist in the investigation of these “things-in-themselves.” The first of these theories may be called absolute illusionism, the second is called transcendental realism by its most rigorously logical exponent, Eduard von Hartmann.²

[ 7 ] Both these points of views have this in common with naïve realism, that they seek to gain a footing in the world by means of an investigation of perceptions. Within this sphere, however, they are unable to find a firm foundation.

[ 8 ] One of the most important questions for an adherent of transcendental realism would have to be: How does the Ego produce the world of mental pictures out of itself? A world of mental pictures which was given to us, and which disappeared as soon as we shut our senses to the external world, might kindle as earnest desire for knowledge, in so far as it was a means of investigating indirectly the world of the I-in-itself. If the things of our experience were “mental pictures”, then our everyday life would be like a dream, and the discovery of the true state of affairs would be like waking. Now our dream images interest us as long as we dream and consequently do not detect their dream character. But as soon as we wake, we no longer look for the inner connections of our dream images among themselves, but rather for the physical, physiological and psychological processes which underlie them. In the same way, a philosopher who holds the world to be his mental picture cannot be interested in the mutual relations of the details within the picture. If he allows for the existence of a real Ego at all, then his question will be, not how one of his mental pictures is linked with another, but what takes place in the independently existing soul while a certain train of mental pictures passes through his consciousness. If I dream that I am drinking wine which makes my throat dry, and then wake up with a cough,³ I cease, the moment I wake, to be interested in progress of the dream for its own sake. My attention is now concerned only with the physiological and psychological processes by means of which the irritation which causes me to cough comes to be symbolically expressed in the dream picture. Similarly, once the philosopher is convinced that the given world consists of nothing but mental pictures, his interest is bound to switch at once from this world to the real soul which lies behind. The matter is more serious, however, for the adherent of illusionism who denies altogether the existence of an Ego-in-itself behind the mental pictures, or at least holds this Ego to be unknowable. We might very easily be led to such a view by the observation that, in contrast to dreaming, there is indeed the waking state in which we have the opportunity of seeing through our dreams and referring them to the real relations of things, but that there is no state of the self which is related similarly to our waking conscious life. Whoever takes this view fails to see that there is, in fact, something which is related to mere perceiving in the way that our waking experience is related to our dreaming. This something is thinking.

[ 9 ] The naïve man cannot be charged with the lack of insight referred to here. He accepts life as it is, and regards things as real just as they present themselves to him in experience. The first step, however, which we take beyond this standpoint can be only this, that we ask how thinking is related to percept. It makes no difference whether or no the percept, in the shape given to me, exists continuously before and after my forming a mental picture; if I want to assert anything whatever about it, I can do so only with the help of thinking. If I assert that the world is my mental picture, I have enunciated the result of an act of thinking. and if my thinking is not applicable to the world, then this result is false. Between a percept and every kind of assertion about it there intervenes thinking.

[ 10 ] The reason why we generally overlook thinking in our consideration of things has already been given (see Chapter 3). It lies in the fact that our attention is concentrated only on the object we are thinking about, but not at the same time on the thinking itself. The naïve consciousness, therefore, treats thinking as something which has nothing to do with things, but stands altogether aloof from them and contemplates them. The picture which the thinker makes of the phenomena of the world is regarded not as something belonging to the things but as existing only in the human head. The world is complete in itself without this picture. It is finished and complete with all its substances and forces, and of this ready-made world man makes a picture. Whoever thinks thus need only be asked one question. What right have you to declare the world to be complete without thinking? Does not the world produce thinking in the heads of men with the same necessity as it produces the blossom on a plant? Plant a seed in the earth. It puts forth root and stem, it unfolds into leaves and blossoms. Set the plant before yourself. It connects itself, in your mind, with a definite concept. Why should this concept belong any less to the whole plant than leaf and blossom? You say the leaves and blossoms exist quite apart from a perceiving subject, but the concept appears only when a human being confronts the plant. Quite so. But leaves and blossoms also appear on the plant only if there is soil in which the seed can be planted, and light and air in which the leaves and blossoms can unfold. Just so the concept of a plant arises when a thinking consciousness approaches the plant.

