The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As we are meeting together here for the first time today, let us speak of some intimate concerns of our spiritual science. We will discuss what concerns the evolution of the human individuality at first in somewhat general terms and next time in detail. We can understand the life of a single individual only when we also know the epoch in which he lives. The human soul evolves through the ages, progressing from one incarnation to another. The soul's faculties today are not the same as in earlier times. Human faculties have reached the point today at which human beings can perceive the world of the senses and can think it through inwardly. Before this epoch it was completely different, because human souls still possessed a certain dreamlike clairvoyance, one could say.

At that time, a person would not have been able to develop his consciousness of self, of his I. The ancient, dreamlike clairvoyance had first to disappear; he had to be limited to the world of the senses to be able, by means of a growing capacity for discernment of physical appearances, to arrive at the consciousness of his own self. In the future, he will win back the clairvoyance he once had and will at the same time be able to hold onto his self-consciousness.

This evolution has proceeded slowly and continuously; nevertheless, we can indicate the exact moment when the conscious condition of physical, sensible perception began. It was the year 3101 before Christ's appearance on earth. Until that time, there existed a natural clairvoyance. Then it gradually began to disappear, and the dark epoch called the lesser Kali Yuga began, in which the human soul could no longer perceive the spiritual world.

Let us imagine now the state of human souls at the onset of that dark epoch. In remembering past epochs, the human soul might say, “I once could behold spiritual beings; I could see into at least a part of the world where the ancient Rishis and Zoroaster were teachers, and I could listen to those great leaders and masters of old; I could hear the great leaders who spoke to me from the wisdom that arises from the spiritual world.” This feeling, however, became ever weaker in those souls.

Three thousand years after the beginning of that dark epoch, a new possibility arose for a human being to unite himself with the spiritual world. This possibility lay in the fact that a person could achieve union with the spiritual world through his I; that is, it was possible for him to perceive the spiritual world even though human perception was limited to the senses. It was through the incarnation of Christ that this possibility arose. All other great world leaders incarnated in such a way that their spiritual being united with an astral body. When we attempt to understand the essence of the Bodhisattvas, we find that their spiritual portion, which worked on earth, raised itself into higher worlds and was linked only to the astral body. In Christ alone do we find a divine-spiritual being in direct connection with a physical body. This means that the I of Jesus abandoned his physical, etheric, and astral sheaths, and the Christ incarnated Himself as the I within those sheaths so that the I of every human being can have a connection with the Christ. Consequently, we see that in earlier ages the great leaders of humanity could be so perceived that one could reach an understanding of their bond with the spiritual world only through pictures. Now, however, in contrast, the whole biography of Christ consists of facts that could come to expression in the physical world. In other words, the Christ event can be grasped with our intellect, with our physical mind. God had to descend to the physical world because the human faculty for perception could no longer raise itself above the world of the physical senses. For this reason came the mighty prophecy of John the Baptist that the disposition of the human soul must change so that the kingdom of heaven can draw near.

In earlier times one could approach the kingdom of heaven to some degree through human clairvoyance. Now one had to find it in Christ Himself through the medium of the senses. In order that humanity should not lose its link with the spiritual world during the dark age of Kali Yuga, Christ had to descend to the physical plane. The Dark Age lasted more than 5,000 years. We are living in the important time of the end of Kali Yuga. Since 1899, the Dark Age, which began in 3101 BC, has already run its course, and since then certain faculties of soul have slowly begun to develop that have not yet been recognized by human science. In this twentieth century of ours, new faculties of the human soul will gradually evolve in a portion of humanity. Before the end of the century, for instance, it will be possible to perceive the human etheric body. Another faculty will be to look inward and behold, as if in a dream, the picture, the counterpart, of a deed one is about to perform. Certain persons endowed in a particular way will have still another experience. What Paul experienced at Damascus, which was a personal experience for him, will become common experience for a certain number of people.

One can perceive the significance of this event in the twentieth century from the following. Paul could learn about everything that had happened in Palestine without its changing him from Saul to Paul. His condition of soul was such that he could not be convinced that the Christ lived in the man from Nazareth. At the event of Damascus, he could say for the first time with his clairvoyant consciousness: Christ exists! The people who will experience the event of Damascus in the twentieth century will receive direct knowledge of Christ. They will not require documentary evidence in order to recognize Christ, but they will have direct knowledge, as is today possessed only by the initiates. All the faculties that today can be acquired by means of initiation will in the future be universal faculties of humanity. This condition of soul, this experiencing of soul, is called in esotericism the “second coming of Christ.” Christ will not be incarnated again in a physical body, but He will appear in an etheric body as in the street near Damascus.

Christ incarnated on the physical plane when humanity had become limited to the physical body. We can repeat today the words of John the Baptist, “Repent! for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (“Change the disposition of your soul so that your own faculties open the spiritual world to you.”) Human beings with etheric clairvoyance will thus behold the Christ appearing before them in an etheric body. The faculties I have just described are lying like seeds in the soul. In the future they will be developed, and one will be able to say that the destiny of a person lies to a certain extent in his own hands. When this etheric vision appears, however, it will be necessary for people to know the significance of these faculties. It will be impossible then to fall back into materialism as people do today. One will not be immediately aware of the faculties when they appear, and those who possess them will even be regarded as sick or deluded by fantasy. It is therefore the mission of spiritual science to prepare human beings for the understanding of such faculties. Communicating the fundamental wisdom (Ideale) of spiritual science thus is not optional but is a necessary measure for the evolution of humanity.

What we have said will often be repeated in the years to come, but it is vital that it be understood correctly. It is possible that materialistic tendencies will penetrate the Theosophical Society, (see Note 6) even to the point that one will believe that Christ will take on a material body when He comes again. If this were to be the case, one could assert that humanity has made no progress at all in the last 2,000 years. Christ appeared 2,000 years ago in a physical body to be perceived by the physical senses. For future clairvoyance He will appear in an etheric body. By means of spiritual science we are preparing ourselves to understand the significant era ahead of us. To be anthroposophists, it is not enough to understand anthroposophy in a theoretical way; we must bring it to life within ourselves. It will be necessary to observe this great event with complete exactness. There will be ambitious persons who try, out of the materialistic direction of theosophy today, to profit for themselves by making believe that they are the Christ, and they will find people who believe them. For the true anthroposophist, it will be a test to arm himself against such attempts and, instead of debasing human feeling in such a way, to raise it up to the spiritual worlds. Those who understand anthroposophy in the right way will say to these false messiahs of the twentieth century: you have announced the appearance of Christ on the physical plane, but we know that Christ will manifest Himself only in an etheric form. True anthroposophists will await Christ's appearance to the higher senses. A person must, before his death, have understood the true significance of this second coming of Christ; then, in the life between death and a new birth, this understanding will open his spiritual senses. Those who will not have these faculties, who have not been able on earth to understand the significance of Christ's second coming, however, must await a new incarnation to be able to acquire this understanding on the physical plane.

We are living in an extremely important epoch. We must characterize the event of Christ's second coming, which will be perceived by clairvoyant human beings. We can characterize this event by directing our attention to the cosmos and by alluding to an event that is approaching in our own day. This event is the appearance of Halley's Comet (see Note 4) which is also an important subject of study in Rosicrucian theosophy. The appearance of this comet is connected with events in the spiritual world. Just as the movements of the planets circling the sun correspond to the regular events in the evolution of humanity, so the appearance of a comet corresponds to an influence that runs counter to the regular events. Rosicrucian research has demonstrated that every comet exerts a particular influence on human evolutions. (see Note 7) The present comet has as its particular influence an intense impulse toward materialism. Every time Halley's Comet has appeared, a new impulse toward materialism has taken place. Its appearance in 1759 corresponded with the epoch in which Voltaireanism was at its high point. The appearance in 1835 corresponded with the materialism of Moleschott, Büchner, and others. (see Note 5) In the same way, in our time there will be a new impulse toward materialism, and the outer sign of this is the appearance of the comet. Those who let themselves be swayed by its influence will fall into the deepest materialism.

Today, not only this impulse exists, but there is also another influence, which is to raise humanity to spiritual heights. This will be observed by those who understand the signs of the times. In the macrocosm, the sign for this influence is the fact that the sun at the vernal equinox has entered the sign of Pisces, the Fish. At the time when Christ appeared, the sun was in the sign of Aries, the Ram. The sun began to enter this sign in about 800 BC and was well into Aries at the time of the event of Golgotha. Now the sun has been in the sign of Pisces for several centuries. In the near future it will have advanced so far in this sign that it will be the outer symbol for the appearance of Christ in the etheric body. You will see, therefore, that anthroposophy does not expound to the world theoretical teaching but rather that the signs of the times have given us the task of teaching anthroposophy. In the West this message has been foreseen for many centuries by those who call themselves Rosicrucians. (see Note 7) Among the Rosicrucians, a Fifth Gospel is taught beside the four that are well known. It is through this spiritual gospel that the other four can be understood, and it will be given to a portion of humanity of the twentieth century, just as the others were given on the occasion of the physical appearance of Christ. Those adherents to the Rosicrucian movement who will have a clear consciousness will understand the significance of this Fifth Gospel for humanity. (see Note 8)

If you will become attentive to Rosicrucian theosophy, your striving will be able to enter into the spirit of the progress of humanity, so that it will become possible to understand the Christ Who is to appear in a new form. The time is at hand when we will be able to recognize the Christ directly, even if, though this is unlikely, all the Gospels as printed documents should be lost.

One can speak about these things only in a circle where a preparation exists that has been acquired not only through theoretical learning but through continuous breathing of the air of our group life. In public lectures one must observe certain boundaries, but in this group we breathe such an air that these great truths could be spoken of tonight. Our souls, however, should not be satisfied merely with the expression of such truths in words but should gain from them the strength for daily work, a light that will stream daily into ordinary life, and a strength for the future. One must become wiser through truth, but one must also speak ever more courageously of the truth, as of a spiritual blood that we wish to allow to flow into our feeling and will.

When the patriarchs are spoken of and their age is given in huge numbers, then we have to understand that these so-called patriarchs must be seen as representatives of tribes. The Bible students had been doing this for a long time, but they did not know what was actually behind it. If we now remember the lecture “Blood is a Special Juice”, we find a special application of the word “consciousness”. Those who firmly believe that there is development must also admit that everything is in development, including consciousness. The consciousness that we have today was not always there; it developed out of another consciousness that was dim and dream-like, that lived in images in people. This kind of consciousness, which was dull and clairvoyant at the same time, was dependent on a very specific fact. In those days, people lived in small communities. All nations, in whose distant origin we delve, show the same thing. The further back we go in the history of civilization, the smaller the communities of people become. It was considered immoral to marry outside of these small communities. It was only later that this principle of close marriage was interrupted by the principle of distant marriage, and it is with this interruption that the development of the dim consciousness to the present rational consciousness begins. In the members of those ancient tribes a very different memory lived; what the father and grandfather experienced lived in the son as if he himself had experienced it. The ancestral powers passed down through the blood of these tribes, which were united in close blood ties, to such an extent that the descendant remembered the events of his ancestors as if he had experienced them himself; that was in the blood, which rolled through generations. The son remembered and said: I have experienced this - what father and grandfather, etc., had experienced. As long as this I - this tribal I - was preserved, one spoke of the same entity with the same name. It is Adam, the continuous I of Adam, it refers to what is inherited through many generations from Adam, not the person of Adam.

Likewise, we must understand the passage where it says, “Enoch, the man of God, disappeared from the earth.” (Genesis 5:24) This does not mean that he dissolved into vapor and mist, but “Enoch” means one of those common “I”. This is dissolved by him becoming the man of God, that is, the one who devotes himself to the spirit, who gives up having offspring, who devotes himself in a kind of asceticism and therefore disappears, since he does not live on in the son and has given what runs in the blood.

Those who believe in the Bible today have no real idea of what the relationship to the Bible was in ancient times. For the ancients, the Bible was the “Word of God”; they knew that those who wrote it were initiates inspired by divine wisdom, and the more they believed that only truth could come from the divine spirit, the more each word of the Bible was sacred to them as the outpouring of that divine spirit, which revealed itself to them through these inspired men. For today's man, it is difficult to put oneself in this reverent frame of mind, which did not criticize this inspired wisdom at all.

It is only natural to see that the modern man must criticize, but we ask ourselves: How is it possible that through the centuries truly not stupid minds, who had these books in their hands, did not also criticize, why they did not also, for example, subject the differences that the four gospels show to this criticism? Are we to imagine that those few who had the Bible in their hands before the invention of printing did not see what today's critics see and from which they draw doubts about the authenticity of the Gospels? They saw these differences, but they knew how they came about. They knew that at this momentous historical moment, in the founding of Christianity, the sequence of initiation had been drawn down onto the physical plane and completed in the Mystery of Golgotha. From then on, the “Son of Man” could undergo this on the physical plane, that is, the one who had developed the consciousness of the general in himself. The Son of Man brought the secret of initiation into the physical world, and the life of these initiates had to be described in such a way that it was a reflection of the old canon of initiation in the old mystery schools, the old temple sites. This canon of initiation was fixed in this area in one way, in another area in another, but you can see the initiation mode of the old initiation schools shining through it.

The physical life of Christ Jesus, as described in the four Gospels, really did unfold as the life of a disciple in the ancient mystery schools; we see in the four Gospels only the various forms of the initiation canon as it was established by the different schools of initiation. There are small deviations, but one whole, one single stream runs through all four. The Jesus Christ, the only Son of Man, presents this mighty sentence in the physical life, living it in the physical body: that life conquers death! What the initiate experiences in his etheric body, Jesus Christ experiences on the physical plane. The symbol has become outer reality, has become an historical fact. In these three days, in which the Christ is dead, spiritual science sees carried out onto the physical plane that which the initiate experienced in the depths of the crypts. When he then awakened to life in his physical body again, when he, having returned from the spiritual worlds, was able to bear witness to their reality, when he had become a proclaimer of the spiritual worlds, then, in the exuberance of these high and holy feelings, the words that Christ Jesus also spoke on Golgotha broke free from his soul: “My God, my God, how have you glorified me!” — “Eli, eli, lama...” (Matthew 27:46, cf. Psalm 22:1; Mark 15:34) The word “forsaken” is not to be used; it is an incorrect translation. These words, “My God, My God, how have You glorified Me!” were the words of each one when he awoke from this three-day sleep, when he had experienced that life in the spirit conquers death.

The principle of initiation before Christ was different from today's. Only the chosen were admitted to the mysteries, from which the schools on the one hand and the churches on the other later developed. The teachings were oral, and in the mystery schools, once admitted, the student was subjected to a very special rhythm of life, which he had to integrate into his life. This rhythm, given in the ancient initiation canon, was fixed and unchangeable; as fixed and sure as the course of the sun, as surely as that, a disciple walked the path of life. These disciples were called solar heroes when they had reached a certain degree; and this life of a disciple, that is what the Christ Jesus carried out onto the physical plane, and that is described in the four Gospels.

There is a certain organ in man that contains the Christ potential; through this organ, man enters into direct relationship with the Christ. The Christ consciousness is created by the historical Christ. Just as the eye beholds light, so does this organ behold the Christ, but the historical Christ has created the Christ possibility, the possibility that man, through this organ, may come into direct touch with the Christ.

When the human body was not yet the carrier of a soul, as long as it was still inanimate, it was, like the earth it inhabited, still quite differently formed. It had an organ within itself that still exists today as the swim bladder of fish. Man did not walk upright at that time; he moved forward by floating and swimming. He carried this organ within him, which has remained with the fish that have not developed further; in man it was transformed into lungs. This gave him the ability to breathe in and process air. We still find gill breathing in the embryonic development of man. This point in time, when the lungs capture oxygen from the air, is also the moment of ensoulment. This, expressed in terms of feeling and perception, is illustrated in the monumental words: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) That is to say, man inhaled the divine soul.

The ancients still felt every breath as a soul, hence the legends and myths that see in the air the body of the deity that has ensouled man. In all ancient forms of religion we find this clothed in images. It had to be clothed in images for humanity at that time, because if the great spiritual leaders of humanity had expressed these truths in the form in which they are expressed today, they would not have been understood; they had to speak in images. Everything, absolutely everything, is in a state of development, including consciousness! The form of imparting truths that was valid for the earlier dim consciousness of man was the pictorial one, so in the old religious documents the I also appears at the same time as the blowing, the one blowing in the air. This is the truth that individualizes itself in the breathing process. This is the same as Wotan, the one riding in the air stream, the one blowing.

