The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the course of these lectures we have seen that the middle of the nineteenth century is an important time in the development of Western humanity. Attention was called to the fact that in a sense the culmination of the materialistic way of thinking and the materialistic world view occurred during this time. Yet it also had to be pointed out that this trend that has emerged in the human being since the fifteenth century was really something spiritual. Thus, it can be said that the characteristic of this developmental phase of recent human evolution was that simultaneously with becoming the most spiritual, the human being could not take hold of this spirituality. Instead, human beings filled themselves only with materialistic thinking, feeling, and even with materialistic will and activity. Our present age is still dominated by the aftereffects of what occurred in so many people without their being aware of it, and then reached its climax in mankind's development. What was the purpose of this climax? It occurred because something decisive was meant to take place in regard to contemporary humanity's attainment of the consciousness soul stage.

In focusing on the evolution of humanity from the third post-Atlantean epoch until approximately the year 747 (see sketch) before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that a process runs its course that can be called the development of the sentient soul in humanity. Then the age of the rational or mind soul begins and lasts roughly until the year 1413. It reaches its high point in that era of which external history has little to report. It must be taken into consideration, however, if European development is to be comprehended at all. This culmination point occurs approximately in the year 333 after Christ. Since the year 1413, we are faced with the development of the consciousness soul, a development we are still involved in and that saw a decisive event around the year 1850, or better, 1840.

A.D. 333

 ----------747-----------/-------------1413----------1840 Sentient Soul........Rational Soul....Consciousness Soul 

For mankind as a whole, matters had reached a point around 1840 where, insofar as the representative personalities of the various nations are concerned, we can say that they were faced with an intellect that had already assumed its most shadowy form. (Following this, we shall have to consider the reaction of the individual nations.) The intellect had assumed its shadowlike character. I tried yesterday to characterize this shadow nature of the intellect. People in the civilized world had evolved to the extent that, from then on it was possible on the basis of the general culture and without initiation to acquire the feeling: We possess intellect. The intellect has matured, but insofar as its own nature is concerned, it no longer has a content. We have concepts but these concepts are empty. We must fill them with something.

This, in a sense, is the call passing through humanity, though dimly and inaudibly. But in the deep, underlying, subconscious longings of human beings lives the call, the wish to receive a content, substance, for the shadow nature of rational thinking. Indeed, it is the call for spiritual science.

This call can also be comprehended concretely. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the human organization, in the physical part of which this shadowy intellect is trained, had simply progressed to the point where it could cultivate this empty shadowy intellect particularly well. Now, something was required for this shadowy intellect; it had to be filled with something. This could only happen if the human being realized: I have to assimilate something of what is not offered to me on the earth itself and does not dwell there, something I cannot learn about in the life between birth and death. I actually have to absorb something into my intellect that, although it was extinguished and became obscured when I descended with the results of my former earth lives out of spiritual soul worlds into a physical corporeality, nevertheless rests in the depths of my soul. From there, I have to bring it up once again, I have to call to mind something that rests within me simply by virtue of the fact that I am a human being of the nineteenth century.

Earlier, it would not have been possible for human beings to have practiced self-awareness in the same manner. This is why they first had to advance in their human condition to the point where the physical body increasingly acquired the maturity to perfect and utilize the shadowy intellect completely. Now, at least among the most advanced human beings, the physical bodies had reached the point where one could have said, or rather, since then it is possible to say: I wish to call to mind what it is that I am seeking to bring up from the depths of my soul life in order to pour a content into this shadowy intellect. This shadowy intellect would have been filled with something and in this way the consciousness soul age would have dawned. Therefore, at this point in time, the occasion arose where the consciousness soul could have unfolded.

Now you will say: Yes, but the whole era prior to that, beginning with the year 1413, was the age of the consciousness soul. Yes, certainly, but at first it has been a preparatory development. You need only consider what basic conditions existed for such a preparation particularly in this period as compared to all earlier times. Into this period falls, for example, the invention of the printing press; the dissemination of the written word. Since the fifteenth century, people by and by have received a great amount of spiritual content by means of the art of printing and through writing. But they absorb this content only outwardly; it is the main feature of this period that an overwhelming sum of spiritual content has been assimilated superficially. The nations of the civilized world have absorbed something outwardly which the great masses of people could receive only by means of audible speech in earlier times. It was true of the period of rational development, and in the age of the sentient soul it was all the more true that, fundamentally speaking, all dissemination of learning was based on oral teaching. Something of the psycho-spiritual element still resounds through speech. Especially in former days, what could be termed “the genius of language” definitely still lived in words. This ceased to be when the content of human learning began to be assimilated in abstract forms, through writing and printed works. Printed and written words have the peculiarity of in a sense extinguishing what the human being brings with him at birth from his pre-earthly, heavenly existence.

It goes without saying that this does not mean that you should forthwith cease to read or write. It does mean that today a more powerful force is needed in order to raise up what lies deep within the human being. But it is necessary that this stronger force be acquired. We have to arrive at self-awareness despite the fact that we read and write; we have to develop this stronger faculty, stronger in comparison to what was needed in earlier times. This is the task in the age of the development of the consciousness soul.

Before taking a look at how the influences of the spiritual world have now started to flow down in a certain way into the physical, sensory world, let us pose the question today, How did the nations of modern civilization actually meet this point of time in 1840?

From earlier lectures we know that the representative people for the development of the consciousness soul, hence for what matters particularly in our age, is the Anglo-Saxon nation. The Anglo-Saxon people are those who through their whole organization are predisposed to develop the consciousness soul to a special degree. The prominent position occupied by the Anglo-Saxon nation in our time is indeed due to the fact that this nation is especially suited for the development of the consciousness soul. But now let us ask ourselves from a purely external viewpoint, How did this Anglo-Saxon nation arrive at this point in time that is the most significant one in modern cultural development?

It can be said that the Anglo-Saxon nation in particular has survived for a long time in a condition—naturally with the corresponding variations and metamorphoses—that could perhaps be described best by saying, Those inner impulses, which had already made way for other forms in Greek culture, were preserved in regard to the inner soul condition of the Anglo-Saxon people. The strange thing in the eleventh and tenth centuries B.C. is that the nations experienced what is undergone at different periods, that the various ages move, as it were, one on top of the other. The problem is that such matters are extraordinarily difficult to notice because in the nineteenth century all sorts of things already existed—reading, writing—and because the living conditions prevailing in Scotland and England were different from those in Homeric times.

And yet, if the soul condition of the people as a nation is taken into consideration, the fact is that this soul condition of the Homeric era, which in Greece was outgrown in the tragic age and changed into Sophoclism, has remained. This age, a kind of patriarchal conception of life and existence, was preserved in the Anglo-Saxon world up until the nineteenth century. In particular, this patriarchal life spread out from the soul condition in Scotland. This is the reason why the influence proceeding from the initiation centers in Ireland did not have an effect on the Anglo-Saxon nation. As was mentioned on other occasions, that influence predominantly affected continental Europe. On the British isle itself, the predominant influence originated from initiation truths that came down from the north, from Scotland. These initiation truths then permeated everything else. But there is an element in the whole conception of the human personality that, in a sense, has remained from primordial times. This still has aftereffects; it lingers on even in the way, say, the relationship between Whigs and Tories develops in the British Parliament. The fact is that fundamentally we are not dealing with the difference between liberal and conservative views. Instead, we have to do with two political persuasions for which people today really have no longer any perception at all.

Essentially, the Whigs are the continuation of what could be called a segment of mankind imbued with a general love of humanity and originating in Scotland. According to a fable, which does have a certain historical background, the Tories were originally Catholicizing horse thieves from Ireland. This contrast, which then expressed itself in their particular political strivings, reflects a certain patriarchal existence. This patriarchal existence retained certain primitive forces, which can be observed in the kind of attitude exhibited by the owners of large properties toward those people who had settled on these lands as their vassals.

This relationship of subservience actually lasted until the nineteenth century; nobody was elected to Parliament who did not possess a certain power by virtue of being a landowner. We only have to consider what this implies. Such matters are not weighed in the right manner. Just think what it signifies, for example, that it was not until the year 1820 that English Parliament repealed the law according to which a person was given the death penalty for having stolen a pocket watch or having been a poacher. Until then, the law decreed that such misdeeds were capital offenses. This certainly demonstrates the way in which particular, ancient, and elementary conditions had remained. Today, people observe life in their immediate surroundings and then extend the fundamental aspects of present-day civilization backwards, so to speak. In regard to the most important regions of Europe, they are unaware of how recently these things have developed from quite primitive conditions.

Thus, it is possible to say that these patriarchal conditions survived as the foundation and basis of a society that was subsequently infused with the most modern impulse, unimaginable in the social structure without the development of the consciousness soul. Just consider all the changes in the social structure of the eighteenth century due to the technological metamorphosis in the textile industry and the like. Note how the mechanical, technological element moved into this patriarchal element. Try to form a clear idea of how, owing to the transformation of the textile industry, the nascent modern Proletariat pushes into the social structure that is based on this patriarchal element, this relationship of landowner to subjects. Just think of this chaotic intermingling, think how the cities develop in the ancient countryside and how the patriarchal attitude takes a daring plunge, so to say, into modern, socialistic, proletarian life.

To picture it graphically, we can actually say that this form of life develops in the way it existed in Greece approximately until the year 1000 B.C. (see drawing). Then it makes a daring jump and we suddenly find ourselves in the year A.D. 1820. Inwardly, the life of the year 1000 B.C. has been retained, but outwardly, we are in the eighteenth century, say 1770 (see arrows). Now everything that then existed in modern life, indeed, even in our present time, pours in. But it is not until 1820 that this English life makes the connection, finds it necessary to do so (see drawing); it is not until then that these matters even became issues, such as the abolition of the death penalty for a minor theft. Thus we can say that, here, something very old has definitely flown together with the most modern element. Thus, the further development then continues on to the year 1840.

Now, what had to occur specifically among the Anglo-American people during this time period, the first half of the nineteenth century? We have to recall that only after the year 1820, actually not until after 1830, it became necessary to pass laws in England according to which children under twelve years of age were not allowed to be kept working in factories for more than eight hours a day, no more than twelve hours a day in the case of children between thirteen and eighteen years of age. Please, compare that with today's conditions! Just think what the broad masses of working people demand today as the eight-hour day! As yet, in the year 1820, boys were put to work in mines and factories in England for more than eight hours; only in that year was the eight-hour day established for them. The twelve-hour day still prevailed, however, in regard to children between twelve and eighteen.

These things must certainly be considered in the attempt to figure out the nature of the elements colliding with each other at that time. Basically, it could be said that England eased its way out of the patriarchal conditions only in the second third of the nineteenth century and found it necessary to reckon with what had slowly invaded the old established traditions due to technology and the machine. It was in this way that this nation, which is preeminently called upon to develop the consciousness soul, confronted the year 1840.

Now take other nations of modern civilization. Take what has remained of the Latin-Roman element; take what has carried over the Latin-Roman element from the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, what has brought over the ancient culture of the intellectual soul as a kind of legacy into the epoch of the consciousness soul. Indeed, what had remained of this life of the intellectual soul reached its highest point, its culmination, in the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. We note that the ideals, freedom, equality, and brotherhood appear all at once in the most extreme abstraction. We see them taken up by skeptics such as Voltaire,¹ by enthusiasts such as Rousseau;² we see them emerge generally in the broad masses of the people. We see how the abstraction, which is fully justified in this sphere, affects the social structure

It is a completely different course of events from the one over in England. In England, the vestiges of the old Germanic patriarchal life are permeated by what the element of modern technology and modern materialistic, scientific life could incorporate into the social structure. In France, we have tradition everywhere. We could say that the French Revolution has been enacted in the same manner in which a Brutus or a Caesar once acted in the most diverse ways in ancient Rome. Thus, here also, freedom, equality and brotherhood surfaced in abstract forms. Unlike in England, the old existing patriarchal element was not destroyed from the outside. Instead, the Roman juridical tradition, the adherence to the ancient concept of property and ownership of land, inheritance laws, and so on, what had been established in the Roman-juristic tradition was corroded by abstraction, driven asunder by abstraction.

We need only consider the tremendous change the French Revolution brought to all of European life. We only need remind ourselves that prior to the French Revolution those who, in a sense, distinguished themselves from the masses of the nation also had legal privileges. Only certain people could aspire to particular positions in government. What the French Revolution demanded based on abstraction and the shadowlike intellect was to make breaches into that system to undermine it. But it did bear the stamp of the shadowy intellect, the abstraction. Therefore, the demands that were being made fundamentally remained a kind of ideology. For this reason, we can say that anything that is of the shadowy intellect immediately turns into its opposite.

Then we observe Napoleonism; we watch the experimentation in the public and social realm during the course of the nineteenth century. The first half of the nineteenth century was certainly experimentation without a goal in France. What is the nature of the events through which somebody like Louis-Philippe, for example, becomes king of France, and so on—what sort of experimenting is carried out? It is done in such a way that one can recognize that the shadowy intellect is incapable of truly intervening in the actual conditions. Everything basically remains undone and incomplete; it all remains as legacy of ancient Romanism. We are justified in saying that even today the relationship to, say, the Catholic Church, which the French Revolution had quite clearly defined in abstraction, has not been clarified in France in external, concrete reality. And how unclear was it time and again in the course of the nineteenth century! Abstract reasoning had struggled up to a certain level during the Revolution; then came experimentation and the inability to cope with external conditions. In this way, this nation encountered the year 1840.

We can also consider other nations. Let us look at Italy, for instance, which, in a manner of speaking, still retained a bit of the sentient soul in its passage through the culture of the intellect. It brought this bit of the sentient soul into modern times and therefore did not advance as far as the abstract concepts of freedom, equality, and brotherhood attained in the French Revolution. It did, however, seek the transition from a certain ancient group consciousness to individual consciousness in the human being. Italy faced the year 1840 in a manner that allows us to say, The individual human consciousness trying to struggle to the fore in Italy was in fact constantly held down by what the rest of Europe now represented. We can observe how the tyranny of Habsburg weighed terribly on the individual human consciousness that tried to develop in Italy. We see in the 1820's the strange Congress of Verona³ that tried to determine how one could rise up against the whole substance of modern civilization. We note that there proceeded from Russia and Austria a sort of conspiracy against what the modern consciousness in humanity was meant to bring. There is hardly anything as interesting as the Congress of Verona, which basically wished to answer the question: How does one go about exterminating everything that is trying to emerge as modern consciousness in mankind?

Then we see how the people in the rest of Europe struggled in certain ways. Particularly in Central Europe, only a small percentage of the population was able to attain to a certain consciousness, experiencing in a certain manner that the ego is now supposed to enter into the consciousness soul. We notice attempts to achieve this at a certain high mental level. We can see it in the peculiar high cultural level of Goethe's age in which a man like Fichte was active;⁴ we see how the ego tried to push forward into the consciousness soul. Yet we also realize that the whole era of Goethe actually was something that lived only in few individuals. I believe people study far too little what even the most recent past was like. They simply think, for example the Goethe lived from 1749 until 1832; he wrote Faust and a number of other works. That is what is known of Goethe and that knowledge has existed ever since.

Until the year 1862, until thirty years after Goethe's death, with few exceptions, it was impossible for people to acquire a copy of Goethe's works. They were restricted; only a handful of people somehow owned a copy of his writings. Hence, Goetheanism had become familiar only to a select few. It was not until the 1860's that a larger number of people could even find out about the particular element that lived in Goethe. By that time, the faculty of comprehension for it had disappeared again. An actual understanding of Goethe never really came about, and the last third of the nineteenth century was not suited at all for such comprehension.

I have often mentioned that in the 1870's Hermann Grimm gave his “Lectures on Goethe” at the University of Berlin.⁵ That was a special event and the book that exists as Hermann Grimm's Goethe is a significant publication in the context of central European literature. Yet, if you now take a look at this book, what is its substance? Well, all the figures who had any connection with Goethe are listed in it but they are like shadow images having only two dimensions. All these portrayals are shadow figures, even Goethe is a two-dimensional being in Hermann Grimm's depiction. It is not Goethe himself. I won't even mention the Goethe whom people at the afternoon coffee parties of Weimar called “the fat Privy Councillor with the double chin.” In Hermann Grimm's Goethe, Goethe has no weight at all. He is merely a two-dimensional being, a shadow cast on the wall. It is the same with all the others who appear in the book; Herder—a shadow painted on a wall. We encounter something a little more tangible in Hermann Grimm's description of those persons coming from among the ordinary people who are close to Goethe, for example, Friederike von Sesenheim who is portrayed there so beautifully, or Lilli Schoenemann from Frankfurt—hence those who emerge from a mental atmosphere other than the one in which Goethe lived. Those are described with a certain “substance.” But figures like Jacobi and Lavater are but shadow images on a wall. The reader does not penetrate into the actual substance of things; here, we can observe in an almost tangible way the effects of abstraction. Such abstraction can certainly be charming, as is definitely the case with Hermann Grimm's book, but the whole thing is shadowy. Silhouettes, two-dimensional beings, confront us in it.

Indeed, it could not be otherwise. For it is a fact that a German could not call himself a German in Germany at the time when Hermann Grimm, for example was young. The way one spoke of Germans during the first half of the nineteenth century is misunderstood, particularly at present. How “creepy” it seems to people in the West, those of the Entente, when they start reading Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation today and find him saying: “I speak simply to Germans, to Germans as such.” In the same way, the harmless song “Germany, Germany above all else”^T1 is interpreted foolishly, for this song means nothing more than the desire to be a German, not a Swabian, a Bavarian, an Austrian, a Franconian, or Thuringian. Just as this song referred only to Germans as such, so Fichte wished simply to address himself to Germans, not to Austrians, Bavarians, those from the province of Baden, Wuerttemberg, Franconia, or Prussia; he wanted to speak “to Germans.” This is naturally impossible to understand, for instance, in a country where it has long since become a matter of course to call oneself a Frenchman. However, in certain periods in Germany, you were imprisoned if you called yourself German. You could call yourself an Austrian, a Swabian, a Bavarian, but it amounted to high treason to call yourself a German. Those who called themselves Germans in Bavaria expressed the sentiment that they did not wish to look up merely to the Bavarian throne and its reign within Bavaria's clearly defined borders, but implied that they also wished to look beyond the borders of Bavaria. But that was high treason! People were not permitted to call themselves Germans.

It is not understood at all today that these things that are said about Germans and Germany, refer to this unification of everything German. Instead, the absurd nonsense is spread that, for example, Hoffmann's song refers to the notion that Germany should rule over all the nations of the world although it means nothing else but: Not Swabia, not Austria, not Bavaria above all else in the world, but Germany above all else in the world, just as the Frenchman says: France above all else in the world. It was, however, the peculiar nature of Central Europe that basically a tribal civilization existed there. Even today, you can see this tribal culture everywhere in Germany. A Wuerttembergian is different from a Franconian. He differs from him even in the formulation of concepts and words, indeed, even in the thought forms disseminated in literature. There really is a marked difference, if you compare, say, a Franconian, such as cloddy Michael Conrad—using modern literature as an example—with something that has been written at the same time by a Wuerttembergian, hence in the neighboring province.

Something like this plays into the whole configuration of thoughts right into the present time. But everything that persists in this way and lives in the tribal peculiarities remains untouched by what is now achieved by the representatives of the nations. After all, in the realm commonly called Germany something has been attained such as Goetheanism with all that belongs to it. But it has been attained by only a few intellectuals; the great masses of people remain untouched by it. The majority of the population has more or less maintained the level of central Europe around the year A.D. 300 or 400. Just as the Anglo-Saxon people have stayed on the level of around the year 1000 B.C., people in Central Europe have remained on the level of the year A.D. 400. Please do not take this in the sense that a terrible arrogance might arise with the thought that the Anglo-Saxons have remained behind in the Homeric age, and we were already in the year A.D. 400. This is not the way to evaluate these matters. I am only indicating certain peculiarities.

In turn, the geographic conditions reveal that this level of general soul development in Germany lasted much longer than in England. England's old patriarchal life had to be permeated quickly with what formed the social structure out of the modern materialistic, scientific, and technological life first in the area of the textile industry, and later also in the area of other technologies. The German realm and Central Europe in general opposed this development initially, retaining the ancient peculiarities much longer. I might say, they retained them until a point in time when the results of modern technology already prevailed fully all over the world. To a certain extent, England caught up in the transformation of the social structure in the first half of the nineteenth century. Everything that was achieved there definitely bypassed central Europe.

Now, Central Europe did absorb something of abstract revolutionary ideas. They came to expression through various movements and stirrings in the 1840's in the middle of the nineteenth century. But this region sat back and waited, as it were, until technology had infused the whole world. Then, a strange thing happened. An individual—we could also take other representatives—who in Germany had acquired his thinking from Hegelianism, namely, Karl Marx, went over to England, studied the social structure there and then formulated his socialist doctrines. At the end of the nineteenth century, Central Europe was then ready for these social doctrines, and they were accepted there. Thus, if we tried to outline in a similar manner what developed in this region, we would have to say: The development progressed in a more elementary way even though a great variety of ideas were absorbed from outside through books and printed matter.

The conditions of A.D. 400 in central Europe continued on, then made a jump and basically found the connection only in the last third of the nineteenth century, around the year 1875. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon nation met already the year 1840 with a transformation of conditions, with the necessity of receiving the consciousness soul, the German people continued to dream. They still experienced the year 1840 as though in a dream. Then they slept through the grace period when a bridge could have been built between leading personalities and what arose out of the masses of the people in the form of the proletariat. The latter then took hold of the socialist doctrine and thereby, beginning about the year 1875, exerted forcible, radical pressure in the direction of the consciousness soul. Yet even this was in fact not noticed; in any case it was not channeled in any direction, and even today it is basically still evaluated in the most distorted way.

In order to arrive at the anomalies at the bottom of this, we need only call to mind that Oswald Spengler, who wrote the significant book The Decline of the West, also wrote a booklet concerning socialism of which, I believe, 60,000 copies or perhaps more have been printed. Roughly, it is Spengler's view that this European, this Western civilization, is digging its own grave. According to Spengler, by the year 2200, we will be living on the level of barbarism. We have to agree with Spengler concerning certain aspects of his observations; for if the European world maintains the course of development it is pursuing now, then everything will be barbarized by the time the third millennium arrives. In this respect Spengler is absolutely correct. The only thing Spengler does not see and does not want to see is that the shadowy intellect can be raised to Imaginations out of man's inner being and that hence the whole of Western humanity can be elevated to a new civilization.

This enlivening of culture through the intentions of anthroposophical spiritual science is something a person like Oswald Spengler does not see. Rather, he believes that socialism—the real socialism, as he thinks, a socialism that truly brings about social living—has to come into being prior to this decline. The people of the Occident, according to him, have the mission of realizing socialism. But, says Oswald Spengler, the only people called upon to realize socialism are the Prussians. This is why he wrote the booklet Prussianism and Socialism. Any other form of socialism is wrong, according to Spengler. Only the form that revealed its first rosy dawn in the Wilhelminian age, only this form of socialism is to capture the world. Then the world will experience true, proper socialism.

Thus speaks a person today whom I must count among the most brilliant people of our time. The point is not to judge people by the content of what they say but by their mental capacities. This Oswald Spengler, who is master of fifteen different scientific disciplines, is naturally “more intelligent than all the writers, doctors, teachers, and ministers” and so on. We can truly say that with his book about the decline of the West he has presented something that deserves consideration, and that, by the way, is making a most profound impression on the young people in Central Europe. But next to it stands this other idea that I have referred to above, and you see precisely how the most brilliant people can arrive today at the strangest notions. People take hold of the intellect prevalent today and this intellect is shadowy. The shadows flit to and fro, one is caught up in one shadow, then one tries to catch up with another—nothing is alive. After all, in a silhouette, in a woman's shadow image cast on the wall, her beauty is not at all recognizable. So it is also with all other matters when they are viewed as shadow images. The shadow image of Prussianism can certainly be confused with socialism. If a woman turns her back to the wall and her shadow falls on it, even the ugliest woman might be considered beautiful. Likewise, Prussianism can be mistaken for socialism if the shadowlike intellect inwardly pervades the mind of a genius.

This is how we must look at things today. We must not look at the contents, we must aim for the capacities; that is what counts. Thus, it has to be acknowledged that Spengler is a brilliant human being, even though a great number of his ideas have to be considered nonsense. We live in an age when original, elementary judgments and reasons must surface. For it is out of certain elementary depths that one has to arrive at a comprehension of the present age and thus at impulses for the realities of the future.

Naturally, the European East has completely slept through the results of the year 1840. Just think of the handful of intellectuals as opposed to the great masses of the Russian people who, because of the Orthodox religion, particularly the Orthodox ritual, are still deeply immersed in Orientalism. Then think of the somnolent effect of men like Alexander I, Nicholas I, and all the other “I's” who followed them! What has come about today was therefore the element that aimed for this point in which the consciousness soul was to have its impact on European life.

We shall say more tomorrow.

• 1. Francois de Voltaire (actually d'Arouet), 1694–1778, French philosopher of the Enlightenment.
• 2. Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1778, French philosopher and pedagogue.
• 3. Congress of Verona: Congress of the “Holy Alliance” (1822) to which all the European powers belonged with the exception of England and the Vatican. Under Metternich, it pursued a clearly reactionary course.
• 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814, German philosopher.
• 5. Hermann Grimm, 1828–1901, German art historian and literary critic.
• T1. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the German national anthem.

The turning-point, between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods,¹ which falls in the fifteenth century, is very much more significant for human evolution than is recognized by external history, even today. There is no awareness of the tremendous change which took place at that time in the condition of human souls. We can say that profound traces of what took place at that time for mankind as a whole became deeply embedded in the consciousness of the best spirits. These traces remained for a long time and are indeed still there today. That something so important can take place without at first being much noticed externally is shown by another example—that of Christianity itself.

During the course of almost two thousand years, Christianity has wrought tremendous transformation on the civilized world. Yet, a century after the Mystery of Golgotha, it meant little, even to the greatest spirits of the leading culture of the time—that of Rome. It was still seen as a minor event of little significance that had taken place out there in Asia, on the periphery of the Empire. Similarly, what took place in the civilized world around the first third of the fifteenth century has been little noted in external, recorded history. Yet it has left deep traces in human striving and endeavour.

We spoke about some aspects recently. For instance, we saw that Calderón's² drama about the magician Cyprianus shows how this spiritual change was experienced in Spain. Now it is becoming obvious—though it is not expressed in the way Anthroposophy has to express it—that in all sorts of places at this point in human evolution there is a more vital sense for the need to gain greater clarity of soul about this change. I have also pointed out that Goethe's Faust is one of the endeavours, one of the human struggles, to gain clarity about it. More light can perhaps be thrown on this Faust of Goethe when it is seen in a wider cultural context. But first let us look at Faust himself as an isolated individual.

First of all in his youthful endeavours, stimulated of course by the cultural situation in Europe at that time, Goethe came to depict in dramatic form the striving of human beings in the newly dawning age of the intellect. From the way in which he came across the medieval Faust figure in a popular play or something similar, he came to see him as a representative of all those seeking personalities who lived at that time. Faust belongs to the sixteenth, not the fifteenth century,³ but of course the spiritual change did not take place in the space of only a year or even a century. It came about gradually over centuries. So the Faust figure came towards Goethe like a personality living in the midst of this seeking and striving that had come from earlier times and would go on into later centuries. We can see that the special nature of this seeking and striving, as it changed from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period, is perfectly clear to Goethe. First he presents Faust as the scholar who is familiar with all four academic faculties. All four faculties have worked on his soul, so that he has taken into his soul the impulses which derive from intellectualism, from intellectualistic science. At the same time he senses how unsatisfying it is for human beings to remain stuck in one-sided intellectualism. As you know, Faust turns away from this intellectualism and, in his own way, towards the practice of magic. Let us be clear about what is meant in this case. What he has gone through by way of ‘Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Medicine and even, alas, Theology,’⁴ is what anyone can go through by studying the intellectualized sciences. It leaves a feeling of dissatisfaction. It leaves behind this feeling of dissatisfaction because anything abstract—and abstraction is the language of these sciences—makes demands only on a part of the human being, the head part, while all the rest is left out of account.

Compare this with what it was like in earlier times. The fact that things were different in earlier times is habitually overlooked. In those earlier times the people who wanted to push forward to a knowledge of life and the world did not turn to intellectual concepts. All their efforts were concentrated on seeing spiritual realities, spiritual beings, behind the sense-perceptible objects of their environment. This is what people find so difficult to understand. In the tenth, eleventh, twelfth centuries those who strove for knowledge did not only seek intellectual concepts, they sought spiritual beings and realities, in accordance with what can be perceived behind sense-perceptible phenomena and not in accordance with what can be merely thought about sense-perceptible phenomena.