[ 11 ] It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through bare perception as a totality, as the whole thing, while that which reveals itself through thoughtful contemplation is regarded as a mere accretion which has nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the picture that offers itself to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my object. If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see today's state change continuously into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance cross-section of an object which is in a continual process of development. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states which lay as possibilities within the bud will not develop. Similarly I may be prevented tomorrow from observing the blossom further, and will thereby have an incomplete picture of it.

[ 12 ] It would be a quite unobjective and fortuitous kind of opinion that declared of the purely momentary appearance of a thing: this is the thing.

[ 13 ] Just as little is it legitimate to regard the sum of perceptual characteristics as the thing. It might be quite possible for a spirit to receive the concept at the same time as, and united with, the percept. It would never occur to such a spirit that the concept did not belong to the thing. It would have to ascribe to the concept an existence indivisibly bound up with the thing.

[ 14 ] I will make myself clearer by an example. If I throw a stone horizontally through the air, I perceive it in different places one after the other. I connect these places so as to form a line. Mathematics teaches me to know various kinds of lines, one of which is the parabola. I know the parabola to be a line which is produced when a point moves according to a particular law. If I examine the conditions under which the stone thrown by me moves, I find the path traversed is identical with the line I know as a parabola. That the stone moves just in a parabola is a result of the given conditions and follows necessarily from them. The form of the parabola belongs to the whole phenomenon as much as any other feature of it does. The spirit described above who has no need of the detour of thinking would find itself presented not only a sequence of visual percepts at different points but, as part and parcel of these phenomena, also with the parabolic form of the path which we add to the phenomenon only by thinking.

[ 15 ] It is not due to the objects that they are given us at first without the corresponding concepts, but to our mental organization. Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sides, from perceiving and from thinking.

[ 16 ] The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the nature of the things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I as spectator confront the things. Which elements do, and which do not, belong to the things cannot depend at all on the manner in which I obtain my knowledge of these elements.

[ 17 ] Man is a limited being. First of all, he is a being among other beings. His existence belongs to space and time. Thus, only a limited part of the total universe can be given him at any one time. This limited part, however, is linked up with other parts in all directions both in time and in space. If our existence were so linked up with the things that every occurrence in the world were at the same time also an occurrence in us, the distinction between ourselves and the things would not exist. But then there would be no separate things at all for us. All occurrences would pass continuously one into the other. The cosmos would be a unity and a whole, complete in itself. The stream of events would nowhere be interrupted. It is owing to our limitations that a thing appears to us as single and separate when in truth it is not a separate thing at all. Nowhere, for example, is the single quality “red” to be found by itself in isolation. It is surrounded on all sides by other qualities to which it belongs, and without which it could not subsist. For us, however, it is necessary to isolate certain sections of the world and to consider them by themselves. Our eye can grasp only single colors one after another out of a manifold totality of color, and our understanding, can grasp only single concepts out of a connected conceptual system. This separating off is a subjective act, which is due to the fact that we are not identical with the world process, but are a single being among other beings.

[ 18 ] The all important thing now is to determine how the being that we ourselves are is related to the other entities. This determination must be distinguished from merely becoming conscious of ourselves. For this latter self-awareness we depend on perceiving just as we do for our awareness of any other thing. The perception of myself reveals to me a number of qualities which I combine into my personality as a whole, just as I combine the qualities yellow, metallic, hard, etc., in the unity “gold.” The perception of myself does not take me beyond the sphere of what belongs to me. This perceiving of myself must be distinguished from determining myself by means of thinking. Just as, by means of thinking, I fit any single external percept into the whole world context, so by means of thinking I integrate into the world process the percepts I have made of myself. My self-perception confines me within certain limits, but my thinking is not concerned with these limits. In this sense I am a two-sided being. I am enclosed within the sphere which I perceive as that of my personality, but I am also the bearer of an activity which, from a higher sphere, defines my limited existence. Our thinking is not individual like our sensing and feeling; it is universal. It receives an individual stamp in each separate human being only because it comes to be related to his individual feelings and sensations. By means of these particular colorings of the universal thinking, individual men differentiate themselves from one another. There is only one single concept of “triangle”. It is quite immaterial for the content of this concept whether it is grasped in A's consciousness or in B's. It will, however, be grasped by each of the two in his own individual way.