Before its embodiment, the soul was sexless; here too, a development has taken place. Every spiritual researcher looks at this development. Before there were men and women, the God who unites both sexes within himself arose within the spiritual world order. This is the reason why the creation of man is told twice in the first chapters of Genesis. Once male-female (Gen 1:27), that is the divine spiritual man, who is neither male nor female, but unites the powers of both sexes in himself, and then the creation of man down on the physical plane; it says: Man came into being as a male-female being (Gen 1:27), not as Luther writes: “a little man and a little woman”.

The new instrument guides humanity towards a common bond that is more comprehensive than the bond of love. In the past there was a tribal ego, then, after long-distance marriage occurred, the same developed into a national consciousness, a national ego. Now, in humanity, there is a tendency to expand the national consciousness, which lies within this national ego, into that which holds all humanity together, into a brotherhood. To prepare this brotherhood, this blood brotherhood, which is independent of the blood that runs through the veins, that is the mission of Christianity. The old God, Jahve, the one who blows, who gave the ego, the one God who lives in the individual consciousness, will develop to recognize something common in all people, this human consciousness, that is the Christ consciousness! This encompasses an ego that will embrace all of humanity in one consciousness. There is a sentence that expresses this: “If anyone does not give up father, mother, son, or brother, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29) Christianity prepares for an all-encompassing human brotherhood; we must not understand this in an everyday, trivial sense.

We may call Jehovah the people-god who splits up humanity into separate peoples; Jahve also means the blowing of the breath with which the I-spirit enters into man, but in Christ, the Son of Man, as whom he designates himself – that that is, not the son of a man or of a family, but of all mankind. In Christ we see him who prepares the universal world-alliance of love; and as Yahweh pours a part of his humanity into man, so the Christ pours a part of his being into humanity from now on. This essence lived in supreme glory in Jesus of Nazareth. He was the most highly initiated of all, and therefore He could say, “Before Abraham was, I am,” or rather, “I am to be.” (John 8:58) In such words lies the esoteric teaching of Christianity, which is meant to live as a power in outer Christianity.

How did it come about that the Son of Man was embodied in a personality? To explain this question, I will describe to you what prophecy means and how the Mystery of Golgotha emerged from it. In the beginning there were only a few initiates, prophets. To initiate means to develop those higher abilities in man that lead him up into the higher worlds and allow him to experience their truths for himself. All spiritual realities that they see and experience there will one day descend to the physical plane. A prophet can ascend to the spiritual plane, he can see what is there, and so he can say what will later descend to the physical plane. That is prophecy!

The old prophets proclaimed the coming of the Son of Man, that is, they foresaw in the spiritual worlds the preparation of that which later became a physical fact at the momentous time when the Christ appeared on the physical plane. The Son of Man brought down to the physical plane that which had previously been in the spiritual worlds, the brotherhood of man, which is to unite people in love, independently of the bonds of blood. And in the blood that flowed from the wounds at Golgotha, there flowed out that which was superfluous, overcome, selfish in human blood; this blood was sacrificed on the cross. That is the mystery of Golgotha. Human blood sacrificed itself to purify the blood of human egoism. This purification of the blood from the ego took place at Golgotha.

If we compare the meaning of the first three gospels, we find that a certain mood underlies them all. The Gospel of Luke points to the initiation school of the Essenes and therapists, which is why we find a certain social character in his parables.

Spiritual science is theosophical in nature because it leads man back to his original source. People today fight against theosophy and are therefore anti-theosophical in their thinking.

The entire soul and spiritual being is engaged in the first years of childhood in order to develop the physical organization, especially the nervous system; all forces are consumed in this work. From a certain point on, the human organism has become harder and more determined. This is the moment when self-awareness arises in the child. The spiritual and mental powers are reflected back upon themselves; before that, he [the human being] threw them all into the organism. Now the spiritual and mental is thrown back upon itself. At first we see as through a pane of glass, but then the organization becomes like a mirror that reflects the spiritual and mental life back upon itself. Then he says to himself “I”. From then on, life proceeds in self-awareness.

The fact that in early childhood our physical organization is transformed into a mirror and our spiritual and soul life is reflected back into itself is how the human being owes his entire earthly destiny and essence. The forces he has brought with him from his previous lives he has worked into his physical organization. In life, the forces are poured into the organization. At first, the child has no self-awareness because the spiritual and soul forces are still flowing into the physical and material organization; this must face us like a mirror. Man would be born a theosophist if he could see this working into the physical organization himself. A new germ is also forming in man, as in plants, that future life demands.

The child would have to remain stunted if it were conscious, because then the spiritual-soul forces would not all pour into the bodily organization. In the spiritual-soul forces, through which we raise our self-awareness, germinal forces for our next life are formed. These, however, must not rise up into our self-consciousness; they must remain asleep, for they are constructive forces and may only unfold their character in our next life. If man were aware of these germinal forces, he would have to fall into a dream or sleep; if we knew of these germinal forces, we would know ourselves in the divine, we would be born theosophists.

The forces that can develop our self-awareness ever more strongly must be formed out of the soul-spiritual world. During our earthly life, we must swim through a stream, on one bank of which lies the transition from theosophical to self-awareness and on the other, the transition from self-awareness to theosophical consciousness. It is precisely from our being set apart from our divine-spiritual mood that we draw the forces of our self-awareness. Our earthly mood must be anti-philosophical.

After the preparations, he [man] can penetrate to these germinal forces, as was explained in the previous lecture. The human being would believe that his self-awareness would be endangered, undermined, and therefore the human being is afraid to let the germinal forces arise for his next life, hence the anti-sophistic mood. The human being has a revulsion for the fact that the germinal forces could overwhelm his self-awareness and throw him into world consciousness. The human being has a secret fear of letting the connection emerge from the foundations. The soul must first become strong and energetic before it can confront the deeper forces, just as a self-confident person confronts this mirror. Man can make his future into a mirror to see his spiritual self, just as we have a mirror in the physical body through which our self-consciousness arises.

By having the secret human being within himself, the spiritual researcher has a guarantee that he is immortal, that he is preparing a life in immortality; just as the germinating powers of the plant guarantee the emergence of a new plant.

We must cultivate those forces most strongly that lead us away from our divine spiritual connection; we cultivate an anti-sophical mood. Humanity has to develop between opposites. Just as man oscillates between freedom and bondage, so he also oscillates between theosophy and anti-theosophy. But there are moments when man becomes aware of his original source, and this mood can grow and lead him to theosophy. Our present culture in its complexity was favorable for the anti-sophical mood. When life was much less complicated, the time was favorable for the theosophical mood. King Leon of Phlius, as Cicero tells us, once asked Pythagoras what he considered his life's work. “I see myself as a philosopher,” he said. ”I can express it in a comparison. I see life as a kind of fair. People come from everywhere to enjoy the festivities, to buy and sell things, for the sake of profit. But there are also those who come just to watch and see everything.” He feels the same way about the fair of life. He leads an inner life that is of no external use to anyone, that exists for its own sake; Pythagoras, a philosophos, was considered such a person.

Now a strange philosophical worldview is coming over from America to Europe. James, Schiller and so on are its representatives, and it is called the pragmatic worldview. This wants to say: What people acquire in ideas that go beyond sensory observations has no basis in truth. One only forms the ideas that are useful; what is useful for life is seen as truth. We form the concept of breath because it is useful to imagine something like this; one cannot perceive it. It is useful to imagine life in terms of ideals and to organize life according to ideals, which is why ideals are true. For our view of the world, it is useful to imagine a God and to bring order to the world. The “Philosophy of the As If” is the European edition of the American one. After its author ceased to be a professor, he published this philosophy. You can't find security, so you act as if there is a God, as if there are ideals, not that they are there in any way. This philosophy is also called fictionalism. Under the ownership of the former and the current religion, it was possible for a “philosophy of as if” to arise, and no matter how much this old religion is renewed, it will continue to develop as a “philosophy of as if”.

In his Ignorabimus speech, Du Bois-Reymond, the great physiologist, sought to define the field that science is capable of grasping. He shows that it is impossible for this science to comprehend sensation, the simplest psychic phenomenon. Regarding everything that is spiritual and mental, Reymond says: We will never recognize it. This attitude makes people materialistic and monistic. At the end, Reymond says: Science must limit itself to what exists and happens in space and time, and therefore must remain incomprehensible to everything that looks beyond spatial and temporal events, because only supernaturalism could know about that, but that is where science ends. If this sentence were true, then no logic could exist, no speech could be there. Spiritual science seeks to explore the question: How do people come to say: Where the sensory ends, science must end?

The soul is greater than consciousness. Many people cannot give clear reasons for their actions, and this is recognized by psychology. The unconscious reasons can be imaginative or affect- and drive-like. The hidden person in us still has power, still beats; man is under his influence.

So man is under the influence of fear; it can be conscious or unconscious, he acts accordingly. The Danish scientist Lange has written a paper “On the Expression of Emotional Movement”. Under the influence of fear, a person turns pale and their eyes become cloudy. The person cannot find a way to find their footing. The vessels contract and with them the muscles. Then the person cries: Where is something I can hold on to, or I will fall over? Thinking directed outwards brings the person into the same state in his nervous system, in his vascular system, as fear. This fear does not come to the consciousness, it remains subconscious. On the one hand we see the timid person who is too weak to stand on his own, who needs external support; on the other hand, the thinker who, through his outward-looking thinking, comes into the same situation. All materialism is an unconscious fear; its clamor for matter is a result of its subconscious fear. They need the material world to support them. When I enter the supersensible world, I fall over; may something hold me – so they unconsciously call out to the material world out of fear. What Reymond said last was an expression of horror of thinking.

Today the human pendulum is swinging in the direction of anti-Sophian sentiment. The consequence will be that Theosophy will also grow strong. Anti-Sophia is one-sidedness; the whole soul must do justice to the consciousness of self and of God. The soul finds rest only where its power is bound to the divine power. The best people, those who have advanced humanity, have sensed Theosophy. Goethe was imbued, aglow and warmed by the theosophical mood. Once, an anti-theosophical mood met him; anti-theosophists can also be great minds. One of them was Albrecht von Haller. He said:

No created mind can penetrate the innermost nature,
Happy the man to whom she shows only the outer shell.

To remain in the shell is anti-philosophy in the most eminent sense of the word. Goethe's answer is well known:

Nature has neither core nor shell, [...]
Only thou, thou, examine thyself,
Whether thou art core or shell.

Fichte says from his theosophical mood: Whoever recognizes himself in his real self is already standing in the spiritual world. - In his lecture on “The Destination of the Scholar,” Fichte expresses himself as follows:

I raise my head boldly to the threatening rocky mountains, and to the raging waterfall, and to the crashing clouds floating in a sea of fire, and say: I am eternal and I defy your power. Break down on me, all of you, and you earth and you sky, mingle in wild tumult, and you elements all - foam and rage and grind in wild struggle the last sun dust of the body that I call mine call mine; my will alone with its firm plan shall float boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more enduring than yours; it is eternal, and I am eternal, like it.

To those who are anti-Sophian, he says:

That ideals cannot be represented in the real world is something we others perhaps know as well as they do, perhaps better. We only claim that reality must be judged by them and modified by those who feel the strength to do so. Even if they cannot be convinced of this, they lose little by doing so, once they are what they are; and humanity loses nothing by it. It merely makes it clear that they are not counted on in the plan for the ennoblement of humanity. The latter will undoubtedly continue on its way; let kind nature prevail over the former, and give them rain and sunshine, beneficial nourishment and an undisturbed circulation of the fluids, and, in due course, wise thoughts! Question

Question: Can reincarnation be linked to facts, or does it have to be accepted as dogma?

Rudolf Steiner: It is no more a dogma than memory is. After all, memory is also an inner fact. You can't pump out and look at what you need to remember. Thus, we cannot prove past memories of previous earthly lives other than by experiencing them.

This is how it is with all supersensible truths. To understand them, only an unprejudiced contemplation of life is necessary; to investigate them, one needs clairvoyance. Between death and a new birth, the decisive point of view is the striving to perfect oneself and also the whole world, not the question of whether it is pleasant or unpleasant or causes pain. One can come to an understanding of reincarnation if one behaves as if strokes of fate are not random, but [as if] one has inflicted them on oneself. These are soul proofs, so we must be there ourselves.

Question: [What about the] seven-year periodicity, and what deeper causes [does it] have? [What about] suicide?

Rudolf Steiner: Regarding the question of suicide, the [Schopenhauer] saying applies: “It is easy to preach morality, but difficult to explain it.” One should do good because it is absorbed into one's soul. (?)

Question: Which is the best prayer? Is it the Lord's Prayer?

Rudolf Steiner: The Lord's Prayer is indeed a universal prayer for the most primitive and the most developed mind. It has this power in itself, even if one does not know its laws, just as a plant grows according to laws that it does not know. Every prayer must be carried by a devotional mood, otherwise it can also be of evil. “Not my will, but Thine, be done.” It is only through this mood that every prayer becomes a true prayer.

Question: The point where man simply feels the connection with the higher worlds, how does he express himself? Please give me more details.

Rudolf Steiner: This is similar to the question: How can I imagine the spirit? - Just spiritually. No spiritual materialism! In the Theosophical Society one could hear such expressions [as]: Today there are wonderful spiritual vibrations in the room. The spiritual researcher would simply say: There is a good atmosphere in the room today. In the theosophical books, the spirit is described as follows: First there is matter, then it becomes thinner and thinner, but matter never actually ends. You should imagine the spirit without leaning on anything material. Feeling is something that has its center within itself.

The first two chapters of Genesis can be better understood if we are familiar with the various things we have already covered. The first chapter presents the development of our planet through the first three earth rounds into the fourth round, up to the moment when man is created. It thus concludes with the creation of man, with man of the fourth round in the third root race entering into the first incarnation. In a very similar way, the Mosaic Genesis is depicted in Greek mythology. It is only more clearly expressed in Greek mythology, which has three currents flowing from the three Logoi: Uranus, Cronus and Zeus. In the beginning of our earthly development, Uranus represents the first Logos, who brings about the split from the undifferentiated state that existed in the preceding Pralaya. The driving force was Uranus; his opposite was Gaia. The origin of the earthly planet is rooted in them. Thus, Uranus, in connection with Gaia, is the creative force. One could therefore also say: In the beginning were Uranus and Gaia. The second current is the soul current, Kronos, which represents the purely psychic moment of the soul. Then what is referred to as the pilgrimage of the soul occurs, the connection with Zeus, the god of Kama-Manas.

And what does it say in Genesis?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void;
and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

That is the Arupa state; it has no form.

And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.
And God saw that the light was good.
Then God separated the light from the darkness
and called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

This is the first form, the beginning of the Rupa state. The second globe has arrived.

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters,
and let it be a division between the waters.
So God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.
And it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven.
And the evening and the morning were the second day. (Genesis 1, 6-8)

When the Book of Genesis speaks of water, it always means astral matter.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.
And it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called the Sea.
And God saw that it was good.
And God said, Let the Earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed, and fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the Earth: and it was so.
And the earth brought forth grass, and herbaceous plants, and the seed-bearing plant after its kind, and the tree bearing fruit, whose seed was in itself, after its kind: and God saw that it was good.
And there was evening, and there was morning, the third day. (Genesis 1:9-13)

This was the time when the plant kingdom came into being. In the beginning, the plant kingdom was a jumbled mass; individual plants had not yet emerged. Therefore, each shall now have its seed according to its kind. Only now are the individual plants emerging.

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them serve for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light on the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights;

And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light on the earth: and they ruled the day and the night: and they divided the light and the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

This is the astral world, the third globe – the sea of stars, the symbol of the astral existence.

Now we come to the actual earth globe. Here matter formed little by little. First the etheric matter. During the first two epochs we are dealing with etheric matter. This condenses during the third root race, during the Lemurian period. At the same time, a condensation of materiality takes place, so that in the Lemurian period we have an ever-increasing density of physical materiality.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, with which the waters bring forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind:
And God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. (Genesis 1, 20-23)

This is not the animal kingdom that natural history tells us about, but what is found in the Dzyan stanzas in the second part of Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine”.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

And God made the wild animals of the earth in variety, each according to its kind, and the livestock according to their kind, and all the creatures that move along the ground in their kind. God saw that it was good.

He made the animals separate, whereas they had previously swayed about in confusion.

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the likeness of ourselves; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; (Genesis 1, 26-27)

And God created him male and female, that is, asexual.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Multiply in a non-sexual way, not by reproduction, but simply by coming apart, as in the astral.