This is what constitutes that great spiritual change. What people sought in earlier times was banished to the realm of superstition, and the inclination to seek for real spiritual beings was lost. Instead, intellectual concepts came to be the only acceptable thing, the only really scientific knowledge. But no matter how logically people told themselves that the only concepts and ideas free of any superstition are those which the intellect forms on the basis of sense-perceptible reality, nevertheless these concepts and ideas failed, in the long run, to satisfy the human being as a whole, and especially the human heart and soul. In this way Goethe's Faust finds himself to be so dissatisfied with the intellectual knowledge he possesses that he turns back to what he remembers of the realm of magic.

This was a true and genuine mood of soul in Goethe. He, too, had explored the sciences at the University of Leipzig. Turning away from the intellectualism he met in Leipzig, he started to explore what in Faust he later called ‘magic’, for instance, together with Susanne von Klettenberg and also by studying the relevant books. Not until he met Herder⁵ in Strasbourg did he discover a real deepening of vision. In him he found a spirit who was equally averse to intellectualism. Herder was certainly not an intellectual; hence his anti-Kant attitude. He led Goethe beyond what—in a genuinely Faustian mood—he had been endeavouring to discover in connection with ancient magic.

Thus Goethe looked at this Faust of the sixteenth century, or rather at that scholar of the fifteenth century who was growing beyond magic, even though he was still half-immersed in it. Goethe wanted to depict his own deepest inner search, a search which was in him because the traces of the spiritual change from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period were still working in him.

It is one of the most interesting phenomena of recent cultural evolution that Goethe, who wanted to give expression to his own youthful striving, should turn to that professor from the fifteenth and sixteenth century. In the figure of this professor he depicted his own inner soul life and experience. Du Bois-Reymond,⁶ of course, totally misunderstood both what lived in Goethe and what lived in the great change that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when he said: Goethe made a big mistake in depicting Faust as he did; he should have done it quite differently. It is right that Faust should be dissatisfied with what tradition had to offer him; but if Goethe had depicted him properly he would have shown, after the early scenes, how he first made an honest woman of Gretchen by marrying her, and then became a well-known professor who went on to invent the electro-static machine and the air pump. This is what Du Bois-Reymond thought should have become of Faust.

Well, Goethe did not let this happen to Faust, and I am not sure whether it would have been any more interesting if he had done what Du Bois-Reymond thought he should have done. But as it is, Goethe's Faust is one of the most interesting phenomena of recent cultural history because Goethe felt the urge to let this professor from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries stand as the representative of what still vibrated in his own being as an echo of that spiritual change which came about during the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period.

The sixteenth century Faust—that is the legendary Faust, not the one who ought to have become the inventor of the electro-static machine and the air pump—takes up magic and perishes, goes to the devil. We know that this sixteenth century Faust could not be seen by either Lessing or Goethe as the Faust of the eighteenth century. Now it was necessary to endeavour to show that once again there was a striving for the spirit and that man ought to find his way to salvation, if I may use this expression.

Here, to begin with, is Faust, the professor in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Goethe has depicted him strikingly well, for this is just what such personalities were like at the universities of that time. Of course, the Faust of legend would not have been suitable, for he would have been more like a roaming vagabond gipsy. Goethe is describing not the legendary Faust but the figure of a professor. Of course, at the profoundest soul level he is an individual, a unique personality. But Goethe does also depict him as a type, as a typical professor of philosophy, or perhaps of medicine, of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. On the one hand he stands in the midst of the culture of his day, occupying himself with the intellectual sciences, but on the other he is not unfamiliar with occult things, which in Goethe's own day were considered nothing more than superstition.

Let us now look at Goethe's Faust in a wider world context. We do make the acquaintance of his famulus and Goethe shows us the relationship between the two. We also meet a student—though judging by his later development he does not seem to have been much influenced by his professor. But apart from this, Goethe does not show us much of the real influence exercised by Faust, in his deeper soul aspects, as he might have taught as a professor in, say, Wittenberg. However, there does exist a pupil of Faust who can lead us more profoundly into this wider world context. There is a pupil of Faust who occupies a place in the cultural history of mankind which is almost equal to that of Professor Faust himself—I am speaking only of Faust as Goethe portrayed him. And this pupil is none other than Hamlet.

Hamlet can indeed be seen as a genuine pupil of Faust. It is not a question of the historical aspect of Faust as depicted by Goethe. The whole action of the drama shows that although the cultural attitudes are those of the eighteenth century, nevertheless Goethe's endeavour was to place Faust in an earlier age. But from a certain point of view it is definitely possible to say: Hamlet, who has studied at Wittenberg and has brought home with him a certain mood of spirit—Hamlet as depicted by Shakespeare,⁷ can be seen in the context of world spiritual history as a pupil of Faust. It may even be true to say that Hamlet is a far more genuine pupil of Faust than are the students depicted in Goethe's drama.

Consider the whole character of Hamlet and combine this with the fact that he studied in Wittenberg where he could easily have heard a professor such as Faust. Consider the manner in which he is given his task. His father's ghost appears to him. He is in contact with the real spiritual world. He is really within it. But he has studied in Wittenberg where he was such a good student that he has come to regard the human brain as a book. You remember the scene when Hamlet speaks of the ‘book and volume’ of his brain.⁸ He has studied human sciences so thoroughly that he speaks of writing what he wants to remember on the table of his memory, almost as though he had known the phrase which Goethe would use later when composing his Faust drama: ‘For what one has, in black and white, one carries home and then goes through it.’⁹ Hamlet is on the one hand an excellent student of the intellectualism taught him at Wittenberg, but on the other hand he is immersed in a spiritual reality. Both impulses work in his soul. The whole of the Hamlet drama stands under the influence of these two impulses. Hamlet—both the drama and the character—stands under the influence of these impulses because, when it comes down to it, the writer of Hamlet does not really know how to combine the spiritual world with the intellectual mood of soul. Poetic works which contain characteristics that are so deeply rooted in life provide rich opportunities for discussion. That is why so many books are written about such works, books which do not really make much sense because there is no need for them to make sense. The commentators are constantly concerned with what they consider to be a most important question: Is the ghost in Hamlet merely a picture, or does it have objective significance? What can be concluded from the fact that only Hamlet, and not the others characters present on the stage, can see the ghost? Think of all the learned and interesting things that have been written about this! But of course none of it is connected with what concerned the poet who wrote Hamlet. He belonged to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And writing out of the life of that time he could do no other than approach these things in a way which cannot be fixed in abstract concepts. That is why I say that it is not necessary to make any sense of all the various commentaries. We are talking about a time of transition. Earlier, it was quite clear that spiritual beings were as real as tables and chairs, or as a dog or a cat. Although Calderon lived even later than Shakespeare, he still held to this older view. It would not have occurred to him even to hint that the spiritual beings in his works might be merely subjective in character. Because his whole soul was still open to spiritual insight, he portrayed anything spiritual as something just as concrete as dogs and cats.

Shakespeare, whose mood of soul belonged fully to the time of transition, did not feel the need to handle the matter in any other way than that which stated: It might be like this or it might be like that. There is no longer a clear distinction between whether the spiritual beings are subjective or objective. This is a question which is just as irrelevant for a higher world view as it would be to ask in real life—not in astronomy, of course—where to draw the line between day and night. The question as to whether one is subjective and the other objective becomes irrelevant as soon as we recognize the objectivity of the inner world of man and the subjectivity of the external world. In Hamlet and also, say, in Macbeth, Shakespeare maintains a living suspension between the two. So we see that Shakespeare's dramas are drawn from the transition between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods.

The expression of this is clearest in Hamlet. It may not be historical but it is none the less true to suggest that perhaps Hamlet was at Wittenberg just at the time when Faust was lecturing not so much about the occult as about the intellectual sciences—from what we said earlier you now know what I mean. Perhaps he was at Wittenberg before Faust admitted to himself that, ‘straight or crosswise, wrong or right’, he had been leading his scholars by the nose these ten years long. Perhaps Hamlet had been at Wittenberg during those very ten years, among those whom Faust had been leading by the nose. We can be sure that during those ten years Faust was not sure of where he stood. So having taken all this in from a soul that was itself uncertain, Hamlet returns and is faced on the one hand with what remains from an earlier age and what he himself can still perceive, and on the other with a human attitude which simply drives the spirits away. Just as ghosts flee before the light, so does the perception of spiritual beings flee before intellectualism. Spiritual vision cannot tolerate intellectualism because the outcome of it is a mood of soul in which the human being is inwardly torn right away from any connection with the spirit. The pallor of thoughts makes him ill in his inner being, and the consequence of this is the soul mood characteristic of the time from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries and on into even later times. Goethe, who was sensitive to all these things, also had a mood of soul that reached back into this period. We ought to be clear about this.

Take Greek drama. It is unthinkable without the spiritual beings who stand behind it. It is they who determine human destinies. Human beings are woven into the fabric of destiny by the spiritual forces. This fabric brings into ordinary life what human beings would otherwise only experience if they were able consciously to go into the state of sleep. The will impulses which human beings sleep through in their daytime consciousness are brought into ordinary life. Greek destiny is an insight into what man otherwise sleeps through. When the ancient Greek brings his will to bear, when he acts, he is aware that this is not only the working of his daytime consciousness with its insipid thoughts. Because his whole being is at work, he knows that what pulses through him when he sleeps is also at work. And out of this awareness he gains a certain definite attitude to the question of death, the question of immortality.

Now we come to the period I have been describing, in which human beings no longer had any awareness that something spiritual played in—also in their will—while they slept. We come to the period in which human beings thought their sleep was their own, though at the same time they knew from tradition that they have some connection with the spiritual world. Abstract concepts such as ‘Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine, and even, alas! Theology’ begin to take on a shadowy outline of what they will become in modern times. They begin to appear, but at the same time the earlier vision still plays in. This brings about a twilight consciousness. People really did live in this twilight consciousness. Such figures as Faust are, indeed, born out of a twilight consciousness, out of a glance into the spiritual world which resembles a looking over one's shoulder in a dream. Think of the mood behind such words as ‘sleep’, or ‘dream’, in Hamlet. We can well say that when Hamlet speaks his monologues he is simply speaking about what he senses to be the riddle of his age; he is speaking not theoretically but out of what he actually senses.

So, spanning the centuries and yet connected in spirit, we see that Shakespeare depicts the student and Goethe the professor. Goethe depicted the professor simply because a few more centuries had passed and it was therefore necessary in his time to go further back to the source of what it was all about. Something lived in the consciousness of human beings, something that made the outstanding spirits say: I must bring to expression this state of transition that exists in human evolution.

It is extremely interesting to expand on this world situation still further, because out of it there arise a multitude of all-embracing questions and riddles about life and the world. It is interesting to note, for instance, that amongst the works of Shakespeare Hamlet is the one which depicts in its purest form a personality belonging to the whole twilight condition of the transition—especially in the monologues. The way Hamlet was understood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could have led to the question: Where was the stimulus for what exists in Hamlet's soul? The answer points to Wittenberg, the Faust source. Similar questions arise in connection with Macbeth. But in King Lear we move into the human realm. The question of the spiritual world is not so much concerned with the earth as with the human being—it enters into the human being and becomes a subjective state of mind which leads to madness.

Then Shakespeare's other dramas could also be considered. We could say: What the poet learnt by taking these human characters and leading them to the spiritual realm lives on in the historical dramas about the kings. He does not follow this specific theme in the historical dramas, but the indeterminate forces work on. Taking Shakespeare's dramas all together, one gains the impression that they all culminate in the age of Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare wanted to depict something that leads from the subconscious, bubbling forces of his people to the intellectual clarity that has especially shone forth from that corner of the civilized world since the age of Elizabeth. From this point of view the whole world of Shakespeare's dramas appears—not perhaps quite like a play with a satisfactory ending, but at least like a drama which does lead to a fairly satisfying conclusion. That is, it leads to a world which then continues to evolve. After the transition had been going on for some time, the dramas lead toShakespeare's immediate present, which is a world with which it is possible to come to terms. This is the remarkable thing: The world of Shakespeare's dramas culminates in the age in which Shakespeare lived; this is an age with which it is possible to come to terms, because from then on history takes a satisfactory course and runs on into intellectualism. Intellectualism came from the part of the earth out of which Shakespeare wrote; and he depicted this by ending up at this point.

The questions with which I am concerned find their answers when we follow the lines which lead from the pupil Hamlet to the professor Faust, and then ask how it was with Goethe at the time when, out of his inner struggles, he came to the figure of Faust. You see, he also wrote Götz von Berlichingen. In Götz von Berlichingen, again taken from folk myth, there is a similar confrontation. On the one side you have the old forces of the pre-intellectual age, the old German empire, which cannot be compared with what became the later German empire. You have the knights and the peasants belonging to the pre-intellectual age when the pallor of thoughts did not make human beings ill; when indeed very little was guided from the head, but when the hands were used to such an extent that even an iron hand was needed. Goethe refers back to something that once lived in more recent civilization but which, by its very nature, had its roots in the fourth post-Atlantean period. Over against all this you have in the figure of Weislingen the new element which is developing, the age of intellectualism, which is intimately linked to the way the German princes and their principalities evolved, a development which led eventually to the later situation in Central Europe right up to the present catastrophe.

We see that in Götz von Berlichingen Goethe is attacking this system of princes and looking back to times which preceded the age of intellectualism. He takes the side of the old and rebels against what has taken its place, especially in Central Europe. It is as though Goethe were saying in Götz von Berlichingen that intellectualism has seized hold of Central Europe too. But here it appears as something that is out of place. It would not have occurred to Goethe to negate Shakespeare. We know how positive was Goethe's attitude to Shakespeare. It would not have occurred to him to find fault with Shakespeare, because his work led to a satisfying culmination which could be allowed to stand. On the contrary, he found this extraordinarily satisfying.

But the way in which intellectualism developed in his own environment made Goethe depict its existence as something unjustified, whereas he spiritually embraced the political element of what was expressed in the French Revolution. In Götz von Berlichingen Goethe is the spiritual revolutionary who denies the spirit in the same way as the French Revolution denies the political element. Goethe turns back in a certain way to something that has once been, though he certainly cannot wish that it should return in its old form. He wants it to develop in a different direction. It is most interesting to observe this mood in Goethe, this mood of revolt against what has come to replace the world of Götz.

So it is extremely interesting to find that Shakespeare has been so deeply grasped by Lessing and by Goethe and that they really followed on from Shakespeare in seeking what they wanted to find through their mood of spiritual revolt. Yet where intellectualism has become particularly deeply entrenched, for instance in Voltaire,¹⁰ it mounts a most virulent attack on Shakespeare. We know that Voltaire called Shakespeare a wild drunkard. All these things have to be taken into account.

Now add something else to the great question which is so important for an understanding of the spiritual revolution which took place in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period. Add to all this the extraordinary part which Schiller played in this spiritual revolution which in Goethe is expressed in a Goethean way in Götz von Berlichingen. In the circle closest of all to Schiller he first met what he had to revolt against. It came out of the most one-sided, unhealthy intellectualism. There was of course as yet no Waldorf school¹¹ to do battle against one-sided intellectualism. So Schiller could not be sent to the Waldorf school in Wurttemberg but had to go to the Karlsschule instead. All the protest which Schiller built up during his youth grew out of his protest against the education he received at the Karlsschule. This kind of education—Schiller wrote his drama Die Räuber (The Robbers) against it—is now universally accepted, and no positive, really productive opposition to it has ever been mounted until the recent foundation of the Waldorf school.

So what is the position of Schiller—who later stood beside Goethe in all this? He writes Die Räuber (The Robbers). It is perfectly obvious to those who can judge such things that in Spiegelberg and the other characters he has portrayed his fellow pupils. Franz Moor himself could not so easily be derived from his schoolmates, but in Franz Moor he has shown in an ahrimanic form¹² everything that his genius can grasp of what lives in his time. If you know how to look at these things, you can see how Schiller does not depict spiritual beings externally, in the way they appear in Hamlet or Macbeth, but that he allows the ahrimanic principle to work in Franz Moor. And opposite this is the luciferic principle in Karl Moor. In Franz Moor we see a representative of all that Schiller is rebelling against. It is the same world against which Goethe is rebelling in Götz von Berlichingen, only Schiller sets about it in a different way. We see this too in the later drama Kabale and Liebe (Love and Intrigue).

So you see that here in Central Europe these spirits, Goethe and Schiller, do not depict something in the way Shakespeare does. They do not allow events to lead to something with which one can come to terms. They depict something which is there but which in their opinion ought to have developed quite differently. What they really want does not exist, and what is there on the physical plane is something which they oppose in a spiritual revolution. So we have a strange interplay between what exists on the physical plane and what lives in these spirits.

In a rather bold way I could draw it like this: In Shakespeare the events he depicts carry on in keeping with the way things are on earth

(blue). What he takes in from earlier times, in which the spirit still worked, goes over (red) into a present time which then becomes a factual world evolution.

Then we see in Goethe and Schiller that they had inklings of an earlier time (red) when the spiritual world was still powerful, in the fourth post-Atlantean period, and that they bring this only as far as their spiritual intentions, whereas they see what is taking place on earth (blue) as being in conflict with it. One thing plays into the other in the human struggle for the spirit. This is why here in Central Europe the question became a purely human one. In the time of Goethe and Schiller a tremendous revolution occurred in the concept of man as a being who stands within a social context. I shall be able to expand on this in the coming lectures.

Let us now look towards the eastern part of Europe. But we cannot look in that direction in the same way. Those who only describe external facts and have no understanding for what lives in the souls of Goethe and Schiller—and also of course many others—may describe these facts very well, but they will fail to include what plays in from a spiritual world—which is certainly also there, although it may be present only in the heads of human beings. In France the battle takes place on the physical earth, in a political revolution. In Germany the battle does not come down as far as the physical plane. It comes down as far as human souls and trembles and vibrates there. But we cannot continue this consideration in the same way with regard to the East, for things are different there. If we want to pursue the matter with regard to the East we need to call on the assistance of Anthroposophy. For what takes place in the souls of Goethe and Schiller, which are, after all, here on the earth—what, in them, blows through earthly souls is, in the East, still in the spiritual world and finds no expression whatsoever down on the earth.

If you want to describe what took place between Goethe's and Schiller's spirits in the physical world—if you want to describe this with regard to the East, then you will have to employ a different view, such as that used in the days of Attila when battles were fought by spirits in the air above the heads of human beings.

What you find being carried out in Europe by Goethe and Schiller—Schiller by writing Die Räuber (The Robbers) and Goethe by writing Götz von Berlichingen—you will find in the East to be taking place as a spiritual fact in the spiritual world above the physical plane. If you want to seek deeds which parallel the writing of Die Räuber (The Robbers) and the writing of Götz, you will have to seek them among the spiritual beings of the super-sensible world. There is no point in searching for them on the physical plane. In a diagram depicting what happens in the East you would have to draw the element in question like a cloud floating above the physical plane, while down below, untouched by it, would be what shows externally on the physical plane.

Now we know that, because we have Hamlet, we can tell how a western human being who had been a pupil of Faust would have behaved, and could have behaved. But there can be no such thing as a Russian Hamlet. Or can there? We could see a Russian Hamlet with our spiritual eyes if we were to imagine the following: Faust lectures at Wittenberg—I mean not the historical Faust but Goethe's Faust who is actually more true than historical fact. Faust lectures at Wittenberg—and Hamlet listens, writing everything down, just as he does even what the ghost says to him about the villains who live in Denmark. He writes everything down in the book and volume of his brain—Shakespeare created a true pupil of Faust out of what he found in the work of Saxo Grammaticus,¹³ which depicts things quite differently. Now imagine that an angel being also listened to Faust as he lectured—Hamlet sat on the university bench, Faust stood on the platform, and at the back of the lecture hall an angel listened. And this angel then flew to the East and there brought about what could have taken place as a parallel to the deeds of Hamlet in the West.

I do not believe that it is possible to reach a truly penetrating comprehension of these things by solely taking account of external facts. One cannot ignore the very profound impression made, by these external facts, particularly on the greatest personalities of the time, when what is taking place is something as incisive as the spiritual revolution which took place between the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean periods.

• 1 . Lecture Three, Note 1
• 2 . Lecture Nine, Note 2
• 3 . The first mention of Faust appeared in 1506. In 1587 the first Faustbuch, a popular chapbook, was published in Frankfurt-am-Main.
• 4 . Faust Part One. The Study.
• 5 . Johann Gottfried Herder, 1744-1803. Called Kant's system ‘a kingdom of never-ending whims, blind alleys, fancies, chimeras and vacant expressions.’
• 6 . Emil Du Bois-Reymond, 1818-1896: In ‘Goethe und kein Ende’ (No end to Goethe), address of 15 October 1882 in Reden (Speeches), Leipzig 1886.
• 7 . William Shakespeare, 1564-1616. Hamlet is one of his later plays.
• 8 . Hamlet, Act One, Scene 5.
• 9 . ‘what one has in black and white’: Faust Part One, The Study.
• 10. Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire, 1694-1778. One of the greatest French authors.
• 11. Lecture Four, Note 3
• 12. Lecture One, Note 3
• 13. Saxo Grammaticus, d.1204. Danish historian who wrote the Gesta Danorum.

The subject that we shall discuss now is a very wide one, and today it will not be possible to deal with it as extensively as I should have liked. But we shall continue these considerations later on. In these considerations, I should like to give you a basis for the understanding of freedom and necessity, so that you may obtain a picture of what must be considered from an occult point of view, in order to understand the course of the social, historical and ethical-moral life of man.

We emphasized that, as far as the life between birth and death is concerned, we only experience in a waking condition what we perceive through the senses, what reaches us through our sense-impressions and what we experience in our thoughts. Man dreams through everything contained as living reality in his feelings, and he sleeps through everything contained as deeper necessity, in the impulses of his will, everything existing as the deeper reality. In the life of our feelings and of our will we live in the same spheres which we inhabit with the so-called dead.

Let us first form a conception of what is really contained in the life of our senses from an exterior aspect. We can picture the sense-impressions as if they were spread out before us—I might say, like a carpet. Of course, we must imagine that this carpet contains also the impressions of our hearing, the impressions of the twelve senses, such as we know them through Anthroposophy. You know that in reality there are twelve senses. This carpet of the sense impressions covers, as it were, a reality “lying behind”—if I may use this expression (but I am speaking in comparisons). This reality lying behind the sense perceptions must not be imagined as the scientist imagines the world of the atoms, or as a certain philosophical direction imagines the “thing in itself.” In my public lectures I have emphasized that when we look for the “thing in itself,” as it is done in modern philosophy and in the Kant-philosophy, this implies more or less the same as breaking the mirror to see what is behind it, in order to find the reality of beings that we see in a mirror. I do not speak in this sense of something behind the sense perceptions; what I mean is something spiritual behind the sense-perceptions, something spiritual in which we ourselves are embedded, but which cannot reach the usual consciousness of man between birth and death. If we could solve the riddle contained in the carpet of sense perceptions as a first step toward the attainment of the spiritual reality, so that we would see more than the manifold impressions of our sense-impulses—what would we see, in this first stage of solving the riddle, of solving spiritually the riddle of the carpet woven by our senses? Let us look into this question.

It will surprise us what we must describe as that which first appears to us. What we first see is a number of forces; all aim at permeating with impulses our entire life from our birth—or let us say, from our conception—to our death. When trying to solve the riddle of this carpet of the senses, we would not see our life in its single events, but we would see its entire organization. At first it would not strike us as something so strange; for, on this first stage of penetrating into the secret of the sense-perceptions, we would find ourselves, not such as we are now, in this moment, but such as we are throughout our entire life between birth and death. This life, that does not extend as far as our physical body, and that cannot be perceived, therefore, with the physical senses, permeates our etheric body, our body of formative forces. And our body of formatives forces is, essentially, the expression of this life that could be perceived if we could eliminate the senses, or the sense-impressions. If the carpet of the senses could be torn, as it were (and we tear it when we ascend to a spiritual vision) man finds his own self, the self as it is organized for this incarnation on earth, in which he makes this observation. But, as stated, the senses cannot perceive this.

With what can we perceive this? Man already possesses the instrument needed for such a perception, but on a stage of evolution that still renders a real perception impossible. What we would thus perceive cannot reach the eye, nor the ear—cannot enter any sense organ. Instead—please grasp this well—it is breathed in, it is sucked in with the breath. The etheric foundation of our lung (the physical lung is out of the question, for, such as it is, the lung is not a real perceptive organ) that which lies etherically at the foundation of our lung, is really an organ of perception, but between birth and death the human being cannot use it as an organ of perception for what he breathes in. The air we breathe, every breath of air and the way in which it enters the whole rhythm of our life, really contains our deeper reality between birth and death. But things are arranged in such a way that here on the physical plane the foundation of our entire lung-system is in an unfinished condition, and has not advanced as far as the capacity of perceiving. If we were to investigate what constitutes its etheric foundation, we would find, on investigating this and on grasping it rightly, that it is, in reality, exactly the same thing as our brain and sense organs from a physical aspect, here in the physical world. At the foundation of our lung-system we find a brain in an earlier stage of evolution; we might say, in an infantile stage of evolution. Also in this connection we bear within us, as it were (I say purposely, “as it were”), a second human being. It will not be wrong if you imagine that you also possess an etheric head—except that this etheric head cannot yet be used as an organ of perception in our everyday life. But it has the possibility of perceptive capacity for that which lies behind the body of formative forces, as that which builds up this body of formative forces. However, that which lies behind the etheric body as creative force is the element into which we enter when we pass through the portal of death. Then we lay aside the etheric body. But we enter into that which is active and productive in this body of formatives forces. Perhaps it may be difficult to imagine this; but it will be good if you try to think this out to the end.

Let us imagine the physical organization of the head and the physical organization of the lung; from the universe come cosmic impulses that express themselves rhythmically in the movements of the lungs. Through our lungs we are related with the entire universe, and the entire universe works at our etheric body. When we pass through the portal of death, we lay aside the etheric body. We enter that which is active in our lung-system, and this is connected with the entire universe. This accounts for the surprising consonance to be found in the rhythm of human life and the rhythm of breathing. I have already explained that when we calculate the number of breaths we draw in one day, we obtain 25,920 breaths a day, by taking as the basis 18 breaths a minute (hence 18 x 60 x 24). Man breathes in and breathes out; this constitutes his rhythm, his smallest rhythm to start with. Then there is another rhythm in life, as I have already explained before—namely, that every morning when we awake we breathe into our physical system, as it were, our soul being, the astral body and the ego, and we breathe them out again when we fall asleep. We do this during our whole life. Let us take an average length of life—then we can make the following calculation:—We breathe in and breathe out our own being 365 times a year; if we take 71 years as the average length of human life, we obtain 25,915. you see, more or less the same number. (Life differs according to the single human being.) We find that in the life between birth and death we breathe in and out 25,920 times what we call our real self. Thus we may say;—There is the same relationship between ourselves and the world to which we belong as there is between the breath we draw in and the elements around. During our life we live in the same rhythm in which we live during our day through our breathing. Again, if we take our life—let us say, approximately 71 years, and if we consider this life as a cosmic day (we will call a human life a cosmic day), we obtain a cosmic year by multiplying this by 365. The result is 25,920 (again, approximately one year). In this length of time, in 25,920 years, the sun returns to the same constellation of the Zodiac. If the sun is in Aries in a certain year, it will rise again in Aries after 25,920 years. In the course of 25,920 years the sun moves around the entire Zodiac. Thus, when an entire human life is breathed out into the cosmos, this is a cosmic breath, which is in exactly the same relationship with the cosmic course of the sun around the Zodiac as one breath in one day in life. Here we have deep inner order of laws! Everything is built up on rhythm. We breathe in a threefold way, or at least we are placed into the breathing process in a threefold way. First, we breathe through our lungs in the elementary region; this rhythm is contained in the number 25,920. Then we breathe within the entire solar system, by taking sunrise and sunset as parallel to our falling asleep and awaking; through our life we breathe in a rhythm that is again contained in the number 25,920. Finally, the cosmos breathes us in and out, again in a rhythm determined by the number 25,920—the sun's course around the Zodiac.

Thus we stand within the whole visible universe; at its foundation lies the invisible universe. When we pass through the portal of death we enter this invisible universe. Rhythmical life is the life that lies at the foundation of our feelings. We enter the rhythmical life of the universe in the time between death and a new birth. This rhythmical life lies behind the carpet woven by our senses, as the life that determines our etheric life. If we would have a clairvoyant consciousness, we would see this cosmic rhythm that is, as it were, a rhythmical, surging cosmic ocean of an astral kind. In this rhythmically surging astral ocean we find the so-called dead, the beings of the higher hierarchies and what belongs to us, but beneath the threshold. There arise the feelings that we dream away, and the impulses of the will that we sleep away, in their true reality.

We may ask, in a comparison, as it were, and without becoming theological: Why has a wise cosmic guidance arranged matters so that man—such as he is between birth and death—cannot perceive the rhythmical life behind the carpet of the senses? Why is the human head, the hidden head that corresponds to the lung-system, not suitable for an adequate perception? This leads us to a truth which was kept secret, one might say, right into our days, by the occult schools in question, because other secrets are connected with it; these must not be revealed—or should not have been revealed so far. But our period is one in which such things must reach the consciousness of mankind.