[ 19 ] This thought is opposed by a common prejudice very hard to overcome. This prejudice prevents one from seeing that the concept of a triangle that my head grasps is the same as the concept that my neighbor's head grasps. The naïve man believes himself to be the creator of his concepts. Hence he believes that each person has his own concepts. It is a fundamental requirement of philosophic thinking that it should overcome this prejudice. The one uniform concept of “triangle” does not become a multiplicity because it is thought by many persons. For the thinking of the many is itself a unity.

[ 20 ] In thinking, we have that element given us which welds our separate individuality into one whole with the cosmos. In so far as we sense and feel (and also perceive), we are single beings; in so far as we think, we are the all-one being that pervades everything. This is the deeper meaning of our two-sided nature: We see coming into being in us a force complete and absolute in itself, a force which is universal but which we learn to know, not as it issues from the center of the world, but rather at a point in the periphery. Were we to know it at its source, we should understand the whole riddle of the universe the moment we became conscious. But since we stand at a point in the periphery, and find that our own existence is bounded by definite limits, we must explore the region which lies outside our own being with the help of thinking, which projects into us from the universal world existence.

[ 21 ] The fact that the thinking, in us, reaches out beyond our separate existence and relates itself to the universal world existence, gives rise to the fundamental desire for knowledge in us. Beings without thinking do not have this desire. When they are faced with other things, no questions arise for them. These other things remain external to such beings. But in thinking beings the concept rises up when they confront the external thing. It is that part of the thing which we receive not from outside but from within. To match up, to unite the two elements, inner and outer, is the task of knowledge.

[ 22 ] The percept is thus not something finished and self-contained, but one side of the total reality. The other side is the concept. The act of knowing is the synthesis of percept and concept. Only percept and concept together constitute the whole thing.

[ 23 ] The foregoing arguments show that it is senseless to look for any common element in the separate entities of the world other than the ideal content that thinking offers us. All attempts to find a unity in the world other than this internally coherent ideal content, which we gain by a thoughtful contemplation of our percepts, are bound to fail. Neither a humanly personal God, nor force, nor matter, nor the blind will (Schopenhauer), can be valid for us as a universal world unity. All these entities belong only to limited spheres of our observation. Humanly limited personality we perceive only in ourselves; force and matter in external things. As far as the will is concerned, it can be regarded only as the expression of the activity of our finite personality. Schopenhauer wants to avoid making “abstract” thinking the bearer of unity in the world, and seeks instead something which presents itself to him immediately as real. This philosopher believes that we can never approach the world so long as we regard it as “external” world.

In point of fact, the sought for meaning of the world which confronts me is nothing more than mental picture, or the passage from the world as mere mental picture of the knowing subject to whatever it may be besides this, could never be found at all if the investigator himself were nothing more than the purely knowing subject (a winged cherub without a body). But he himself is rooted in that world: he finds himself in it as an individual, that is to say, his knowledge, which is the determining factor supporting the whole world as mental picture, is thus always given through the medium of a body, whose affections are, for the intellect, the starting point for the contemplation of that world, as we have shown. For the purely knowing subject as such, this body is a mental picture like any other, an object among objects; its movements and actions are so far known to him in precisely the same way as the changes of all other perceived objects, and would be just as strange and incomprehensible to him if their sense were not made clear for him in an entirely different way. ... To the subject of knowledge, who appears as an individual through his identity with the body, this body is given in two entirely different ways: once as a mental picture for intelligent consideration, as an object among objects and obeying their laws; but at the same time, in quite a different way, namely as the thing immediately known to everyone by the word will. Every true act of his will is at once and without exception also a movement of his body: he cannot will the act without at the same time perceiving that it appears as a movement of the body. The act of will and the action of the body are not two things objectively known to be different, which the bond of causality unites; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect; they are one and the same, but they are given in two entirely different ways: once quite directly and once in contemplation for the intellect.⁴

Schopenhauer considers himself entitled by these arguments to find in the human body the “objectivity” of the will. He believes that in the activities of the body he feels an immediate reality—the thing-in-itself in the concrete. Against these arguments it must be said that the activities of our body come to our consciousness only through percepts of the self, and that, as such, they are in no way superior to other percepts. If we want to know their real nature, we can do so only by a thinking investigation, that is, by fitting them into the ideal system of our concepts and ideas.