And God saw all that He had made; and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31)

We are now at the point in time when the third root race of the fourth round begins, the third main age of the Earth.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it,... (Genesis 2, 1-3)

"He rested means that he has now transferred the task to man. Before that, he had stimulated everything from within that needed stimulating. Now the cosmic Pentecost occurred: the spirits descended and continued the work.

... therefore by him were all things created, that were created God, visible and invisible,

Thus the heavens and the earth were created, when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it had sprung; for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.

But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

(Genesis 2: 3-7)

Now man was there.

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; and the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; and the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

This describes the transition from the ethereal races to the physical races. These are brought together from the four sides, from east, west, south, north, and from the four elements, which correspond to the abilities of the spirit-soul. The tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the symbol for the higher self that has connected with man.

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became into four heads.
The name of the first is Pison, because all the land of Havilah, where there is gold, is a land of Pison.
And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. (Genesis 2, 10-12)

The other waters are called Gehon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. The four waters are the symbols for the four astral forms of matter that flow together. Water always means the astral in the esoteric language. In the esoteric language, gold is the symbol of the spiritual; onyx is the symbol of matter that goes deepest down. Onyx is the symbol of how the living must transform before it can be absorbed into the higher principle. The living, the prana, must pass through a state of purification; this is called the onyx state. The transformation of the pug into an onyx can also be found in Goethe's “Fairytales”.

And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You shall eat from every tree of the garden;

but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

And the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” (Genesis 2:15-18)

Now the fourth round begins; before that there was a small pralaya. When the fourth round begins, the ethereal human races only end. Man is the firstling of the fourth round. And what is now emerging is emerging through man; it is a product of decadence, it is falling away.

For when the Lord God had made every beast of the earth, and every fowl of the air, he brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that should be the name thereof.

And man gave names to every animal, and to the birds of the air, and to the beasts of the field; but for man no helper was found to be with him.

Then the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. (Genesis 2, 19-21)

Sleep signifies that transition which must be understood very precisely. We imagine a light in the middle [of the room] that is reflected in the most diverse ways all around. Let us imagine that the light in the middle goes out, and the outer lights continue to shine. This is how the sinking of Manas into the bodies, which now begin to glow from within when Manas ceases to irradiate the human beings from without. Dream consciousness forms the transition between the inner radiance and the disappearance of the light in the outer. Sex is the counterpole for Kama-Manas, just as the south pole is the counterpole of the north pole.

So he took one of his ribs and closed up the place with flesh.

And the LORD God built the woman out of the rib he had taken from the man, and he brought her to him.

And Adam said: This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

Every man will leave his father and mother, which is to say, he will leave that which formerly constituted him.

The first two chapters of Genesis contain the Egyptian secret doctrine. Moses was initiated in Egypt; he then brought the secret doctrine with him and gave it to his people.

My dear Friends,

today we will take first a reading from Goethe that will illustrate for you many of the things of which we have been speaking in the previous lectures. You will have seen from the readings you listened to a few days ago—taken first from the earlier, and then for comparison from the later Iphigenie—what sort of an ideal for drama was living in Goethe at the beginning of his work as a playwright. He brought this form of drama to a kind of perfection in Götz von Berlichingen, also in some of the scenes in Faust, Part I. Goethe was working here essentially out of a feeling for prose—not yet out of an artistic forming of speech.

The first Iphigenie, which may be described as the German Tasso, proclaims itself at once, in contradistinction to the Roman, as a striking example of well-formed prose, although a prose that has, under the influence of the poetic content, been allowed to run into rhythm.

It was on his visit to Italy that Goethe began to interest himself in the artistic forming of speech. Contemplation of Italian art awakened in him a perception of how man's formative powers work, how they shape and mould a material artistically. With the whole strength of his soul, Goethe set himself to work his way through to what he now saw to be art in its purity. And this led him to feel that wherever possible he must re-mould his earlier work, he must form it anew, letting its form arise now from the language, from the formative qualities of speech.

Goethe accomplished this in an eminent manner with the material he had at hand in his earlier Tasso and Tasso. And in Tasso he succeeded even in letting the speech shape the whole drama throughout. This was an achievement of remarkable originality. There is perhaps no other work of its kind where the conscious endeavour has been made to develop a drama entirely within the formative activity of speech itself.

Now, it will of course be evident from what I was saying yesterday that speech formation alone is not enough; drama must have in addition mime and gesture. The intellect of the spectator—for that too should undergo artistic development as he watches the play—needs to see the gesturing as well as to hear the words. This was not sufficiently clear to Goethe at the time when he was working at his Roman Tasso and Tasso; he had not yet realised the importance of mime and gesture as an integral part of drama. Hence it is that we have in Tasso so striking an example of a drama where it is all a matter of speech, where everything follows from the forming of the speech.

But now put yourself in the position of having to produce Goethe's Tasso. As you begin to develop your picture of the stage, scene by scene, you will find that many different possibilities are open to you for your stage settings. It will certainly not be easy to introduce modifications into the form of the speech, for speech has here been brought to a certain artistic perfection; but your picture of the stage you will find you can plan in the most varied ways. There is, however, a passage in Tasso where, as producer, you will come up against an insuperable difficulty. It is in the scene where Tasso makes himself intolerable to the Princess, acting in such a way as to give a most unfortunate turn to the whole drama. Here the producer is helpless. There is, in fact, no way out. Call on all the artistic means at your disposal, and see whether as producer you can make a success of this passage. You will not be able to do it. That such moments occur in plays must be known and recognised, if the art of the stage is to be cultivated in the right manner. You will of course finally manage to devise some way of meeting the situation, but you will not be able to give artistic form to your pis alle.

This instance from Tasso can serve to show that in his work as dramatist Goethe did not altogether find the way from the forming of speech to the development of full drama that lives and weaves on the stage. That, one must admit, is an important fact; and the importance of it can be clearly seen in the further development of Goethe's work. For what do we find?

In his Tasso and Tasso, Goethe may be said to live in the speech, to live in it as a supreme and perfect artist. In the sphere of speech, these two plays are unsurpassed. Goethe himself knew well of course that drama could not stop here, that it must develop further. While still in Italy, he composed also many scenes for his Faust. These, however, did not take on a Roman character. The ‘Witches' Kitchen’, for example, was composed in Italy, and is thoroughly northern, thoroughly Gothic in the old sense. Goethe knew that for these scenes he must wrest himself free of the Italian influence that surrounded him, must forget all about it and be a complete northerner. This comes out also in the letters he was writing at the time. What had been possible with Tasso and with Tasso was not possible with the material he was dealing with in Faust.

And now we can follow the development a step further. Goethe began to write Die natürliche Tochter. In this play he shows that he wants to come right out on to the stage. He is not going to continue working in speech alone, he means to concern himself with the whole picture presented to the audience. He planned here a trilogy, but it was never completed; we have no more than the first part. As a matter of fact, only fragments, mere torsos, remain to us of all the plays that Goethe began after this time. Even Pandora—a work that was grandly conceived, as can be seen from the rough sketch the author made of the whole—was never completed. Faust alone was finished, but finished in such a way that only in the speech was the poet happy and successful; for the rest, he drew on tradition. The last grand scene is derived from the traditional imaginative conceptions of Roman Catholicism. Goethe did not find in himself the sources for that scene.

Inherent of course in all this lies Goethe's profound honesty; Faust alone he finishes, and that, as can plainly be seen, out of a certain inability! The other plays he leaves unfinished, because he knew he could not complete them without entirely re-forming them. A dishonest artist would have finished them. Naturally, it is easy enough to polish off plenty of plays if one has no inclination or ability to delve down to the very deeps and make contact with the Archai of all creating. Oh yes, one can then complete many things to one's own satisfaction!

A number of different people have set out to complete Schiller's Demetrius, for example, but not one among them all has left us an artistic creation; no single ending proposed can be said to develop the play artistically. And it is art that we must really begin again to care about and expect to find. We must get to know art in its foundations, we must develop again a genuine artistic sensitiveness. For a long time this has been lacking. Traditions have survived, they have been handed down; but sensitiveness to true art—that is what our civilisation needs. The art of the stage has unique opportunity for helping this sensitiveness to develop: it can turn to good account the living relationship that subsists between stage and spectator. Unless we seize on this opportunity, we shall not get any farther.

In order to show you—or I should rather say, remind you, for I assume you are all of you familiar with the play—in order to remind you how far the forming of the speech dominated Goethe's dramatic work in the period of its highest attainment, we will ask you now to listen to the first scene from his Torquato Tasso. Frau Dr. Steiner will recite it for us.

(Frau Dr. Steiner): Let me first recall to you the setting of the scene. It takes place in a garden ornamented with columns carrying the busts of epic poets. In the foreground are Virgil on the right and Ariosto on the left.

(PRINZESSIN, LEONORE)

PRINZESSIN

Du siehst mich lächelnd an, Eleonore,
Und siehst dich selber an und lächelst wieder.
Was hast du? Lass es eine Freundin wissen!
Du scheinst bedenklich, doch du scheinst vergnügt.

LEONORE

Ja, meine Fürstin, mit Vergnügen seh' ich
Uns beide hier so ländlich ausgeschmückt.
Wir scheinen recht beglückte Schäferinnen,
Und sind auch wie die Glücklichen beschäftigt.
Wir winden Kränze. Dieser, bunt von Blumen,
Schwillt immer mehr und mehr in meiner Hand;
Du hast mit höherm Sinn und grösserm Herzen
Den zarten, schlanken Lorbeer dir gewählt.

PRINZESSIN

Die Zweige, die ich in Gedanken flocht,
Sie haben gleich ein würdig Haupt gefunden:
Ich setze sie Virgilen dankbar auf.
(Sie kränzt die Herme Virgils.)

LEONORE

So drück' ich meinen vollen frohen Kranz
Dem Meister Ludwig auf die hohe Stirne—
(Sie kränzt Ariostens Herme.)
Er, dessen Scherze nie verblühen, habe
Gleich von dem neuen Frühling seinen Teil.

PRINZESSIN

Mein Bruder ist gefällig, dass er uns
In diesen Tagen schon aufs Land gebracht:
Wir können unser sein und stundenlang
Uns in die goldne Zeit derDichter träumen.
Ich liebe Belriguardo, denn ich habe
Hier manchen Tag der Jugend froh durchlebt,
Und dieses neue Grün und diese Sonne
Bringt das Gefühl mir jener Zeit zurück.

LEONORE

Ja, es umgibt uns eine neue Welt!
Der Schatten dieser immer grünen Bäume
Wird schon erfreulich. Schon erquickt uns wieder
Das Rauschen dieser Brunnen. Schwankend wiegen
Im Morgenwinde sich die jungen Zweige.
Die Blumen von den Beeten schauen uns
Mit ihren Kinderaugen freundlich an.
Der Gärtner deckt getrost das Winterhaus
Schon der Zitronen und Orangen ab.
Der blaue Himmel ruhet über uns,
Und an dem Horizonte löst der Schnee
Der fernen Berge sich in leisen Duft.

PRINZESSIN

Es wäre mir der Frühling sehr willkommen,
Wenn er nicht meine Freundin mir entführte.

LEONORE

Erinnere mich in diesen holden Stunden,
O Fürstin, nicht, wie bald ich scheiden soll.

PRINZESSIN

Was du verlassen magst, das findest du
In jener grossen Stadt gedoppelt wieder.

LEONORE

Es ruft die Pflicht, es ruft die Liebe mich
Zu dem Gemahl, der mich so lang entbehrt.
Ich bring' ihm seinen Sohn, der dieses Jahr
So schnell gewachsen, schnell sich ausgebildet,
Und teile seine väterliche Freude.
Gross ist Florenz und herrlich, doch der Wert
Von allen seinen aufgehäuften Schätzen
Reicht an Ferraras Edelsteine nicht.
Das Volk hat jene Stadt zur Stadt gemacht,
Ferrara ward durch seine Fürsten gross.

PRINZESSIN

Mehr durch die guten Menschen, die sich hier
Durch Zufall trafen und zum Glück verbanden.

LEONORE

Sehr leicht zerstreut der Zufall, was er sammelt.
Ein edler Mensch zieht edle Menschen an
Und weiss sie festzuhalten, wie ihr tut.
Um deinen Bruder und um dich verbinden
Gemüter sich, die euer würdig sind,
Und ihr seid eurer grossen Väter wert.
Hier zündete sich froh das schöne Licht
Der Wissenschaft, des freien Denkens an,
Als noch die Barbarei mit schwerer Dämmrung
Die Welt umher verbarg. Mir klang als Kind
Der Name Herkules von Este schon,
Schon Hippolyt von Este voll ins Ohr.
Ferrara ward mit Rom und mit Florenz
Von meinem Vater viel gepriesen! Oft
Hab' ich mich hingesehnt; nun bin ich da.
Hier ward Petrarch bewirtet, hier gepflegt,
Und Ariost fand seine Muster hier.
Italien nennt keinen grossen Namen,
Den dieses Haus nicht seinen Gast genannt.
Und es ist vorteilhaft, den Genius
Bewirten: gibst du ihm ein Gastgeschenk,
So lässt er dir ein schöneres zurück.
Die Stätte, die ein guter Mensch betrat,
Ist eingeweiht; nach hundert Jahren klingt
Sein Wort und seine Tat dem Enkel wieder.

PRINZESSIN

Dem Enkel, wenn er lebhaft fühlt wie du.
Gar oft beneid' ich dich um dieses Glück.

LEONORE

Das du, wie wenig andre, still und rein
Geniessest. Drängt mich doch das volle Herz,
Sogleich zu sagen, was ich lebhaft fühle;
Du fühlst es besser, fühlst es tief und—schweigst.
Dich blendet nicht der Schein des Augenblicks.
Der Witz besticht dich nicht, die Schmeichelei
Schmiegt sich vergebens künstlich an dein Ohr:
Fest bleibt dein Sinn und richtig dein Geschmack,
Dein Urteil grad, stets ist dein Anteil gross
Am Grossen, das du wie dich selbst erkennst.

PRINZESSIN

Du solltest dieser höchsten Schmeichelei
Nicht das Gewand vertrauter Freundschaft leihen.

LEONORE

Die Freundschaft ist gerecht, sie kann allein
Den ganzen Umfang deines Werts erkennen.
Und lass mich der Gelegenheit, dem Glück
Auch ihren Teil an deiner Bildung geben;
Du hast sie doch, und bist's am Ende doch,
Und dich mit deiner Schwester ehrt die Welt
Vor allen grossen Frauen eurer Zeit.

PRINZESSIN

Mich kann das, Leonore, wenig rühren,
Wenn ich bedenke, wie man wenig ist,
Und was man ist, das blieb man andern schuldig.
Die Kenntnis alter Sprachen und des Besten,
Was uns die Vorwelt liess, dank' ich der Mutter;
Doch war an Wissenschaft, an rechtem Sinn
Ihr keine beider Töchter jemals gleich,
Und soll sich eine ja mit ihr vergleichen,
So hat Lucretia gewiss das Recht.
Auch, kann ich dir versichern, hab' ich nie
Als Rang und als Besitz betrachtet, was
Mir die Natur, was mir das Glück verlieh.
Ich freue mich, wenn kluge Männer sprechen,
Dass ich verstehen kann, wie sie es meinen.
Es sei ein Urteil über einen Mann
Der alten Zeit und seiner Taten Wert;
Es sei von einer Wissenschaft die Rede,
Die, durch Erfahrung weiter ausgebreitet,
Dem Menschen nutzt, indem sie ihn erhebt;
Wohin sich das Gespräch der Edlen lenkt,
Ich folge gern, denn mir wird leicht, zu folgen.
Ich höre gern dem Streit der Klugen zu,
Wenn um die Kräfte, die des Menschen Brust
So freundlich und so fürchterlich bewegen,
Mit Grazie die Rednerlippe spielt;
Gern, wenn die fürstliche Begier des Ruhms,
Des ausgebreiteten Besitzes, Stoff
Dem Denker wird, und wenn die feine Klugheit,
Von einem klugen Manne zart entwickelt,
Statt uns zu hintergehen, uns belehrt.

LEONORE

Und dann, nach dieser ernsten Unterhaltung,
Ruht unser Ohr und unser innrer Sinn
Gar freundlich auf des Dichters Reimen aus,
Der uns die letzten lieblichsten Gefühle
Mit holden Tönen in die Seele flösst.
Dein hoher Geist umfasst ein weites Reich,
Ich halte mich am liebsten auf der Insel
Der Poesie in Lorbeerhainen auf.