The occult schools that were inaugurated here and there keep such things secret for reasons that will not be explained today. They still keep them secret, although today these things must be brought to the consciousness of mankind. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, means and ways were given whereby that which occult schools have kept back (in an unjustified way, in many cases) becomes obsolete. This is connected with the event that I mentioned to you—the event which took place in the autumn of 1879. Now we can only lift the outer veil of this mystery; but even this outer veil is one of the most important pieces of knowledge concerning man. It is indeed a head that we bear within us as the head of a second man; it is a head, but also a body belongs to this head, and this body is, at first, the body of an animal. Thus we bear within us a second human being. This second human being possesses a properly formed head, but attached to it, the body of an animal—a real centaur. The centaur is a truth, an etheric truth.

It is important to bear in mind that a relatively great wisdom is active in this being—a wisdom connected with the entire cosmic rhythm. The head belonging to this centaur sees the cosmic rhythm in which it is embedded, also during the existence between death and a new birth. It is the cosmic rhythm that has been shown in a threefold way, also in numbers—the rhythm on which many secrets of the universe are based. This head is much wiser than our physical head. All human beings bear within them another far wiser being—the centaur. But in spite of his wisdom, this centaur is equipped with all the wild instincts of the animals.

Now you will understand the wisdom of the guiding forces of the universe. Man could not be given a consciousness which is, on the one hand, strong and able to see through the cosmic rhythm, and on the other hand, uncontrolled and full of wild instincts. But the centaur's animal nature—please connect this with what I have told you in other lectures dealing with this subject from another point of view—is tamed and conquered in the next incarnation, during his passage through the world of cosmic rhythms between death and a new birth. The foundation of our lung-system in the present incarnation appears as our physical head, although this is dulled down to an understanding limited to the senses, and what lies at the basis of our lung-system appears as an entire human being whose wild instincts are tamed in the next incarnation. The centaur of this incarnation is, in the next incarnation, the human being endowed with sense perception.

Now you will be able to grasp something else:—You will understand why I said that, during man' s existence between death and a new birth, the animal realm is his lowest realm and that he must conquer its forces. What must he do? In what work must he be engaged between two incarnations? He must fulfill the task of transforming the centaur, the animal in him, into a human form for the next incarnation. This work requires a real knowledge embracing the impulses of the whole animal realm; in the age of Chiron, men possessed this knowledge atavistically, in a weaker form. Although the knowledge of Chiron is a knowledge weakened by this incarnation, it is of the same kind. Now you see the connection. You see why man needs this lower realm between death and a new birth; he must master it; he needs it because he must transform the centaur into a human being.

What Anthroposophy sets forth has been attained only in single flashes outside the occult schools. There have always been a few men who discovered these things, as if in flashes. Especially in the nineteenth century a few scattered spirits had an inkling, as it were, that something resembling the taming of wild instincts can be found in man. Some writers speak of this. And the way in which they speak of these things shows how this knowledge frightens them. High spiritual truths cannot be gained with the same ease as scientific truths, which can be digested so comfortably by the mind. These high truths often have this quality; their reality scares us. In the nineteenth century some spirits were scared and tremendously moved when they discovered what speaks out of the human eye that can look round so wildly at times, or out of other things in man. One of the writers of the nineteenth century expressed himself in an extreme manner by saying that every man really bears within him a murderer. He meant this centaur, of whom he was dimly conscious.

It must be emphasized again and again that human nature contains enigmas which must be solved gradually. These things must be borne in mind courageously and calmly. But they must not become trivial, because they make human consciousness approach the great earnestness of life. In this age it is our task to see the earnest aspect of life, to see the serious things that are approaching and that announce themselves in such terrible signs.

This is one aspect, preparing the way for certain considerations that I shall continue very soon. The other aspect is as follows:—Man passes through the portal of death. Last time I mentioned the great change in man's entire way of experiencing things, by showing you how a connection with the dead is established—what we tell him seems to come out of the depths of our own being. In the intercourse with the dead the reciprocal relationships are reversed. When you associate with a human being here on earth, you can hear yourself speaking to him—you hear what you tell him, and you hear from him what he tells you. When you are in communication with the dead, his words rise out of your own soul, and what you tell him reaches you like an echo coming from the dead. You cannot hear what you tell him as something coming from yourself; you hear this as something coming from him. I wished to give you an example of the great difference between the physical world in which we live between birth and death, and the world in which we live between death and a new birth.

We look into this world when we contemplate it from a certain standpoint. When we look through the carpet woven by our senses, we look into the rhythm of the world—but this rhythm has two aspects. I will show you these two aspects of the rhythm in a diagram, by drawing here, let us say, a number of stars—planets if you like [The drawing can not be rendered.]. Here are a number of stars or planets—the planetary system, if you like, belonging to our Earth. Man passes through this planetary system in the time between death and a new birth. (A printed cycle of lectures contains details on these things.) Man passes through the planetary system. But in passing through the world which is still the invisible world, he also reaches—between death and a new birth—the world which is no longer visible, and is not even spatial. These things are difficult to describe, because when we imagine anything in the physical world we are used to imagine it spatially. But beyond the world that can be perceived through the senses lies a world which is no longer spatial. In a diagram I must illustrate this spatially. The ancients said:--Beyond the planets lies the sphere of the fixed stars (this is expressed wrongly, but this does not matter now), and beyond this lies the super-sensible world. The ancients pictured it spatially, but this is merely a picture of this world.

When man has entered this super-sensible world, in the time between death and a new birth, one can say (although this is also rendered in a picture):—Man is then beyond the stars, and the stars themselves are used by man, between death and a new birth, for a kind of reading. Between death and a new birth, the stars are used by man for a kind of reading. Let us realize this clearly. How do we read here on earth? When we read here on earth we have approximately twelve consonants and seven vowels with various variations; we arrange these letters in many ways into words; we mix these letters together. Think how a typographer throws together the letters in order to form words. All the words consist of the limited number of letters that we possess. For the dead, the fixed stars of the Zodiac and the planets are what the letters—approximately twelve consonants and seven vowels—are for us, here on the physical plane. The fixed stars of the Zodiac correspond to the consonants; the planets are the vowels. Beyond the starry heaven, the outlook is peripheral. (Between birth and death, man's outlook is from a center; here on the earth he has his eye, and from there his gaze rays out to the various points.) It is most difficult of all to imagine that things are reversed after death so that we see peripherally. We are really in the circumference, and we see the Zodiac-starsthe consonants and the planets—the vowels, from outside. Thus we look from outside at the events taking place on earth. According to the part of our being which we imbue with life, we look down on the earth through the Taurus and Mars, or we look through the Taurus, in between Mars and Jupiter. (You must not picture this from the earthly standpoint, but reversed—for you are looking down on the earth.) When you are dead and circle round the earth, you read with the help of the starry system. But you must picture this kind of reading differently. We could read in another way, but it would be more difficult, from a technical aspect, than our present reading system. It is possible to read differently—we could read in such a way that we have a sequence of letters—a, b, c, d, e, f, g, etc.—or arranged according to another system and instead of arranging them in the type-case, we could read in the following way:—If the word “he” is to be read, a ray of light falls on h and e; if “goes” is to be read, a ray falls on g, o, e, s. The sequence of the letters could be there, and they could be illuminated as required. It would not be arranged so comfortably, from a technical aspect—but you can picture an earthly life in which reading is arranged in this way—an alphabet is there, and then there would be some arrangement which always illuminates one letter at a time; then we can read the sequence of the illuminated letters, and obtain as a result, Goethe's Faust for instance.

This cannot be imagined so easily; yet it is possible to imagine this, is it not?

The dead reads in this way, with the aid of the starry system: the fixed stars remain immobile, but he moves—for he is in movement—the fixed stars remain still and he moves round. If he must read the Lion above Jupiter, he moves round in such a way that the Lion stands above Jupiter. He connects the stars, just as we connect h and e in order to read “he.” This reading of the earthly conditions from the cosmos—and the visible cosmos belongs to this—consists in this—The dead can read that which lies spiritually at the foundation of the stars. Except that the entire system is based on immobility—the entire godly system of reading from out the universe is based on immobility.

What does this mean? This means that according to the intentions of certain beings of the higher hierarchies, the planets should be immobile, they should have an immobile aspect; then the being outside engaged in reading would be the only one moving about. The events on the earth could be read rightly from out the universe if the planets would not move, if the planets had an immobile position.

But they are not immobile! Why not? They would be so, if the world's creation had proceeded in such a way that the Spirits of Form, or the Exusiai alone, had created the world.

But the luciferic spirits participated in this work, and interfered—as you already know. Luciferic spirits brought to the earth what used to be law during the Moon-period of the Earth, where several things were governed by the Spirits of Form; luciferic spirits brought this system of movement to the Earth from the Moon-period. They caused the planets' movement. A luciferic element in the cosmic spaces brought the planets into movement. In a certain respect this disturbs the order created by the Elohim; a luciferic element enters the cosmos. It is that luciferic element which man must learn to know between death and a new birth; he must learn to know it by deducting, as it were, in what he reads, that which comes from the movement of the planets, or the moving stars. He must deduct this—then he will obtain the right result.

Indeed, between death and a new birth we learn a great deal concerning the sway and activity of the luciferic element in the universe. Such a thing, like the course of the planets, is connected with the luciferic.

This is the other side that I wished to point out. But from this you will see the connection between the other life between death and new birth, and the present life. We might say that the world has two aspects; here, between birth and death we see one aspect, through our senses. Between death and a new birth we see it from the reversed side, with the soul's eye. And between death and a new birth, we learn to read the conditions here on earth in relationship with the spiritual world. Try to realize this, try to imagine these conditions. Then you will have to confess that it is, indeed, deeply significant to say that the world which we first learn to know through our senses and our understanding is an illusion, a Maya. As soon as we approach the real world, we find that the world that we know is related to this real world in the same way in which the reflection in the mirror is related to the living reality before the mirror, which is reflected in it. If you have a mirror, with several shapes reflected in it, this shows that there are shapes outside the mirror, which are reflected by the mirror. Suppose that you look into the mirror as a disinterested spectator. The three figures which I have drawn here [diagram not available] fight against each other; in the mirror you see them fighting. This shows that the mirrored figures do something, but you cannot say that the figure A, there in the mirror, beats the figure B in the mirror! What you see in the mirror is the image of the fight, because the figures outside the mirror are doing something.

If you believe that A, there in the mirror, or the reflected image of A, does something to B, there in the mirror, you are quite mistaken. You cannot set up comparisons and connections between the reflected images, but you can only say:—What is reflected in the mirrored images points to something in the world of reality, which is reflected. But the world given to man is a mirror, a Maya, and in this world man sees causes and effects. When you speak of this world of causes and effects, it is just as if you were to believe that the mirrored image A beats the mirrored image B. Something happens among the real beings reflected by the mirror, but the impulses leading to the fight are not to be found in the mirrored A and in the mirrored B. Investigate nature and its laws; you will find, at first, that such as it appears to your senses it is a Maya, a reflection or a mirrored picture. The reality lies beneath the threshold which I have indicated to you, the threshold between the life of thought and the life of feelings. Even your own reality is not contained at all in your waking consciousness; your own reality is contained in the spiritual reality; it is dipped into the dreaming and sleeping worlds of feeling and of will. Thus it is nonsense to speak of a causing necessity in the world of Maya—and it is also nonsense to speak of cause and effect in the course of history! It is real nonsense! To this I should like to add that it is nonsense to say that the events of 1914 are the result of events in 1913, 1912, etc. This is just as clever as saying:—This A in the mirror is a bad fellow; he beats the poor B, there in the mirror! What matters is to find the true reality. And this lies beneath the threshold, which must be crossed by going down into the world of feeling and of will—and does not enter our usual waking consciousness.

You see, we must interpret in another way the idea that “something had to happen” or “something was needed;” we cannot interpret it as the ordinary historians or scientists do this. We must ask:--Who are the real beings that produced the events of a later period, which followed an earlier one? The preceding historical events are merely the mirrored reflections—they cannot be the cause of what took place subsequently.

This, again, is one side of the question. The other side will be clear to you if you realize that only a Maya is contained in the waking reality embraced by our thoughts and by our sense perceptions. This Maya cannot be the cause of anything. It cannot be a real cause. But pure thoughts can determine man's actions. This is a fact taught by experience, if man is not led to deeds by passions, desires and instincts, but by clear thoughts. This is possible and can take place—pure ideals can be the impulses of human actions. But ideals alone cannot effect anything. I can carry out an action under the influence of a pure idea; but the idea cannot effect anything.

In order to understand this, compare once more the idea with the mirrored image. The reflection in the mirror cannot cause you to run away. If you run away it displeases you, or something is there which has nothing to do with the reflection in the mirror. The reflection in the mirror cannot take a whip and cause you to run away. This image cannot be the cause of anything. When a human being fulfills actions under the influence of his reflected image, i.e., his thoughts, he fulfills them out of the Maya; he carries out his actions out of the cosmic mirror. It is he who carries out the actions, and for this reason he acts freely. But when he is led by his passions, his actions are not free; he is not free, even if he is led by his feelings. He is free when he is led by his thoughts, that are mere reflections, or mirrored images. For this reason I have explained in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that man can act freely and independently if he is guided by pure thoughts, pure thinking, because pure thoughts cannot cause or produce anything, so that the causing force must come from somewhere else. I have used the same image again in my book The Riddle of Man. We are free human beings because we carry out actions under the influence of Maya, and because this Maya, or the world immediately around us, cannot bring about or cause anything. Our freedom is based on the fact that the world that we perceive is Maya. The human being united himself in wedlock with Maya, and thus becomes a free being. If the world that we perceive were a reality, this reality would compel us, and we would not be free. We are free beings just because the world which we perceive is not a reality and for this reason it cannot force us to do anything, in the same way in which a mirrored reflection cannot force us to run away. The secret of the free human being consists in this—to realize the connection of the world perceived as Maya—the mere reflection of a reality—and the impulses coming from man himself The impulses must come from man himself, when he is not induced to an action by something that influences him.

Freedom can be proved quite clearly if the proofs are sought on this basis:—That the world given to us as a perception is a mirrored reflection and not a reality.

These are thoughts that pave the way. I wish to speak to you about things that lie at the foundation of human nature—that part of human nature that can perceive reality and has not attained the required maturity in one incarnation, but must be weakened in order to become man in the next incarnation. The centaur, of whom I spoke to you, who is to be found beneath the threshold of consciousness, would be able to perceive truth and reality, but the centaur cannot as yet perceive. What we perceive is not a reality! But man can let himself be determined by that part of his being which is no longer, or is not yet, a centaur; then his actions will be those of a free being. The secret of our freedom is intimately connected with the taming of our centaur-nature. This centaur-nature is contained in us in such a way that it is chained and fettered, so that we may not perceive the reality of the centaur, but only the Maya. If we let ourselves be impelled by Maya, we are free.

This is looked upon from one side. From the other side we learn to know the world between death and a new birth. That which otherwise surrounds us as the universe shrivels up, and enables us to read in the cosmos; the physical letters are a reflection of this. The fact that languages contain today a larger number of letters (the Finnish languages has still only twelve consonants) is due to the different shadings; but, essentially, there are twelve consonants and seven differently shaded vowels. The various shadings in the vowels were added by the luciferic element; what causes the vowels to move corresponds to the movement of the planets.

Thus you see the connection of that which exists in human life on a small scale; the connection between the reading of the letters that are here on the paper, and that which lives outside, in the cosmos. Man is born out of the cosmos, and is not only the result of what preceded him in the line of heredity.

These are some of the foundations that will enable us gradually to reach the real conceptions of freedom and necessity in the historical, social and ethical-moral course of events.

My dear friends! A whole group of new members of this school have arrived here today, and so I am obliged to say at least a few words once again to convey something of the principles of this school.

The first thing to be said about this school is that it forms the esoteric aspect of the existing Anthroposophical Movement, which with the Christmas Conference here at the Goetheanum has been newly reestablished. Earlier there were a few esoteric circles at the Goetheanum. All these esoteric circles must by and by come into this school, for it certainly has occurred that with the Christmas Conference a new spirit has come into the Anthroposophical Movement, insofar as it streams through the Anthroposophical Society.

I have also just spoken the words abroad, in recapitulation, which should point out the difference between the Anthroposophical Movement before Christmas, and what we now have since Christmas. Previously the Anthroposophical Society was a sort of administrative body for anthroposophical teachings, for the substance of Anthroposophy. Since Christmas it is different. Now it does more than merely foster Anthroposophy in the Anthroposophical Society. Now it is constituted so that Anthroposophy is actually done, which means that all things that flow through the Anthroposophical Society bearing on operations and ideas are constituted so as to be anthroposophical through and through.

What has happened with this renewal, my dear friends, must be taken in with sufficient depth, and fundamentally must be taken in with deepest sincerity. The renewal will then allow a differentiation between the Anthroposophical Society in general, and this esoteric school within the Anthroposophical Society. In keeping with the principle of openness that was established at the Christmas Conference, the Anthroposophical Society will of course require no more of its members than that they stand honestly by whatever Anthroposophy is, that they are, we might say, listeners to Anthroposophy, and that they make of this Anthroposophy whatever they can with their hearts and souls.

It is quite different within the school. Whoever enters this school, declares thereby that as a member he will be a true representative of the Anthroposophical Movement. And in this esoteric school, that eventually will be expanded into three classes, in this esoteric school the freedom implicit for every member of the anthroposophical community most certainly must be made to rule. Also, for the directorate, the Executive Council at the Goetheanum,¹ whose members answer for the school, full freedom must rule.

Being a true member of this school entails that in whatever matters a member is engaged with in daily life, that an anthroposophical approach is displayed to the world. And the Goetheanum Executive Council, as it appears to them, must be able to decide whether a member, not being able to be a representative of the Anthroposophical Movement, should therefore be stricken from the membership of the school. It must be a two-way relationship.

In the future, in the holding and handling of this school, a certain spirit must be engaged, a spirit that is ever more and more serious and in a certain sense stronger. Otherwise, we just cannot progress further with the Anthroposophical Movement. We ourselves must really feel it within the school, especially if we have a chance to enhance and strengthen Anthroposophy. There will be hard times ahead for Anthroposophy, and so the members of the school must know the difficulties that they have taken upon themselves. They are not simply devoted to Anthroposophy, but are members of an esoteric school.

And it must be seen as a commitment, a most inward commitment, that the operation of the Executive Council, as it is presently constituted, is seen in its esoteric substance. This must ever more and more come into the awareness of the members, which has not yet happened. It must happen. It must come to be generally known. And it says a lot, that at this time an Executive Council has come into being out of the esoteric.

What is certainly being pointed out, is that all of those who rightfully regard themselves as members of the school, should see the school as having been founded not by men and women, but rather by the will of the present-day ruling spiritual powers of the world. The school should be seen as having been put in place by the spiritual world, and should be seen as the meaningful work of the spiritual world, the spiritual world that not only feels somewhat responsible for it, but the spiritual world that feels responsible for it in the strongest sense. Therefore, whoever does not take this School seriously, and does not carry it within when involved in daily activities, without fail, for such a member, who does not take the matter seriously, his membership must be stricken.

Actually, lassitude to a very great degree has infiltrated the Anthroposophical Society in the last few years. To remove this forever is to be one of the many functions of this school. We should feel ourselves to be responsible for the words that we speak, we should before all things feel responsible for them, so that every word we speak, in the most serious sense, has been so fully verified by us, that we can represent it as truth. For untruthful statements, even when coming forth with good will, will work destructively within an occult movement. There must be no deceit about this, but rather the fullest clarity must reign. It comes down to this, the intention is not to allow it to wash lightly over a person, but the intention is to arrive at the absolute truth. And among the first responsibilities of a student of the esoteric, is that he not only feel a commitment to relate what he believes to be the truth, but that a commitment is felt to verify that the things that are said are actual objective truths. For only when (in the sense of objective truth) we have won godly spiritual might, the strength of which runs through this school, will we thereby be able to steer our way through all the difficulties that will beset Anthroposophy.

One should also not fail to attend to what is happening in the external world. Now please, my friends, whatever is spoken in the environs of the school should remain within the environs of the school. Yet I tell you that even within the environs of the school, one may not forget the sorts of things that are being discussed by authoritative personalities, such as the following: “Those who represent the principles of the Roman Church will be doing their utmost in the near future to make the individual states of the former German Empire independent,” and I am merely reporting, “so that out of these independent states, with the exclusion of Prussia, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation can once more be established, which in turn, having been established out of such a prominent quarter, will of course spread its influence over neighboring regions.” These persons say that they will have to do this in order to destroy, in root and branch, those movements that are most dangerous and frightful. They add that if they fail to reestablish the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, then they will find other means by which to destroy in root and branch those most contrary, those most dangerous movements. The movements they are referring to are the Anthroposophical Movement and the Movement for Religious Renewal.

I am quoting them almost word for word. And you should see, from what I say time and again, that the difficulties will not become smaller, but rather every week greater, and that what I say is built through and through on a firm foundation. I would like you to take this to heart at once, by bringing an earnest heart-felt quality to what you become acquainted with as members of this school. Only when we are members of this school openly, fully, in earnest, and actively, will we be able to reach the bedrock that is absolutely necessary, if we are to make it through the difficulties of the future.

You may conclude from this that opponents will take Anthroposophy, and its branch Religious Renewal, much more seriously than many already ensconced as members. For when one becomes aware of the intention of reconstituting the broken-up Holy Roman Empire of 1806, and the implication that it is in order to dispose of our Movement, then one must take the matter very seriously. In a movement grounded in the spirit, it really and truly does not matter, my dear friends, just how many members are in the movement. What does matter is the sort of strength living within, strength that has come out of the spiritual world. The opponents know that this sort of strong force dwells within our Movement, so don't enter into it lightly, but with sufficient strength and firmness.

It is not easy to present to someone that the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold can really happen, if the person has not had the experience of knowing what it means for their human nature to be in the "I am” and their astral body to be outside of the physical body. For if a person's essential being is closed up within the physical body, he can only take whatever is in his vicinity as the truth, when it has been verified through the apparatus of the physical body. And through the apparatus of the physical body, the sensory world can only come to be taken as a reflection of the spiritual world, which initially is not disclosed through the senses, but is merely reflected.

Now in general, it is not so difficult to leave one’s body. It is done every time one goes to sleep. A person is then outside of his body. But when outside of his body in the state of sleep, then his awareness is also quenched to the point of unconsciousness. Only illusory dreams, or perhaps also dreams that are not illusory, surge up out of this loss of consciousness. It is part of the subject matter of the attainment of higher awareness, however, to leave the physical body with fully aware-self-possession, so that external to his physical body one may perceive around about himself, just as within his physical body with the help of the physical senses he perceives the physical world. And he partakes then, outside of his physical body, of the spiritual world in truth.

Initially, however, a person just sleeps without awareness. Under ordinary conditions it is not given to us to know what could be seen when outside of one’s body. And this specifically is due to a person being protected from coming upon the spiritual world unprepared.

If and when a person is sufficiently prepared, what happens with him then? Then, when the person steps up to the abyss between the sensory world and the spiritual world [It was marked in red.], when the person has been found to be prepared, as has been pointed out in the last lesson, then the Guardian of the Threshold takes the true individuality of the person out and beyond, allowing over-flight of the abyss [It was marked in yellow.], under the agency of what has been delineated in the foregoing mantric verses. And for the first time, from the other side of the Threshold, a person can then observe his own sensory being, his physical being.

Such is the first grand impression of true experience, my dear friends, when the Guardian of the Threshold can say to a person, "Look over there, there you are, so you appear to the outside while within the physical world, but with me, you appear in your innermost being."

And then resounding again and again from the Guardian of the Threshold is a significant word. For now, it resounds from the Guardian of the Threshold out over the abyss, this significant word, in calling out to the person, for him to retain his presence of mind when he looks upon himself quite differently from the other side of the abyss. And he does look upon himself quite differently. He beholds himself as threefold. [It was marked in green.]²

He beholds himself in his threefold nature, expressed in soul in thinking, in feeling, and in willing. There are actually three people, the thinking person, the feeling person, and the willing person, all of which have been stuck into each person, and for the time being are really only drawn together in the physical world through the physical body. And all this, that the person looks upon, is intoned by the lips of the Guardian of the Threshold in the following manner.

O show the three
They are the one,
When you bear the stamp of man
In existence-awareness on the earth.

Or it could be the human stamp, for one must of course translate the words from the occult speech.

O show the three
They are the one,
When you bear the stamp of man
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

Experience the head’s world-gestalt
Feel the heart’s world-beat
Think the limb’s world-strength

They are the three,
The three, that live as one
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

[The mantra was now written on the board.]

O show the three
They are the one,
When you bear the human stamp
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

Experience the head’s world-gestalt
Feel the heart’s world-beat
Think the limb’s world-strength

They are the three,
The three, that live as one
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

The Guardian of the Threshold points out here how the three, which separate from one another as soon as the person leaves his physical body, how the three appear in relationship to this physical body. The gaze is directed out upon the physical body, upon the head, the heart, the various members of the body, and as said by the Guardian of the Threshold, "When you in actual truth behold the human head, this human head will be an image of the heavenly universe. You must gaze out upon the far-flung depths that seem to border on and to define the world, and realize it is not so, your physical one-sided envisioning of it, you must gaze out and on, and in your gazing out and on, you must remember that your head, in its roundness, is really a truthful image of the surrounding heavenly world.” And one may connect to this here and now by bringing into awareness the mantric verse.

Experience the head’s world-gestalt

One connects outwardly through the symbol of a triangle pointing up. [It was drawn before the line.]

Through this symbol, as one pauses at this line of the mantric verse, you send your attention to the wide-open space above, and take note that everything around and about the earth is certainly part of this wide-open space above. You send your attention out and make it all an immediate presence.

Feel the heart’s world-beat

Through this cosmic-heavenly presence flows the rhythm of the world, resounding as music of the world. When we feel the human heart beating, it seems as though this human heart is merely beating out upon all that passes before the human organism. In reality, what beats in the heart is a harmonious counterpoint to what has been circling as world-rhythm for not merely a thousand years, but a million years. Hence one again pauses, as the Guardian of the Threshold speaks accordingly the words "Feel the heart’s world-beat" and one senses, finds with empathy, feels what takes effect both in the heart and all around and overhead. [Now the symbol ⧖ of a down-pointing and an up-pointing triangle connected at the tips was drawn before the second line.] The triangles in this diagram join all that is below with all that is overhead.

Think the limb’s world-strength

This world-strength is the one in which gravity and the other earthly forces are concentrated and rise from beneath. In our thinking, that is, insofar as it is earth-thinking, adapted merely to grasping the earthly, we must gaze down and under, then we grasp the things that stream out of the earth working effectively in men and women. Again, one pauses by the "Think the limb’s world-strength” in a triangle facing downward. [▽ was drawn before the third line of the stanza.]

And one will feel the character of the word of the Guardian, how it should work today on the human heart, on the human soul, if one allows this mantric verse in commensurate manner to come alive within and to work effectively.

O show the three
They are the one,
When you bear the stamp of man
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

One says the following verse while rendering the up-pointing triangle symbol △ before the head:

△ Experience the head’s world-gestalt

⧖ Feel the heart’s world-beat

One says the last verse while rendering the down-pointed triangle symbol ▽.

▽ Think the limb’s world-strength

These are the three,
The three, that live as one
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

And one tries, after having allowed this mantric verse to work on his soul, to blunt the senses, to close the eyes, to hear nothing with the ears, to perceive nothing, and to remain in the dark for a while, that one might live fully and completely in the atmosphere of what sounds through the words. And in this manner, a person will place himself in the sphere in which initiation into all reality can then be experienced. In undertaking this, a person may take the first step beyond the Threshold.

But one must allow the profound word of the Guardian to work upon him fully and in earnest. This profound word of the Guardian speaks of everything, the moment we cross over the Threshold, of everything being different than it is in the sensory world. In the sensory world we think that thoughts, that ideas are predominant in people. This is the way it is in the sensory world. By itself this predominance of envisioning, of thinking, which is perceptible to customary awareness as well, is always intermixed with a bit of willing. Always in stepping from one thought to another, we must be using our will, as we do when we bring an arm into motion, or a leg into motion, or in doing just about anything we wish to do. But it is easy and refined, this willing that carries one thought on to the next. And so it is, when we are in the sensory world, the two are bound together, the predominance mostly of thinking with a little bit of willing, an easy willing. Yet as soon as a person comes across over the Threshold and comes before the Guardian, it will be quite the opposite, for there the bundled predominance is mostly of far-flung will and minimally of thinking. And in this willing that is otherwise sleeping in people, one catches in it a scent of the spirit, for the human head is constituted out of the cosmos, out of the heavenly world, a spherical copy in all particulars.

Hence the Guardian of the Threshold, when we have crossed over to the other side of the Threshold, calls out the following words. [A new part of the mantra was written on the board forthwith.]