[ 24 ] Rooted most deeply in the naïve consciousness of mankind is the opinion that thinking is abstract, without any concrete content; it can at most give us an “ideal” counterpart of the unity of the world, but never the unity itself. Whoever judges in this way has never made it clear to himself what a percept without the concept really is. Let us see what this world of percepts is like: a mere juxtaposition in space, a mere succession in time, a mass of unconnected details—that is how it appears. None of the things which come and go on the stage of perception has any direct connection, that can be perceived, with any other. The world is thus a multiplicity of objects of equal value. None plays any greater part in the whole machinery of the world than any other. If it is to become clear to us that this or that fact has greater significance than another, we must consult our thinking. Were thinking not to function, the rudimentary organ of an animal which has no significance in its life would appear equal in value to the most important limb of its body. The separate facts appear in their true significance, both in themselves and for the rest of the world only when thinking spins its threads from one entity to another. This activity of thinking is one full of content. For it is only through a quite definite concrete content that I can know why the snail belongs to a lower level of organization than the lion. The mere appearance, the percept, gives me no content which could inform me as to the degree of perfection of the organization.

[ 25 ] Thinking offers this content to the percept, from man's world of concepts and ideas. In contrast to the content of percept which is given to us from without, the content of thinking appears inwardly. The form in which this first makes its appearance we will call intuition. Intuition is for thinking what observation is for percept. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge. An observed object of the world remains unintelligible to us until we have within ourselves the corresponding intuition which adds that part of reality which is lacking in the percept. To anyone who is incapable of finding intuitions corresponding to the things, the full reality remains inaccessible. Just as the color-blind person sees only differences of brightness without any color qualities, so can the person without intuition observe only unconnected perceptual fragments.

[ 26 ] To explain a thing, to make it intelligible, means nothing else than to place it into the context from which it has been torn by the peculiar character of our organization as already described. A thing cut off from the world-whole does not exist. All isolating has only subjective validity for our organization. For us the universe divides itself up into above and below, before and after, cause and effect, thing and mental picture, matter and force, object and subject, etc. What appears to us in observation as separate parts becomes combined, bit by bit, through the coherent, unified world of our intuitions. By thinking we fit together again into one piece all that we have taken apart through perceiving.

[ 27 ] The enigmatic character of an object consists in its separateness. But this separation is our own making and can, within the world of concepts, be overcome again.

[ 28 ] Except through thinking and perceiving nothing is given to us directly. The question now arises: What is the significance of the percept, according to our line of argument? We have learnt that the proof which critical idealism offers of the subjective nature of perceptions collapses. But insight into the falsity of the proof is not alone sufficient to show that the doctrine itself is erroneous. Critical idealism does not base its proof on the absolute nature of thinking, but relies on the argument of naïve realism, which when followed to its logical conclusion, cancels itself out. How does the matter appear when we have recognized the absoluteness of thinking?