PRINZESSIN

In diesem schönen Lande hat man mir
Versichern wollen, wächst vor andern Bäumen
Die Myrte gern. Und wenn der Musen gleich
Gar viele sind, so sucht man unter ihnen
Sich seltner eine Freundin und Gespielin,
Als man dem Dichter gern begegnen mag,
Der uns zu meiden, ja, zu fliehen scheint,
Etwas zu suchen scheint, das wir nicht kennen
Und er vielleicht am Ende selbst nicht kennt.
Da wär' es denn ganz artig, wenn er uns
Zur guten Stunde träfe, schnell entzückt
Uns für den Schatz erkennte, den er lang'
Vergebens in der weiten Welt gesucht.

LEONORE

Ich muss mir deinen Scherz gefallen lassen,
Er trifft mich zwar, doch trifft er mich nicht tief.
Ich ehre jeden Mann und sein Verdienst,
Und ich bin gegen Tasso nur gerecht.
Sein Auge weilt auf dieser Erde kaum;
Sein Ohr vernimmt den Einklang der Natur;
Was die Geschichte reicht, das Leben gibt,
Sein Busen nimmt es gleich und willig auf:
Das weit Zerstreute sammelt sein Gemüt,
Und sein Gefühl belebt das Unbelebte.
Oft adelt er, was uns gemein erschien,
Und das Geschätzte wird vor ihm zu nichts.
In diesem eignen Zauberkreise wandelt
Der wunderbare Mann und zieht uns an,
Mit ihm zu wandeln, teil an ihm zu nehmen:
Er scheint sich uns zu nahn, und bleibt uns fern;
Er scheint uns anzusehn, und Geister mögen
An unsrer Stelle seltsam ihm erscheinen.

PRINZESSIN

Du hast den Dichter fein und zart geschildert,

Der in den Reichen süsser Träume schwebt.
Allein mir scheint auch ihn das Wirkliche
Gewaltsam anzuziehn und festzuhalten.
Die schönen Lieder, die an unsern Bäumen
Wir hin und wieder angeheftet finden,
Die, goldnen Aepfeln gleich, ein neu Hesperien
Uns duftend bilden, erkennst du sie nicht alle
Für holde Früchte einer wahren Liebe?

LEONORE

Ich freue mich der schönen Blätter auch.
Mit mannigfalt'gem Geist verherrlicht er
Ein einzig Bild in allen seinen Reimen.
Bald hebt er es in lichter Glorie
Zum Sternenhimmel auf, beugt sich verehrend
Wie Engel über Wolken vor dem Bilde;
Dann schleicht er ihm durch stille Fluren nach,
Und jede Blume windet er zum Kranz.
Entfernt sich die Verehrte, heiligt er
Den Pfad, den leis ihr schöner Fuss betrat.
Versteckt im Busche, gleich der Nachtigall,
Füllt er aus einem liebekranken Busen
Mit seiner Klagen Wohllaut Hain und Luft;
Sein reizend Leid, die sel'ge Schwermut lockt
Ein jedes Ohr, und jedes Herz muss nach—

PRINZESSIN

Und wenn er seinen Gegenstand benennt,
So gibt er ihm den Namen Leonore.

LEONORE

Es ist dein Name, wie es meiner ist.
Ich nähm' es übel, wenn's ein andrer wäre.
Mich freut es, dass er sein Gefühl für dich
In diesem Doppelsinn verbergen kann.
Ich bin zufrieden, dass er meiner auch
Bei dieses Namens holdem Klang gedenkt.
Hier ist die Frage nicht von einer Liebe,
Die sich des Gegenstands bemeistern will,
Ausschliessend ihn besitzen, eifersüchtig
Den Anblick jedem andern wehren möchte.
Wenn er in seliger Betrachtung sich
Mit deinem Wert beschäftigt, mag er-auch
An meinem leichtem Wesen sich erfreun.
Uns liebt er nicht—verzeih, dass ich es sage!—
Aus allen Sphären trägt er, was er liebt,
Auf einen Namen nieder, den wir führen,
Und sein Gefühl teilt er uns mit; wir scheinen
Den Mann zu lieben, und wir lieben nur
Mit ihm das Höchste, was wir lieben können.

PRINZESSIN

Du hast dich sehr in diese Wissenschaft
Vertieft, Eleonore, sagst mir Dinge,
Die mir beinahe nur das Ohr berühren
Und in die Seele kaum noch übergehn.

LEONORE

Du, Schülerin des Plato! nicht begreifen,
Was dir ein Neuling vorzuschwatzen wagt?
Es müsste sein, dass ich zu sehr mich irrte;
Doch irr' ich auch nicht ganz, ich weiss es wohl.
Die Liebe zeigt in dieser holden Schule
Sich nicht, wie sonst, als ein verwöhntes Kind:
Es ist der Jüngling, der mit Psychen sich
Vermählte, der im Rat der Götter Sitz
Und Stimme hat. Er tobt nicht frevelhaft
Von einer Brust zur andern hin und her;
Er heftet sich an Schönheit und Gestalt
Nicht gleich mit süssem Irrtum fest, und büsset
Nicht schnellen Rausch mit Ekel und Verdruss.

PRINZESSIN

Da kommt mein Bruder! Lass uns nicht verraten,
Wohin sich wieder das Gespräch gelenkt:
Wir würden seinen Scherz zu tragen haben,
Wie unsre Kleidung seinen Spott erfuhr.

---

TORQUATO TASSO
by Goethe
Act I. Scene 1.

(PRINCESS and LEONORA, habited as shepherdesses.)

PRINCESS

Smiling thou dost survey me, Leonora,
And with a smile thou dost survey thyself.
What is it? Let a friend partake thy thought!
Thou seemest pensive, yet thou seemest pleased.

LEONORA

Yes, I am pleased, my princess, to behold
Us twain in rural fashion thus attir'd.
Two happy shepherd-maidens we appear,
And like the happy we are both employed.
Garlands we wreathe, this one, so gay with flowers,
Beneath my hand in varied beauty grows;<
Thou hast with higher taste and larger heart
The slender pliant laurel made thy choice.

PRINCESS

The laurel wreath, which aimlessly I twin'd,
Hath found at once a not unworthy head;
I place it gratefully on Virgil's brow.
(She crowns the bust of Virgil.)

LEONORA

With my full joyous wreath the lofty brow
Of Master Ludovico, thus I crown—
(She crowns the bust of Ariosto.)
Let him whose sportive sallies never fade,
Receive his tribute from the early spring.

PRINCESS

My brother is most kind, to bring us here
In this sweet season to our rural haunts;
Here, by the hour, in freedom unrestrain'd,
We may dream back the poet's golden age.
I love this Belriguardo; in my youth
Full many a joyous day I linger'd here,
And this bright sunshine, and this verdant green,
Bring back the feelings of that bygone time.

LEONORA

Yes, a new world surrounds us! Grateful now
The cooling shelter of these evergreens.
The tuneful murmur of this gurgling spring
Once more revives us. In the morning wind
The tender branches waver to and fro.
The flowers look upwards from their lowly beds,
And smile upon us with their childlike eyes.
The gardener, fearless grown, removes the roof
That screened his citron and his orange-trees;
The azure dome of heaven above us rests;
And, in the far horizon, from the hills
The snow in balmy vapour melts away.

PRINCESS

Most welcome were to me the genial spring,
Did it not lead my friend away from me.

LEONORA

My princess, in these sweet and tranquil hours,
Remind me not how soon I must depart.

PRINCESS

Yon mighty city will restore to thee,
In double measure, what thou leavest here.

LEONORA

The voice of duty, and the voice of love,
Both call me to my lord, forsaken long,
I bring to him his son, who rapidly
Hath grown in stature, and matured in mind,
Since last they met—I share his father's joy.
Florence is great and noble, but the worth
Of all her treasur'd riches doth not reach
The prouder jewels that Ferrara boasts.
That city to her people owes her power;
Ferrara grew to greatness through her princes.

PRINCESS

More through the noble men whom chance led here,
And who in sweet communion here remain'd.

LEONORA

Chance doth again disperse what chance collects.
A noble nature can alone attract
The noble, and retain them as ye do.
Around thy brother, and around thyself,
Assemble spirits worthy of you both,
And ye are worthy of your noble sires.
Here the fair light of science and free thought
Was kindled first, while o'er the darkened world
Still hung barbarian gloom. E'en when a child,
The names resounded loudly in mine ear,
Of Hercules and Hippolyte of Este.
My father oft with Florence and with Rome
Extoll'd Ferrara! Oft in youthful dream
Hither I fondly turn'd, now am I here.
Here was Petrarca kindly entertain'd,
And Ariosto found his models here.
Italia boasts no great, no mighty name,
This princely mansion hath not call'd its guest.
In fostering genius we enrich ourselves;
Dost thou present her with a friendly gift,
One far more beautiful she leaves with thee.
The ground is hallow'd where the good man treads;
When centuries have roll'd his sons shall hear
The deathless echo of his words and deeds.

PRINCESS

Yes, if those sons have feelings quick as thine;
This happiness full oft I envy thee.

LEONORA

Which purely and serenely thou, my friend,
As few beside thee, dost thyself enjoy.
When my full heart impels me to express
Promptly and freely what I keenly feel,
Thou feel'st the while more deeply, and—art silent.
Delusive splendour doth not dazzle thee,
Nor wit beguile; and flattery strives in vain
With fawning artifice to win thine ear;
Firm is thy temper, and correct thy taste,
Thy judgment just, and, truly great thyself,
With greatness thou dost ever sympathise.

PRINCESS

Thou shouldst not to this highest flattery
The garment of confiding friendship lend.

LEONORA

Friendship is just; she only estimates
The full extent and measure of thy worth.
Let me ascribe to opportunity,
To fortune too, her portion in thy culture,
Still in the end thou hast it, it is thine,
And all extol thy sister and thyself
Before the noblest women of the age.

PRINCESS

That can but little move me, Leonora,
When I reflect how poor at best we are,
To others more indebted than ourselves.
My knowledge of the ancient languages,
And of the treasures by the past bequeath'd,
I owe my mother, who, in varied lore
And mental power, her daughters far excell'd.
Might either claim comparison with her,
'Tis undeniably Lucretia's right.
Besides, what nature and what chance bestow'd
As property or rank I ne'er esteem'd.
'Tis pleasure to me when the wise converse,
That I their scope and meaning comprehend;
Whether they judge a man of bygone times
And weigh his actions, or of science treat,
Which, when extended and applied to life,
At once exalts and benefits mankind.
Where'er the converse of such men may lead,
I follow gladly, for with ease I follow.
Well pleas'd the strife of argument I hear,
When, round the powers that sway the human breast,
Waking alternately delight and fear,
With grace the lip of eloquence doth play:
And listen gladly when the princely thirst
Of fame, of wide dominion, forms the theme,
When of an able man, the thought profound,
Develop'd skilfully with subtle tact,
Doth not perplex and dazzle, but instruct.

LEONORA

And then, this grave and serious converse o'er,
Our ear and inner mind with tranquil joy
Upon the poet's tuneful verse repose,
Who through the medium of harmonious sounds
Infuses sweet emotions in the soul.
Thy lofty spirit grasps a wide domain;
Content am I to linger in the isle
Of poesy, her laurel groves among.

PRINCESS

In this fair land, I'm told, the myrtle blooms
In richer beauty than all other trees;
Here, too, the Muses wander, yet we seek
A friend and playmate’mong their tuneful choir
Less often than we seek to meet the bard,
Who seems to shun us, nay, appears to flee,
In quest of something that we know not of,
And which perchance is to himself unknown.
How charming were it, if in happy hour
Encountering us, he should with ecstasy
In our fair selves the treasure recognise,
Which in the world he long had sought in vain!

LEONORA

To your light raillery I must submit,
So light its touch it passeth harmless by.
I honour all men after their desert,
And am in truth toward Tasso only just.
His eye scarce lingers on this earthly scene,
To Nature's harmony his ear is tuned.
What history offers, and what life presents,
His bosom promptly and with joy receives,
The widely scatter'd is by him combined,
And his quick feeling animates the dead.
Oft he ennobles what we count for naught;
What others treasure is by him despis'd.
Thus moving in his own enchanted sphere,
The wondrous man doth still allure us on
To wander with him and partake his joy;
Though seeming to approach us, he remains
Remote as ever, and perchance his eye,
Resting on us, sees spirits in our place.

PRINCESS

Thou hast with taste and truth portray'd the bard
Who hovers in the shadowy realm of dreams.
And yet reality, it seems to me,
Hath also power to lure him and enchain.
In the sweet sonnets, scattered here and there,
With which we sometimes find our trees adorn'd,
Creating like the golden fruit of old
A new Hesperia, perceiv'st thou
not The gentle tokens of a genuine love?

LEONORA

In these fair leaves I also take delight.
With all his rich diversity of thought
He glorifies one form in all his strains.
Now he exalts her to the starry heavens
In radiant glory, and before that form
Bows down, like angels in the realms above.
Then stealing after her through silent fields,
He garlands in his wreath each beauteous flower;
And should the form he worships disappear,
Hallows the path her gentle foot hath trod.
Thus like the nightingale, conceal'd in shade,
From his love-laden breast he fills the air
And neighbouring thickets with melodious plaints.
His blissful sadness and his tuneful grief
Charm every ear, enrapture every heart—

PRINCESS

And Leonora is the favour'd name
Selected for the object of his strains.

LEONORA

Thy name it is, my princess, as’tis mine.
It would displease me were it otherwise.
Now I rejoice that under this disguise
He can conceal his sentiment for thee,
And am no less contented with the thought
That this sweet name should also picture me.
Here is no question of an ardent love,
Seeking possession, and with jealous care
Screening its object from another's gaze.
While he enraptur'd contemplates thy worth
He in my lighter nature may rejoice.
He loves not us—forgive me what I say—
His lov'd ideal from the spheres he brings,
And doth invest it with the name we bear;
His feeling we participate; we seem
To love the man, yet only love in him
The highest object that can claim our love.

PRINCESS

In this deep science thou art deeply vers'd,
My Leonora, and thy words in truth
Play on my ear, yet scarcely reach my soul.

LEONORA

Thou Plato's pupil! and not comprehend
What a mere novice dares to prattle to thee?
It must be then that I have widely err'd;
Yet well I know I do not wholly err.
For love doth in this graceful school appear
No longer as the spoilt and wayward child;
He is the youth whom Psyche hath espous'd;
Who sits in council with the assembled gods.
He hath relinquish'd passion's fickle sway,
He clings no longer with delusion sweet
To outward form and beauty, to atone
For brief excitement by disgust and hate.

PRINCESS

Here comes my brother! let us not betray
Whither our converse hath conducted us;
Else we shall have his raillery to bear,
As in our dress he found a theme for jest.
(From the translation by Anna Swanwick.)

(Dr. Steiner): One fact has been entirely forgotten in the drama of recent years. When I tell you what it is, you will not very easily believe me; but I have been present at scarcely a single performance in recent years where the fact that we hear with our ears has not been forgotten. It seems such a simple obvious fact; and yet, from the point of view of art, it has been quite overlooked. The drama of our time has been working on the peculiar assumption that we hear- with our eyes ! It is accordingly considered necessary that whenever an actor is listening to another actor, he shall look straight towards him. In real life, it is certainly customary to turn to the person who is speaking, and it is perhaps justified there as a mark of politeness. Politeness is undoubtedly a praiseworthy virtue, it may even in certain circumstances be reckoned as one of the virtues that go to make up the moral code; and I am far from wanting to imply that there is no need for an actor to be polite; on the contrary! The actor on the stage, however, owes politeness first of all to the audience. (I do not mean some individual there; I shall have important things to say about the audience in the later lectures.) The only politeness that is due from the actor is in his relation to the audience, but in that he must not fail. It must never once be allowed to happen, for instance, that the audience see before them an actor speaking from the back of the stage, and four or five or more others standing in the foreground, turning their backs on the auditorium. That the stage should ever present such a picture is due to the intrusion there in recent years of the dilettantism that wants merely to imitate life. Blunders of this kind will disappear altogether as soon as we begin to take account again of style.

And where a true feeling for style is present, what difference will it make? We shall find we are perfectly able to arrange our positions on the stage so that only on the rarest occasion does an actor need to turn his back to the audience—only, that is, where a particular situation in the play absolutely requires it. As a matter of fact, nothing should ever happen on the stage for which there is not a compelling motive inherent in the play itself.