The head's spirit,
You can will it;

And now one sees that willing is something quite different than it was previously. Previously the senses facilitated sensory perceptions, mediated sensations, and one had no awareness of will coursing through the eyes, of will coursing through the ears, of will coursing through the sense of warmth, of will coursing through every sense. Now, one sees that of all that the eyes sense as manifold colors, that the ears hear as manifold tones, that a person discerns as warmth and cold, as the difference between coarse and smooth, as odors, tastes, et cetera, that all this, all in the spiritual world is a sort of willing. [The mantra was continued on the board.]

And willing becomes for you
Sensing’s many-formed heavenly weaving;

If a person has come to know this by looking back at his head from the other side of the Threshold as willing becomes predominant, [The verb "willing" in the second line of the mantra was underlined.] how the mind sets willing in place there, [The word "willing" in the third line of the mantra was underlined.] then he would furthermore know, how the heart harbors the soul, and how he can feel the soul in his heart, just as he can will the head's spirit correspondingly in the head. And then he knows for the first time, when he regards thinking not as a capacity of the brain, but rather as an capacity of the heart, of the soul of the heart, how thinking belongs not to an individual person, but rather to the world. Then he experiences world living, circling around as world music. [The second stanza was begun on the board.]

The heart's soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
Thinking’s seed-awakening world living;

You live in glory, not in soulless semblance of glory, but rather in the glory of the glow of the being of the world. [The summary lines of the first and second stanzas were now written, as the first stanza was once again spoken.]

The head's spirit,
You can will it;
And willing becomes for you
Sensing’s many-formed heavenly weaving;

Summarized in the final line:

You weave in wisdom.

Summarized, bearing on the heart's soul, on feeling, in the sentence:

You live in glory.

[The words "wisdom" and "glory" were underlined.]

Just as a person gets to know the mind as a willing, so he gets to know feeling as a thinking in regard to personal presence and awareness in the world, if from the other side he observes the three, which only in the sensory world are one. [In the second stanza “feel” and "feeling" were underlined.]

And the Guardian continues in the third section. [The third stanza was begun on the board.]

The limb's strength,
You can think it;

Now we have the full reversal. On the other side a person maintains a concentration in the head of something else than thinking, for willing is here [The first stanza was indicated.], as I have just explained, concentrated in the head. Feeling remains in the heart, where it is also felt in the sensory world, for the inner force of the heart continues on in the spiritual world,

The limb's strength,
You can think it;

["Think" was underlined.]

On the other side, thinking is brought together directly with the limbs, which is quite the reverse in the sensory world. [The writing was continued.]

And thinking becomes for you
Willing’s goal-directed human striving;

And the will does this for thinking. ["Thinking" was underlined. The writing was continued and the word "virtue" was at the same time underlined.]

You strive in virtue.

And so, we have the full reversal in the spiritual world, by means of what the Guardian of the Threshold has said to us. While not being able to differentiate willing, feeling, and thinking while a person looks up from down under, it is differentiated as a trinity when the person looks on it from the other side, willing up at the head, feeling in the middle, and thinking down among the limbs.

In this way one becomes aware that what is willed, concentrated in the head, is wisdom woven into the world, in which all the beings of the spirit stream forth, and that thinking, seen in the extremities, is human striving, that can live as human virtue. And the three appear before the spiritual gaze:

The head's spirit,
The heart's soul,
The limb's strength.

[At the same time the words on the board "head's", "heart's", and limb's" were underlined in white, and the words "spirit", "soul", and "strength" were underlined in red.]

In this way the mantric verse is built. And a person must be aware of the inner congruence, more than aware, for as it floods into him, he must allow the mantric verse to work on him:

heavenly weaving
world living
human striving

[Forthwith were these three word-groups underlined on the board in yellow.]

These are the words of the Guardian of the Threshold, in which the three, emerging from the one as we cross over into the world on the other side of the Threshold, the three are guided into our mind's eye.

The head's spirit,
You can will it;
And willing becomes for you
Sensing’s many-formed heavenly weaving;
You weave in wisdom.

The heart's soul,
You can feel it;
And feeling becomes for you
Thinking’s seed-awakening world living;
You live in glory.

The limb's strength,
You can think it;
And thinking becomes for you
Willing’s goal-directed human striving;
You strive in virtue.

These are the impressions through which the soul must sift, if real insight, real inward knowing is to be attained, resounding in the admonitions of the Guardian of the Threshold, as he also says to us:

Enter
The door is opened³
You will⁴ become
A true human being.

[It was written on the board.]

Enter
The door is opened
You will become
A true human being.

And these are the words, that for countless thousands of years, that yawn at all portals to the spiritual world, and at the same time, that resound spiritedly:

Enter
The door is opened
You will become
A true human being.

Imagine, my brothers and sisters,⁵ saying to yourselves at once, "I will take these words of the Guardian of the Threshold seriously; I will know that I was not yet human; I will know that I become so through insight into the spiritual world." Imagine, my brothers and sisters, saying to yourselves a second time, "Why, the first time I did not take these words seriously enough; I will tell myself that I need twice as many steps, from my present state of being, not being a true human being, in order to become a true human being." Imagine declaring to yourselves a third time, "I will know that I need three steps, from the spot on which I stand, not being a true human being, in order to become a true human being."

Serious is the first admonition that you give to yourselves. More serious is the second admonition. But the stamp of highest seriousness must be borne by the third admonition. And when you know how to bring this trinity in three-fold seriousness into the depths of your souls, then you will have an inkling of what it means for a person, through insight, through actual inwardly knowing, to become a person. And then you will have come full circle, as we have in this class today, coming full circle to the first admonition, all of which should live in our souls as one self-transmuting verse.

O show the three
They are the one,
When you bear the stamp of man
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

△ Experience the head’s world-gestalt
⧖ Feel the heart’s world-beat
▽ Think the limb’s world-strength

These are the three,
The three, that live as one
In existence-awareness upon the earth.

Just so, my brothers and sisters, it has sounded just so in the heart, since there has been human existence on the earth, struggling for awareness. There has been a pause in this struggle since the emergence of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. This pause is at an end, by will of the heavenly, spiritual entities leading mankind. May it once again commence in a worthy manner. In your human hearts may it sound again. So the wise leaders of mankind, ever since there has been human existence upon the earth, have guided human hearts into glimpsing what works as spirit in the world, what works as spirit through the world in human beings, as the crown of the world.

• 1. Der Vorstand
• 2. Sinn is “mind-awareness,” whereas Geist is “body-free spirit-awareness.” Body-free thinking becomes many-formed sensing. Body-free feeling becomes seed-awakening heart-thinking. Body-free willing becomes goal-directed willing.
• 3. Das Tor ist geöffnet is neither present-perfect in German nor in English, so should not be “The door has opened,” which would imply that someone has opened it. Instead, it is phrasal-reflexive auto-causative intransitive, so must be “The door is opened.” This leaves one with the proper sense of wonder at how one’s meditative activity in conjunction with the spirit has caused the door to be opened.
• 4. Regarding the translation of wirst in the next to last line, according to the Oxford Dictionary, normally “shall” is used only with first person pronouns, and “will” is used with second and third person pronouns, but if strong determination is expressed, the order is reversed. The word “shall” is now seldom used in any normal context in American English. The question is does the Guardian say to put our will into entering and “You will become,” or does he admonish us with determination to enter and says, “You shall become.” Both are correct translations.
• 5. In this lesson for the first of many times Steiner says the phrase Schwestern und Brüder. This sounds just fine in German, but in English, one always says it the other way around, for otherwise it just does not sound right, so it should be translated always as “brothers and sisters.”

[ 1 ] The decision as to whether I should be sent to the Gymnasium or the Realschule was arrived at by my father, on the basis of his intention to give me the right preparation for a “position” on the railway. This purpose of his finally took definite form in the decision that I should be a railway civil engineer. Hence his choice was the Realschule.

[ 2 ] Next, however, the question remained to be settled as to whether in passing from the village school of Neudörfl to one of the schools in the neighbouring Wiener-Neustadt, I should be prepared for admission to such a school. So I was taken to the town hall for an examination.

[ 3 ] These plans which were thus being carried through for my own future did not excite in me any deep interest. At that age these questions concerning my “position,” and whether the choice should fall on town school, Realschule, or Gymnasium were to me matters of indifference. Through what I observed around me and felt within me, I was conscious of undefined but burning questions about life and the world and the soul, and my wish was to learn something in order to be able to answer these questions of mine. I cared very little through what sort of school this should be brought about.

[ 4 ] The examination at the town school I passed very creditably. All the drawings I had made for the assistant teacher had been brought along; and these made such an impression upon the teachers who examined me that on this account my very defective knowledge was overlooked. I came out of the examination with a “brilliant” record. There was great rejoicing on the part of my parents, the assistant teacher, the priest, and many of the notabilities of Neudörfl. People were happy over the result of my examination because to many of them it was a proof that “the Neudörfl school can teach a thing or two!”

[ 5 ] For my father there came out of all this the thought that I should not spend a preliminary year in the town school – seeing that I was already so far along – but should enter the Realschule at once. So a few days later I was taken to that school for another examination. In this case matters did not turn out so well; nevertheless, I was admitted. This was in October 1872.

[ 6 ] I had now to go every day from Neudörfl to Wiener Neustadt. In the morning I could go by train; but I had to come back in the afternoon on foot, since there was no train at the right time. Neudörfl was in Hungary, Wiener Neustadt in Lower Austria. So every day I went from “Transleitanien” to “Cisleitanien.” (These were the official designations for the Hungarian and the Austrian districts.)

[ 7 ] During the noon recess I remained in Wiener-Neustadt. It so happened that a certain woman had come to know me during one of her stops at the Neudörfl station, and had learned that I was coming to Wiener-Neustadt to school. My parents had spoken to her of their concern as to how I was to pass the noon recess during my attendance at the Wiener-Neustadt school. She told them she would be glad to have me take lunch at her home without charge, and would welcome me there whenever I needed to come.

[ 8 ] In summer the walk from Wiener-Neustadt to Neudörfl was very beautiful; in winter it was often exceedingly hard. To get from the outskirts of the town to the village one had to walk for half an hour across fields which were not cleared of snow. There I often had to “wade” through the snow, and I would arrive at home a veritable “snow man.”

[ 9 ] The town life I could not share inwardly as I could the life of the country. I would fall into a brown study over the problem of what might be happening in and between those houses closed tight one against the other. Only before the booksellers' shops of Wiener-Neustadt did I often linger for a long time.

[ 10 ] What went on in the school also, and what I had to do there, proceeded at first without awakening any lively interest in my mind. In the first two classes I had great difficulty in “keeping up.” Only in the second half-year was the work easier in these two classes. Only then had I become a “good scholar”. [ 11 ] I was conscious of one overwhelming need. I craved men whom I could take as human models to follow. The teachers of the first two classes were not such men. [ 12 ] In this school life something now occurred which impressed me deeply. The principal of the school, in one of the annual reports which had to be issued at the close of each school year, published a lecture entitled Die Anziehungskraft betrachtet als eine Wirkung der Bezuegung.¹ As a child of eleven years I could at first understand almost nothing of the content of this paper; for it began at once with higher mathematics. Yet from some of the sentences I got hold of a certain meaning. There formed itself in my mind a bridge between what I had learned from the priest concerning the creation of the world and these sentences in the paper. The paper referred also to a book which the principal had written, Die allgemeine Bewegung der Materie als Grundursache aller Naturerscheinungen.² I saved my money until I was able to buy that book. It now became my aim to learn as quickly as possible everything that might lead me to an understanding of the paper and the book.

[ 13 ] The thing was like this. The principal held that the conception of forces acting at a distance from the bodies exerting these forces was an unproved “mystical” hypothesis. He wished to explain the “attraction” between the heavenly bodies as well as that between molecules and atoms without reference to such “forces.” He said that between any two bodies there are many small bodies in motion. These, moving back and forth, thrust the larger bodies. Likewise these larger bodies are thrust from every direction on the sides turned away from each other. The thrusts on the sides turned away from each other are much more numerous than those in the spaces between the two bodies. It is for this reason that they approach each other. “Attraction” is not any special force, but only an “effect of motion.” I came across two sentences stated positively in the first pages of the volume: “1. There exist space and in space motion continuing for a long period of time. 2. Space and time are continuous, homogeneous masses; but matter consists of separate particles (atoms).” Out of the motions occurring in the manner described between the small and great parts of matter, the professor would derive all physical and chemical occurrences in nature.

[ 14 ] I had nothing within me which inclined me in any way whatever to accept such a view; but I had the feeling that it would be a very important matter for me when I could understand what was in this manner expressed. And I did everything I could in order to reach that point. Whenever I could get hold of books of mathematics and physics, I seized the opportunity. It was a slow process. I set myself to read the paper over and over again; each time there was some improvement.

[ 15 ] Now something else happened. In the third class I had a teacher who really fulfilled the “ideal” I had before my mind. He was a man whom I could emulate. He taught computation, geometry, and physics. His teaching was wonderfully systematic and thorough-going. He built everything so clearly out of its elements that it was in the highest degree beneficial to one's thinking to follow him.

[ 16 ] A lecture accompanying the second annual school report was delivered by him. It had to do with the law of probabilities and calculations in life insurance. I buried myself in this paper also, although of this likewise I could not understand very much. But I soon came to grasp the idea of the law of probabilities. A more important result, however, for me was that the exactness with which my favourite teacher handled his materials gave me a model for my own thinking in mathematics. This now brought about a wonderfully beautiful relationship between this teacher and me. I was very happy to have this man through all the classes of the Realschule as teacher of mathematics and physics.

[ 17 ] Through what I learned from him I drew nearer and nearer to the riddle that had arisen for me through the paper by the principal.

[ 18 ] With still another teacher I came only after a long time into a more intimate spiritual relationship. This was the one who taught constructive geometry in the lower classes and descriptive geometry in the upper. He taught even in the second class. But only during his course in the third class did I come to an appreciation of the kind of man he was. He was an enthusiastic constructor. His teaching also was a model of clearness and order. The drawing of circles, lines, and triangles became to me, through his influence, a favourite occupation. Behind all that I was taking into myself from the principal, the teacher of mathematics and physics, and the teacher of geometrical design, there arose in me in a boyish way of thinking the problem of what goes on in nature. My feeling was: I must go to nature in order to win a standing place in the spiritual world, which was there before me, consciously perceived.

[ 19 ] I said to myself: “One can take the right attitude toward the experience of the spiritual world by one's own soul only when one's process of thinking has reached such a form that it can attain to the reality of being which is in natural phenomena.” With such feelings did I pass through life during the third and fourth years of the Realschule. Everything that I learned I so directed as to bring myself nearer to the goal I have indicated.

[ 20 ] Then one day I passed a bookshop. In the show window I saw an advertisement of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft.³ I did everything that I could to acquire this book as quickly as possible.

[ 21 ] As Kant then entered the circle of my thinking, I knew nothing whatever of his place in the spiritual history of mankind. What anyone whatever had thought about him, in approval or in disapproval, was to me entirely unknown. My boundless interest in the Critique of Pure Reason had arisen entirely out of my own spiritual life. In my boyish way I was striving to understand what human reason might be able to achieve toward a real insight into the being of things.

[ 22 ] The reading of Kant met with every sort of obstacle in the circumstances of my external life. Because of the long distance I had to traverse between school and home, I lost every day at least three hours. In the evenings I did not get home until six o'clock. Then there was an endless quantity of school assignments to master. On Sundays I devoted myself almost entirely to geometrical designing. It was my ideal to attain the greatest precision in carrying out geometrical constructions, and the most immaculate neatness in hatching and the laying on of colours.

[ 23 ] So I had scarcely any time left for reading the Critique of Pure Reason. I found the following way out. Our history course was handled in such a manner that the teacher appeared to be lecturing but was in reality reading from a book. Then from time to time we had to learn from our books what he had given us in this fashion. I thought to myself that I must take care of this reading of what was in my book while at home. From the teacher's “lecture” I got nothing at all. From listening to what he read I could not retain the least thing. I now took apart the single sections of the little Kant volume, placed these inside the history book, which I there kept before me during the history lesson, and read Kant while the history was being “taught” down to us from the professor's seat. This was, of course, from the point of view of school discipline, a serious fault; yet it disturbed nobody and it subtracted so little from what I should otherwise have acquired that the grade I was given on my history lesson at that very time was “excellent.”

[ 24 ] During vacations the reading of Kant went forward briskly Many a page I read more than twenty times in succession. I wanted to reach a decision as to the relation sustained by human thought to the creative work of nature.

[ 25 ] The feeling I had in regard to these strivings of thought was influenced here from three sides. In the first place, I wished so to build up thought within myself that every thought should be completely subject to survey, that no vague feeling should incline the thought in any direction whatever. In the second place, I wished to establish within myself a harmony between such thinking and the teachings of religion. For this also at that time had the very strongest hold upon me.

In just this field we had truly excellent text-books. From these books I took with the utmost devotion the symbol and dogma, the description of the church service, the history of the church. These teachings were to me a vital matter. But my relation to them was determined by the fact that to me the spiritual world counted among the objects of human perception. The very reason why these teachings penetrated so deeply into my mind was that in them I realized how the human spirit can find its way consciously into the supersensible. I am perfectly sure that I did not lose my reverence for the spiritual in the slightest degree through this relationship of the spiritual to perception.

[ 26 ] On the other side I was tremendously occupied over the question of the scope of human capacity for thought. It seemed to me that thinking could be developed to a faculty which would actually lay hold upon the things and events of the world. A “stuff” which remains outside of the thinking, which we can merely “think toward,” seemed to me an unendurable conception. Whatever is in things, this must be also inside of human thought, I said to myself again and again. [ 27 ] Against this conviction, however, there always opposed itself what I read in Kant. But I scarcely observed this conflict. For I desired more than anything else to attain through the Critique of Pure Reason to a firm standing ground in order to get the mastery of my own thinking. Wherever and whenever I took my holiday walks, I had in any case to set before myself this question, and once more clear it up: How does one pass from simple, clear-cut perceptions to concepts in regard to natural phenomena? I held then quite uncritically to Kant; but no advance did I make by means of him.

[ 28 ] Through all this I was not drawn away from whatever pertains to the actual doing of practical things and the development of human skill. It so happened that one of the employees who took turns with my father in his work understood book-binding. I learned bookbinding from him, and was able to bind my own school books in the holidays between the fourth and fifth classes of the Realschule. And I learned stenography also at this time during the vacation without a teacher.

Nevertheless, I took the course in stenography which was given from the fifth class on.

[ 29 ] Occasions for practical work were plentiful. My parents were assigned near the station a little orchard of fruit trees and a small patch for potatoes. Gathering cherries, taking care of the orchard, preparing the potatoes for planting, cultivating the soil, digging the potatoes – all this work fell to my sister and brother and me. Buying the family groceries in the village, of this I would not let anyone deprive me at those times when the school left me free.

[ 30 ] When I was about fifteen years old I was permitted to come into more intimate relationship with the doctor at Wiener Neustadt whom I have already mentioned. I had conceived of a great liking for him because of the way in which he talked to me during his visits to Neudörfl. So I often slipped past his home, which was on the ground floor of a building at the corner of two very narrow streets in Wiener-Neustadt. One day he was at the window. He called me into his room I stood before what seemed to me then a great library He talked again about literature; then took down Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm from the collection of books, and said I must read that and afterwards come back to him. In this way he gave me one book after another to read and invite me from time to time to come to see him. Every time that I had an opportunity to go back, I had to tell him my impression of what I had read. In this way he became really my teacher in poetic literature. For up to that time both at my home and also at school, all this – except for some “extracts” – had been quite outside of my life. In the atmosphere of this lovable doctor, sensitive to everything beautiful, I learned especially to know Lessing.

[ 31 ] Another event deeply influenced my life. The mathematics books which Lübsen had prepared for home study became known to me. I was then able to teach myself analytical geometry, trigonometry, and even differential and integral calculus long before I learned these in school. This enabled me to return to the reading of those books on The General Motion of Matter as the Fundamental Cause of All the Phenomenon of Nature. For now I could understand them better through my understanding of mathematics. Meanwhile, we had come to the course in physics following that in chemistry, and this brought me a new set of riddles concerning human knowledge to add to the older ones. The teacher of chemistry was a distinguished man. He taught almost entirely by means of experiments. He spoke little. He let natural processes speak for themselves. He was one of our favourite teachers. There was something noteworthy in him which distinguished him in the eyes of his pupils from the other teachers. One felt that he stood in a closer relationship to his science than did the others. The others we addressed with the title “Professor”; he, although he was just as much a professor, was called “Doctor.” He was the brother of the thoughtful Tyrolese poet Hermann von Gilm. He had an eye which held one's attention firmly. One felt that this man was accustomed to looking intently at the phenomena of nature and then retaining what he had perceived.

[ 32 ] His teaching puzzled me a little. The feeling for facts which marked him could not always hold concentrated that state of mind through which I was then striving toward unification. Still he must have considered that I made good progress in chemistry, for he marked my notes from the start “creditable,” and I kept this grade through all the classes.

[ 33 ] One day I found at an antiquary's in Wiener-Neustadt Rotteck's history of the world. Until then, in spite of the fact that I received the highest grades in the school in history, this subject had always remained to me something external. Now it grew to be an inner thing. The warmth with which Rotteck conceived and set forth historic events swept me along. His one-sidedness of view I did not then perceive. Through him I was led to two other books which, by reason of their style and their vivid historical conceptions, made the deepest impression on me: Johannes von Müller and Tacitus.

Amid such impressions, it was very hard for me to take any interest in the school lessons in history and in literature. But I strove to give life to these lessons from all that I made my own out of other sources. In this manner I passed my time in the three upper classes of the seven years of the Realschule.

[ 34 ] From my fifteenth year on I taught other pupils of the same grade as myself or of a lower grade. The teachers were very willing to assign me this tutoring, for I was rated as a very “good scholar.” Through this means I was enabled to contribute at least a very little toward what my parents had to spend out of their meagre income for my education. [ 35 ] I owe much to this tutoring. In having to give to others in turn the matter which I had been taught, I myself became, so to speak, awake to this. For I cannot express the thing otherwise than by saying that I received in a sort of dream life the knowledge imparted to me by the school. I was always awake to what I gained by my own effort, and what I received from a spiritual benefactor, such as the doctor I have mentioned of Wiener-Neustadt. What I received thus in a fully self-conscious state of mind was noticeably different from what passed over to me like dream-pictures in the class-room instruction. The development of what had thus been received in a half-waking state was now brought about by the fact that in the periods of tutoring I had to vitalize my own knowledge.

[ 36 ] On the other hand, this experience compelled me at an early age to concern myself with practical pedagogy. I learned the difficulties of the development of human minds through my pupils.

[ 37 ] To the pupils of my own grade whom I tutored the most important thing I had to teach was German composition. Since I myself had also to write every such composition, I had to discover for each theme assigned to us various forms of development. I often felt then that I was in a very difficult situation. I wrote my own theme only after I had already given away the best thoughts on that topic.

[ 38 ] A rather strained relationship existed between the teacher of the German language and literature in the three upper classes and myself. The pupils considered him the “keenest professor,” and especially strict. My essays had always been unusually long. The briefer forms I had dictated to my fellow pupils. It took the teacher a long time to read my papers. After the final examination, during the celebration before the close of the session, when for the first time he was “in a good humour” among us pupils, he told me how I had annoyed him with my long themes.

[ 39 ] Still another thing happened. I had the feeling that some thing was brought into the school through this teacher which I must master. When he discussed the nature of poetic descriptions, it seemed to me that there was something in the background behind what he said. After a time I found out what this was. He adhered to the philosophy of Herbart. He himself said nothing of this. But I discovered it. And so I bought an Introduction to Philosophy and a Psychology, both of which were written from the point of view of Herbart's philosophy.

[ 40 ] And now began a sort of game of hide-and-seek between the teacher and me in my compositions. I began to understand much in him which he set forth in the colours of Herbart's philosophy; and he found in my compositions all sorts of ideas that came from the same source. Only neither he nor I mentioned Herbart as the source of our ideas. This was through a sort of tacit agreement. But one day I ended a composition in a way that was imprudent in view of the situation. I had to write about some characteristic or other of human beings. At the end I used this sentence: “Such a man possesses psychological freedom.” Our teacher would discuss the compositions with the class after he had corrected them. When he came to the discussion of this particular theme, he drew in the corners of his mouth with obvious irony and said: “You say something here about psychological freedom. There is no such thing” I answered: “That seems to me a mistake, Professor. There really is a psychological freedom, only there is no ‘transcendental freedom’ in an ordinary state of consciousness.” The lips of the teacher became smooth again. He looked at me with a penetrating glance and remarked: “I have noticed for a long while from your compositions that you have a philosophical library. I would advise you not to use it; you only confuse your thinking by so doing.” I could never understand at all why I would confuse my thinking by reading the same books from which his own thinking was derived. And thus the relation between us continued to be somewhat strained.

[ 41] His teaching gave me much to do. For he covered in the fifth class the Greek and Latin poets, from whom selections were used in German translation. Then for the first time I began to regret once in a while that my father had put me in the Realschule instead of the Gymnasium . For I felt how little of the character of Greek and Roman art I should get hold of through the translations. So I bought Greek and Latin text-books, and carried along secretly by the side of the Realschule course also a private Gymnasium course of instruction. This required much time; but it also laid the foundation by means of which I met, although in unusual fashion yet quite according to the rules, the Gymnasium requirements. I had to give many hours of tutoring, especially when I was in the Technische Hochschule⁴ in Vienna. I soon had a Gymnasium pupil to tutor. Circumstances of which I shall speak later brought it about that I had to help this pupil by means of tutoring through almost the whole Gymnasium course. I taught him Latin and Greek, so that in teaching him I had to go through every detail of the Gymnasium course with him.

[ 42 ] The teachers of history and geography who could give me so little in the lower classes became, nevertheless, important to me in the upper classes. The very one who had driven me to such unusual reading of Kant wrote once a lecture for a school report on Die Fiszeit und ihre Ursachen.⁵ I grasped the meaning of this with great eagerness of mind, and conceived from it a strong interest in the problem of the glacial age. But this teacher was also a good pupil of the distinguished geographer, Friedrich Simony. This fact led him to explain in the upper classes the geological-geographical evolution of the Alps with illustrative drawings on the blackboard. Then I did not by any means read Kant, but was all eyes and ears. From this side I now got a great deal from this teacher, whose lessons in history did not interest me at all.

[ 43 ] In the last class I had for the first time a teacher who gripped me with his instruction in history. He taught history and geography. In this class the geography of the Alps was set forth in the same delightful fashion as had already been the case with the other teacher. In the history lessons the new teacher got a strong hold upon us. He was to us a personality in the full sense of the word. He was a partisan, enthusiastic for the progressive ideas of the Austrian liberal movement of the time. But in the school there was no evidence of this. He brought nothing from his partisan views into the class room. Yet his teaching of history had, by reason of his own participation in life, a strong vitality. I listened to the temperamental historical analyses of this teacher with the results from my reading of the Rotteck volumes still in my memory. The experience produced a satisfying harmony. I cannot but think it was an important thing for me to have had the opportunity to imbibe the history of modern times in this manner.

[ 44 ] At home I heard much talk about the Russo-Turkish war (1877–78). The employee who then took my father's place every third day was an original sort of person. When he came to relieve my father, he always brought along a huge carpet-bag. In this he had great packets of manuscript. These were abstracts of the most varied assortments of scientific books. Those abstracts he gave to me, one after another, to read. I devoured them. He would then discuss these things with me. For he really had in his head a conception, somewhat chaotic to be sure but comprehensive, concerning all these things that he had compiled. With my father, however, he talked politics. He delighted to take the side of the Turks; my father defended with great earnestness the Russians. He was one of those persons still grateful to Russia for the service she rendered to Austria at the time of the Hungarian uprising (1848). For my father was on no sort of terms with the Hungarians. He lived in the Hungarian border town of Neudörfl during that period when the process of Magyarizing was going forward, and the sword of Damocles hung over his head – the danger that he might not be allowed to remain in charge of the station of Neudörfl unless he could speak Magyar. This language was quite unnecessary in that originally German place, but the Hungarian regime was endeavouring to bring it to pass that railway lines in Hungary should be manned with Magyar-speaking employees, even the privately owned lines. But my father wished to hold his place at Neudörfl long enough for me to finish at the school at Wiener-Neustadt. By reason of all this, he was then not friendly to the Hungarians. So, since he could not endure the Hungarians, he liked in his simple way to think of the Russians as those who in 1848 had “shown the Hungarians who were their masters.” This way of thinking manifested itself with extraordinary earnestness, and yet in the wonderfully lovable manner of my father toward his Turkophile friend in the person of the “substitute.” The tide of discussion rose oft times very high. I was greatly interested in the mutual outbursts of the two personalities, but scarcely at all in their political opinions. For me a much more vital need at that time was that of finding an answer to this question: To what extent is it possible to prove that in human thinking real spirit is the agent?