[ 29 ] Let us assume that a certain perception, for example, red, appears in my consciousness. To continued observation, this percept shows itself to be connected with other percepts, for example, a definite figure and with certain temperature- and touch-percepts. This combination I call an object belonging to the sense-perceptible world. I can now ask myself: Over and above the percepts just mentioned, what else is there in the section of space in which they appear? I shall then find mechanical, chemical and other processes in that section of space. I next go further and study the processes I find on the way from the object to my sense organs. I can find movements in an elastic medium, which by their very nature have not the slightest in common with the percepts from which I started. I get the same result when I go on and examine the transmission from sense organs to brain. In each of these fields I gather new percepts, but the connecting medium which weaves through all these spatially and temporally separated percepts is thinking. The air vibrations which transmit sound are given to me as percepts just like the sound itself. Thinking alone links all these percepts to one another and shows them to us in their mutual relationship. We cannot speak of anything existing beyond what is directly perceived except what can be recognized through the ideal connections of percepts, that is, connections accessible to thinking). The way objects as percepts are related to the subject as percept—a relationship that goes beyond what is merely perceived—is therefore purely ideal, that is, it can be expressed only by means of concepts. Only if I could perceive how the percept object affects the percept subject, or, conversely, could watch the building up of the perceptual pattern by the subject, would it be possible to speak as modern physiology and the critical idealism based on it do. Their view confuses an ideal relation (that of the object to the subject) with a process which we could speak of only if it were possible to perceive it. The proposition, “No color without a color-sensing eye,” cannot be taken to mean that the eye produces the color, but only that an ideal relation, recognizable by thinking, subsists between the percept “color” and the percept “eye”. Empirical science will have to ascertain how the properties of the eye and those of the colors are related to one another, by what means the organ of sight transmits the perception of colors, and so forth. I can trace how one percept succeeds another in time and is related to others in space, and I can formulate these relations in conceptual terms, but I can never perceive how a percept originates out of the non-perceptible. All attempts to seek any relations between percepts other than thought relations must of necessity fail.

[ 30 ] What, then is a percept? The question, asked in this general way, is absurd. A percept emerges always as something perfectly definite, as a concrete content. This content is directly given and is completely contained in what is given. The only question one can ask concerning the given content is what it is apart from perception, that is, what it is for thinking? The question concerning the “what” of a percept can, therefore, only refer to the conceptual intuition that corresponds to this percept. From this point of view, the question of the subjectivity of percepts, in the sense of critical idealism, cannot be raised at all. Only what is perceived as belonging to the subject can be termed “subjective.” To form a link between something subjective and something objective is impossible for any process that is “real” in the naïve sense, that is, one that can be perceived; it is possible only for thinking. Therefore what appears for our perception to be external to the percept of myself as subject is for us “objective”. The percept of myself as subject remains perceptible to me after the table which now stands before me has disappeared from my field of observation. The observation of the table has produced in me a modification which likewise persists. I retain the faculty to produce later on an image of the table. This faculty of producing an image remains connected with me. Psychology calls this image a memory-picture. It is in fact the only thing which can justifiably be called the mental picture of the table. For it corresponds to the perceptible modification of my own state through the presence of the table in my visual field. Moreover, it does not mean a modification of some “Ego-in-itself” standing behind the percept of the subject, but the modification of the perceptible subject itself. The mental picture is, therefore, a subjective percept, in contrast with the objective percept which occurs when the object is present in the field of vision. Confusing the subjective percept with the objective percept leads to the misconception contained in idealism—that the world is my mental picture.

[ 31 ] Our next task must be to define the concept of “mental picture” more closely. What we have said about it so far does not give us the concept of it but only shows us whereabouts in the perceptual field the mental picture is to be found. The exact concept of mental picture will make it possible for us also to obtain a satisfactory explanation of the way that mental picture and object are related. This will then lead us over the border line where the relationship between the human subject and the object belonging to the world is brought down from the purely conceptual field of cognition into concrete individual life. Once we know what to make of the world, it will be a simple matter to direct ourselves accordingly. We can only act with full energy when we know what it is in the world to which we devote our activity.

Author's addition, 1918

[ 32 ] The view I have outlined here may be regarded as one to which man is at first quite naturally driven when he begins to reflect upon his relation to the world. He then finds himself caught in a system of thoughts which dissolves for him as fast as he frames it. The thought formation is such that it requires something more than mere theoretical refutation. We have to live through it in order to understand the aberration into which it leads us and thence to find the way out. It must figure in any discussion of the relation of man to the world, not for the sake of refuting others whom one believes to be holding mistaken views about this relation, but because it is necessary to understand the confusion to which every first effort at reflection about such a relation is apt to lead. One needs to arrive at just that insight which will enable one to refute oneself with respect to these first reflections. This is the point of view from which the arguments of the preceding chapter are put forward.