Take the case of smoking. In what I said yesterday I did not at all mean to convey the impression that I am against the smoking of cigarettes on the stage. But can there be any genuine motive behind it, when a number of persons, obviously merely to fill up dead moments with a bit of mime, are continually lighting cigarettes and smoking them in between their words, or even—as I have often seen—trying to cover their ignorance of rightly formed speech by standing there talking, holding cigarettes in their mouths as they speak? Yes, that does happen. All manner of detestable tricks of this sort have been finding their way on to the stage.

If, however, a boy of seventeen or eighteen years old comes on the stage and lights a cigarette, then there may well be a perfectly definite motive behind the action: we are to understand that the young fellow is anxious to pose as grown-up. He wants us to see that he is quite a man. In that case, the lighting of the cigarette has behind it a conscious motive that originates in the play itself, and I would thoroughly commend it—as I certainly do when in the plays of today I see boys and girls of seventeen or eighteen (the age of the part, of course, not of the actor) lighting their cigarettes. There, it is right and good; the action must, however, always be prompted directly by the situation in the play.

Do you see what is implied here—what demand we are making on behalf of art? We are asking that everything done on the stage shall be directly consequent on the inner texture of the play as an artistic creation. If our work is to have form and style, we must be able to see how every single detail in the acting springs straight from the fundamental intentions of the play. I have mentioned the matter of cigarettes merely as an example.

Suppose it happens in a play that one person is giving a command, and one, two or three others are receiving it. There you have a clear situation to be staged. As to the manner and bearing of the one who is giving the command, I need only refer you to what I said the other day, when we went through the several gestures for the variously spoken word—the incisive, hard, gentle, etc. What we have now to consider is the behaviour, in dumb show, of those who are receiving a command. Naturally, what they would find easiest would be to stand with their backs to the audience, for then there would be no need for them to act at all. But there is no occasion for them to take up such a position; in fact, it mustn't be done, it would be quite inartistic.

There are two things the audience must be able to see in one who is receiving a command. First, it must be evident that he is listening while the command is being given. And this, even when instead of facing the speaker he faces them, the audience will have no difficulty in seeing. If an actor who is receiving a command should ever turn his back to the audience, then we would have necessarily to conclude that he had some very particular reason for doing so. Imagine the speaker standing behind him, on his right; then the listener can still quite properly face the audience. He will be listening with his right ear and the audience will be able to see that he is doing so, by the way he turns just a little in that direction. No situation can possibly occur in a play where a listener is not perfectly well able to face the audience. And then, if the actor has his mime under proper control, the audience can see also in his countenance the impression that the command is making upon him. For that has to be seen too; it is the second of the two things that must be clearly visible to the spectator. The listener will therefore present to the audience a three-quarter profile more or less, his head inclined a little in the direction of the voice and slightly forwards. And if he has gone through beforehand the other exercises that I described yesterday, then as he assumes this position and enters into the feeling of it, his facial muscles will instinctively be set working in such a manner that the audience will see expressed in his countenance the nature of the command he is receiving. And if, in addition, he shows a tendency to move his arms and hands—not outwards, but more in the way of drawing them towards him—the gesture will be complete, will be exactly as it should be.

And now, my dear friends, you will probably be wanting to say: But if I were to arrange the stage with three or four actors all listening in the way you describe, it would look stereotyped, it would look as if it were according to some set plan.

Raphael would not have said so ! He would no doubt have introduced slight modifications into the gesture of the second listener, or of the third and so on, but the essential spirit and character of the gesture he would have maintained in them all. Raphael was not of course a producer; but he would, as onlooker, as critic, have demanded that gesture. He would, as I said, have modified it a little here and there, but the very similarity of gesture in the listeners would have impressed Raphael as aesthetically right. And should it ever be a case of some individual actor wanting his own way, then no question but that the stage picture as a whole must always receive the first consideration.

What I have been describing has reference to the receiving of a command. We can, however, also consider how it will be with mere listening. One actor is speaking and others are listening. The gesturing here will naturally be not unlike what we have found to belong to the receiving of a command. The speaker's gesture will of course again be from among those I indicated in connection with the different categories that I named for the word : incisive, gentle, etc.; the precise gesture of the listener will have to be carefully determined in the following way.

Let us suppose the content of what he has to say requires the speaker to speak quite slowly, so that his speaking falls into the category we named: slow, deliberate. We know then what his gesture will be. But what kind of a gesture will the listener have to make? The listener will have to adopt the gesture of a speaker who utters quick, decided words. Why is this?

When someone speaks in a quick, incisive tone of voice, he tends involuntarily to make sharply defined gestures; you will remember how we designated them as ‘pointing’ gestures. The narrator, who is speaking slowly, will not make these pointing gestures; he will make the movements with the fingers that I showed at the end of yesterday's lecture. The listener, however, will—silently, to himself– accentuate, as he listens, the important words. He will thus be in • the condition for incisive speaking—speaking, as it were, inaudibly, within; and he will accordingly be right in making the pointing gestures. Then you will have a perfect harmony of gesture: the one making those finger movements that belong to the telling, the other making the’ pointing’ finger movements that rightly accompany the listening. These are suggestions that you can study and work out in detail for yourselves.

Take another case. Again we have an actor relating something; but this time the content has the effect of making him speak his words out abruptly, as though they were cut short. This kind of speaking will always mean that the speaker particularly wants to drive home what he is telling; otherwise he would not tell it in that manner When the dramatist lets us see that a great deal depends on getting some information across to the listener, then the narrator will have to speak in this way, cutting his words short, and he will at the same time make the corresponding ‘flinging away’ gesture with his fingers—this gesture that you will remember I showed you before. The listener, on the other hand, will be true to his part and show the right response if he listens with all his ears—comes, that is, inwardly into the mood of a speaker who gives his words their full tone and value. Suppose someone wants to make sure of my taking in what he is telling me. Then I must stand before him in the manner of a full-toned speaker; for since I have to feel in full measure what he is saying, I must make the gesture that we saw to be right for the word that is spoken in full measure. These are ways to establish a right relationship between speaker and listener.

It must only not be forgotten that what I have now been recommending should never be noticeable on the stage; it should have been so thoroughly worked with that it has passed over entirely into an instinctive sensitiveness for what is true in art. If ever a movement gives the appearance of being studied or artificial, that movement is immediately false. For in art, everything is false unless it is the artistic itself that the spectator has before him—the artistic itself as style.

Consider in this connection what a difference there will be in their whole manner of speaking between some character in a drama who wants to convince, and one who wants to persuade. This difference must be brought out on the stage.

Situations occur where we want to persuade another person, we want to talk him round. One can have this desire in a good or in a bad sense—or somewhere between the two. You have a classic and grand instance of persuasion in the famous saying of Wallenstein: ‘Max, bleibe bei mir! ’ (Max, stay with me!).¹ There you have, not the will to convince, as will be evident from the context, but the will to persuade.

Now, you could not imagine Wallenstein standing in front of Max Piccolomini, wringing his hands and saying: ‘Max, bleibe bei mir!’ But you can, and indeed you must, imagine him clapping Max on the shoulder, or showing at least an inclination to do so. That is the gesture that belongs properly to the words. Where, on the other hand, it is a question of trying to carry conviction by reasoning, the speaker must make some gesture upon his own person. He will have to clasp his hands, for example, or touch himself somewhere with his hands. He feels a need to discover within himself the power of conviction—as it were, to track it down. If, however, the speaker wants to persuade, he should make the gesture of touching the other person—or at least let it begin, making a movement, that is, which, if carried further, would be a complete gesture of touching.

Note carefully also the fine distinctions we have to make for different kinds of persuasion. We may, for example, be using persuasion with the intention of giving comfort. Much will then depend on our powers of persuasion in the good sense of the word, for the one who needs comfort has not time to be convinced; what he wants, as a rule, is to be persuaded, not to be convinced by reason. We shall find, however, it makes a great difference whether we are in this way using persuasion to bring comfort, or are, for instance, wanting something from the other person.

If we want to bring comfort, then we make this gesture of touching; it will work naturally and harmoniously, whether we only begin it, or carry it to completion. It need really only be begun. We can take the other's hand, or lay the palm of our hand on his forearm. The audience will then instinctively receive the right impression.

This gesture will, however, not be right if you are wanting something for yourself, as in the famous example I quoted just now, not even if your wish be inspired by the very best intentions. ‘Max, bleibe bei mir !’ The actor who says these words will not lay his hand on Max's arm; he will have to place his hand on Max's shoulder or on his head, or anyway make a gesture of beginning to do so. Things like this will have to be grasped in all their exact detail, if we are ever to have again a genuine art of production that concerns itself with the whole practical work of the stage.

And now let us go a little farther; for there are many more details of gesture and posture that require to be studied. We need, for example, to develop an artistic perception for the following. When a person is standing in front of you, you may be seeing him in profile, in part profile, or in full face; and there is a meaning for each of these three ways of being seen. Anyone who is an attentive observer of life will know how people sometimes place themselves instinctively so that others are seeing them in one or other of these ways. In real life a kind of affectation lies behind it, but in art it is done for artistic reasons. I once knew a professor (he was a German) who never lectured without presenting himself in profile to his audience—and not only before ladies, to whom he frequently gave lectures, but before his own men students too; and he knew very well what it meant.

Standing in profile always calls up instinctively in the onlooker a sense of being in the presence of intellectual superiority. You cannot look at a person in profile without being impressed with his intellectual superiority—or inferiority, as the case may be; for in real life inferiority also occurs. The front-face view can never, for unprejudiced observation, tell us whether the person is clever or stupid. Looking him full in the face, we can remark whether he is a good or a bad man, whether he is kindly disposed or selfish; but if we want to observe whether he is clever or dull, we must see him in profile. And since one who makes use of profile is sure to be a person who believes himself to be clever, we shall know he is wanting in this way to show us his cleverness.

The actor should also make here an additional gesture; he should at the same time hold his head back a little. Then the audience will be bound to feel that he is impressing his hearers with his intellectual superiority. If therefore you want the acting to be artistic, you must arrange that an actor who is to speak a passage wherein he has to appear superior to the one he is addressing shall turn his complete profile to the audience, holding his head back a little as he speaks. We must, you know, once and for all rid the stage of dilettantism. We must create again the possibility for students to learn the preliminaries for the art of the stage, just as painters have to learn how to use colour. For unless one has learned and studied these things, one is not an actor, one is not acting artistically, but at best merely performing à la Reinhardt or Bassermann!

But now, suppose you stand before the audience in part profile. That will express, not intellectual superiority but intellectual participation in what the other is saying, especially if at the same time the head be inclined forward a little, so. A listener can in this way show to the audience that he is following the speaker with his understanding. It may, however, be that you want rather more the listener's feelings to be apparent to the audience. In this case, whilst the other is speaking, the listener must as far as possible allow the audience to see him full face.

The situation on the stage can really come alive when the speaking is accompanied by these postures in the listener. Where the speaking is intended to make an impression on his intellect, you will choose for the listener the profile position; where it is rather his heart that is to be touched, you will let him stand full face to the audience. When details of this nature begin to be clearly envisaged and understood, then the art of the stage will be able to emerge from dilettantism and once again acquire content. We shall be able to see from the way an actor stands or walks, whether it is more with the intellect or with the feelings of the heart that he is participating in the situation.

Passing on now to consider the will, we find that for the expression of will there has always to be movement, and here you will have to pay particular regard to what I said about form in movement. The expression of will or resolve calls forth in another an answering impulse of will. We know how this happens in life. Someone gives expression to his will in a certain direction. We listen to him. We can fall in with his will, or we can ourselves ‘will’ to hinder it. There you have the two extreme situations, and there are naturally many intermediate possibilities.

A will that gives in to the will of the other must always be accompanied with a movement from left to right, either of the whole person or of the arms. Try it out for yourselves on the stage. Let one actor say something that has will in it, and another be standing there and making this gesture—that goes from left to right. You will feel at once that there is agreement on the part of the listener; the gesture expresses that he too wills the same thing Let him, however, make a right-to-left movement, and he is obviously on the defensive and may even be considering how he can put hindrances in the other's way. Still greater emphasis can be given to this’ will to oppose’ if the movement is made expressly with the head—naturally, the rest of the body also sharing in it.

These are among the things that will have to be taught in a school for production that sets out to be comprehensive and take the whole art of the stage for its province. You will remember I told you yesterday—it may have seemed as though I were making rather paradoxical statements—I told you that in practising running one learns instinctively the walking that is required for the stage, and that leaping helps to modify the walking in the right way, making it now quicker, now slower, and that wrestling develops hand and arm movements, and so on. How is all this to be put into practice?

The first thing the school will have to do is to arrange for the students to practise Running, Leaping, Wrestling, something in the nature of Discus-throwing, something like Spear-throwing; for that will help them to come easily and readily into all the bodily movements that are needed on the stage. Then we shall at any rate be saved from a feeling one has sometimes nowadays about an actor as soon as ever he comes on: that fellow, we feel, has no proper control of his body. How often we have the impression that all those people who are dancing and hopping about up there on the stage have not their bodies under control! They would have quite a different relation to their bodies if, right at the beginning of their training, they had practised these exercises.

The next thing will be to draw forth from each exercise the particular ability it can develop for the stage. Let the students practise running for a quarter to half an hour, and then for half to three-quarters of an hour stage-walking; and the same with leaping and wrestling. For they must be able to unite the two : the exercise, and the skill in movement that the exercise helps them to acquire. And in order that, when they come to the last exercise, they may really succeed in drawing forth from their body the forming of the word, the four preceding exercises should be practised in the following way.

For the practice of walking, and of modified walking, for the practice also of arm and hand movement and of play of countenance, you should have a reciter who does the speaking, while the student makes, in silence, the corresponding gesture or facial expression. And as far as these first four steps in the training are concerned, the same method should be continued even later on for one who is wanting presently to appear on the stage. He should practise his gestures, to begin with, without yet saying a word, while the speaker of the company does the speaking. This will give him the opportunity to make himself entirely familiar with the gestures in dumb play. When the students come to the fifth exercise, they can begin to speak; they can accompany the gesture with the speaking—which up to now they have been practising only separately, without gesture, in recitative. These two, gesture and the forming of the word, have then to be consciously combined, consciously fitted into one another. Only so will our acting have the necessary artistic style.

The men of ancient India had a theory of the origin of man which, while it resembled our modern one, bespoke more feeling for the spiritual. For they too looked upon a certain species of ape as akin to man; but they were more consistent than we in their adherence to the mistaken theory. These apes, they said, can speak; they only don't want to—partly out of obstinacy and partly because they are a little bashful about it. If they are in any way human, if they are on the way to becoming man, then it follows that they must be able to speak. That was the conclusion, the perfectly correct conclusion of the ancient Indians. And I am always reminded of it when I meet with lack of temperament in the very people who need it. For I know well that these people have temperament; they are only unwilling to show it. I mean that quite seriously; the people of today are far more temperamental than they seem. We think it improper to show temperament; but it is by no means always so, and especially not in the case of little children. And yet how annoyed we often are when children begin to show temperament! But there too, you know, we shall have to learn to be more understanding!

When we have a school of dramatic art, planned in the way I have indicated, we shall not need to have any misgivings about arranging for the students to practise leaping and wrestling and discus-throwing. If only the teacher has temperament, and does not go about with a long face, but is a person gifted with some humour, then that of itself will help to evoke in the students the necessary temperament. They will soon stop being shy of exhibiting it. We have the means at our disposal for evoking temperament, we only don't use them. And for art, in so far as its practice is concerned, temperament is an essential factor. My dear friends, we must know this; we must know how intrinsically temperament belongs to art.

To write books on mysticism may not require temperament. If the books please, well and good; the readers do not the the author. But in those arts where the human being presents himself in person, there has to be temperament; there has to be also enhanced temperament—that is to say, humour. And therewith the moment is reached where it can all begin to be esoteric. And that is what we are minded to achieve in these lectures—that our study shall take us right into the esoteric aspect of the whole matter.

• 1. Schiller's Wallenstein, Act III, Scene 18.
• 2. Heinrich Laube (1806–1884). In an article written in 1898, Rudolf Steiner referred to Laube as this master of all producers.' He worked mainly in Vienna.

When we look over the history of the last few years and ask ourselves how the social problems and needs occupying the public mind for more than half a century have been dealt with, we can find only one answer. Although in the greater part of the civilized world, opportunity to carry out in practice their ideas of reconstructing social life was given to people who, after their own fashion, had devoted themselves for decades to the study of social problems, yet it must be regarded as extremely characteristic of the age that all the theories and all the views which are the result of half a century of social work from every quarter have shown themselves powerless to reconstruct the present social conditions.