• 1. Attraction Considered as an Effect of Motion.
• 2. The General Motion of Matter as the Fundamental Cause of All the Phenomenon of Nature.
• 3. Critique of Pure Reason
• 4. The Technische Hochschule does not correspond wholly to any English or American institution. It might be called a “university” with marked scientific emphasis.
• 5. The Glacial Age and Its Causes.

[ 1 ] I wrote down the ideas of the Theory of Cognition in Goethe's World-Conception at a time when Fate had led me into a family which made possible for me many happy hours within its circle, and a fortunate chapter of my life. Among my friends there had for a long time been one whom I had come to hold very dear because of his gay and sunny disposition, his accurate observations upon life and men, and his whole manner, so open and loyal. He introduced me and other mutual friends into his home. There we met, in addition to this friend, two daughters of the family, his sisters, and a man whom we soon had to recognize as the fiancé of the elder daughter. [ 2 ] In the background of this family there hovered something we were never able to see. This was the father of the brother and sisters. He was there, and yet not there. We learned from the most various sources something about the man who was to us unknown. According to what we were told, he must have been somewhat unusual. At first the brother and sisters never spoke of their father, even though he must have been in the next room. Then they began, at first very gradually, to make one or another remark about him. Every word showed a feeling of genuine reverence. One felt that in this man they honoured a very important person. But one also felt that they dreaded lest by chance we should happen to see him.

[ 3 ] Our conversations in the family circle were generally of a literary character, and, in order to refer to this thing or that, many a book would be brought by the brother or sisters from the father's library. And the circumstances brought it about that I became acquainted, little by little, with much which the man in the next room read, although I never had an opportunity to see him.

[ 4 ] At last I could no longer do otherwise than inquire about much that concerned the unknown man. And thus, from the talk of the brother and sisters – which held back much, and yet revealed much – there gradually arose in my mind an image of a noteworthy personality. I loved the man, who to me also seemed an important person. I came finally to reverence in him a man whom the hard experiences of life had brought to the pass of dealing thenceforward only with the world within himself, and of foregoing all human intercourse.

[ 5 ] One day we visitors were told that the man was ill, and soon afterward the news of his death had to be conveyed to us. The brother and sisters entrusted to me the funeral address. I said what my heart impelled me to say regarding the personality whom I had come to know only through descriptions. It was a funeral at which only the family, the fiancé of one daughter, and my friends were present. The brother and sisters said to me that I had given a true picture of their father in my funeral address. And from the way they spoke, and from their tears, I could not but feel that this was their real conviction. Moreover, I knew that the man stood as near me in the spirit as if I had had much intercourse with him.

Between the younger daughter and me there gradually came about a beautiful friendship. She really had in her something of the primal type of the German maiden. She bore in her soul nothing acquired from her education, but expressed in her life an original and charming naturalness together with a noble reserve, and this reserve of hers caused a like reserve in me. We loved each other, and both of us were fully aware of this; but neither of us could overcome the fear of saying that we loved each other. Thus the love lived between the words we spoke to each other, and not in the words themselves. I felt the relationship as to our souls was of the most universal kind; but it found no possibility of taking a single step beyond what is of the soul.

[ 6 ] I was happy in this friendship; I felt my girl friend like something of the sun in my life. Yet this life later bore us far apart. In place of hours of happy companionship there then remained only a short-lived correspondence, followed by the melancholy memory of a beautiful period of my past life – a memory, however, which has through all my later life arisen again and again from the depths of my soul.

[ 7 ] It was at that same time that I once went to Schröer. He was altogether filled with an impression which he had just received. He had become acquainted with the poems of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie. Before him there lay a little volume of her poems, an epic Herman, a drama Saul, and a story Die Zigeunerin.¹ Schröer spoke enthusiastically of these poetical writings. “And all these have been written by a young person before completing her sixteenth year!” he said. Then he added that Robert Zimmermann had said that she was the only genius he had known in his life.

[ 8 ] Schröer's enthusiasm now led me also to read the productions one after another. I wrote an article about the poet. This brought me the great pleasure of being permitted to call upon her. During this call I had the opportunity of a conversation with the poet which has often come to mind during my life. She had already begun to work upon an undertaking in the grand style, her epic Robespierre. She discussed the basic ideas of this composition. Already there was present in her conversation an undertone of pessimism. I felt in regard to her as if she meant to represent in such a personality as Robespierre the tragedy in all idealism. Ideals arise in the human heart, but they have no power over the horrible destructive action of nature, empty of all ideals, who utters against all ideals her pitiless cry: “Thou art mere illusion, a fantasm of my own, which I again and again hurl back into nothingness.”

[ 9 ] This was her conviction. The poet then spoke to me of a further poetic plan, a Satanid. She would represent the antitype of God as the Primal Being which is the Power revealing itself to man in terrible, ruinous nature, empty of the ideal. She spoke with genuine inspiration of the Power from the abyss of being, dominant over all being. I went away from the poet profoundly shocked. The greatness with which she had spoken remained impressed upon me; the content of her ideas was the opposite of everything which stood before my mind as a view of the world. But I was never inclined to withhold my interest or my admiration from that which seemed to me great, even when it repelled me utterly by its content. Indeed, I said to myself, such opposites in the world must somewhere find their reconciliation. And this enabled me to follow what repelled me just as if it lay in the same direction as the conception held by my own mind.

[ 10 ] Shortly after this I was invited again to the home of delle Grazie. She was to read her Robespierre before a number of persons, among whom were Schröer and his wife and also a woman friend of his family. We listened to scenes of lofty poetic rhythm, but with a pessimistic undertone of a richly coloured naturalism: life painted in its most terrible aspects. Great human beings, inwardly deceived by Fate, rose to the surface, or sank below in the grip of tragedy. This was my impression. Schröer became indignant. For him art ought not to plunge beneath such abysses of the “terrible.” The women withdrew. They had experienced a sort of convulsion. I could not agree with Schröer, for he seemed to me to be wholly filled with the feeling that poetry can never be made out of what is terrible in the experience of the human soul, even though this terrible experience is nobly endured. Delle Grazie soon after published a poem in which Nature is celebrated as the highest Power, but in such a way that she mocks at all ideals, which she calls into existence only in order to delude man, and which she hurls back into nothingness when this delusion has been accomplished.

[ 11 ] In relation to this composition I wrote a paper entitled Die Natur und unsere Ideale,² which I did not publish but had privately printed in a small number of copies. In this I discussed the apparent correctness of delle Grazie's view. I said that a view which does not shut out the hostility manifested by nature against human ideals is of a higher order than a “superficial optimism” which blinds itself to the abysses of existence. But I also said in regard to this matter that the free inner being of man creates for itself that which gives meaning and content to life, and that this being could not fully unfold itself if a prodigal nature bestowed upon it from without that which ought to arise within.

[ 12 ] Because of this paper I had a painful experience. When Schröer had received it, he wrote me that, if I thought in such a way about pessimism, we had never understood one another, and that anyone who spoke in such a way about nature as I had done in the paper showed thereby that he could not have taken in a sufficiently profound sense Goethe's words: “Know thyself, and live at peace with the world.”

[ 13 ] I was cut to the heart when I received these lines from the person to whom I felt the most devoted attachment. Schröer could be passionately aroused when he became aware of a sin against the harmony manifesting itself in art in the form of beauty. He turned against delle Grazie when he was forced to observe this sin against his conception. And he considered the admiration which I felt for the poet as a falling away both from him and also from Goethe. He failed to see in my paper what I said regarding the human spirit overcoming from within itself the obstacles of nature; he was offended because I said that external nature could not be the creator of true inner satisfaction for man. I wished to set forth the meaninglessness of pessimism in spite of its correctness within certain limits; Schröer saw in every concession to pessimism something which he called “the slag from burned-out spirits.”

[ 14 ] In the home of Marie Eugenie delle Grazie I passed some of the happy hours of my life. Saturday evening she always received visitors. Those who came were persons of divers spiritual tendencies. The poet formed the centre of the group. She read aloud from her poems; she spoke in the spirit of her world-conception in very positive language. She cast the light of these ideas upon human life. It was by no means the light of the sun. Always in truth only the pale light of the moon-threatening, overcast skies. But from human dwellings there arose flames of fire into the dusky air as if carrying the sorrows and illusions in which men are consumed. All this, nevertheless, humanly gripping, always fascinating, the bitterness enveloped in the magic power of a wholly spiritualized personality.

[ 15 ] At delle Grazie's side was Laurenz Müllner, a Catholic priest, teacher of the poet, and later her discreet and noble friend. He was at that time professor of Christian philosophy in the theological faculty of the University. The impression he made, not only by his face but in his whole figure, was that of one whose development had been mental and ascetic. A sceptic in philosophy, thoroughly grounded in all aspects of philosophy, in conceptions of art and literature. He wrote for the Catholic clerical journal, Vaterland, stimulating articles upon artistic and literary subjects. The poet's pessimistic view of the world and of life fell always from his lips also.

[ 16 ] Both united in a positive antipathy to Goethe; on the other hand, their interest was directed to Shakespeare and the later poets, children of the sorrowful burden of life, and of the naturalistic confusions of human nature. Dostoievsky they loved warmly; Leopold von Sacher-Masoch they looked upon as a brilliant writer who shrank back from no truth in order to represent that which is growing up in the morass of modern life as all too human and worthy of destruction. In Laurenz Müllner the antipathy to Goethe took on something of the colour of Catholic theology. He praised Baumgarten's monograph, which characterized Goethe as the antithesis of that which is deserving of human endeavour. In delle Grazie there was something like a profound personal antipathy to Goethe.

[ 17 ] About the two were gathered professors of the theological faculty, Catholic priests of the very finest scholarship. First among them all was the priest of the Cistercian Order of the Holy Cross, Wilhelm Neumann. Müllner justly esteemed him because of his comprehensive scholarship. He said to me once, when in the absence of Neumann I was speaking with enthusiastic admiration of his broad and comprehensive scholarship: “Yes, indeed, Professor Neumann knows the whole world and three villages besides.” I liked to accompany the learned man when we went away from delle Grazie's at the same time. I had many a conversation with this “ideal” of a scientific man who was at the same time a “true son of his Church.” I would here mention only two of these. One was in regard to the person of Christ. I expressed my view to the effect that Jesus of Nazareth, by reason of supramundane influence, had received the Christ into himself, and that Christ as a spiritual Being has lived in human evolution since the Mystery of Golgotha. This conversation remained deeply imprinted in my mind; ever and again it has arisen in memory. For it was profoundly significant for me. There were really three persons engaged in that discussion: Professor Neumann and I, and a third, unseen person, the personification of Catholic dogmatic theology, visible to spiritual perception as he walked behind the professor, always beckoning with his finger threateningly, and always tapping Professor Neumann on the shoulder as a reminder whenever the subtle logic of the scholar led him too far in agreement with me. It was noteworthy how often the first clause of the latter's sentences would be reversed in the second clause. There I was face to face with the Catholic way of life in one of its best representatives. It was through him that I learned to esteem it, but also to know it through and through.

Another time we discussed the question of repeated earth lives. The professor then listened to me, spoke of all sorts of literature in which something on this subject could be found; he often nodded his head lightly, but had no inclination to enter into the merits of a question which seemed to him very fanciful. So this conversation also became of great import to me. The uncomfortableness with which Neumann felt the answers he did not utter in response to my statements was deeply impressed upon my memory.

[ 18 ] Besides these, the Saturday evening callers were the historian of the Church and other theologians, and in addition I met now and then the philosopher Adolf Stöhr, Goswine von Berlepsch, the emotionally moving story-teller Emilie Mataja (who bore the pen-name of Emil Marriot, the poet and writer Fritz Lemmermayer, and the composer Stross. Fritz Lemmermayer, with whom I was later on terms of intimate friendship, I came to know at one of delle Grazie's afternoons. A highly noteworthy man. Whatever interested him he expressed with inwardly measured dignity. In his outward appearance he resembled equally the musician Rubinstein and the actor Lewinsky. With Hebbel he developed almost a cult. He had definite views on art and life born out of the sagacious understanding of the heart, and these were unusually fixed. He had written the interesting and profound romance, Der Alchemist,³ and much besides that was characterized by beauty and depth. He knew how to consider the least things in life from the view-point of the most vital. I recall how I once saw him in his charming little room in a side-street in Vienna together with other friends. He had planned his meal: two soft-boiled eggs, to be cooked in an instantaneous boiler, together with bread. He remarked with much emphasis while the water was heating to boil the eggs for us: “This will be delicious!” In a later phase of my life I shall again have occasion to speak of him.

[ 19 ] Alfred Stross, the composer, was a gifted man, but one tinged with a profound pessimism. When he took his seat at the piano in delle Grazie's home and played his études, one had the feeling: Anton Bruckner's music reduced to airy tones which would fain flee this earthly existence. Stross was little understood; Fritz Lemmermayer was inexpressibly devoted to him.

[ 20 ] Both Lemmermayer and Stross were intimate friends of Robert Hamerling. Through them I was led later into a brief correspondence with Hamerling, to which I shall refer again. Stross finally died of a serious illness in spiritual darkness.

[ 21 ] The sculptor Hans Brandstadter I also met at delle Grazie's. [ 22 ] Even though unseen, there hovered over all this group of friends, through frequent wonderful descriptions of him almost like hymns of praise, the historian of theology Werner. Delle Grazie loved him more than anyone else. Never once did he appear on a Saturday evening when I was able to be present. But his admirer showed us the picture of the biographer of Thomas Aquinas from ever new angles, the picture of the good, lovable scholar who remained naïve even to extreme old age. One imagined a man so selfless, so absorbed in the matter about which he spoke as a historian, so exact, that one said, “If only there were many such historians!”

[ 23 ] A veritable fascination ruled over these Saturday evening gatherings. After it had grown dark, a lamp was lighted under a shade of some red fabric, and we sat in a circular space of light which made the whole company festive. Then delle Grazie would frequently become extraordinarily talkative – especially when those living at a distance had gone – and one was permitted to hear many a word that sounded like sighs from the depths in the after-pangs of grievous days of fate. But one listened also to genuine humour over the personalities of life, and tones of indignation over the corruption in the press and elsewhere. Between-whiles there were the sarcastic, often caustic, remarks of Müllner on all sorts of philosophical, artistic, and other themes. [ 24 ] Delle Grazie's house was a place in which pessimism revealed itself in direct and vital force, a place of anti-Goetheanism. Everyone listened whenever I spoke of Goethe; but Laurenz Müllner held the opinion that I ascribed to Goethe things which really had little to do with the actual minister of the Grand-duke Karl August. Nevertheless for me every visit at this house – and I knew that I was welcomed there – was something for which I am inexpressibly grateful; I felt that I was in a spiritual atmosphere which was of genuine benefit to me. For this purpose I did not require agreement in ideas; I required earnest and striving humanity susceptible to the spiritual. [ 25 ] I was now between this house, which I frequented with much pleasure, and my teacher and fatherly friend Karl Julius Schröer, who, after the first visit, never again appeared at delle Grazie's. My emotional life, drawn in both directions by sincere love and esteem, was actually torn in two. [ 26 ] But it was just at this time that those thoughts first came to maturity in me which later formed the volume Die Philosophie der Freiheit.⁴ In the unpublished paper about delle Grazie mentioned above, Nature and Our Ideals, there lie the germs of the later book in the following sentences: “Our ideals are no longer so superficial as to be satisfied with a reality often so flat and so empty. Yet I cannot believe that there is no means whereby to rise above the profound pessimism which comes from this knowledge. This elevation comes to me when I look into our inner world, when I enter more intimately into the nature of our ideal world. This is a self-contained world, complete in itself, which can neither win anything nor lose anything by reason of the transitoriness of the external. Do not our ideals, if these are really living individualities, possess an existence for themselves independently of the kindness or unkindness of nature? Even though the lovely rose may for ever be shattered by the pitiless gusts of the wind, it has fulfilled its mission, for it has rejoiced hundreds of human eyes; if to-morrow it should please murderous nature to destroy the whole starry sky, yet for thousands of years men have gazed up reverently toward it, and this is enough. Not the existence in time, no, but the inner being of things, constitutes their completion. The ideals of our spirits are a world for themselves, which must also live for themselves, and which can gain nothing from the co-operation of a good nature. What a pitiable creature man would be if he could not gain satisfaction within his own ideal world, but must first to this end have the co-operation of nature! What divine freedom remains to us if nature guides and guards us like helpless children tied to leading strings? No, she must deny us everything, in order that, when happiness comes to us, this shall all be the result of our free selves. Let nature destroy every day what we shape in order that we may every day experience anew the joy of creation! We would fain owe nothing to nature; everything to ourselves.

[ 27 ] “This freedom, one may say, is only a dream! While we think that we are free, we obey the iron necessity of nature. The loftiest thoughts that we conceive are merely the fruit of the blind power of nature within us. But we surely should finally admit that a being who knows himself cannot be unfree! ... We see the web of law ruling over things, and this it is which constitutes necessity. In our knowledge we possess the power to separate the natural laws from things; and must we ourselves be nevertheless without a will, slaves to these same laws?”

These thoughts I did not evolve out of a spirit of controversy; but I was forced to set forth what my perception of the spiritual world said to me in opposition to a view of life which I had to consider as being at the opposite pole from my own, but which I none the less profoundly reverenced because it was revealed to me from the depths of true and earnest souls.

[ 28 ] At the very time during which I enjoyed such stimulating experiences at the home of delle Grazie, I had the privilege of entering also a circle of the younger Austrian poets. Every week we had a free expression and mutual sharing together of whatever one or the other had produced. The most varied characters met in this gathering. Every view of life and every temperament was represented, from the optimistic, naïve painter of life to the leaden-weighted pessimist. Fritz Lemmermayer was the soul of the group. There was present something of the storm which the Hart brothers, Karl Henckel, and others had loosed in the German Empire against “the old” in the spiritual life of the time. But all this was tinged with Austrian “amiability.” Much was said about how the time had come in which new tones must sound forth in all spheres of life; but this was done with that disapproval of radicalism which is characteristic of the Austrian.

[ 29 ] One of the youngest of this circle was Joseph Kitir. He devoted his effort to a form of lyric to which he had been inspired by Martin Greif. He did not wish to bring subjective feelings to expression; he wished to set forth an event or situation objectively, and yet as if this had been observed, not with the senses, but with the feelings. He did not wish to say that he was enchanted; but rather he would paint the enchanting event, and its enchantment should act upon hearer or reader without the poet's statement. Kitir did really beautiful things in this way. His soul was naïve. A little while after this he bound himself more closely to me. [ 30 ] In this circle I now heard an Austro-German poet spoken of with great enthusiasm, and I afterward became familiar with some of his poems. These made a deep impression upon me. I endeavoured to meet the poet. I asked Fritz Lemmermayer, who knew him well, and also some others whether the poet could not be invited to our gatherings.

But I was told that he could not be dragged there with a four-horse team. He was a recluse, they said, and would not mingle with people. But I was deeply desirous of knowing him. Then one evening the whole company went out and roamed over to the place where the “knowing ones” could find him. It was a little wine-shop in a street parallel to Kärtnerstrasse. There he sat in one corner, his glass of red wine – not a small one – before him. He sat as if he had sat there for an indefinitely long time, and would continue to sit indefinitely long. Already a rather old gentleman, but with shining, youthful eyes, and a countenance which showed the poet and idealist in the most delicate and most speaking lines. At first he did not see us enter. For it was clear that in the nobly shaped head a poem was taking form. Fritz Lemmermayer had first to take him by the arm; then he turned his face in our direction and looked at us. We had disturbed him. His perplexed glance could not conceal this; but he showed it in the most amiable fashion. We took our places around him. There was not space enough for so many to sit in the cramped little room. It was now remarkable how the man who had been described as a “recluse” showed himself in a very short while as enthusiastically talkative. We all had the feeling that with what our minds were then exchanging in conversation we could not remain in the dull closeness of that room. And there was now not much difficulty in bringing the “recluse” with us to another Lokal. Except for him and one other acquaintance of his who had for a long time mingled with our circle, we were all young; yet it soon became evident that we had never been so young as on this evening when the old gentleman was with us, for he was really the youngest of us all.

[ 31 ] I was completely captivated by the charm of this personality. It was at once clear to me that this man must have produced much that was more significant than what he had published, and I pressed him with questions regarding this. He answered almost timidly: “Yes, I have besides at home some cosmic things.” I succeeded in persuading him to promise that he would bring these the next evening that we could see him.

[ 32 ] It was thus that I became acquainted with Fercher von Steinwand. A poet from the Karntnerland, pithy, full of ideas, idealistic in his sentiments. He was the child of poor people, and had passed his youth amid great hardships. The distinguished anatomist Hyrtl came to know his worth, and made possible for him the sort of existence in which he could live wholly in his poems, thoughts, and conceptions. For a considerable time the world knew very little of him. After the appearance of his first poem, Gräfin Seelenbrand, Robert Hamerling brought him into full recognition.

After that night we never needed again to go for the “recluse.” He appeared almost regularly on our evenings. I was extremely glad when on one of these evenings he brought along one of his “cosmic things.” It was the Chor der Urtriebe ⁵ and the Chor der Urträume,⁶ poems in which feelings live in swinging rhythm which seem as if they penetrated into the very creative forces of the world. There hover ideas as if actual beings in splendid euphony, forming themselves into pictures of the Powers which in the beginning created the world. I consider the fact that I came to know Fercher von Steinwand as one of the most important events of my youth; for his personality acted like that of a sage who reveals his wisdom in genuine poetry.

[ 33 ] I had struggled with the riddle of man's repeated earth lives. Many a perception in this direction had come to me when I came close to men who in the habit of their lives, in the impress of their personalities revealed clearly the signs of a content within their beings which one would not expect to find in what they had inherited through birth or acquired afterward through experience. But in the play of countenance, in every gesture of Fercher, I saw the essence of a soul which could only have been formed in the time from the beginning of the Christian evolution, while Greek paganism was still influencing this evolution. One does not arrive at such a view when one thinks only of those expressions of a personality which press immediately upon one's attention; it is aroused in one rather by the intuitively perceived marks of the individuality which seem to accompany such direct expressions but which in reality deepen these expressions immeasurably. Moreover, one does not attain to this view when one seeks for it, but only when the strong impression remains active in retrospect, and becomes like the memory of an experience in which that which is essential in the external life falls away and the usually “unessential” begins to speak a deeply significant language. Whoever observes men in order to solve the riddle of their previous earth-lives will certainly not reach his goal. Such observation one must feel to be an offence which does injury to the one observed, for one can hope for the present disclosure of the long past of a man only through the dispensation of fate coming from the outer spiritual world.

[ 34 ] It was in the very time of my life which I am now describing that I succeeded in attaining to these definite views of the repeated earth-lives of man. Before this time I was not far from the conceptions, but they had not yet come out of indeterminate lines to sharply defined impressions. Theories, however, in regard to such things as repeated earth-lives, I did not form in my own thoughts; I took them into my understanding out of literature or other sources of information as something illuminating, but I did not theorize about them. And now, since I was conscious within myself of real perception in this region, I was in a position to have the conversation mentioned above with Professor Neumann. A man is not to be blamed if he becomes convinced of the truth of repeated earth-lives and other insights which can be attained only in supersensible ways; for a complete conviction in this region is possible also to the sound and unprejudiced human understanding, even though the man has not yet attained to actual perception. Only the way of theorizing in this region was not my own way.

[ 35 ] During the time when concrete perceptions were more and more forming within me in regard to repeated earth-lives, I became acquainted with the theosophical movement, which had been initiated by H. P. Blavatsky. Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism came into my hands through a friend to whom I had spoken in regard to these things. This book, the first from the theosophical movement with which I became familiar, made upon me no impression whatever. And I was glad that I had not read this book before I had experienced perception out of the life of my own soul. For the content of the book was repellent to me, and my antipathy against this way of representing the supersensible might well have prevented me from going farther at once upon the road which had been pointed out to me.

• 1. The Gipsy.
• 2. Nature and Our Ideals.
• 3. The Alchemist.
• 4. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.
• 5. The Chorus of Primal Instincts.
• 6. The Chorus of Primal Dreams.

In order, gentlemen that the last question may be thoroughly answered. I will, as far as possible, say something about colors. One cannot really understand colors if one does not understand the human eye, for man perceives colors entirely through the eye.

Picture to yourselves, for instance, a blind person. A blind person feels differently in a room that is lighted and in a room that is dark. Though it is so weak a matter that he does not perceive it, yet it has a great significance for him. Even a blind person could not live perpetually in a cellar, he would need the light. And there is a difference if one brings a blind man into a bright room with yellow windows, or into a dark room, or into a fairly light room which has blue windows. That acts quite differently on his life. Yellow color and blue color influence life quite differently. But these are things which one learns to understand only when one has grasped how the eye is affected by color.

Now from what I have hitherto put before you, you will perhaps have realized that two things are most important in man. The first is the blood, for if man were not to have blood he would have to die at once. He would not be able to renew his life every moment and life must be every moment renewed. So if you think away the blood from the body, man is a dead object.

Now think away the nerves too: man would no doubt look just the same, but he would have no consciousness; he could form no ideas, could will nothing, would not be able to move.

We must therefore say to ourselves: For man to be a conscious human being he needs nerves. For man to be able to live at all he needs blood. Thus blood is the organ of life, the nerves are the organ of consciousness.

But every organ has nerves and has blood. The human eye is in fact really like a complete human being and has nerves and blood. Imagine that here [a drawing was made] the eye protrudes, and in the eye little blood-arteries, many blood-arteries spread out. And many nerves too spread out. You see, what you have in the hand, that is, nerves and blood, you have also in the head.

Now think: the external world which is illumined works upon the eye. By day at any rate the world in which you go about is illumined, but it is difficult to form an idea of this wholly-lighted outer world. You get a true idea when you imagine the half-lighted world in the morning and evening, when you see the red of dawn and evening. Dawn and the sunset glow are particularly instructive.

For what is actually there in the glow of dawn and evening? Picture to yourselves the sunrise. The sun comes up, but it cannot shine on you direct as yet. The sun comes when the earth is like this—I am now drawing the apparent path, but that does not matter (in reality the earth moves and the sun stands still, but how we see this makes no difference). The sun sends its rays here [drawing] and then here. So if first you stand there, you do not see the sun at dawn, you see the litÖ¾up clouds. These are the clouds and the light falls actually on them. What is that actually? This is very instructive. Because the sun has not quite risen, it is still dark around you and there in the distance are the clouds lit up by the sun. Can one understand that?

If you stand there you are seeing the illumined clouds through the darkness that is around you. You see light through darkness. So that we can say it is the same thing at dawn and sunset—one sees light through darkness. And light seen through darkness—as you can see in the morning and evening glow—looks red. Light seen through darkness looks red.

Now I will say something different. Imagine that dawn has gone by and it is daytime. You see freely up into the air, as it is today. What do you see? You see the so-called blue sky. To be sure, it is not there, but you see it all the same. That certainly does not continue into all infinity, but you see the blue sky as if it were surrounding the earth like a blue shell.

Why is that? Now you have only to think of how it is out there in distant universal space. It is in fact dark. For universal space is dark. The sun shines only on the earth and because there is air round the earth the sunbeams are caught and make it light here, especially when they shine through watery air. But out there in universal space it is absolutely black darkness. So that if one stands here by day one looks into darkness, and one should actually see darkness. But one does not see it black, but blue, because all round there is light from the sun. The air and the moisture in the air are illumined.

So you see quite clearly darkness through the light. You look through the light, through the illumined air into darkness. And therefore we can say: Darkness through light is blue.

There you have the two principles of the color-theory which you can simply get from observation of the surroundings. If you thoroughly understand the red of dawn and evening glow you say to yourself: Light seen through darkness or obscurity is red. When by day you look out into the black heavens, you say to yourself: Darkness or obscurity seen through light—since it is light around you—is blue.

You see, men have always had this quite natural view until they became “clever.” This perception of light seen through darkness being red, and darkness through light being blue, was possessed by ancient peoples over in Asia when they still had the knowledge which I have lately described to you. The ancient Greeks still had this concept, and it lasted through the whole Middle Ages until the 14th. 15th, 16th, 17th centuries when people became clever. And as they became clever, they began not to look at nature but to think out all sorts of artificial sciences.

One of those who devised a particularly artificial science about color was the Englishman Newton. Out of cleverness—you know how I am now using the word, namely quite in earnest—out of special cleverness Newton said something like this: Let us look at the rainbow—for when one is clever one does not look at something happening naturally every day: dawn, sunset, one looks at the specially unusual and rare, something to be understood only when one has gone further. However. Newton said: Let us look at the rainbow. In the rainbow one sees seven colors, namely, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. One sees them next to each other in the rainbow:

When you look at a rainbow you can distinguish these seven colors quite plainly.

Now Newton made an artificial rainbow by darkening the room, covering the window with black paper, and in the paper he made a tiny hole. That gave him a very small streak of light.