[ 33 ] Whoever tries to work out for himself a view of the relation of man to the world becomes aware of the fact that he creates this relation, at least in part, by forming mental pictures about the things and events in the world. In consequence, his attention is deflected from what exists outside in the world and is directed towards his inner world, the life of his mental pictures. He begins to say to himself: It is impossible for me to have a relationship to any thing or event unless a mental picture appears in me. Once we have noticed this fact, it is but a step to the opinion: After all, I experience only my mental pictures; I know of a world outside me only in so far as it is a mental picture in me. With this opinion, the standpoint of naïve realism, which man takes up prior to all reflection about his relation to the world, is abandoned. So long as he keeps that standpoint, he believes that he is dealing with real things, but reflection about himself drives him away from it. Reflection prevents him from turning his gaze towards a real world such as naïve consciousness believes it has before it. It allows him to gaze only upon his mental picture—these interpose themselves between his own being and a supposedly real world, such as the naïve point of view believes itself entitled to affirm. Man can no longer see such a real world through the intervening world of mental pictures. He must suppose that he is blind to this reality. Thus arises the thought of a “thing-in-itself” which is inaccessible to knowledge.

So long as we consider only the relationship to the world, into which man appears to enter through the life of his mental pictures, we cannot escape from this form of thought. Yet one cannot remain at the standpoint of naïve realism except by closing one's mind artificially to the craving for knowledge. The very existence of this craving for knowledge about the relation of man to the world shows that this naïve point of view must be abandoned. If the naïve point of view yielded anything we could acknowledge as truth, we could never experience this craving.

But we do not arrive at anything else which we could regard as truth if we merely abandon the naïve point of view while unconsciously retaining the type of thought which it necessitates. This is just the mistake made by the man who says to himself: “I experience only my mental pictures, and though I believe that I am dealing with realities, I am actually conscious only of my mental pictures of reality; I must therefore suppose that the true reality, the 'things-in-themselves', exist only beyond the horizon of my consciousness, that I know absolutely nothing of them directly, and that they somehow approach me and influence me so that my world of mental pictures arises in me.” Whoever thinks in this way is merely adding another world in his thoughts to the world already spread out before him. But with regard to this additional world, he ought strictly to begin his thinking activity all over again. For the unknown “thing-in-itself”, in its relation to man's own nature, is conceived in exactly the same way as is the known thing in the sense of naïve realism.

One only avoids the confusion into which one falls through the critical attitude based on this naïve standpoint, if one notices that, inside everything we can experience by means of perceiving, be it within ourselves or outside in the world, there is something which cannot suffer the fate of having a mental picture interpose itself between the process and the person observing it. This something is thinking. With regard to thinking, we can maintain the point of view of naïve realism. If we fail to do so, it is only because we have learnt that we must abandon it in the case of other things, but overlook that what we have found to be true for these other things does not apply to thinking. When we realize this, we open the way to the further insight that in thinking and through thinking man must recognize the very thing to which he has apparently blinded himself by having to interpose his life of mental pictures between the world and himself.

From a source greatly respected by the author of this book comes the objection that this discussion of thinking remains at the level of a naïve realism of thinking, just as one might object if someone held the real world and the world of mental pictures to be one and the same. However, the author believes himself to have shown in this very discussion that the validity of this “naïve realism” for thinking results inevitably from an unprejudiced observation of thinking; and that naïve realism, in so far as it is invalid for other things, is overcome through the recognition of the true nature of thinking.

• 1. See Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen.
• 2. Knowledge is called transcendental in the sense of this theory when it believes itself to be conscious that nothing can be asserted directly about the thing-in-itself, but makes indirect inferences from the subjective, which is known, to the unknown which lies beyond the subjective (transcendental). The thing-in-itself is, according to this view, beyond the sphere of the directly knowable world; in other words, it is transcendent. Our world can, however, be transcendentally related to the transcendent. Hartmann's theory is called realism because it proceeds from the subjective, the ideal, to the transcendent, the real.
• 3. See Weygandt, Entstehung der Träume, 1893.
• 4. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Book 2, par. 18.