Of late years, much has been destroyed and, in the eyes of all observant persons, little, or probably nothing, built up. Does not the question force itself here upon the human soul: What is the cause of this impotence of so-called advanced views, in the face of some positive task? Shortly before the great catastrophe of the World-War, in the spring of 1914, I ventured to answer this question in a short series of lectures which I delivered in Vienna before a small audience. A larger number of hearers would probably have treated what was said with ridicule. In regard to all the assumptions of the so-called experts in practical affairs as to the immediate future, I ventured to say that an exact observer of the inner life of humanity could see in the social conditions prevailing all over the civilized world something like an abscess, like a social disease, a kind of cancerous growth, which must inevitably very soon break out in a terrible manner over this world. Those practical statesmen, who were then talking of the “improvement in political relations” and the like, looked upon this as the pessimism of an idealist. But that was the utterance of a conviction gained by a study of human evolution from the point of view of spiritual science, which I will describe to you this evening. To this kind of research the building known as the Dornach Building, the Goetheanum, is dedicated. Situated in the corner of the northwest of Switzerland, this building is the outer representative of the movement whose object is the study of the spiritual science of which I speak. You will hear and read all kinds of assertions about the aims and object of this building and the meaning of the movement which it is intended to represent. And it may be said in most cases that the gossip about these things is the very opposite of the truth; mysterious nonsense, false and senseless mysticism, many varieties of obscure nonsense are attached to the work attempted by this movement in the building at Dornach representing it. It cannot be expected that anything but misunderstandings without number should still exist regarding this movement of spiritual life. In reality, the meaning of the movement is to be found in its striving with set purpose to bring about a renewal of our whole civilization, as it is expressed in art, religion, science, education, and other human activities; in fact, it may truly be said that a renewal is sorely needed from the very foundations of social life upwards. This stream of spiritual life leads us to the conviction, already indicated by me. in these lectures, that it is no longer of any use to devise net schemes for world-improvement; from its very nature, human evolution demands a transformation of thoughts and ideas, of the most intimate life of feeling of humanity itself. Such a transformation is the aim of spiritual science, as it is represented in this movement. Spiritual science stimulates the belief that the views of society, of which we have just spoken, proceed from the old habits of thought which have not kept pace with the evolution of humanity and are no longer suited to its present life. These views have been clearly proved useless in aiding the reconstruction of social life.

What we need is understanding. What is really the meaning of all the subconscious yearnings, of the demands, which have not yet penetrated into the conscious thought of our present humanity? What do they mean, above all things, with regard to art, with regard to science, religion, and education? Let us look at the new directions followed by art, especially of late! I know well that in giving the following little sketch of the development of art, I must inevitably give offence to many; indeed, what I am going to say will be taken by many as a proof of the most complete lack of understanding of the later schools of art.

If we except a few isolated, very commendable efforts of recent years, the chief characteristic in the development of modern art is that it has lost that inner impulse which should drive it to place before the world that which is felt by humanity as a pressing need. The opinion has grown more and more common that, in contemplating a work of art. we must ask: How much of the spirit and significance of outer reality does it express? How far is external nature or human life reflected in art? One need only ask, what meaning has such a criterion with respect to a “Raphael”, or a “Leonardo”, or to any other real work of art? Do we not see in such great works of art that the resemblance to the outer reality surrounding us is by no means the measure of their greatness? Do we not see the measure of their greatness in the creation of something from within that is far removed from the immediate outer reality? What worlds are those that unroll before us as we gaze at the now almost effaced picture at Milan, Leonardo's Last Supper, or when we stand before a “Raphael”? Is it not a matter of secondary importance that those painters have succeeded more or less well in depicting the laws of nature in their work? Is it not their chief aim to tell us something of a, world which we do not see when we only use our eyes, when, we perceive only with our outer senses? And do we not find more and more that the only criterion now applied in judging a, work of art, or in judging anything artistic, is whether the thing is really true, and “true” here is to be understood in the ordinary naturalistic sense of the word. Let us ask ourselves—strange as the question may appear to the holders of certain artistic views—what does an art confer on life, actually on social life, what is an art, which aspires to nothing higher, than the reproduction of a part of external reality?

At the time in which modern capitalism and modern technical science became a power, landscape painting began to be developed in the world of art. I know, of course, that landscape painting is justified, fully justified from an artistic point of view. But it is also true, that no artistically perfect landscape painting, however perfect, equals in any sense the scene lying before me, as I stand on a mountain side and contemplate Nature's: own landscape. Precisely the rise of landscape painting shows to what an extent art has taken refuge in the mere imitation of nature, which it can never equal. Art turned to landscape painting because it had lost touch with the spiritual world; it could no longer create out of the spiritual and super-sensible world., What will be the future of art, if it is inspired only by the recent impulses toward naturalistic art? Art such as this can never grow out of life, as a flower grows from its roots; it will be a luxury outside life, an object of desire for those only for whom life has no cares. Is it not comprehensible that people who are absorbed in the pressing cares of life from morning till evening, who are shut off from all culture, the object of which is the understanding of art, should feel themselves separated as by an abyss from art? Though one hardly dare to put the sentiment into words now-a-days, because to many it would stamp the speaker as a philistine, it is distinctly evident in social life that great numbers of people look on art as something remote, and unconsciously feel it to be a luxury of life, something that does not belong to every human life, and to every existence worthy of a human being, although, in truth, it brings completion to every human life worthy of the name.

Naturalistic art will always be in one sense a luxury for those whose lives are free from care, and who are able to educate themselves in that art. I felt this when I was teaching for some years in a working-men's college, where I had the opportunity of addressing the workers themselves directly in order to help them understand the socialist theories which were being instilled into their minds, to their ruin, by those who called themselves “leaders of the people.” I learnt to understand—forgive the personal remark—what it means to bring scientific knowledge from a purely human standpoint⁷ within reach of those unspoiled minds. From a longing to know something also about modern art a request was made by my students that I take them through the museums and picture galleries on Sundays. Though it was possible, of course, to explain a great deal to them, since they had themselves the desire to be educated, I knew quite well that what I said did not at all make the same impression on these minds as did the things that I had told them from the standpoint of universal humanity. I felt that it would be a cultural untruth to tell them about the luxury art of the later naturalistic school, so far removed from actual life. This on the one hand.

On the other hand, do we not see, how art has lost its connection with life? Here, too, praiseworthy endeavors have come to light in the last few decades; but these have been by no means decided enough, though much has been done in the direction of industrial art. We see how inartistic our everyday surroundings have become. Art has made an illusory progress. All the buildings around us with which we come in contact in our daily routine are as devoid of artistic beauty as possible. Practical life cannot be raised to artistic form, because art has separated itself from life. Art which merely imitates nature cannot design tables and chairs and other articles of utility in such a manner that when we see them, we at once have the feeling of something artistic. These objects must transcend nature as human life transcends itself. If art merely imitates, it fails in the shaping of practical life, and practical life thereby becomes prosaic, uninteresting and dry, because we are unable to give it an artistic form and to surround ourselves with beautiful objects in our everyday lives.

This might be further amplified. I shall only indicate the decided direction which the evolution of our art has nevertheless taken. In like manner we have moved in other domains of modern civilization. Have we not seen that science has gradually ceased to proclaim to us the foundation which lies at the base of all sense-life? Little wonder that art has not found the way out of the world of sense since science itself has lost that way. By degrees science has come to the point of merely registering the outer facts of the senses, or at most to comprise them in natural laws. Intellectualism of the most pronounced type has over-spread all modern scientific activity to an ever increasing degree, and a terrible fear prevails among scientists lest they should be unable to exclude everything but intellectualism in their research, lest something like imaginative or artistic intuitions should perchance find their way into science. It is easy to see by what is said and written on this subject by scientists themselves how great is the terror they experience at the thought that any other means than the dry, sober intellect and the investigation by sense-perception should find entrance into scientific research. In every activity which does not keep strictly to intellectual thought men do not get far enough away from cuter reality to judge it correctly. Thus the modern researcher, the modern scientist, strives to carry on his work by intellectualism only; because he believes he can by this means get away far enough from the reality to judge it, as he says, quite objectively. Here the question might perhaps be asked: Is it not possible through intellectualism to get so far away from reality that we can no longer experience it? And it is this intellectualism, above all, which has made it impossible for us to conquer reality by science, as I have already indicated in these lectures and into which I will enter more fully today.

Turning to the religious life: with what mistrust and disapproval is every attempt to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of spiritual science received by the religious communities! On what grounds? People are quite ignorant of the reason of their disapproval. From official quarters we learn of a science which is determined to keep to the mere world of the senses, and we hear that in these official quarters the claim is apparently allowed that it is only in this way that strict and true scientific knowledge can be attained. But the student of historical evolution does not view the matter in this light. To him it appears that for the last few centuries the religious bodies have more and more laid claim to he the only authority in matters relating to the spirit and soul, and have recognized as valid only those opinions which they themselves permit the people to hold. Under the influence of this claim to the monopoly of knowledge by the Church, the sciences have neglected the study of everything except the outer sense-perceptions, or at most they have attempted to penetrate into the higher regions with a few abstract conceptions. They believe they are doing this purely in the interests of exact science, and do not dream that they are influenced by the Church's pretension to the monopoly of knowledge, the knowledge of the spirit and the soul as contained in their religious creeds. What has been forbidden to the sciences for centuries, the sciences themselves now declare to be an absolute condition for the exactness of their research, for the objective truth of their work. Thus it has happened that the religious communities having failed to develop their insight into the world of soul and spirit, and having preserved the old traditions, now see in the new methods of spiritual research, in the new paths of approach to the soul and spirit, an enemy to all religion, whereas they ought to recognize in these new methods the very best friends of religion.

We shall now speak of these three regions of culture, art, science, and religion. For it is the mission of Anthroposophy or spiritual science to build up a new structure in these three regions of culture. To explain what I mean, I must indicate in a few words the vital point of spiritual science. Its premises are very different from those of science as it is commonly known today. It fully recognizes the methods of modern science, fully recognizes also the triumphs of modern science. But because spiritual science believes it understands the methods of research of modern science better than the scientists themselves, it feels compelled to take other ways for the attainment of knowledge regarding spirit and soul than those which are still regarded by large numbers of people as the only right ones. In consequence of the enormous prejudice entertained against all research into the higher worlds, great errors and misunderstandings have been spread abroad regarding the aims of the Dornach movement. That here is truly no false mysticism, nothing in any way obscure in this movement, is plainly evident in my endeavors in the beginning of the 'nineties, which formed the starting-point for the spiritual-scientific movement to which I allude, and of which the Building at Dornach is the representative. At that time I collected the material which seemed to me then most necessary for the social enlightenment of today in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Whoever reads that book will hardly accuse the spiritual science of which I speak of false mysticism; but he may see what a difference there is between the idea of human freedom contained in my book and the idea of freedom as an impulse prevalent in our modern civilization.

As an example of the latter, I might give Woodrow Wilson's idea of freedom; an extraordinary one, but very characteristic of the culture, the civilization of our age. He is honest in his demand for freedom for the political life of the present day. But what does he mean by freedom? We arrive at an understanding of his meaning when we read words like the following: ‘A ship moves freely,’ he says, ‘when it is adapted to all the forces which act upon it from the wind, from the waves, and so on. When its construction is exactly adapted to its environment, no hindrance to its progress can arise through the forces of wind or wave. Man must also he able to motive freely through life, by adapting himself to the forces with which he comes in contact in life, so that no hindrance may ever come to him from any direction.’ He also compares the life of a free human being with a part of a machine, saying: ‘We say of a part, built into a machine, that it can move freely when it has no connection with anything anywhere; and when the rest of the machine is so constructed that this part runs freely within it.’ I have just one thing to say to this; we can only speak of freedom with regard to the human being when we see in it the very opposite of such an adaptation to the environment, we can only speak of human freedom when we compare it, not with the freedom of a ship on the sea, perfectly adapted to the forces of wind and weather, but when we compare it with the freedom of a ship that can stop and turn against wind and weather, and can do so without regarding the forces to which it is adapted. That is to say, at the bottom of such an idea of freedom as this lies the whole mechanical conception of the world, yet at the present day it is considered to be the only possible one. This world-conception is the result of the mere intellectualism of modern times. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have felt compelled to take a stand against views of this kind. I know very well—forgive another personal remark—that this book has fragments of the European philosophical conception of the world, out of which it is born, still clinging to it, as a chicken sometimes retains fragments of the eggshell from which it has emerged. For the book has. of course, grown out of European philosophical world-conceptions. It was necessary to show in that book the erroneous thought in those world-conceptions. For this reason the book may appear to some to be pedantic, though this was by no means my intention. The contents are intended to work as an impulse in the immediate practice of life, so that, through the ideas developed in that book, the impulse thus generated in the human will may flow directly into human life.

For this reason, however, I was obliged to state the problem of human freedom quite differently from the usual manner of doing so wherever we turn, throughout the centuries of human evolution, the question regarding the freedom of human will and of the human being has been: Is man free, or is he not free? I was under the necessity of showing that the question in this form was wrongly framed and must be put from a different standpoint. For if we take that which modern science and modern human consciousness look upon as the real self, but which ought to be regarded as the natural self, then, certainly, that being can never he free. That self must act of inner necessity. Were man only that which he is held to be by modern science, then his idea of freedom would be the same as that of Woodrow Wilson's. But this would be no real freedom; it would be only what might be called with every single action the inevitable result of natural causes. But modern human consciousness is not much aware of the other self within the human being where the problem regarding freedom really begins. Modern human consciousness is only aware of the natural self in man; it regards him as a being subject to natural causality. But those who penetrate more deeply into the human being must reflect that man can become something more in the course of his life than that with which nature has endowed him. We first discover what the human being really is, when we recognize that one part of him is that with which he is born, and all that which he has inherited; the other part is that which he does not owe to his bodily nature, but which he can make of himself by awakening the real self slumbering within him. Because these things are true I have not asked: Is man free or not free? I have stated the question in the following way: Can man become a free being through inner development, or can he not? And the answer is: He can become free if he develops within himself that which otherwise slumbers, but can be awakened; he can only then become free. Man's freedom is not a gift of nature. Freedom belongs to that part of man which he can, and must, awaken within himself. But if the ideas contained in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity are to be further developed and applied to external social life, so that these truths may become clear to a larger circle of people, it will be necessary to build a superstructure of the truths of spiritual science on the foundation of that philosophy. It had to be shown that by taking his evolution into his own hands, man is really able to awaken a slumbering being within him. I endeavored to do this in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, and in the other books which I have contributed to the literature of spiritual science. In these books I tried to show that the human being can indeed take his own evolution in hand and that only by so doing, and thus making of it something different from that to which he is born, can he rise to a real knowledge of soul and spirit. It is true that this view is considered by a large part of humanity at the present day to be a most unattractive one. For what does it presuppose? It presupposes that we attain to something like intellectual humility. But few desire this today. I will explain what I mean by this quality of intellectual humility, to which we must attain.

Suppose we give a volume of Goethe's lyric poems to a child of five. The child will certainly not treat the book as it deserves; he will tear it to pieces, or spoil it in some other way. In any case he does not know how to value such a book. But suppose the child to have grown ten or twelve years older, that he has been taught. and trained; then he will treat Goethe's lyric poems in a different manner. And yet there is no great difference externally between a child of five and one of twelve or fourteen with a book of Goethe's poems before him. The difference lies within the child. He has developed so that he knows what to do with such a volume. As the child feels towards the volume of Goethe's lyrics, so must the man feel towards nature, the cosmos, the whole universe, when he begins to think seriously of soul and spirit. He must acknowledge to himself that, in order to read and understand what is written in the book of nature and the universe, he must do his utmost to develop his inner self, just as the five-year-old child must be taught in order to understand Goethe's lyric poems. We must acknowledge with intellectual humility our impotence to penetrate the universe with understanding by means of the natural gifts with which we are born; and we must then admit that there may be ways of self-development and of unfolding the inner powers of our being to see in that which lies spread out before the senses the living spirit and the living soul. My writings to which I have referred show that it is possible to put this in practice. This must be said, because intellectualism, the fruit of evolution of the last few centuries, is no longer able to solve the riddles of life. Into one region of life, that of inanimate nature, it is able to penetrate, but it is compelled to halt before human reality, more especially social reality.