Then he put in this streak of light something that one calls a prism. It is a glass that looks like this [drawing], a sort of three-cornered glass, and behind this he set up a screen. So he then had the window with the hole, this tiny beam of light, the prism and behind it the screen. Then the rainbow appeared with the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet colors. What did Newton then say?

Newton said to himself: The white light comes in; with the prism I get the seven colors of the rainbow. Therefore they are already contained in the white light and I only need to draw them out.

You see, that is a very simple explanation. One explains something by saying: It is already there and I draw it out.

In reality he ought to have said: Since I set up a prism—that is. a glass with a cornered surface, not a regular glass plate—when I look through it like this, there is light made red through darkness, and on the other side darkness made blue through light—the blue color appears. And in between lie in fact gradations. That is what he ought to have told himself.

But at that time the aim in the world was to explain everything by seeking to find everything already inside that from which one was really to explain it. That is the simplest method, is it not? If, for example, one is to describe how the human being arises, then one says: Oh well, he is already in the ovum of the mother, he only develops out of it. That is a fine explanation!

We don't find things as easy as that, as you have seen. We have to take the whole universe to our aid, which first forms the egg in the mother. But natural science is concerned with throwing everything inside, which is the simplest possible way. Newton said that the sun already contained all the colors and we had only to draw them out.

But that is not it at all. If the sun is to produce red at dawn, it must first shine on the clouds and we must see the red through darkness; and if the sky is to appear blue, that is not at all through the sun. The sun does not shine into the heavens: it is all black there, dark, and we see the blue through the illumined air of the earth. We see darkness through light, and that is blue.

The point is to make a proper physics where it could then be seen how in the prism on the one side light is seen through darkness and on the other darkness through light. But that is too tiresome for people. They find it best to say that everything is within light and one only draws it out. Then one can say too that once there was a giant egg in the world, the whole world was inside, and we draw everything out of it.

That is what Newton did with the colors. But in reality one can always see the secret of the colors if one understands in the right way the morning and evening glow and the blue of the heavens.

Now we must consider further the whole matter in relation to our eye and to the whole of human life altogether. You see, you all know that there is a being which is especially excited through red—that is, where light works through darkness—and that is the bull. The bull is well known to be frightfully enraged by red. That you know.

And so man too has a little of the bull-nature. He is not of course directly excited through red, but if man lived continually in a red light, you would at once perceive that he gets a little stimulation from it. He gets a little bull-like. I have even known poets who could not write poetry if they were in their ordinary frame of mind, so then they always went to a room where they put a red lampshade over the light. They were then stimulated and were able to write poetry. The bull becomes savage: man by exposing himself to the red becomes poetic! The stimulation to poetry is only a matter of whether it comes from inside or from outside. This is one side of the case.

On the other hand you will also be aware that when people who understand such things want to be thoroughly meek and humble, they use blue, or black—deep black. That is so beautiful to see in Catholicism: when Advent comes and people are supposed to become humble, the Church is made blue; above all the vestments are blue. People get quietened, humble; they feel themselves inwardly connected with the subdued mood—especially if a man has previously exhausted his fury, like a bull, as for instance at Shrove Tuesday's carnival. Then one has the proper time of fasting afterwards, not only dark raiment, black raiment. Then men become tamed down after their violence is over. Only, where one has two carnivals, two carnival Sundays, one should let the time of fasting be twice as long! I do not know if that is done.

But you see from this that it has quite a different effect on man whether he sees light through dark that is red, or darkness through light, that is blue.

Now consider the eye. Within it you have nerves and blood. When the eye looks at red, let us say at the dawn or at something red, what does it experience? You see, when the eye looks at red then these quite fine little blood-arteries become permeated by the red light, and this light has the peculiarity of always destroying the blood a little. It therefore destroys the nerve at the same time, for the nerve can live only when it is permeated by blood. So that when the eye confronts red, when red comes into the eye, then the blood in the eye is always somewhat destroyed and the nerve with it.

When the bull is faced with red it simply feels: Good gracious—all the blood in my head is destroyed! I must defend myself!—Then it becomes savage because it will not let its blood be destroyed.

Well, but this is very good—not only in the bull, but in man and in other animals. For if we look at red and our blood becomes somewhat destroyed, then on the other hand our whole body works to bring oxygen into the eye so that the blood can be re-established.

Just think what a wonderful process takes place there. When light is seen through darkness—that is, red—then the blood is destroyed, oxygen is absorbed from the body and the eye vitalized through the oxygen. And now we know through the renewal of life in our eye: There is red outside. But in order that we may perceive this red, the blood and the nerve in the eye must be a little destroyed. We must send life, that is, oxygen, into the eye. And by our own vitalizing of the eye, by this waking up of the eye we notice: there is red outside.

Now you see, man's health too actually depends on his perceiving rightly the reddened light, on his always being able to take in reddened light properly. For the oxygen which is drawn out of the body vitalizes then the whole body and man gets a healthy color in the face. He can really reanimate himself.

This refers not only to a person who is healthy and able to see, it applies as well to one whose eyes are not healthy and who does not see: When the light works through the bright color then he is vitalized in the head, and this vitalizing acts again on the whole body and gives him a healthy color. So when we live in the light and can take in the light properly we get a healthy color.

It is very important tor people not to be brought up in dark places where they can become lifeless and submissive. People should be brought up in light, bright places with yellowish-reddish light, where they also properly assimilate the oxygen in them through the light.

But you see from this that everything connected with the element of red is actually connected with the development of man's blood. When we look at red the nerve is actually destroyed.

Now just think: We see darkness through light, that is, blue. Darkness does not destroy our blood, it leaves our blood unharmed. The nerve too is undestroyed since our blood is in order. The result is for man to feel himself thoroughly well inwardly. Since blood and nerve are not attacked by blue, man feels thoroughly well inside.

And there is really something subtly refined in creating submissive meekness. When, let us say, the priests there above at the altar are in their blue or their black vestments, and the people sit below and gaze at them, the blood-arteries and nerves in the eye are not destroyed and naturally the people feel very well. It is actually directed to the feeling of well-being of the people.

Do not imagine that that is not known! For they still have their ancient science. The more modern science has only arisen with the men of the Enlightenment, in such men as, for instance. Newton.

Thus we can say: Blue is what sends through man a feeling of well-being, when he says to himself (it is all unconscious, but he says it inwardly): There alone I can live—in the blue. There man feels inwardly himself; in red, on the other hand, he feels as if something were to penetrate into him. One can say that with blue the nerve remains undestroyed and the body sends the feeling of well-being into the eye and hence into the whole body.

That is the difference between the color blue and the color red. And yellow is only a gradation of red, and green is a gradation of blue. So that one can say: according to whether nerve or blood is active, the more sensitive is man to red or to blue.

Now you see, one can apply that to substances. If I want to look for a red for painting, to produce a red color which contains the substances that stimulate man to develop oxygen inwardly, then I gradually arrive at the fact that to get red color for painting I must test the substances of the outer world to find how much carbon they contain. If I combine carbon in the right way with other substances, I discover the secret of making a red for my painting.

If I use plants for getting colors for paints then above all it is a matter of so organizing my processes, diminishing, consuming, and so on, that I obtain the carbon in the paint in the right way. If I have the carbon in it in the right way, then I get the bright, the reddish color.

If on the other hand I have substances which contain much oxygen—not carbon but oxygen—then I obtain the darker colors, such as blue. When I know the living element in the plant then I can really create my colors. Imagine that I take a sunflower: that is quite yellow, a bright color. Yellow is near to red, that is, light seen through darkness. If I now treat the sunflower in such a way as somehow to gel into my paint-color the right process that lies in the flower, then I have a good yellow. Even the outer light cannot have much against it, because the blossom of the sunflower has already taken from the sun the secret of creating yellow. If I therefore get the same process into my artist's color as there is in the blossom, then if I get it thick enough, I can use it normally as paint.

But let me take another plant, the chicory, for instance, the blue flower that grows on the wayside—it grows here too. If I have this blue plant and want to prepare a paint from the flower, I cannot do it, I get nothing from it. On the other hand, if I treat the root in the right way, there is a process in it which actually makes the blossom blue.

When the blossom is yellow then something goes on in the blossom itself which makes yellow; when the blossom is blue, however, the process lies in the root and it only presses upwards towards the flower. So if I want to produce a blue paint from the indigo-plant, where I get a darker blue, or from the chicory, this blue flower, I must use the root. I must treat it chemically till it yields me the blue color.

In this way, through real study, I can find out how to obtain paints from the plant. I cannot do so in Newton's way; he simply says that everything is in the sunlight and one has only to draw it out. (One can apply that at most to one's purse; what I spend for a day I must have in the purse in the morning.) That is how the quite clever people picture it, like a sack in which everything is lying. That, however, is not the case.

We must know, for instance, how the yellow is in the sunflower or in the dandelion. We must know how the blue is in chicory. The processes which make the chicory or the indigo׳ plant blue lie in the root, whereas the processes that make the sunflower or the dandelion yellow lie in the flower.

And so I must imitate chemically, in a chemistry become living, the flower-process of the plant and get the bright, light color. I must imitate the root process of the plant and there obtain the dark color.

You see, what I have related here is plain to the real human understanding; whereas as a matter of fact this business (in the rainbow) with the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, is a rarity.

Now when Goethe lived the affair had got to the point where people generally believed in what Newton had taught, namely, the sun is the great sack in which lie the so-called seven colors. One need only tempt them out, then they come to light. Everyone believed that; it was taught and in fact is still taught today.

Goethe's nature was not one to believe everything immediately. He wanted to convince himself a little about things that were taught everywhere. People generally say that they do not believe anything on authority. But when it comes to the point of crediting what is taught from the professorial chair, then people are today frightfully credulous, they believe everything that is taught. Goethe did not want to believe everything straightaway, so he borrowed from the university in Jena the apparatus, the prisms and so on which provide the proof. He thought: Now I will do exactly what the professors do in order to see how it actually is.

Well, Goethe did not get down to it immediately and had the apparatus rather a long time without doing anything. He just did something else. So the time became too long for the Hofrat Büttner who needed the apparatus and wanted to have it fetched back. Goethe said: Now I must do the thing quickly—and at least, as he was already packing up, looked through a prism. He said to himself: The rainbow must look beautiful on the white wall if I look through there; instead of white, red, yellow, green and so on must appear. He therefore peered through, anticipating with delight that he would now see the white wall in these beautiful colors,—but he saw nothing: white as before, simply white. Naturally he was extremely surprised and asked himself what was behind it. And his whole theory of color arose out of this.

Goethe said: One must now control the whole affair again. The ancients have said light seen through darkness = red, darkness through light = blue. If I gradate the red somewhat it becomes yellow. If I make the blue go up to red, then it becomes green on the one side and violet on the other. These are gradations. And he then worked out his color theory and in fact better than it existed in the Middle Ages.

Now today we have a physicist's color-theory with the sack from which the seven colors come, which is taught everywhere. And we have a Goethean color-theory which understands the blue of the heavens rightly, understands rightly the morning and evening glow as I have been explaining to you.

But there is a certain difference between the Newtonian and the Goethean theory. For the most part other people do not notice it, for other people look on the one hand to the physicists: there the Newtonian theory of color is taught which stands in the books everywhere. One can very clearly picture to oneself what appears there in the rainbow as red, orange, yellow, green and so on. Well, but there is no prism there! However, one does not reflect further. The Newtonians certainly know, but they do not admit, that when one looks through the rainbow on the one side, then one sees darkness through the sun-illumined rainbow; sees on the other side the blue. But then one also sees in front the surface where one sees light through darkness, and on the other side the red. One must explain everything therefore by the simple principle: light through darkness is red; darkness through light is blue.

But as I have said, people on the one hand see everything as the logicians explain it to them: on the other hand they look at pictures where the colors are used. Well, they do not ask further about the red and the yellow and so on; they do not bring the two things together.

But the painter must bring them together: one who wants to paint must connect them. He must not merely know: There is a sack and the colors are within it—for he has not got the sack anywhere. He must obtain the right thing from the living plant, or living substances, so that he can mix his colors in the right way.

So this is the position today: painters really reflect (—there even are painters who reflect, who do not simply buy their colors): but those painters who reflect upon how they are to obtain these colors and how they should use them, they say: Yes, with the Goethean color-theory one can do something; that tells us something. With the Newtonian color-theory, the theory of the physicists, we painters can do nothing.

The public does not bring painting and the physicists' theory of color together, but the painter does! He therefore likes the Goethean color-theory. He says to himself: Goodness! We don't bother about the physicists: they say something in their own field. They may do what they like; we keep to the Goethean color-theory. The painters look on themselves as artists and not as having to encroach on the teaching of the physicists. That is in fact uncomfortable, enmities arise, and so on.

But that is how things stand today between what is in the books about color and what is true. With Goethe it was simply the defense of truth which impelled him to oppose the Newtonians and the whole modern physics. And we cannot really understand nature without coming to Goethe's color-theory.

Hence it is quite natural that in a Goetheanum Goethe's theory of color should also be vindicated. But then if one does not remain in some religious or moral sphere but also intervenes in the smallest single part of Physics, then one has the physicists' whole pack of hounds upon one.

So, you see, the defense of truth is extraordinarily difficult in modern times. But you should just know in what a complicated way the physicists explain the blue of the sky. Naturally, if I start from a false principle and want to explain the simple thing that the blackness of universal space appears blue through light, then I must make a frightfully complicated explanation of it. And then the red of dawn and sunset! These chapters mostly begin like this; the blue sky—one cannot actually explain that properly today, one could imagine this or that.—Yes, with all that the physicists have, their little hole which so much amused Goethe—the little hole through which they let the light come into the room, in order with the darkness to investigate the light—with all this they cannot explain the simplest facts. And so it comes to the point that color is no longer understood at all.

If one understands, however, that the destruction of the blood calls forth the vitalizing process—for when I have destroyed my blood then I call up all the oxygen in me and renew myself, bring about health—then one also understands the healthy rosy color in man.

If I have darkness round me or continual blueness, well, then I shall not continually reanimate myself, or else I should create too much life in me. And so on the one hand one can understand the healthy rosy countenance from the intake of' oxygen, when one is thoroughly exposed to the light, and one can understand paleness from the perpetual intake of carbonic acid. Carbonic acid, the counterpart of oxygen, wants to go into my head. That makes me quite pale.

Today, for instance in Germany, the children are almost all pale. But one must understand that that comes from too much carbonic acid. And if man develops too much carbonic acid—carbonic acid consists of a combination of carbon and oxygen—then he uses the carbon which he has in him too much for forming carbonic acid. Thus in such a pale child you have all the carbon in him continuously changed into carbonic acid. So he becomes pale. What must I do? I must administer something to him through which this eternal development of carbonic acid inside him is hindered, through which the carbon is held back. I can do that if I give him some carbonate of lime.

In this way the functions are again stimulated, as I have told you from quite a different standpoint, and man keeps the carbon that he needs, does not continually change it into carbonic acid. And since carbonic acid consists of carbon and oxygen, the oxygen comes up into the head and animates the head processes, the life processes. But when the oxygen is given up to the carbonic acid, the life processes are suppressed.

If I therefore bring a pale person into a region where he has a good deal of light, he becomes stimulated not to give up his carbon continually to carbonic acid, because the light sucks the oxygen up into the head. Then he will get a healthy color again. In the same way I can stimulate that through the carbonate of lime, inasmuch as I keep back the oxygen and the person has it at his disposal.

So everything must be interconnected. One must be able to understand health and illness from the theory of color. One can do that only from Goethe's theory, for that rests simply on nature in a natural manner. It can never be done from Newton's color-theory which is merely devised, does not rest on nature at all, and actually cannot explain the simplest phenomena, the red at dawn and sunset and the blue sky.

Now, gentlemen, may I still say something else to you. Think of the old pastoral peoples who drove out their flocks and herds and slept in the open air. During their sleep they were not exposed to the blue sky but to the dark sky. And up there upon it [drawing] are the unnumbered shining stars. Now picture the dark sky with these countless shining stars and there below the sleeping men. From the heavens there streams out a calming force, the inner feeling of well-being in sleep. The whole human being is permeated by the darkness, so that he becomes inwardly quiet. Sleep proceeds from the darkness, but nevertheless these stars shine down. And wherever a star-beam shines the human being becomes inwardly a little stirred up. An oxygen ray goes out from the body. Pure oxygen rays go to meet the rays from the stars and the man becomes entirely permeated inwardly by the oxygen rays: he becomes inwardly an oxygen reflection of the whole starry heavens.

Thus the ancient shepherd folk took into their quietened bodies the whole star heavens in pictures, pictures which the course of the oxygen engraved into them. Then they woke up and they had the dream of these pictures. From this they had their star knowledge, their wonderful knowledge of the stars.

Their dream was not merely that Aries, the Ram, had so-and-so-many stars, but they really saw the animal, the Ram, the Bull, and so on, and felt the whole starry heavens in themselves in pictures. That is what has remained to us from the ancient shepherd folk as a poetic wisdom which sometimes has extraordinarily much that can still be instructive today.

One can understand it when one knows that the human being lets an oxygen ray radiate to each beam of light from the stars, that he becomes wholly sky, an inner oxygen sky.

Man's inner life is as we know an astral body, for during sleep he experiences the whole heavens. It would go badly with us if we were not descended from these ancient pastoral peoples. All men in fact are descended from ancient shepherd folk. We still have, purely through heredity, the knowledge of an inner star-heaven. We still unfold that, although not so well as the ancients. In sleep, when we lie in bed, we have still a sort of recollection of how once the shepherd of old lay in the fields and drew the oxygen into him. We are no longer shepherds and herdsmen but something is still given to us, we still receive something, only we cannot express it so beautifully as it has already become pale and dim. But the whole of mankind today is indeed interconnected, all belong to each other,—and if one would know what man still bears in him today, one must go back to ancient times. Everywhere, all men on earth have proceeded from this shepherd-stage and have actually inherited in their bodies what could descend from these pastoral peoples.

Good morning, gentlemen! Did you come up with anything that needs to be discussed today?

Question: Perhaps Dr. Steiner would say something about the essence of Christ, Ahriman and Lucifer in relation to man.

Dr. Steiner: To do that, we have to approach the nature of the human being from a completely different angle, otherwise it will naturally seem to you to be a kind of superstition. Based on what we have already discussed, I would like to say the following to you.

You see, gentlemen, today we have the notion that human beings are thoroughly homogeneous creatures. He is not; but man is actually constantly in a state in which he revives and dies again. One does not merely live at birth and does not merely die with death, but - as I have often explained to you - one dies continually and revives again.

Now, if we look at our head, for example, the head is actually entirely composed of what is called nervous substance. You know, nerves usually run through the organism only as threads, but the head is entirely made of nerves on the inside. If you draw it, it actually looks like this (drawing $. 220): the head, the forehead; the head is entirely made of nerves on the inside, a strong nerve mass; then some of this nerve mass goes through the spinal cord. But then the nerve threads go through the whole body. So what only goes through the whole body in threads is present in the head as a unified mass. That is the nerve mass.

If you now look at the inside of the human abdomen, for example, you will also see a great many nerves inside. There is the so-called solar plexus. There are a lot of nerves in there. But in the arms and hands and in the legs and feet, the nerves just run out in a thread-like manner.

If you now look again for something else, for the blood vessels, then you will find: in the head, the blood vessels are quite fine. In contrast, the blood vessels are particularly strong in the heart area; and then there are thick blood vessels in the limbs. So you can say: on the one hand we have the nervous system, on the other hand we have the blood system.

Now the thing is that we are born again and again from the blood, every day, every hour. Blood always signifies renewal. If we only had blood in us, we would be like beings that are constantly growing, getting bigger, fresh and so on. But, you see, gentlemen, if we were only nerves, if we were only made of nerves, we would be constantly exhausted, tired, we would actually be constantly dying. So we have two opposing principles in us, the nervous system, which makes us continually grow old, continually at the mercy of death, and the blood system, which is connected to the nutritional system, which makes us continually grow young and so forth.

The matter that I have explained to you now can also be further expanded. You know, in old age, some people become so that one has to say that they are calcified. Calcification occurs, sclerosis. It is very easy for people to no longer be able to move properly when their veins, as one says, calcify, that is, when the walls of their blood vessels calcify. And when the calcification is particularly severe, then the person is struck by a stroke, as they say. They get a stroke. The stroke that a person gets is only because their blood vessels have calcified and can no longer hold.

What actually happens to a person when their blood vessels calcify, when they become sclerotic? You see, it is as if the walls of their blood vessels want to become nerves. That is the strange thing. Nerves must constantly die off. Throughout our entire lives, nerves must be in the same state that blood vessels must not be in. Blood vessels must be fresh. The nerves must constantly tend to die off. If, on the other hand, a person develops nerves that are too soft, that are not sufficiently, if I may put it this way, calcified, that are too soft, then he goes crazy. So you see, the nerves must not be like the blood vessels and the blood vessels not like the nerves.

This is precisely what forces us to say that man has two principles within him. One is the nervous principle. This causes him to actually grow old all the time. From morning till evening, we actually get a little older each day. During the night, the blood renews itself. It goes like the pendulum of a clock: getting old, getting young, getting old, getting young. Of course, if we are awake from morning till night, we just get older, and if we sleep from night till morning, we get younger again; but a little something always remains. So the night makes up for it; but a little remains from each day of aging. And when that adds up to a sufficiently large sum in a person, then he really does die. That is the story. We therefore have two things in man that work against each other, growing old and growing young.

Now we can also look at it from a psychological point of view. I have explained it to you physically now. You see, when growing young takes hold too strongly in a person, then he gets pleurisy or pneumonia. It is namely the case that the things that are quite good, that are excellent when they remain within their limits, then, when they get out of hand, become illness. In a human being, illness is nothing more than an excess of something that he always needs. Fever comes from the fact that the process of growing young becomes much too strong in us. We can no longer tolerate it. We start to become too fresh with our whole body. Then we have a fever or pleurisy, which is a inflammation of the pleura, or pneumonia.

Now, the whole thing can also be looked at from a spiritual point of view. You see, a person can also dry up spiritually, or he can become as he otherwise becomes physically in a fever. There are certain qualities in a person - one does not like to hear them because so many people have them, especially today - and these are: one becomes pedantic, one becomes a Philistine. You know that there are Philistines today, after all. Philistines already exist. You become a philistine, you become a pedant. You become, while you should actually be a schoolmaster as a fresh guy, just dried up as a schoolmaster. Yes, that is again the same as when our blood vessels calcify, dry up. We can also dry up mentally. And then again we can also soften mentally. That is when you become a dreamer, a mystic or a theosophist. Yes, what do you want there? You don't want to think properly there. You want to reach out with your imagination into all the worlds without thinking properly. It's the same as when you get a physical fever. Becoming a mystic, becoming a theosophist, means becoming mentally feverish.

But we must always have both conditions within us. We cannot recognize anything if we cannot use our imagination, and we cannot work together in any way if we are not a little pedantic, if we do not register all sorts of things and so on. If you do it too much, you are a pedant, a philistine. If you do it just in the right measure, you are a real soul.

That is it, that one always has something that must be in the right measure in man, but which, if it gets out of hand, makes one physically or mentally ill.

The spiritual is the same, gentlemen. We cannot always sleep, we also have to wake up sometimes. Imagine what a jolt it is when you wake up! Just imagine what it is like when you are asleep: you lie there, you know nothing of your surroundings. If you have a good sleep, someone can even tickle you and you won't even wake up. Think what a difference that makes! Afterwards you wake up, you see everything around you, you hear everything around you. That is a big difference. Now when you wake up – yes, we must have this power to wake up in us; but if it is too strong, if one always wakes up, if one cannot sleep at all, for example, then the power to wake up is just too strong in us.

On the other hand, there are people who cannot wake up properly at all. There are people who doze and dream their whole lives, who might as well be asleep all the time. Yes, these people cannot wake up. We need to have the ability to fall asleep properly; but we must not have this ability to fall asleep properly too strongly. Otherwise we will sleep forever and never wake up again.

So we can say: we can distinguish certain conditions in people in three ways. Firstly, physically. On the one hand, we have the nervous system. This is constantly subject to hardening, to calcification. So we say:

You see, you are all already so old, with the exception of the only one sitting among you, that you must have calcified your nervous system a little. Because if you still had your nervous system today as you had it when you were six months old, you would all be crazy. You can no longer have such a soft nervous system. Those people who are crazy have a childlike nervous system. So we have to have the power of hardening, of calcification within us. And on the other hand, we have to have the power of softening, of rejuvenation. These two forces must maintain a balance.

If we look at the matter psychically, we can say that hardening corresponds to mental pedantry, philistinism, materialism, dry intellect.

We have to be able to see beyond all this. We have to be a little bit of a Philistine, otherwise we would be a Springing-ear. We have to be a little bit of a pedant, otherwise we would not even pick up our things properly. Instead of hanging our coat in the right closet, we would hang it in the stove or in the chimney. So being a little bit of a Philistine and a little bit of a pedant is all well and good, but it must not be too strong. Then we also have the strength in our souls for fantasy, for enthusiasm, for mysticism, for theosophy. If all these powers become too strong, then we become a fantasist, an enthusiast. We must not become that. But we must not lose all imagination either.

I once knew a person who hated all imagination, and he never went to the theater, for example, certainly not to the opera, because he said, “It's all not true.” He just had no imagination at all. Yes, but if you have no imagination at all, then you become a very dry subject, then you slink through life, not a real, true human being. So that must not degenerate again.

If we now look at it spiritually, we have the strength to harden when we wake up. When we wake up, we take our body firmly in hand and use our limbs. And the strength that is otherwise in the body in softening, in rejuvenation, we have in falling asleep. Then we sink into dreams. There we no longer have our body in hand.

You could say that people are actually constantly exposed to the danger of falling into one or the other, either into excessive softening or excessive hardening.

If you have a magnet, you know that the magnet attracts the iron. We say that we have two types of magnetism in the magnet. We also have positive magnetism and negative magnetism. One attracts the magnetic needle, the other repels it. They are opposite.

Not so in the physical, in the bodily, where we are not at all embarrassed about giving things names. We need names. I have now described something to you, physically, mentally and spiritually, that each of you can always perceive, always see, and be clear about. But we need names. When we have positive magnetism, we have to be clear that this is not the iron; this is inside the iron. Something invisible is inside the iron.

Anyone who does not admit that there is something invisible in the iron will say: “You are a foolish fellow! There should be magnetism in the iron inside? This is a horseshoe. I use it to shoe my horse. — Not true, such a person is an idiot who does not admit that there is something invisible in the iron inside, who shoes his horse with it. You can use this horseshoe for something completely different than for shoeing, if there is magnetism inside.

Now, in the same way, you see, there is something invisible, supersensory, in the hardening. And this invisible, supersensory, entity, which can be observed if one has the gift for it, is called ahrimanic. Ahrimanic are therefore the forces that would continually turn a person into a kind of corpse. If only ahrimanic forces were present, we would continually become corpses, and we would become pedants, completely petrified people. We would wake up all the time, we would not be able to sleep.

The forces that now soften us, rejuvenate us, bring us to fantasy, are the luciferic forces, these are the forces we need to avoid becoming a living corpse. But if only the luciferic forces were there, yes, we would remain children all our lives. So in the world we need the luciferic forces so that we are not already old at the age of three. In the world we need the ahrimanic forces so that we do not remain children all the time. These two opposing forces must be in man.

Now it is a matter of these two opposing forces having to be balanced. Where, then, does the balance lie? Neither of these forces should prevail.

You see, we are now writing, aren't we, 1923. The whole period from the turn of time until 1923 is actually such that humanity is in danger of falling prey to the forces of Ahriman. You only have to consider that today, wherever there is no spiritual science, people are educated in an Ahrimanic way. Just think, our children start school and have to learn things that seem very strange to them – I have already hinted at them – that they cannot possibly be interested in. I told you that they have always seen the father; yes, he looks like this, has hair, ears, eyes, and then they are supposed to learn that this (written): Father, is the father. It is completely foreign to them. They have no interest in it. And so it is with everything that children are supposed to learn in elementary school. They have no interest in it.

And this is the reason why we need to establish sensible schools where children can learn things that interest them. If teaching were to continue as it is today, then people would grow old very early, become old, because it is Ahrimanic. It makes people old. The way children are educated in school today is all Ahrimanic. It has been like this for nineteen hundred years, that the whole development of humanity is Ahrimanic. Before that it was different.

If you now go back, say, from the year 8000 to the turn of the century, it was different, people were exposed to the danger of not being able to grow old. There were no schools in the modern sense in those ancient times. There were only schools for those people who had already reached a respectable age and who were then to become real scholars. There were schools for them. In the old days there were no schools for children. They just learned by living. They learned from what they saw. So there were no schools, nor did anyone endeavor to teach children anything that was foreign to them. There was a danger that people would become completely Luciferian, that they would become fanatical, that is, Luciferian. And it was so. In those ancient times, there was much wisdom available, I have already told you that. But of course, this Luciferic had to be restrained, otherwise they would have wanted to tell ghost stories all day long! That was what people particularly loved.

So that one can say: from very ancient times, from about 8000 BC to the turn of time, was a Luciferic age, and then came an Ahrimanic age.

Let us now take a look at the Luciferian Age. You see, those who were scholars in those ancient times had certain concerns. Those who were scholars at that time lived in tower-shaped buildings. The Babylonian Tower, which is told to you in the Bible, is just one of these buildings. These scholars lived there. These scholars said: Well, we have it good here. We also want our imagination to run away with us. We always want to go into the ghostly, always into the Luciferian. But we have our instruments. We look out at the stars and see how the stars move. That reins in our imagination. Because if I look at a star and want it to go like that, it just doesn't go like that. So our own imagination is reined in.

So the scholars knew that they could let their imagination be tamed by the phenomena of the world. Or they had physical instruments. They knew: If I imagine that I have a very small piece of wood, heat it up a little, there will be a huge fire – I can say that in my imagination, but if I really do it, the small piece of wood will become a small fire.

So that was actually the purpose of these old educational institutions, to rein in the rampant imagination of these people. And the concern that these people had was that they said, “Yes, there are all the others now, but not all of them can become scholars!” And so they came up with the teachings, which were sometimes honest and sometimes dishonest. These are the old religious teachings, which are based entirely on science. Of course, the priests also went astray. And so the dishonest teachings - the honest ones have been partially, mostly lost - have come down to posterity. That was the restraint of the Luciferic.

And you know what the Ahrimanic element is. Today's science is moving more and more towards the Ahrimanic. In fact, all our science is something that makes us dry up today. Because this science, it only knows the physical, that is, the calcified, the material. And that is what is Ahrimanic in our whole civilization.

Between the two stands that which in the real sense we call the Christian. You see, gentlemen, the real Christian is too little known in the world. If one calls that Christian which is known in the world, then one would naturally have to fight the Christian, that is self-evident.

But the being of whom I also spoke to you last time, who was born at the turn of an era and lived for thirty-three years, this personality was not as people describe him, but he actually had the intention of giving such teachings to all people that would make possible a balance, an equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And being Christian means seeking this balance between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. You cannot really be a Christian in the way that people often call it today.

What does it mean, for example, to be Christian in the physical sense? To be Christian in the physical sense means that I acquire knowledge about the human being. The human being can also become ill. The human being gets pleurisy. What does it mean when he gets pleurisy? It means that there is too much of the Luciferic in him. If I know that there is too much of the Luciferic in him – if he gets pleurisy, then there is too much of the Luciferic in him – then I must say: if I have a balance (drawing $. 230) and it rises too sharply here, then I must take away the weights. If it sinks too low, I have to add weights. Now I say to myself: if a person has pleurisy, the Luciferic is too strong and the Ahrimanic too weak. I have to add something Ahrimanic, then it balances out again.

Let us assume, then, that I am saying to myself quite correctly: this person has pleurisy; how can I help him? I take, say, a piece of birch wood. Birch wood grows strongly in spring. Birch wood in particular is very good, especially when it is towards the bark; there are very good growth forces in the bark. I kill them, that is, I char the birch wood. Then I have birch charcoal. What have I made out of the fresh, ever-rejuvenating birch wood? I have made birch charcoal out of it; I have made Ahrimanic out of it. And now I make a powder out of this birch charcoal and give it to the person who has too much of the Luciferic in his pleurisy. Then I have added the Ahrimanic to what he has too much of the Luciferic.

You see, I have then created the balance. Just as I have to add something to the scales when they swing up too high on one side, so too have I added birch charcoal when there is too much of the Luciferic in the pleurisy. I have mineralized the birch wood by charring it. It has been made Ahrimanic.

Or suppose a person takes on such a tired, paralyzed appearance that I can say to myself: this person will be struck down soon. There is too much Ahrimanic in him. Now I have to give him something Luciferic to balance it out. What do I do in such a case?

You see, when I have a plant: there is the root. You know, the root is hard. It contains a lot of salts. That is not luciferic. The trunk and the leaves are not luciferic either. But I go further up, and there I have a smelling, a strong-smelling flower. It wants to get away, just as fantasy wants to get away, otherwise I would not be able to smell it at all. Now I take the juice from the flower. That is luciferic. Then I administer it in the right way, thus balancing out the ahrimanic, and I can heal him.

What does today's medicine do? Today's medicine, yes, it tries things out. A chemist comes up with the discovery of acetylphenetidine. I don't need to explain to you what that is; it is a complicated substance. Now one takes that into a hospital. There are thirty patients for my sake. You give all thirty patients acetylphenetidine, take the clinical thermometer, measure, note, and if something comes out, you consider it a cure.

But we have no conception of how things actually work in the human body. We cannot look inside the human body. Only when we know: in pleurisy there is too much of the Luciferic, so we must add the Ahrimanic; in apoplexy there is too much of the Ahrimanic, so we must add the Luciferic — then we have the right thing. That is what humanity lacks today. In this sense humanity is insufficiently Christian, because the Christian element is the element of balance. You see, I will show you what the Christian element consists of in the sphere of physical healing. The Christian element consists of seeking balance.

You see, that is what I wanted to show in this wooden figure, which is supposed to be under construction. At the top is Lucifer, the Luciferic, that is everything in man that is feverish, imaginative, asleep; and below is everything that wants to harden, the Ahrimanic. And in between is the Christ.

That is what brings one to what one should do in medicine, in natural science, in sociology, what one should do everywhere. And today it is just part of being human to understand how Luciferic and Ahrimanic is in human nature.

But what do people understand of these things? Once upon a time a very famous pastor in Basel, and even beyond, by the name of Frohnmeyer, a very famous pastor, presented a paper. He did not take the trouble to look at this figure, but he read in another paper, which perhaps had not been looked at either, but copied out, that there is a figure here, Luciferic at the top, Christ in the middle, and Ahrimanic at the bottom. There are three figures, one above the other, and, aren't there even more, Ahriman twice, Lucifer twice as well. But now this Frohnmeyer knew so well that he wrote: Steiner is doing something quite terrible out there in Dornach, a Christ figure that has Luciferian features at the top and animal characteristics at the bottom.

Now, the Christ-Figure has no Luciferic features at all, but a quite human head. But he has confused the two. He has believed, a Christ-Figure, which has Luciferic features above and animalistic ones below. — Now the Christ below is not finished at all, but is still a wooden block!

This is how this Christian pastor, who was striving for truth, described the matter, and now the whole world says that it must be true, because it is a pastor who wrote it! It is difficult to counter this when people do not want to understand. They always turn to the pastors because they believe what the pastors say. But here you have an example of slander that is so pathetic that you can't imagine anything worse than that.

And these people have strange views. Pastor Frohnmeyer wrote this. At the time he wrote this, Dr. Boos was still here at the Goetheanum. You know, Dr. Boos has a tendency to lash out. You may have your own opinion about whether you should lash out with a club or with a whisk. The whisk is softer, more luciferic, the mace is hard, more ahrimanic. So it depends on what you are supposed to hit. But now that he has told Frohnmeyer the truth, told the truth with the mace. Who gets a letter from Frohnmeyer? Me! I get a long letter from Dr. Frohnmeyer telling me to get Dr. Boos not to be so naughty to Dr. Frohnmeyer.

Just imagine what these people are capable of. It's unbelievable what they are capable of. They slander someone, as I told you, and then they turn to someone and say that action should be taken against the person who corrects the untruth!

That is precisely the difficulty, that the public, namely the bourgeois public, does not somehow make it convenient to see for themselves in these matters, but it is just accepted; because they are officially set up by the people concerned, it is right. That is why our civilization is so tremendously frivolous, so mean in many ways.

The point is that today's entire way of thinking must be brought into such a channel that one realizes again: with all this talk of Christianity, it is nothing, but one must take it factually. One must therefore know that medicine can become Christian if one knows, for example, the following. Let us say that someone shows very clearly that if a person has regularly eaten sugar, perhaps even as a child, they will develop liver cancer – this is the liver becoming Ahrimanic – and now one must know what to use against it: the corresponding Luciferic. Just as a person differentiates between warmth and cold, one must differentiate between becoming Luciferic and becoming Ahrimanic. If your limbs are numb, then you have become Ahrimanic. If you now apply warm compresses, warm cloths, then that is the Luciferic that counteracts it. And so, in all areas and under all circumstances, one must know what the human being is like. Then the medicine will become Christian.

In the same way, education and the school system must become Christian. This means that children must be educated in such a way that they do not become decrepit from an early age. So they must be introduced at school to things that are close to them, that they are interested in, and so on.

You see, if we look at it this way, then there is nothing superstitious about the use of the terms ahrimanic, luciferic, Christian. Rather than being something superstitious, it is something completely scientific. And that is what it is.

So how did this develop historically? Yes, it is true that from the earliest Christian times until the 12th, 13th century, even into the 14th century, Christians were forbidden to read the Bible. It was forbidden to read the New Testament. Only the priests were allowed to read it. The general believers were not allowed to read the Bible. Why? Yes, because the clergy knew that the Bible had to be read correctly. The Bible was written at a time when people did not think as they do today, but rather in images. So you have to read the Bible correctly. If people were to read the Bible without being properly prepared, they would notice that the Bible has four testaments: the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Luke, and the Gospel of John. Now, they contradict each other. Why do they contradict each other? Yes, gentlemen, you just have to understand it correctly. Even in the 4th or 5th century, a person who was not half-witted could see that they contradict each other.

But imagine that I have photographed Mr. Burle from the front and show you all the picture. Now, from the picture, you know Mr. Burle. Now someone comes along and takes a picture of him from the side, so that you see the profile, right? I show you this, and you would all say: “That's not Mr. Burle, he looks quite different; you have to look at him from the front, that's how he looks. But what you show me from the side, that's not Mr. Burle!” Yes, that is also Mr. Burle, but only from two different sides! And if I were to photograph him from behind, you would say, “But he also has a nose, not just hair!” But that is from different sides!

If you now “photograph” spiritual events from different sides, they will also look different. You just have to know that the Gospels describe from four different sides. Therefore, they must contradict each other, just as a picture of Mr. Burle from the front, from the side, from behind differs from each other.

But now the times have come when people have said: It is inconceivable that people should first have to prepare themselves in order to read the Gospels. Nowadays we prepare ourselves for nothing at all. We allow ourselves to be prepared at school, we allow ourselves to be trained; but once we have progressed beyond this training, after fourteen or fifteen years, there is nothing more to prepare, we must understand everything. Well, that is the normal view today.

Why should that not lead to people seeing that the Goetheanum is a place where not children are involved in preparation, but old, balding guys who still want to be prepared? Yes, a school that is not attended by children but only by old people must be a madhouse! — You see, that is what they say because they cannot imagine that people still want to learn something. And that is what we must realize: in order to read something like the Gospels, one must first be properly prepared for it, because it is meant to be pictorial. Just as if someone today wanted to read a Chinese document, he would first have to learn the letters. If you wanted to take the Gospels as they are written, it would of course be nonsense, just as Chinese writing is a scribble if you do not look at it properly. But if you understand things correctly, you realize that everything in Christianity is about learning to balance the Ahrimanic with the Luciferic in the right way, so that one does not dominate the other.

And that is why anthroposophy does not hesitate to speak of Christianity in this sense. It emphasizes that Christianity is not just about constantly mentioning the name of Christ and so on. That is what people criticize about anthroposophy: that it speaks so little of Christ. Well, I always say: Yes, you see, anthroposophy does not talk much about Christ because it knows the Ten Commandments. And you talk so much about Christ because you don't even know the commandment: You shall not speak the name of the Lord your God in vain.

If a Christian pastor preaches today, the name of Christ is uttered continually. One should only speak it when one really understands what it means! That is it, isn't it, that distinguishes anthroposophy from it, which really wants to be Christian in the right sense, but without superstition, without being sanctimonious, just really scientific, in this sense really only wants to be scientific. And in this way it also regards what took place between the old time, which was Luciferic, and the new time, which is Ahrimanic, it regards this event in Palestine as the decisive one for world history.

And when people will once again understand what actually happened on Earth, then I would venture to say that they will truly come to themselves. People are now beside themselves with their entirely external science. We will continue to talk about this next Wednesday at nine o'clock. That is what I wanted to say in response to the question. I believe that one can understand the whole thing.

To give you, gentlemen, a more complete picture, I would like to take a closer look at what actually happens in the human body every day during certain processes. For one can only understand higher processes if one really recognizes certain lower processes. Therefore, today I would like to look again at the whole process of nutrition, both from the physical, material side and from the spiritual side.

We eat; when we eat, we first put the food in our mouths. We enjoy solid and liquid food, we take in air through breathing, through the lungs. So we enjoy solid and liquid food. But we can only use liquids in our bodies. Therefore, the solid food must be dissolved into a liquid in the mouth. This is done in the mouth. This can only be achieved in the mouth, on the palate, because small organs, known as glands, are found throughout the palate and in the oral cavity. These glands continuously produce saliva.

So you have to imagine that there are such small glands, for example, on the side of the tongue. These are small formations that are arranged in such a way that, when you look at them closely under the microscope, they look like small grapes; they are composed of cells in this way. These glands secrete saliva. The saliva dissolves the food and permeates it. The food must be salivated in the mouth, otherwise it is no good in the human organism.

Now, an activity is taking place – this salivating, this permeation of the food with saliva – and we perceive this activity, we grasp it in taste. We taste the food during the salivating through the sense of taste. Just as we perceive colors through the eye, we perceive the taste of the food through the sense of taste.

So we can say: the food is mixed with saliva in the mouth and tasted. Through taste, we become aware of the food. And through the mixing with saliva, the food is prepared so that it can be absorbed by the other body. But there must be a certain substance in the saliva of the mouth, otherwise food could not be prepared so that it is then suitable for the stomach. There must be a certain substance in it. This substance is actually present and is called ptyalin. So the ptyalin is expelled from the salivary glands in the mouth. And this ptyalin is the substance that first processes the food so that it can be used by the stomach.

Then, through the esophagus, through the throat, the food that has been salivated and processed by the ptyalin enters the stomach. In the stomach, they must be processed further. For this, there must be another substance in the stomach. This is secreted by the stomach, produced. Just as saliva with ptyalin is produced in the mouth, so too is a kind of saliva produced in the stomach. Only this gastric saliva already contains a slightly different substance. The gastric saliva once again coats the food in the stomach. So we can say that instead of ptyalin, the stomach contains pepsin.

Now, you see, in the stomach of an adult human being, and even in that of a seven-year-old child, no more taste develops. But the baby still tastes the food in the stomach just as the adult tastes the food in the mouth. So you have to go to the soul of the infant if you want to see through the human being. The adult, at most, gets an idea of this taste in the stomach when the stomach is already a bit ruined and the story from the stomach goes down instead of up. Then a person already gets an idea that there is a taste in the stomach. I assume that at least some of you have already gone through this, that something that has already been in the stomach comes back up into the mouth, and they will know that it really tastes worse than anything or at least most of the things you eat. And what would taste like what comes back from the stomach, you would certainly not find extraordinarily tasty. You don't eat things that would taste like what comes back from the stomach. But the taste that is in the chyme that comes back must have formed. It forms in the stomach. Right, in the mouth the food is only pepticized; in the stomach it is enteropepticized. And the consequence of that is that it tastes different. Taste is a very complicated thing.

Suppose you are very sensitive and you drink water. In general, if it is not contaminated water, it will not taste bad. But if you let a lot of sugar melt on your tongue, and your tongue is attuned to it, you may find that the water tastes sour. Taste is a very individual thing. But the way an adult experiences it is not formed in the mouth, but in the stomach. Of course, a child does not feel or think yet, so it does not know taste in the same way that an adult knows the taste of something in their mouth. Therefore, the child must be given foods that do not taste too bad in the stomach. And that is precisely the mother's milk or milk in general, because the child is related to the milk, and it does not get a taste that is too bad in the stomach. It is born out of the body that can produce milk. So the child feels related to the milk. Therefore, the milk does not taste bad to it. However, if the child were to receive other foods too early, it would find them disgusting. Adults no longer do this because their taste has become coarser. But the child would find it disgusting because it is not related to them, because they are external foods.

Now, you see, from the stomach, after the food has been mixed with saliva in the stomach with the pepsin, the food goes into the intestines, into the small intestine, large intestine and so on, and the food pulp spreads out in the intestines.

I can write here by the stomach: childish taste.

If the chyme were to spread and nothing were to happen to it, it would become a hard, stony mass in the intestines and would destroy the person. But something else is done to this chyme.

What is done there is done first by a gland. In the mouth we have glands, in the stomach glands, and now there is a large gland behind the stomach. So when the stomach is there, behind the stomach, if you look at the human being from the front, there is a fairly large gland, and in front of this gland is the stomach. So this gland is behind the stomach. And this gland, which is called the pancreas, now in turn secretes a kind of saliva, and the saliva goes through fine channels into the intestines. So that the food is mixed with saliva a third time in the intestines. And the substance that is secreted in this pancreas is even transformed in the human being. First, the pancreas secretes it. There it is almost like the pepsin of the stomach. But then, on its way into the intestines, it changes. It becomes sharper. The food must now be treated more sharply than before. And this sharper kind of salivary substance secreted by the pancreas is called trypsin. So, we have the pancreas as the third. It secretes trypsin – at least it secretes something that becomes the pungent juice of trypsin in the intestines. This means that the chyme is secreted a third time. So something new happens to it again.

This can no longer be perceived by the consciousness of the human being in the head, as I told you last time, but what arises from the chyme is now perceived, tasted or felt by the liver and thought by the kidneys. So everything that happens in the intestines is thought by the kidneys and perceived by the liver. There is therefore a soul in the kidneys and liver, and it perceives in the same way as a person perceives through the head. Only he knows nothing about it. At most, as I told you last time, when he dreams; then the story comes to consciousness in a pictorial form. The way the chyme winds its way through the intestines like a snake, always mixing with the trypsin, has a stimulating effect, and in the dream the person perceives it as snakes. So what the person perceives is a transposition into an unclear, unclear soul life.

Now, the liver perceives the story with the ptyalin, pepsin, trypsin – I have to say it that way because, unfortunately, science has given things such awful names. And if you are already being received quite unpleasantly by science if one wants to explain things clearly, then science would be turned upside down if one wanted to give things new names; one could do it, but in order to avoid turning science upside down unnecessarily, one does not do it, continues to use the old names ptyalin, pepsin, trypsin. So it is the case that the substances are now being secreted by the saliva for the third time. And this is based on liver feeling (see diagram on page 104).

What this has to do with the liver feeling, gentlemen, you can understand by remembering what it is like – if you have ever done it – to bring a very sharp onion to your nose. Right, the tears come. If you bring horseradish to your nose, the tears come too. Why is that? It is because the horseradish or the onion acts on the lacrimal glands, and the lacrimal glands then secrete bitter tears. Yes, you see, gentlemen, the chyme that passes through the intestines is about the same as the onion or horseradish, and the liver secretes bile just as the eyes secrete tears. The onion must be perceived if it is to produce tears; it must be felt. So the liver feels this chyme and secretes bile, which is added to it. This is the fourth.

Now, after the mouth has worked through the ptyalin, the stomach through the pepsin, and the pancreas through the trypsin, the bile is added to the chyme in the intestines by the liver. And only then does thinking come through the kidneys.

When the chyme has been prepared in this way, with saliva four times, it then passes through the intestinal walls into the lymphatic vessels and from there into the blood. So we can say that an extraordinarily complicated life process takes place in the human body. From the mouth to the blood, the chyme is constantly being transformed so that it can be digested in the right way, not only by the stomach but by the whole human body.

But now this is done in a different way. You can tell yourself, if you think about it, gentlemen, if you were to do all of this in a chemical laboratory, even if you were a very clever professor, you would not be able to do it if you first had to chew the food with your mouth saliva, then with your stomach saliva, then with your intestinal saliva and finally with your bile! All this happens inside you, you do it all the time every day. But if you were to do it in a laboratory, you wouldn't be able to. Although people have brains, what happens in their stomachs in an understandable way is much more intelligent than people on earth are. And it is a very wise, very intelligent process that takes place there. You can't easily imitate it.

But you will have even more respect for this process when I describe its details. What does a person eat? A person eats plant substances, animal substances, mineral substances, and thus he gets very different substances into his mouth and his stomach and his intestines, which have to be converted, changed by the saliva.

Imagine you are eating potatoes. What does a potato consist of? The potato consists mainly of what you have in starch. You also know that starch is prepared from potatoes. So you actually eat starch when you eat potatoes. That is one of the first things you eat; we eat starch. There are many starch-like things. The potato consists almost entirely of starch, only interspersed with a few liquids, namely water. And that is why the potato looks the way it does – because it is alive, not dead. The potato is actually living starch. But that is why, as I have told you, it has to be killed. So there it is, pure starch. There is starch in all plants; whatever you eat from the plant kingdom – it contains starch.

What else do you eat? Whether you take it from the plant kingdom or from the animal kingdom, you eat protein. You eat protein in the ordinary egg; there you have it as it is, only slightly killed. But you eat protein that is added to muscle meat or plants. You actually eat protein all the time. So the second is protein and protein-like substances.

And the third thing you eat, which is different from starch and protein, is fat. Fats are different substances from starch and protein. There are fewer fats in plants than in animals. There are so-called vegetable fats. Man needs fats either from the vegetable or from the animal kingdom if he is to nourish himself properly. So fats are the third thing in what man takes in as food.

And fourthly, there are the salts. Man must always either eat food that naturally has enough salts or at least contains salts, or you know, people put a salt shaker on the table, and depending on the situation, they take the salt out of the salt shaker either with their fingers or with the small horn spoon or with the tip of a knife and add it to the soup or to the other food. This is eaten. We need this. It is the fourth thing that is eaten; I have to write salts because there are different salts.

All of this enters the intestines, and all of it is changed in the intestines.

Now, gentlemen, what comes out of all this? The fact that the food is well prepared by the saliva of the mouth and the saliva of the stomach means that it can be mixed with saliva in the intestines for a third time, and it does not harden, but it transforms, it becomes something else.

What does starch become? Starch becomes sugar. So when you eat starch, your stomach converts it into sugar. We don't need to eat sugar if we have it in us, for the simple reason that we make it ourselves if we produce enough of it. But it is the case with humans that they cannot make everything, even though human nature is very capable. And so it develops too little sugar, and in some people even far too little sugar. And then extra sugar has to be added to the food, or it is added so that what would otherwise be prepared by the intestines in normal life actually enters the intestines already prepared. And the intestines make sugar out of starch. This is a great skill.

One more thing: you know that people with weak stomachs do better when they eat soft-center eggs than when they eat very hard eggs. And what's more, if the eggs have already gone a bit stinky, they go bad even more quickly. The egg white is a good food, but if we put it into the intestines in a stinky state, this egg white would also go stinky and unusable in us. We cannot use the protein in our intestines as it is out there. This protein must also be converted, and above all, it must be dissolved. If you put it in water, it will not dissolve. Something completely different must be present for it to dissolve. And trypsin dissolves protein particularly well. So protein is converted into liquid protein.

And while liquid protein is being formed, something else is formed in the human organism; through the action of this intestinal saliva of the pancreas, something else is formed. As much fun as it is, alcohol is formed. Man develops alcohol within himself. You don't need to drink any alcohol at all; you have a source of alcohol within yourself. Alcohol is formed in the intestines. And when people become drunkards, it is only because their liver becomes too greedy. It is not satisfied with the alcohol that is produced in the intestines; it demands more alcohol, and that is how people become drunkards.

You see, people who knew this even cited it as a reason for drinking wine and beer. They said: There are those who are anti-alcoholic; but a person cannot be anti-alcoholic because he makes alcohol in his own intestines. — Well, but that does not, of course, justify the fact that you have to become a drunkard and drink too much alcohol. Because if you now drink too much alcohol, that is, give in to the liver in its greed for alcohol, then it becomes sick, then it degenerates through it all, proliferates. The liver must be active. The liver enlarges and the small glands become bloated. And when the liver has to work to produce bile, it does not produce proper bile. The chyme is not properly permeated with bile in the intestines. It enters the lymph vessels and blood vessels as improper chyme. This enters the heart and also attacks the heart. That is why people who drink too much beer have a diseased liver, one that looks very different from those who drink little or even those who limit themselves to the little alcohol in the human intestines, which in itself is actually enough. The degenerated liver and the degenerated heart are a result of excessive alcohol consumption. Hence the beer heart that a large number of the Munich population have. But the liver is also always degenerate. You see, you understand the degeneration and the various diseases when you look in this way at the various stages of the chyme in the organism.

Now I have told you what happens when the egg white is liquefied. Alcohol penetrates into the protein and prevents it from becoming stinky. You know that when you want to store something alive, you also store it in alcohol, because alcohol, as they say, preserves the thing. It can sustain itself. The protein can also sustain itself in the organism by being placed in alcohol by the organism itself. This is extraordinarily clever.

But the processes that take place are so delicate that a human being could not do all this. If, let us say, he wants to preserve some human limb or a small organism, to preserve a small creature, he puts it in alcohol and displays it in his scientific cabinet. But trypsin does this in a much more delicate and ingenious way in the human intestine; it breaks down alcohol and converts the protein into alcohol.

And what happens to the fats? Yes, gentlemen, the fats go into the intestines and are converted again by what is secreted by the pancreas, in combination with the bile. And two substances are formed from the fat. One of these substances is glycerine. You know glycerine from the outside, but you produce it inside yourself every day. The other substance is acid. So fats are broken down into glycerol and acids, all kinds of fatty acids.

And only the salts that remain similar remain unchanged; at most they are dissolved so that they are made easier to digest. But they actually remain as they are absorbed. So the salts remain salts (see diagram on page 106).

So, with the corresponding foods, we eat starchy substances, protein-like substances, fatty substances and salt substances. And after we have digested, instead of starch and protein and fat, we have inside us: sugar, dissolved, liquid protein, glycerine, acids and salts.

And what happens to what we have eaten? We have something completely different inside us than what we ate. We have truly transformed the story.

You see, there was a doctor here in Switzerland a few centuries ago – but he travelled a lot – whom science today rather despises, but who still had an idea of all these processes. That was Paracelsus. He was a professor in Basel. But the guys threw him out because he knew more than they did. He is still generally reviled today. He fell off a rock and smashed his head, despite being a very clever person. He spent the last years of his life in Salzburg. He was a doctor. If he had been an honorable citizen, a city councilor of Salzburg, as they say today, they would have remembered him fondly. But he was a person who knew more than the others. And so they said: He was a drunkard, was drunk and fell over the rock. - Well, that is the way of the world. So he knew something about the world and always pointed out in a strong way how there is a transforming power inside man. But that has been forgotten for centuries since that time.

And what happens to all that is inside? Here science again succumbs to a great illusion. You see, science says: All that is now being produced as sugar, liquid protein, alcohol, glycerine, fatty acids and salts, all that goes into the blood vessels and from there into the heart, and from the heart it is driven through the blood vessels into the rest of the organism. Of course, I would like to say, with the thickest that is still there – everything is liquid, but even among liquids there are thick liquids – but with the thickest that is still there, it can be so, and it is so: it passes into the veins and from there supplies the body. But, gentlemen, haven't you noticed that when there was a glass of water and you put sugar in the glass and then drank it, that it is not only sweet at the bottom where the sugar was? The whole glass of water is sweet, isn't it! The sugar, when it is liquefied, dissolves in all the water. And the same goes for salt. In that glass of water in there, there are no veins for the sugar or salt to enter from all sides, but it is absorbed.

Now, some time ago I told you that a human being actually consists of 90 percent water, or at least fluid. It is living water, but it is water. Now, do the substances that are there all need the veins to pass into the whole body? When sugar is made in the intestines, does it first need the veins to pass into the whole body? Man consists of water so that the sugar can spread through him.

Yes, people have said: If a person becomes a drunkard, then all the alcohol a person consumes goes through the intestines to the heart and from there to the entire body.

So we can say: the chyme, which now consists of sugar, liquid protein, glycerine, acids, salts, passes into the whole body; only the thickest part passes through the veins into the whole body. And so it happens that salts are deposited in the head, that salts are deposited in all the other organs, which do not pass through the Blur at all, but go directly into these organs.

Now, you see, if it were the case that a person would constantly feel all the salt that is deposited in his head, then he would have a constant headache. Too much salt in the head gives headaches. Perhaps you have heard of migraine. I have spoken about it here before. One can explain things differently at different levels. What is migraine? Migraine consists of the fact that this whole distribution is out of order and too much salt, namely uric acid salts, is deposited in the head. Instead of the uric acid salts being excreted in the urine, they remain in the head during a migraine because the other foods are not properly prepared and retain the salts. Migraine is not such a noble disease at all, although it is usually noble people who suffer from it. Migraine is a very nasty disease. That which should be secreted in the urine remains on the right side of the head because it is already deteriorating in the stomach. So that which works on the left side of the organism works on the right side of the head. I will show why this is so in the near future.

And so it happens that the story, which should actually go out through the urine, is deposited on the right side of the head.