That quality which I have called intellectual humility must be the groundwork of every true modern conception of the impulse towards freedom. It must also be the groundwork of all real insight into the transformation necessary in art, religion, and science. Here intellectuality has plainly, only too plainly, shown that it can attain no real knowledge which truly perceives and attains to the things of the soul and spirit. As I leave already pointed out, it has confined itself to the outer world of the senses and to the combining and systematizing of perceptions Hence it has been unable to prevail against the pretensions of the religious bodies, which have also not attained to a new knowledge of matters pertaining to the soul and spirit, but have on this account carried into modern times an antiquated view, unsuited to the age. But one thing must be conquered, that is the fear I have already described, the fear that we might become too much involved in the objects of the senses, in our endeavors to gain a spiritual knowledge of them. It is so easy to call oneself a follower of intellectualism, because, when we occupy ourselves merely with abstract ideas, even of modern science, we are so far removed from the reality that we only view it in perspective, and there is no danger of our being in any way influenced by the reality. But with the knowledge that is meant here, which we gain for ourselves when we take our own evolution in hand, with such knowledge we must descend into the realities of life, we must plunge into the profoundest depths of our own nature, deeper than those reached by mere self-training in intellectualism. Within the bounds of intellectualism, we only reach the upper strata of our own life. If with the help of the knowledge here spoken of, we descend into the depths of our own inner nature, we find there not only thoughts and feelings, a mere reflection of the outer world, we find there happenings, facts of our inner being, from which the merely intellectual thinker would recoil in horror; but which are of the same kind as those within nature herself, of the same kind as those which happen in the world. Then, within our own nature, we learn to know the nature of the world. We cannot learn to know that life of the world if we go no further than mere abstract conceptions or the laws of nature. We must penetrate so far that our own inmost being becomes one with reality. We must not fear to approach reality; our inner development must carry us so far that we can stand firm in the presence of reality, without being consumed, or scorched, or suffocated. When we stand in the presence of reality, no longer held at a distance by the intellect, we are able to grasp the truth of things. Thus we find described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, the inner development of the human being to the stage of spiritual knowledge at which he becomes one with reality, but in such wise that, being merged in reality, he can imbibe from it knowledge which is not a distant perception by means of the intellect, but is instead saturated with reality itself and for this reason can merge with it.

You will find that one characteristic feature of the spiritual science which occupies us here is that it can plunge into reality, that it does not merely speak of an abstract spirit, but of the real, tangible spirit, living in our environment surrounding us just as the things of the sense-world surround us. Abstract observations are the fruit of modern intellectualism. Take up any new work, with the exception of pure natural science or pure philosophy, and you will find the conception of life it contains, often a would-be philosophical view, is far removed from actual life or from a real knowledge of things. Read what is said about the will in one of the newer books on psychology, and you will find that there is no profound meaning underlying the words. The ideas of those who devote themselves to such studies have not the power actually to penetrate to the core, even of nature herself. To them matter is a thing outside, because they cannot penetrate it in spirit. I should like to elucidate this by an example.

In one of my last books, Riddles of the Soul, Von Seelenraetseln, I have shown how an opinion of long standing, prevailing in natural science, must be overcome by modern spiritual science. I know how very paradoxical my words must sound to many. But it is just those truths which are able to satisfy the demands—already making themselves heard and becoming more and more insistent as time goes on—for a new kind of thought which will often appear paradoxical, when compared with all that is still looked upon as authoritative. Every modern scientist who has occupied himself with the subject maintains that there are two kinds of nerves⁸ in human and animal life (we are now only concerned with human life, one set, leading from the sense organs to the central organ, is the sensory nerves, which are stimulated by sense-perceptions, the stimulus communicating itself to the nerve center. The second kind of nerves, the so-called motor nerves, pass from the center out to the limbs. These motor-nerves enable us to use our limbs. They are said to be the nerves of volition, while the others are called the sensory nerves.

Now I have shown in my book, Riddles of the Soul, though only in outline, that there is no fundamental difference between the sensory and the so-called motor nerves or nerves of volition, and that the latter are not subject to the will. The instances brought forward to support the statement that these nerves are obedient to the will as is shown by the terrible disease of locomotor ataxia really prove the exact opposite, which can easily be shown. They, indeed, prove the truth of my contention. These so-called voluntary nerves are also sensitive nerves. While the other sensitive nerves pass from the sense organs to the central organ, so that the outer sense-perceptions may be transmitted to it, the voluntary nerves, as they are called, which do not differ from the other set, perceive that which is movement within ourselves. They are endowed with the perception of movement. There are no voluntary nerves. The will is of a purely spiritual nature, purely spirit and soul, and functions directly as spirit and soul. We use the so-called voluntary nerves, because they are the sensory nerves for the limb which is going to move and must be perceived if the will is to move it. For what reason do I give this example? Because countless treatises on the will exist at the present day, or may be read and heard, in which the will is dealt with. But the ideas developed have not the impelling power to advance to real knowledge, to press forward to the sight of will in its working. Such knowledge remains abstract and foreign to life. While such ideas are current, modern science will continue to tell us of motor nerves, of nerves of volition. Spiritual science evolves ideas regarding the will which at the same time show us the nature of the physical human nervous system. Spiritual science will penetrate the phenomena and facts of nature. Instead of remaining in regions foreign to life, it will find its way into reality. It will have the courage to permeate material things with the spirit, not to leave them outside as things apart. For spiritual science everything is spiritual. Spiritual science will be able to pierce the surface and penetrate into the social order, and will work for a reality in social life, which baffles our abstract, intellectual natural science. And thus, spiritual science will again proclaim a spiritual knowledge, a new way of penetrating into the psychic and the spiritual in the universe. It will proclaim boldly that those spiritual worlds, represented in pictures envisioned by artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, can no longer suffice for us. In accordance with the progress of human evolution, we must find a new way into the spiritual world. But if we learn to understand the spiritual world anew, if we penetrate into that world, not in the nebulous manner of pantheism, by a continual repetition of the word “spirit”, a universal, abstract, vague spirit which “must he there”: if we pierce through to the real phenomena of the spiritual world not by spiritualism, but by the development of the human forces of spirit and soul in the manner described above, then again we shall know of a spiritual world in the only way adapted to the present development of humanity. Then the mysteries of the spiritual world will reveal themselves to us, and then something will happen of which Goethe spoke. Although he was only a beginner in the things which modern spiritual science goes on developing in accordance with his own spirit, but of which he had a premonition, Goethe beautifully expressed that which will happen in the words: “He to whom nature begins to reveal her open secrets, experiences a profound longing for her worthiest exponent—art.” Once more will the artist receive a revelation from the spiritual world; he will then no longer be led astray in the belief that his portrayal of spiritual things in a material picture is an abstract, symbolic, lifeless allegory; he will know the living spirit and will be able to express that living spirit through material means. No longer will the perfect imitation of nature be considered the best part of a work of art, but the manifestation of that which the spirit has revealed to the artist. Once more an art will arise, filled with spirit, an art which is in no way symbolical, in no way allegorical, which also does not betray its luxurious character by attempting to rival nature, to the perfection of which it can never attain. It demonstrates its necessity, its justification, in human life by proclaiming the existence of something of which the ordinary, direct beholding of nature, naturalism, can give us no information. And even if the artist's attempt to give expression to something spiritual be but a clumsy effort, he is giving form to something which has a significance, apart from nature, because it transcends nature. He makes no bungling attempts at that which nature can do better than he. A way opens here to that art in which a beginning has been made in the external structure and the external decoration of the Goetheanum at Dornach.

The attempt has been made there to create a University of Spiritual Science for the work to be carried on within it. In all the paintings on the ceilings, the wood carvings, etc., an attempt has been made to give form to all that spiritual science reveals in that building. Hence the building itself is a natural development. No old architectural style could be followed here, because the spirit will be spoken of in a new way within it. Let us look at nature and consider the shell of a nut; the kernel within determines the form of it; in nature every sheath is formed in accordance with the requirements of the inner core. So the whole of the building at Dornach is formed in consonance with that which as music will one day resound within it; with those mystery dramas which will one day be presented there; with those revelations of spiritual science which will one day be uttered within its walls. Everything described here will echo in the wood carvings, in the pillars, and in the capitals. An art as yet only in its beginnings, which is really horn of a new spirit, altogether born of the spirit, is there represented. The artists who are working there are themselves their own severest critics. In such an undertaking one is, of course, exposed to misunderstandings; this is only natural. Objections are raised against the Dornach Building by visitors, who say: “These anthroposophists have filled their building with symbols and allegories.” Other visitors who increase in number from day to day, understand what they see here.

Now the characteristic of the building is that it does not contain a single symbol or allegory; in the work attempted here the spirit has flowed into the immediate artistic form. That which is expressed here has nothing of symbolism, nothing of allegory, but everything is something in its own form. Up to the present we have only been able to build a covering for a spiritual center of work; for external social conditions do not yet permit us to erect a railway station or even a bank building. For reasons, which may perhaps be easily comprehensible to you, we have not yet been able to find the style of a modern bank or of a modern department store; but they must also he found. Above all things, the way must be found along these lines to an artistic shaping of actual practical life.

Just think of the social importance of art, even for our daily bread; for the preparation of bread depends on the manner in which people think and feel.

It is a matter of great and social significance to men, that everything by which they are immediately surrounded in life should take on an artistic form; that every spoon, every glass, should have a form well adapted to its use, instead of a form chosen at random to serve the purpose; that one should see at a glance, from its form, what service a thing performs in life, and at the same time recognize its beauty. Then for the first time large numbers of people will feel spiritual life to be a vital necessity, when spiritual life and practical life are brought into direct connection with each other. As spiritual science is able to throw light on the nature of matter, as I have shown in the example of the sensory and motor nerves, so will art, born of spiritual science, attain to the power of giving direct form to every chair, every table, to every man-created object.

Since it is plainly evident that the gravest prejudices and misunderstandings come from the churches, we may ask: What is the position finally reached by the religious creeds? If they have any justification at all, they must have a connection by their very nature with the spiritual world. But they have preserved into our period of time old traditions of these worlds, grown out of very different conditions of the human soul. Spiritual science strives to advance to the spiritual world, in accordance with the new mode of thought, with the new life of the soul. Should this be condemned by the religious sentiment of humanity, if it understands itself aright? Is such a thing possible? Never! What is the real aim of religious sentiment and of all religious work? Certainly not the proclamation of theories and dogmas pertaining to the higher worlds. The aim of all religious work should be to give all men an opportunity to look up with reverence to higher worlds. The work of religion is to inculcate reverence for the super-sensible. Human nature needs this reverence. It needs to look up in reverence to the sublime in the spiritual worlds. If human nature is denied the present mode of entrance, then, of course, the old way must still be kept open. But since this way is no longer suited to the thoughts of our day, it must be enforced, its recognition must be imposed by authority. Hence the external character of religious teaching as applied to modern human nature. An antiquated outlook on the higher worlds is imposed by the religious teachers.

Let us suppose that there are communities in which an understanding exists of the true nature of religion consisting in reverence for spiritual things. Must it not be to the highest interest of, such communities that their members should develop a living knowledge of the unseen world? Will not those whose souls contain a vision of the super-sensible, whose knowledge gives them a familiarity with those worlds be the most likely to reverence them? Since the middle of the fifteenth century human evolution has taken the line of development of the individuality, of the personality. To expect of anyone today that he should attain a vision or an understanding of the higher worlds on authority, or in any other way than by the force of his own individuality or personality, is to expect of him something which is against his nature. If he is allowed freedom of thought with respect to his knowledge of the super-sensible he will unite with his fellow-men in order that reverence for the spiritual world, which everyone recognizes in his own personal way, may be encouraged in the community. When men have attained freedom of thought to approach knowledge of the spiritual world through their own individuality, then the common service of the higher worlds, true religion, will flourish.

This will show itself especially in the conception of the Christ Himself. This conception was very different in earlier centuries from that even of many theologians of the later centuries, especially of the nineteenth. How greatly has humanity fallen away from the perception of the true super-sensible nature of the Christ, who lived in the man Jesus! How far is it removed from the understanding of that union of a super-sensible being with a human body, through the Mystery of Golgotha, in order that the earth in its development might have a deeper meaning! That union of the super-sensible with the things of the senses, which was consummated in the Mystery of Golgotha, how little has it been understood even by theologians of a certain type in recent times! The man of Nazareth has been designated “the simple man of Nazareth”, the conception of religion has become more and more materialistic. Since no one was able to find a way into the higher worlds, suited to modern humanity, the super-sensible path to the Christ-Being was lost. Many who now believe that they are in communion with the Christ, only believe this. They do not dream how little their thought of Christ and their words concerning Him correspond to the experiences of those who draw near to the great Mystery of Humanity with a spiritual knowledge that is suited to our time.

It must be said that spiritual science makes absolutely no pretension of founding a new religion. It is a science, a source of knowledge; but we ought to recognize in it the means for a rejuvenescence of the religious life of humanity. As it can rejuvenate science and art, so can it also renew religious life, the very great importance of which must lie apparent to anyone who can appreciate the extreme gravity of the social future. Much, very much has been said recently on the subject of education, yet it must be acknowledged that a large part of the discussion does not touch the chief problem. I endeavored to deal with this problem in a series of educational lectures which I was asked to deliver to the teachers who are to form the staff of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded last September [1919], in conformity with ideas underlying the Threefold Social Order.

At the foundation of the school I not only endeavored to give shape to externals, corresponding to the requirements and the impulse of the Threefold Order; I also strove to present pedagogy and didactics to the teaching-staff of this new kind of school in such a light that the human being would be educated to face life and be able to bring about a social future in accordance with certain unconquerable instincts in human nature. It is evident that the old-fashioned system of normal training, with its stereotyped rules and methods of teaching, must be superseded. It is true nowadays that many people agree that the individuality of the pupil ought to be taken into account in teaching. All sorts of rules are produced for the proper consideration of the child's individuality. But the pedagogy of the future will not be a normal science; it will be a true art, the art of developing the human being. It will rest upon a knowledge of the whole man. The teacher of the future will know that in the human being before him, who carries on development from birth through all the years of life, a spirit and soul element is working through the organs out to the surface. From the first year of school, he will see how every year new forces evolve from the depths of the child's nature. No abstract normal training can confirm this sight; only a living perception of human nature itself. Much has been said of late on the subject of instruction through observation and, within certain limits, this kind of tuition is justified. But there are things which cannot be communicated through external observation, yet which must be communicated to the growing child; but they can only be so communicated when the teacher, the educator, is animated by a true understanding of the growing human being, when he is able to see the inner growth of the child as it changes with every succeeding year; when he knows what the inner nature of the human being requires in the seventh, ninth, and twelfth years of his life. For only when education is carried on in accordance with nature, can the child grow strong for the battle of life. One comes in contact with many shattered lives at the present day, many who do not know what to make of life, to whom it has nothing to offer. There are many more people who suffer from such disrupted lives than is commonly known. What is the reason.? It is because the teacher is unable to take note of important laws of the evolving human being. I will give only one instance of what I mean. How very often do we hear well-meaning teachers say emphatically that one should develop in the child a clear understanding of what is being offered him as mental food. The result of this method in practice is banality, triviality! The teacher descends artificially to the understanding of the child, and that manner of teaching has already become instinctive. If it is persisted in, and the child is trained in this false clarity of understanding, what is overlooked? A teacher of this kind does not know what it means to a man, say thirty-five years of age, who looks back to his childhood and remembers: “My teacher told me such and such a thing when I was nine or ten years old; I believed it because I looked up with reverence to the authority of my teacher, and because there was a living force in his personality through which I was impressed by his words. Now, looking back, I find that his words have lived on in me; now I can understand them.” A marvellous light is shed on life by such an event, when through inner development we can look back in our thirty-fifth year at the lessons we have learnt out of love for our teacher which we could not understand at the time. That light, which is a force in life, is lost when the teacher descends to the banality of the object-lesson, which is praised as an ideal method. The teacher must know what forces should be developed in the child, in order that the forces which are already in his nature, may remain with him throughout his life. Then the child need not merely recall to memory what he learnt between his seventh and fifteenth years; what he then learnt is renewed again and again, and wears a new aspect in each successive stage of life. What the child learnt is renewed at every later epoch of life.