How much salt can a person take? Well, remember what I told you before. Remember that I said: the brain water is in the head. The mere fact that the brain water is inside makes the brain so light that it can exist in the human being at all. Because a body that is simply in the air has a certain heaviness, a certain weight. But when we put it in water, it becomes lighter. If that were not the case, one could not swim. And you see, the brain, if it were not in water, would weigh about 1500 grams. I have told you this before: because the brain floats in water, it weighs only 20 grams. That's how much lighter it is; 20 grams is the only thing it weighs! But the more salts that are deposited in the brain, the heavier it becomes, because the salts increase the weight of the brain. It then becomes just too heavy due to the salts.

Now we can say: In humans, when salts are deposited in the brain, the salt is made lighter – the whole brain is made lighter (by the buoyancy). But now think about how this is different in humans than in animals. You have to imagine that the human being has his head set on top of his whole organism. There the head has a proper supporting surface. It is different with animals. The head does not have this supporting surface; instead, the head is directed purely forward. What follows from this? Well, in humans, the pressure exerted by the head, although it is very light, is absorbed by the body. In animals, it is not absorbed by the body. You see, this is the main difference between humans and animals.

Naturalists are always pondering how man has developed from animals. It is all very well to think like that, but you can't look at man that way. You can't say: the animal has so and so many bones, and man has just as many bones. The monkey has so and so many bones, and man has just as many. So it's all the same. You can't say that. In the case of the ape, the head still hangs over at the front, however upright it walks, even if it is an orangutan or a gorilla. Man is already designed so that the head sits on the body, so that the entire pressure is absorbed by the body. What happens there?

Well, something very peculiar happens. We have sugar, liquid protein, glycerine, acids, salts in us. The salts go from the stomach up to the head and are deposited there, and then have to go back again, going back through the body if there are too many of them. But with regard to the other substances, something else has to happen in the body. And there, while the substances are going up, a new transformation takes place. This happens simply because the body intercepts the force of gravity. Some of the substances become lighter and lighter, while another part settles as a thick substance. Just as when you dissolve something, a sediment also settles; so, as it were, sediment forms everywhere on the way from the stomach to the head; the finest parts go up and are converted by this gravity, which has been made lighter. And what is created when the lightest parts of the food, which go up to the head, are converted? A kind of phosphorus is created from the food. And it is actually the case that a kind of phosphorus is produced from the food, so that the food does not simply penetrate into the head. A lot of it penetrates up, sugar, glycerine and so on, all kinds of things penetrate up, but some of it is converted into phosphorus before it comes up.

You see, gentlemen, in our heads we have salts that have been absorbed almost unchanged from the outside world, and we have phosphorus that has been spread out in a finely dispersed state, actually much finer than air. And these are the main substances found in the human head: salts and phosphorus. The others are only there so that he can survive as a living being. But the most important ones are salts and phosphorus. So we can say: in the human head, the most important things are salt and phosphorus.

Now, in a way that I will show you in a moment, it can be demonstrated that if a person does not have the right amount of salt in his head, he cannot think properly. You have to have the right amount of salt in your head so that you can think properly. Salt in the head is what you have to use to think. This is in addition to what I have already told you about thinking. Things in man are just complicated.

And if we simply have too much phosphorus in us, that is, eat too fiery foods, then we become a terrible fidget who wants to attack everything, who always wants to want. Because we have phosphorus, the will is there. And if we have too much phosphorus, then this will starts to fidget. And if the organism is such that it sends too much phosphorus up into the head through its entire composition, then the person not only starts fidgeting and, as they say, fidgets around nervously in the world – this has nothing to do with nerves, but with phosphorus – but he starts raging and becomes a madman, becomes raving mad. We need a little phosphorus in us so that we can want anything at all. But if we create too much phosphorus in ourselves, we go mad.

Now gentlemen, just think about it, when someone gives you salt, how you make it think. I would advise you to take a salt shaker and try to make it think! You do it all the time; in your mind you do use salt to think. And then, please rub off a little phosphorus from a match, rub it off a little so that it becomes very fine, then light it at the bottom and try to burn it. It should now want to burn, that is, it should evaporate, but it doesn't want to! But you do this to yourself all the time. Do you not now say to yourself that there is something in you that is truly more intelligent than our stupid head, which can do very little, which cannot turn salt into a thinking being or phosphorus into a volitional being? And that is the part of us that can be called the soul-spiritual. That is the living, weaving, what can be called the soul-spiritual. It is in there inside of us, uses the salt in the head for thinking, and uses the phosphorus, which rises like a smoke, very fine, to will.

In this way, one passes from the physical to the soul and into the spiritual if one observes correctly. But what does today's science do? It stops at the belly. At most, it knows that sugar and so forth are produced in the belly; but afterwards it loses track of things as they spread out further, and knows nothing of what happens next. That is why science cannot tell us anything about the soul and spirit. This science must be supplemented and expanded. We must not limit ourselves to the stomach and think of the head only as something that is put on. But one does not see how salts and phosphor have come up. One believes that it is the same in the head as in the stomach. The whole thing depends on the fact that today's science only knows something about the stomach, but only that something arises there, but does not know that the liver perceives and the kidneys think. It does not know that either. It does not know that because it does not know anything about the head either. So it does not look for it there, and considers what is on the dissecting table to be the complete liver. But it is not the complete liver, because the soul has lost it when it was in the state in which it was simply cut out of the body. As long as the soul is inside, you cannot cut it out of the body. So you see that a serious science must continue where today's science must stop. That is what matters. That is why we built the Goetheanum here, so that science does not just know something incomplete about the gut, but can explain something about the whole body. Then it will also be a real science.

Yoga means striving for union with the source of divine truth. The one who strives for this is a yogi. A yogi must lead a certain way of life; in so doing, he seeks to open the source of truth within himself. Certain things that a yogi must strive for cannot be carried out in our [Western] life. But that doesn't make them any less true. Sometimes it is better to renounce than to not renounce in terms of development. For example, every killing takes a person back in development. The Hindu strictly adheres to this. He would not kill vermin, for example. But within our Western way of life, one cannot adhere to such a rule, even if it remains true.

Man achieves union with the primary source of divine truth by purifying his three bodies more and more.

In the Christian mystery, the mystic says to himself: “I should achieve union - the unio - with the Holy Spirit, the Word or the Son and the Father.” This is achieved by purifying the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body.

When the astral body is purified, then man can unite with the Holy Spirit.

If we want to form thoughts about the world, then there must be thoughts in it. The whole world must carry within it the plan that one subsequently thinks. The [creative] world thought is called the “Great Architect” by the Freemasons and the “Holy Ghost” by the Christians.

If you look at the world, you will find wisdom. The whole world, down to the last detail, is built by this wisdom. For example, a bone is so wisely [built] from infinitely fine beams that no engineer could even begin to imagine it. Everywhere you look, you will find the wisdom of the world, which we extract in our everyday thinking and in science. The ordinary person does not consider how to organize his actions so that they fit into the plan of the world. The yoga student transforms his drives; he consciously follows the laws of logic. Thus, his astral body no longer works against his ego, but his ego illuminates his astral body. In this way, he achieves catharsis. Then he becomes one with divine wisdom; this is the union with the divine spirit. Our astral then unites with the spirit of the world. This can only be achieved in stages, by going through certain meditations. He tries to live within himself by devoting himself in a certain way to exercises according to the instructions of experienced people.

The religions strive to fill man with thoughts that are independent of space and time. Our everyday thoughts are largely produced by the environment in space and time. Just think about how many of our thoughts have arisen from the fact that we live at a certain time, under certain circumstances, in a certain place, in a certain environment.

The union with the Holy Spirit or the World Tree Master is the first step of yoga that transforms our animal nature into a life of virtue. Man then imprints the eternal in the world through his actions, if he regularly, even if only a few minutes a day, occupies himself with thoughts of eternity. Even if the actions of the meditator and the non-meditator appear the same on the outside, everything that comes from a meditator has a completely different effect because something of the general world spirit flows into his actions.

The etheric body must also be transformed. It is also worked on alongside during the transformation of the astral body. The astral body can be transformed through great, ideal feelings, through immersion in great truths; but this does not go beyond the soul. But working on the etheric body goes beyond the soul. To achieve this, a person must study those things that are related to their external nature, for example, temperaments. Usually one of the temperaments prevails in a person. The melancholic person lets little affect himself from the outside, but he is very attached to these effects. The phlegmatic person also lets little affect himself, but he is not very attached to these effects. In the case of the choleric person, there is a strong influence [from the outside] and also a strong after-effect. In the case of the sanguine person, one also sees strong impressions, but no after-effects.

Only when we know ourselves well in this way can we begin to educate our temperament. The yogi must bring harmony to the four temperaments. This already reaches down into the etheric body. Much has been achieved by the person who, for example, is able to curb his attention through self-education. Much has been achieved by the person who has become a level-headed person out of an irascible person. (Usually, a person gives up the temperament he was born with even at death). One must delve into the way the temperaments work. The yogi studies them and also applies them. He is constantly striving to educate the missing aspects of his being. If you have managed to change your temperament, you have achieved a lot. If a person who is hot-tempered becomes harmonious in one lifetime, it is much more significant than if a person was harmonious all his life. With every change in lifestyle, a person acquires a bit of vitality. Some people cannot stand “working on their temper. But if he can endure it, he gains vitality and becomes younger at the same time. This also applies to the physical when he changes his way of life. If he can endure it, if he can successfully make such a fundamental change to himself several times, then he will also grow older in years, he will then become younger. This intervention in the inner being is a real rejuvenation process.

The etheric body is the carrier of life, [and when the human spirit works into this etheric body, it supplies it with spiritual powers, rejuvenating powers].

The yogi must regulate the life functions; he must do what evolution demands. Those who want to understand how to nourish themselves as yogis must take into account the connections with nature to some extent.

This also applies to their food.

We can observe various currents in the historical development of humanity. In the period from Augustine to Calvin, the inner life of Christianity attained great depth in mysticism. External science, on the other hand, stood still. It was an involution of science and an evolution of the mystical life. Then, starting with Copernicus, there began an involution of the mystical life and an evolution of science. Now an evolution of the mystical life has begun again. Thus life swings back and forth. Man has gone through such congestions and forward movements in his evolution. The first great congestion occurred when man entered into the Saturn existence. He came from a different development. He could have undergone a one-sided high development without this, but he would not have been able to reach the earth. The sun existence is then a progress of development; the moon existence is a congestion. The earth existence is an equilibrium.

On Saturn, man was a mineral being; that was a congestion. On the sun, he was vegetable; that was a furthering. On the moon, there was another congestion, and on the earth, the equilibrium. There, man must choose for himself whether he wants to remain in the congestion or whether he wants to develop further into new stages of existence. Everything that is animalistic, that originated on the moon wave, signifies a retrogression. Everything that is on the sun promotes progress. That is why eating plants has a beneficial effect. In contrast, animal food contains inhibiting lunar power. This is how man brings himself back.

Initially, as the earth developed, humans first repeated the earlier conditions on earth. There is a great difference between what is warm-blooded and what is cold-blooded in the animal kingdom. Warm-blooded animals are created by Kama working from within. Passion, or Kama, produces warm blood. In fish, on the other hand, Kama works from the outside as the World Kama. The fish egg is hatched by the sun. This is the case with all cold-blooded animals. The warm-blooded animals are the ones most closely related to humans. For those who aspire to purify their Kama, it is a good exercise to abstain from all warm-blooded animals. If they eat a piece of meat, they eat the whole animal. The Kama of the animal is undivided in every single piece of meat.

Before man had reached the stage of becoming warm-blooded, he warmed his body from the outside. In the case of lower animals, kama also acts from the outside. A fish is the expression of the whole world kama. When you eat a fish, you eat the whole world kama with it. He [man] then basically works against evolution because he associates himself with the blockages from the outside. He fraternizes with something that is tremendously inhibiting. It is similar with the consumption of eggs. They are shaped by the general Kama. With them, one absorbs the general Kama.

Favorable for the yogi, on the other hand, is everything that grows directly in the sun: grains, fruits, and so on. Less favorable is what thrives in the moldy earth, under the earth, including everything onion-like and garlic-like. Potatoes are also not among the beneficial things. The potato is a stem transplanted into the earth, a shoot from an older plant that grew above the earth. It only migrated into the earth with the later development of the earth. The leek-like plants grew on the moon, firmly rooted in the living things within. Mistletoe is also a harmful plant, a parasite. Some plants are just as harmful as lower animals, snails and so on.

[Mistel, which still today parasitically takes root on living things, is a remnant of the moon; also mushrooms that thrive on soil that still contains living things.

There are two natures in man, a lower and a higher one.

[So wrote Goethe:]

Two souls, alas! dwell in my breast:
The one wants to separate from the other:
The one, in its crude love of pleasure
Clings with clinging organs to the world,
The other forcibly lifts itself from the dust
To the realms of high ancestors.

Everything that belongs to the formation of warm blood, flesh, muscles, and bones is of a lower nature. Flesh, muscles, and bones are something that has hardened from the development on the moon. The development on earth should be an upward development. Therefore, man should only enjoy what is connected with it.

Everything in the animal that is connected with life itself, that belongs to the animal's life process, is beneficial, for example milk and everything that is prepared from it. From the occult point of view, milk, cheese and so on have a beneficial effect because they belong to the beneficial life process of the animal.

[Milk is therefore beneficial, also because animals give it up voluntarily. Some seek a substitute for meat, especially those who live as vegetarians because they do not want to kill. They eat plants that contain substances similar to those found in animals: they eat legumes. However, these are detrimental to occult development. They originate from the moon in that they are embedded in a shell. This separates them from the sun's energy and they tend towards hardening. Therefore, they are not favorable for occult development. Their consumption often has dire consequences. They make the dream life impure, it becomes desolate and confused. This can often be observed in vegetarians. But the vision of the higher worlds should begin with the vision in dreams. It is therefore desirable that this vision only allows pure, beautiful images to arise.

Roots also tend towards hardening. In contrast, anything that is bathed in sunlight is beneficial: flowers, leaves, fruits.

From the mineral kingdom, anything that separates out of mineral solutions as a sediment is harmful, for example, all salts. These should be avoided if possible.

Wine has only existed since the Earth cycle. It would have been impossible earlier. Everything that has the composition of alcohol disappears again in the future. Two thousand six hundred years ago, wine was a great rarity. Eight hundred years before Christ, the consumption of wine began. In the past, it was something extraordinarily rare. Eight hundred years before Christ, a new world cycle begins, the fourth sub-race of the fifth root race. In the previous races, the consumption of spirits played a minor role. In the first races, it was completely out of the question for them to drink wine. They knew that those who consume wine cannot go beyond the four principles that nature has given them. He cannot purify the astral body to such an extent that the manasic develops. The ancient Indians knew this; only the later Persians knew something about the enjoyment of wine. The enjoyment of wine was only really introduced in the fourth sub-race. In this race, man was to refrain from the higher principles. [His earthly personality was to emerge and be purified through man's own work.] He should purify his earthly personality. It was the education in Kama-Manas, the resurrection of the fleshly, the personal in Kama-Manas [- Noah - Melchizedek -]. In Christianity, the education of man was to emphasize the personality, the one life between birth and death. It was still natural for the Egyptian slave to return one day. The teaching of reincarnation and karma had to be excluded for a time, so that the valuable part of the personality, of Kama Manas, could come out. This is physically achieved by drinking wine. In Christianity, drinking wine is permitted.

Water is really the drink of him who wants to look up into the higher worlds, wine is the drink of him who does not want to look up into the higher worlds. The yogi must therefore refrain from drinking wine, because only then can he truly grasp the higher worlds. When a person begins to work on his etheric body, he must take himself in hand in this way.

The work on the astral body takes place, as it were, within the soul. The work on the etheric body is done by acting on the temperament and purifying the physical body. When man forces the etheric body under the power of his ego, then man becomes such that he absorbs into himself what works as [spiritual] substance in the world plan.

[Part of proper thinking is being able to reason logically. Coffee has the same effect in the digestive tract and on thinking [...]. It causes logically ordered thinking, but in a dependent way [...]. If a person wants to think independently, they must free themselves from the craving for coffee.

Erratic, unstable thinking is correlated with tea. It has a dispersing effect on the upper levels.

The question is what kind of person we should become. The organs that we have in common with predators should disappear; the organs that plants require should develop. Man should eat food that comprehends the meaning of his becoming. Not too much, but not too little protein either. Legumes contain too much protein. Those who eat them are overwhelmed by a lower mode of thinking. The vegetarian must at the same time acquire a spiritual mode of thinking. Comprehend nature in its becoming! [...]

The significance of the Lord's Supper: to move from the nutrition of dead animals to that of dead plants. This is to be replaced by a nutrition that does not kill the life in the plants [...]. At the end of the fifth cultural epoch, no animal products will be consumed anymore. Through Christ, the physical body is being killed in the entire human race. In the middle of the sixth root race, there will be no more physical bodies. Then the human being will be ethereal. Then the human being will produce mineral nutrition in the laboratory.

At the end of the Atlantean era, everything that produces egoism will be done. In the sixth cultural epoch of the fifth root race, the I will again come to higher development. Meditation:

I break the pride of the Philistines
And tear the bloody flesh from their mouths
And the abominations from their teeth
Surely your King will enter with you.
He is just, full of victory and humility
And he rides on a donkey
On a young foal of the she-donkey.

Hosiana [...]

The Lord will help him
Like precious stones they will
Rise up on his soil.
For what good things do they have
And what beauty do they have:
Grain that makes the young men [...]
And must [...]
That makes the maidens bloom.

[Sach 9,6-17]

Blood of plants, which retains vegetative blood and milk. ([Soma] was an intoxicating drink among the Indians made from rice).]

Thought is the substance that flows to us through becoming word. [Through the word, one person can communicate to another what lives substantially in each of them as thought.] The air wave is only the form for this substance. Imagine this applied to the world. At first, everything there is in outer forms: minerals, plants and animals. The divine word corresponds to the outer world. This divine Word resounds in the world, and the forms of things arise.

In the divine soul rests the hidden Father-thought. Then it streams out as the divine Word [the second Logos]; then the divine Word becomes the forms of things. We understand the spirit as the form of things; but the Word itself is within the forms. [It is also in the human form.] The union with the Word, which the yogi strives for, takes place during the transformation of the etheric body. [The yogi strives to experience the Word of the creative deity in the living currents of his etheric body.] Then he becomes a chela. Then he hears the Logos resounding in all things with his etheric body. This is the union with the Son.

The third stage is the union with the Father. This is the stage of mastership. [Then man can himself continue to build upon his physical body.]

The great principle the yogi has in view is one: the union with the Father. He says to himself: In so far as you become similar to the Godhead, you approach the Godhead.

[This happens first through the purification of the astral body. Through this, he achieves the unio mystica, the union with his divine self. Then he strives further. He experiences union with the Son by experiencing world thinking and world feeling through his transformed etheric body. And finally, the last thing is that man experiences union with the Father and thus consciously works on his physical body. That is the great perspective, the work of the human being for the future of the human race.

Supplement from the transcript by Camilla Wandrey

Thus, yoga is the path to higher knowledge, and also to participation in the higher worlds in general. Yoga means union with the divine source of existence, with the spiritual sources of the world. The yogi develops the powers within themselves to penetrate into these worlds of origin. He seeks the sources of knowledge that come from spiritual life itself. Anyone who wants to become a yogi must, without fail, acquire a belief in the higher development of the human race. This is not a blind faith, but an active belief that it is possible to go beyond the present state of the human race, that forces within human nature can be developed that have not yet been expressed and are waiting to be developed. Yoga is a path that consists largely of abstinence and requires patience and endurance. In today's cultural life, it is indeed difficult to achieve yoga. That is why the theosophical movement was necessary.

One may ask how long it takes to achieve yoga. That depends on the person striving for yoga. It can take incarnations, it can take seventy years, seven years; there are people who achieve it in seven months, seven weeks, even in seven hours. It depends on the stage of existence at which a person finds himself. Often he can be further than he realizes. He may already be inwardly capable of exercising his willpower and mental powers in higher worlds. It may also be that someone in a previous incarnation was much further along than he has come today. In this life, it may not have emerged through the conditions of physical life, which was already within him. The previously acquired powers must then be brought out again through the powers of the present life. For example, someone may have been a wise priest with a magical will, and this would now have to be brought out in a later incarnation. But perhaps the brain development in the later incarnation is not so far advanced as to make this possible. Perhaps other powers are also lacking. Perhaps love and kindness are missing. Then the earlier powers cannot be brought out again, and it takes longer for some people and shorter for others until yoga is achieved.

Above all, it is necessary to develop an inner life that is as intimate as possible, in order to explore what is within us. We must distance the concept of yoga more and more from what is externally tumultuous. Yoga must take place entirely in the seclusion of the inner life.

Higher spiritual qualities should never be developed without strengthening the character at the same time. Just as a blue liquid and a yellow liquid, when mixed, produce a green liquid, so are the spiritual and physical powers of man united. When the spiritual is brought out, the physical nature remains behind, as it were, as a sediment. Much depends on these remaining properly mixed. It is through this that man becomes a particular man, that this higher nature is connected with the lower nature. In the yogi, the higher nature is withdrawn, and all those qualities that are bad in man then come to the fore if absolute character development does not go hand in hand with it. If you strive for yoga, you must always be prepared to face the strangest things in life. These were, for example, the temptations of St. Anthony. When you seriously begin to do yoga exercises, you have to be prepared for the lower nature to come out. Some people who have been truthful up to that point begin to lie, to cheat, to become unreliable. This happens if the yoga student is not required in the strictest sense to constantly strengthen his character. That is why the greatest emphasis is placed on the development of morality in the old, genuine yoga schools. Annie Besant says: spiritual training without morality can only lead to wrongdoing.

The yoga training consists of bringing certain things that a person would otherwise do unconsciously into consciousness. In this way, the student brings the unconscious breathing process into consciousness. The Hatha Yoga training places the greatest emphasis on this process from the outset. However, it only leads to a certain point in development. It breaks off at the realization of the astral. That is why man should not follow the path of Hatha Yoga, but that of Raja Yoga. This leads the disciple, if followed correctly and with earnestness and perseverance and devotion, into the highest spiritual worlds. In the Raja Yoga school, a process such as the breathing process is seen as part of the whole. Many other things that we do unconsciously must be brought into consciousness.

The thought process is largely ignored. We must learn to follow the inner process of thinking with attention. This is only possible through complete calmness towards the outside. No thought from the outer world must be in the soul. And then we must bring thoughts into this calmness ourselves and focus all our attention on a specific thought.

It is best to devote yourself to a thought that contains strength. To consciously devote yourself to such a thought in complete outer seclusion, to immerse yourself completely in it, that is meditation. The disciple must repeatedly live intimately with such thoughts, resting completely on them in all silence. It is difficult for a European man of culture to immerse himself in such a concept for a long time. But the yogi must do so. In this way he develops powers in his soul that were not there before. These powers arise from the unconscious depths of the soul when we rest so quietly in ourselves in a thought. The thoughts of ordinary life call upon the soul for various emotions. But one must learn not to be led by the soul's powers, but to lead them. One must learn to hold back an arising outburst of anger. We must maintain complete mastery and control over our inner selves. This is achieved through this silent devotion to thoughts that contain forces.

Each exercise requires a counter-exercise to prevent one-sided overdevelopment from leading to deformity – as in gymnastics. The so-called secondary exercises are very important.

For meditation it is necessary:

1. To fix a thought of strength in the soul - concentration.
2. To identify oneself with the thought.
3. To remain in it for a time in complete calm.

The regulation of the breathing process is connected with such training of thought. If it is tackled alone, it is Hatha Yoga; if it is a part of the other training, it is Raja Yoga. The seven degrees of the Persian initiation are based on this: Raven, Occultist, Warrior, Lion, Persian, Sunrunner, Father.

Sun runners were those who had made their lives a very rhythmic one. In this way, the human being integrated his thinking, feeling and soul life into the natural process. Everything in nature lives in rhythm: the sun, the moon, the wandering stars go or come in a certain rhythm. Plants and animals are connected to the seasons in a very specific way. Everything that lives outside lives in rhythm; life is based on rhythm. In the case of human beings, however, everything has become arbitrary, the arbitrariness of the astral body. It makes life unrhythmic. The human being must make it rhythmic again, because rhythm generates strength and life. Therefore, the yogi must meditate every day at a certain hour.

If he meditates at seven o'clock today and tomorrow at eleven o'clock, then again one day not at all, the rhythm is disturbed. But if you decide to say a prayer every day at seven o'clock, then one at twelve o'clock and another one before going to bed, then these are fixed points that bring rhythm into your life. Part of the rhythmization of life is the rhythmization of the breathing process. This is connected with the deep things that exist between a person and the whole universe.

In a sense, plants and human beings belong together. Human beings breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. In the case of plants, it is the other way around. They release oxygen and, from the carbon dioxide that human beings exhale, they form their bodies by retaining the carbon. Apple trees, for example, need children to play around them. There is a connection between plants and human nature. The plant grows rhythmically according to natural laws. It is chaste through and through, since it does not yet have astral life within it. Thus, on the one hand, it is higher than man, but on the other hand it is lower. It stands as an ideal before the yogi. He must become similar to it by rhythmizing the breathing process.

The yogi knows that one day the human being will be able to absorb the plant existence within themselves, to carry out within themselves the process that they now leave to the plant. This means that he will retain the carbon in himself and consciously build his body with it. Man will develop an organ in himself through which he will prepare oxygen for himself, so that he does not need to take it from plants. He combines this oxygen with carbon to form carbonic acid and then stores the carbon in himself again. In this way he will later build his own body structure, as plants do today. His body will consist of transparent, clear, soft carbon. In this way he transforms his body into the “philosopher's stone”. This is a future perspective that the yogi already anticipates today through his rhythmic breathing process, which he carries out according to the instructions of his teacher. He breathes in rhythmically and holds his breath for longer. In this way, one develops carbon in oneself – and thus approaches the nature of plants by using it to build one's body. The yogi gradually unites with the divine source of existence, becoming a co-creator of the world. He experiences new worlds.

When we sleep, we cannot hear the most beautiful music. It is there; we do not perceive it. In this way, the human being is asleep with respect to the higher worlds. And just as there is waking up to the melodies of this world, there is waking up in the spiritual world through the rhythmic breathing process.

When you consciously invest your entire soul life in the breathing process, then imaginative knowledge begins. Ordinary life brings us material knowledge through the senses of the physical body. Imaginative knowledge consists in our being able to awaken images in the soul that are not mere visions, but that are grounded in the source of existence. The outer world also only stimulates images in our soul, ideas that correspond to it. Images that arise through the yoga process stimulate the inner being in the right way. In the right way, that is to say: truthfully. They correspond to the truth that permeates the world and is wisdom. But to do that, a person must be true within. That is the difficulty in the training of yoga. As long as a person has personal desires, he cannot distinguish truth from untruth in the higher world. That is why there is a constant need to become selfless, to renounce everything personal.

The Pythagorean disciple was told: Only when a person is no longer concerned about whether he is still alive or not, can he learn something about life after death. All personal desires must be eliminated. When personal desire is eliminated within, wisdom expresses itself and the wisdom that permeates the world can shine in. Man then comes to imaginative knowledge.

The third stage is that of the rational will; and the fourth stage is that of [intuition]. The third stage involves the complete restraint of what is in us as desire, urge, craving, passion, through the strengthened will. As long as one does not completely master this, one only makes the truth illusory.

One must develop absolute inner calm, patience, endurance, steadfastness. One must never lose the indispensable harmony with one's surroundings. If the wisest person were to fall asleep here, he could not receive anything there with his wisdom. He would be considered insane. All madness is a lack of harmony with one's surroundings. Then one cannot progress when that happens. One should not become a drunken person, but a sober one, says Plato, and that applies to the person who strives for yoga. He must not neglect his daily duties in any way. This is absolutely necessary for the practice of yoga. And in this it is important to develop modesty. Only under the influence of the highest modesty can one speak of the higher worlds in the right way. An inner high degree of humility must go hand in hand with the yoga training. The oriental student has an easier time in the respect and esteem of other people; the western student has a harder time of it. But a lot depends on this. It is also necessary to have the most profound trust in the teacher. This is necessary because one must have a fixed point. The yoga student, in a sense, leaves the whole rest of the world. His relationship to the world changes, is reversed, so to speak. All things take on a new meaning. He becomes alienated from his surroundings, all things change; a certain spiritual alchemy takes place in him. Now he must do everything the physical world demands of him out of a certain inner sense of duty. He must find a completely new point of view towards it. If the yogi does not develop full strength of character in this, then he can easily lose touch with his surroundings. That is why the teacher is the fixed point for him. In the East, the guru regards the teacher as the embodiment of the divine in man. In reality, divine beings are truly present and active in the higher human nature that the teacher must have developed. It seems obvious to the Oriental that there is a higher being in the guru. This is not the case in the West. When someone in the West undergoes the yoga training, they also find the opportunity to reach their goal through their inner trust in the teacher.