The foregoing is an effort to place before you an idea of the fundamental character of a system of pedagogy which, if followed, may truly grow into an art; by its practice the human being may take his place in life and find himself equal to all the demands of the social future. However much people may vaunt their social ideals, there are few who are at all capable of surveying life as a whole. But in the carrying out of social ideals, a wide outlook on life is indispensable. People speak, for instance, of transferring the means of production to the ownership of the community and believe that by withdrawing them from the administration of the individual human being, much would be accomplished. I have already spoken on this point, and will go into the subject again more thoroughly in the following lectures. But assuming for a moment that it is possible to transfer the means of production to the ownership of the community at once, do you suppose that the community of the next generation would still own them? No! For even if the means of production were transmitted to the next generation, it would be done without taking into account the fact that this next generation would develop new and fruitful forces, which would transform the whole system of production, and thus render the old means useless. If we have any idea of molding social life. we must take part in life in its fullness, in all its phases. From a conception of man as a being composed of body, soul, and spirit, and from a real understanding of body, soul, and spirit, a new art of education will arise, an art which may truly be regarded as a necessity in social life.

Arising from this way of thinking, something has developed within the spiritual movement, centered at Dornach, which has to a great extent met with misunderstanding. There are a number of persons who have learnt in the course of years to think not unfavorably of our spiritual-scientific movement. But when we recently began, in Zurich and elsewhere, to give representations of the art known as eurythmy, an art springing naturally out of spiritual science itself, but, as we are fully aware, as yet only in its infancy, people began to exclaim that after all, spiritual science cannot be worth much, for to introduce such antics as an accompaniment to spiritual science only shows that the latter is completely crazy. In such a matter as this, people do not consider how paradoxical anything must appear which works towards reconstituting the world on the basis of spiritual science. This art of eurythmy is a social art in the best sense; for its aim is, above all things, to communicate to us the mysteries of human nature. It uses the capacities for movement latent in the human being, bringing to expression these movements in a manner to be explained at the next representation of the eurythmic art. I will only mention here that eurythmy is a true art; for it reveals the deepest secrets of human art itself by bringing to evidence a true speech, a visible speech expressed by the whole human being. But beside the mere movements of the body, founder on physiological science and a study of the structure of the human form, eurythmy presents to us at the same time a capacity of movement through which man, ensouled and inspired, yields himself up to movement. The purely physiological, gymnastic exercises of our materialistic age may also be taught to children, and they are now taught in the Waldorf School of which I have spoken. Ensouled movement, however, actually employs the whole being, while gymnastics on physiological, merely material lines employs only a part of the whole nature of the human being, and therefore, unless supplemented by eurythmy, allows much to degenerate in the growing human being Out of the depths of human nature spiritual life in a new form must enter into the most important branches of life.

It will be my task in the next few days to show how external life may really be given a new form in the present and for the future, when the impulse for the change comes from such a new spirit. Many people of all sorts, noteworthy people, feel today the necessity of understanding spiritually the modern pressing demands of social life. It is painful to see the number of people who are still asleep as regards these demands, and the many others who approach them in a confused way as agitators. We find faint indications of a feeling that none of the mere superficial programs can be of any use without a change of thought, of ideas, a new mode of learning from the spirit. But in many cases how superficial is the expression of that longing for a new spirit! We may say that the yearning for a new spirit is dimly and imperceptibly felt here and there in remarkable men, who most certainly have no idea of that which the Dornach Building represents in the outer world. But the expression of a longing for this new spirit can be heard. I will give one out of many examples of this.

In addition to the numerous memoirs published in connection with the disaster of the World War just ended, those of the Austrian Statesman, Czernin, will soon appear. This book promises to be extremely interesting. It is difficult to express what I wish to say without the risk of being misunderstood; I mean that it is interesting, because Czernin was a good deal less pretentious than the others who up to now have given expression to their opinions on the War, and he should therefore be leniently judged. In this book of Czernin's we may read something like the following passage:

‘The War continues, though in another form. I believe that coming generations will not call this great drama which has held the world in thrall for five years, the World-War; they will call it the world-revolution and they will know that the world-revolution only began with the World-War. Neither the Peace of Versailles nor that of St. Germain will create a lasting effect. This peace contains within it the destructive germ of death. The conflicts which shake Europe are not yet on the wane. As in a mighty earthquake, the subterranean rumbling still goes on. Now here, now there, the earth will continue to open and hurl fire towards heaven. Again and again events of elemental vehemence will sweep over the lands, bringing destruction in their train, till everything has been swept away, reminiscent of the madness of this War. Slowly, out of: unspeakable sacrifice, a new world will be born. Coming generations will look back to our times as to a long, terrible dream. But the darkest night is followed by the dawn. Generations have sunk into graves, murdered, starved, victims of disease. Millions have died in the effort to annihilate, to destroy, their hearts filled, with hatred and murder. But other generations will arise, and with them a new spirit. They will build up, what war and revolution have destroyed. Every winter is followed by spring. It is an eternal law in the circuit of life that resurrection follows death. Happy those who are called upon to cooperate as soldiers of labor in the work of rebuilding the world.’

Even this man speaks of a new spirit, but this new spirit is only a shadowy conception, a dim presentiment in heads like his. In order that this new spirit may take hold of the hearts, of the minds, of the souls of men in a really concrete form, the spiritual science and the art of education of which I wished to speak today in connection with human evolution, will labor for the social future of humanity.

• 7. or a deeper understanding of this, the reader is referred to Rudolf Steiner's The Story of My Life, page 274:
  
  “It is my impression that if the workers' movement had been followed with interest by a greater number of unprejudiced persons, and if the proletariat had been dealt with understandingly, this movement would have developed quite differently. But we have left the people to live in their own class, and we have lived in ours. The conceptions of each class of men held by the others were merely theoretical. There was discussion of wages when strikes and the like forced it; and all sorts of welfare movements were established. These latter were exceedingly creditable.
  
  “But the submerging of these world-stirring questions into a spiritual sphere was wholly lacking. And yet only this could have taken from the movement its destructive forces.”
  
  >We offer this quotation in order to show that the many remarks made by Rudolf Steiner in these lectures, characterizing the proletarian movement and its Marxian ideology, should not give the impression that he was hostile toward the proletariat. Quite the contrary was the case. His untiring efforts in 1919 and later were deeply concerned with the need of establishing a mutual understanding between the two classes—the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—which were fighting one another for political power.
  
  In 1919, when the workers were in power in Central Europe—in Russia since 1917—Rudolf Steiner continued this effort by offering a cultural, instead of a political-economic viewpoint. In doing this, he found it necessary for an understanding of the problem to make clear to the proletariat the nature of the destructive forces at work in their midst, embodied in an erroneous materialistic ideology. It must be emphatically stressed, too, that Rudolf Steiner made it clear that the same destructive forces were at work with an equal degree of fatality in the egotistic and unintelligent attitude of the members of the other class—the bourgeoisie—toward life and its world problems.
• 8. The original statement about the nature of the nerves can be found in the appendix of Rudolf Steiner's previously mentioned book, The Riddles of the Soul, (Von Seelenraetseln, Riddle of the Soul (1996).
  
  This most important statement shows how Anthroposophy solves the crucial problem of modern physiology and psychology, that is to say, it explains the relation between body and soul. The reader will learn that the human body functions in a threefold way, or one may say, there are three systems of organic activity: (a) the nervous system, including the senses; (b) the metabolic system, in connection with the limb-system; and (c) the rhythmic system, i. e., blood circulation and breathing.
  
  The important discovery made by Rudolf Steiner reveals the fact that the human soul in her entirety is not limited to a mere relationship with the nervous system, for this is only one of her several special functions, manifest in thinking, in so far as this activity depends on sense perception. Another function of the soul—feeling—is supported by the bodily rhythmic system, and a third soul function—willing—finds its bodily counterpart in the metabolic system. All this means that the human soul, as a whole, with her three functions is connected with the bodily organism as a whole. She functions through three systems which are intimately interwoven and mutually interplaying.
  
  Rudolf Steiner's statement shows further that by devoting herself to a certain training, the soul is able to detach herself, bond by bond, from the connection with the body and to turn her perceptions with transformed thinking, feeling, and willing toward the spiritual world.
  
  It must be emphasized, however, that the discovery of the threefold physiological and mental organism of man did not lead Rudolf Steiner to develop forthwith the idea of the three-fold social organism. The threefold structure of the body-social was discovered by him through independent research without taking the human organism into account. To quote the words of Rudolf Steiner:
  
  “The present comparison is not an attempt to take some natural science truth and transplant it into the social system. Its object is quite different: namely, to use the human body as an object lesson for training human thought and feeling to a sense of what organic life requires, and then to apply this perceptive sense to the body social.” (The Threefold Commonwealth.)
  
  >Bernhard Behrens.

As in the past winters, I will take the liberty of giving a series of lectures on spiritual science here in this place during the course of this winter semester. The program will show that these lectures will first cover what spiritual science has to say about the questions of life from its point of view, that then the transition will be made to the illumination of some important cultural phenomena, outstanding cultural facts and outstanding personalities of the past, such as Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, and that finally the relationship between spiritual science and various phenomena in the immediate present spiritual life will be illuminated. Today, these lectures are to be begun in a peculiar way. At the outset, we shall not present what can be said in support and confirmation of this spiritual research, but, on the contrary, what can be said in the way of possible, more significant objections to this spiritual science.

It is in the nature of things that this spiritual research attracts much opposition in our time, owing to the state of our present-day culture and owing to many other facts. But nothing would be more inappropriate to this spiritual science than for it to lapse into fanaticism and, so to speak, only to want to see what can be adduced in support of it from the standpoint of its representatives. Fanaticism must — and we shall see for what reasons this is completely foreign to spiritual research. Therefore, more than is perhaps necessary from any other point of view, it must be anxious to understand the objections of its opponents; indeed, in a certain sense it must almost tolerate them, and it must appear understandable to it that a good number of honest truth-seekers of the present time cannot go with it. It has been my custom – and those who have honored me with their attendance at my earlier lectures will be aware of this, and I shall continue to follow this practice – to take possible objections into consideration at the same time as I present my arguments. Today, so to speak, more significant and weighty objections are to be anticipated. For objections to what can be said from the point of view of spiritual research do not arise merely from the opponents, but in the conscientious pursuit of spiritual research, the soul that is devoted to such an undertaking is confronted with these possible objections at every turn. Since the truths of spiritual research have to be won and fought for in the soul, the soul must in a certain sense be equal to the opponent with regard to such objections as are raised in the soul itself. And much better progress will be made in this field if one is clear from the outset about what can be objected.

Now it is not my intention to deal with those objections or alleged refutations which can be found on the street, so to speak, or conjured up out of thin air. Instead, I shall consider the objections that an honest seeker of truth in our time, based on our education and the spiritual foundations of our present age, can and to a certain extent must raise. Nor will the objections of those be dealt with who often call themselves spiritual researchers or Theosophists; for it must be admitted at the outset that much of what passes today under the name of “Theosophy” is not to be taken seriously. But what has been and is advocated here is to be taken into account in my objections today. But if we want to engage with such objections, then much of what has already been said in the course of the previous cycles and what will be discussed in the next lectures must be brought to mind, as it were in outline. So, let us briefly agree on what is meant by spiritual research in terms of its content and sources here.

First of all, one can characterize spiritual science in very general terms by saying that spiritual science takes the view that it must go beyond everything that man perceives through his senses, everything that he is able to fathom with a science that is based primarily on the senses and on the intellect, which draws its conclusions from the senses. that it must go beyond all this to the spiritual causes of the sensual facts that can be investigated by the mind, so that it not only assumes but attempts to prove a spiritual world behind these sensual facts, a spiritual world in which lie the causes of all that the senses can see and the mind can investigate.

This spiritual science differs from many other schools of thought in the present and the past in that it does not merely assert in general, hypothetically, that there is a spiritual world beyond the mind and the senses, but that it assumes that the human being is capable of training and developing his powers of knowledge and soul to such an extent that they are able to see into a spiritual world — something they are incapable of doing without this development. So it is not just the possibility of a spiritual world, but the recognizability of a spiritual world that is the peculiar feature of this spiritual research or anthroposophy, if we want to call it that. It is admitted from the start that the soul forces and the qualities of the cognitive powers as they are in man in his ordinary daily use, if we may so express it, are not such as to enable him to penetrate into the spiritual world. But spiritual science denies that these powers of knowledge are undevelopable, that they cannot unfold to look into a spiritual world after their externalization to this higher point of view, just as the eyes look into the sensory world. But with that we are already at the sources of this spiritual research.

These sources reveal themselves to the soul when, through inner work, through inner development — and the methods of this inner development have often been mentioned here — this soul works its way up to a higher point of view. Then, as spiritual science shows, there is another world, a spiritual world, alongside the sense world that surrounds us, and it is from this spiritual world that the true causes of all phenomena in the sense world emanate.

Through the study of the spiritual world, however, we come to see man as a much more complicated being than he is for ordinary sensory or intellectual perception. We come to see man as a four-part being. That which is called the physical body is regarded by spiritual research only as part of the entire human being. This physical body can be observed by the ordinary sense life and can be grasped by the intellect. This sense body is the subject of ordinary science. For a large part of our present-day view of the world, this physical body is the totality of the human being. For spiritual scientific research, it is only one part among four members of this human being.

Beyond this physical body, spiritual research distinguishes the so-called etheric body or life body, which is incorporated into the physical body. But spiritual research does not speak of this etheric body or life body in the same way as if it were only accessible to the mind, but in such a way that the developed soul powers are able to see it, just as the developed eye can see the colors blue or red, while the color-blind eye cannot see these colors. And then she says that the necessary conclusion arises that the physical body, through the powers inherent in it, naturally disintegrates at death, because the powers belonging to the physical body cause its disintegration, its decay, and only held together by the etheric body, which is a continuous fighter against the disintegration of the physical body, being incorporated into the physical body during the time of life between birth and death. Only when the separation from the etheric body occurs at the moment of death does the physical body follow its own forces, which, however, then, because they work in their own way, cause its decomposition. The human being has the physical body in common with the whole mineral, inanimate world. The etheric body is shared with all living things, with the whole plant world.

But spiritual science cannot stop there. It recognizes a third link in the human being that is as independent as the physical body. There is no need to be offended by expressions; they will be explained and have already been partly explained. The third link is the astral body. It is the actual vehicle of the passions, desires, instincts, affects, in other words, of everything that we call our soul life, that takes place within. And in spiritual research, we then distinguish the actual carrier of the ego from this astral body. While the human being shares the astral body with everything that, for example, has affects and passions in the animal world and can develop an inner life of imagination, the human being has the ego as the fourth link of his being for himself as the crown of his individuality. Man's being initially lies in the physical body, in the etheric or life body, in the astral body and in the I-bearer for spiritual research.

Furthermore, for those who are able to penetrate into the spiritual world, there is the realization of how a large part of our life conditions, to which we are subject, differs from ordinary life, namely the life of sleep. For the spiritual researcher, sleep differs from waking life in that in sleeping humans, the I-vehicle and the astral body of the person are separated from his etheric body and physical body. The latter two remain in bed during sleep like a vegetative form, whereas the I-bearer with the astral body and with the affects, drives, imagination and so on move out of the physical body and ether body during sleep and then unfold their own life in a spiritual world that exists for itself. But for the average person today, when the I and the astral body are alone during sleep, ordinary life is impossible because this astral body and the I have no organs for perceiving the environment, do not have eyes and ears like the physical body. So it is impossible for the astral body and I to perceive the world in which they then are.

The higher development of the soul consists precisely in the astral body and I becoming able to develop organs to perceive their surroundings, and that through this a state can arise for the spiritual researcher in which he perceives the spiritual world ; so that in addition to the waking state and the sleeping state, he has a waking sleep state, if we may call it that, which is precisely the state in which the spiritual researcher can perceive the spiritual world to which man belongs according to his actual origin. Thus spiritual science tries to explain the transition of man between waking and sleeping in twenty-four hours on the basis of spiritual facts.

What is more, spiritual science approaches the great riddle of life and death, that is, in other words, the question that moves the human heart so: the question of the immortality of man. Spiritual science comes to the conclusion that the actual spiritual essence of man is not just a result of his physical organization, but an independent unit and entity belonging to a spiritual world, which builds up the physical body, which exists before birth, even before conception, and from the first moment when man enters into existence as a germ cell, has the effect of building up his organism. In other words, it is the spiritual soul that is actually active and constructive, that organizes the human being throughout his life, that carries only the fruits of his life experiences through the gate of death and that passes with death into a spiritual world to then have further experiences, and that then organizes a new physical body for a further life, to undergo a new life and repeat the cycle.

Spiritual science speaks in other words of repeated lives on earth, speaks of repeated lives on earth in such a way that we look back from our present embodiment within the sensual existence to other embodiments in the past, but also look into the future to later incarnations of our being. So that we divide the total life of a person into one life between birth and death and into another one, which runs purely spiritually for the senses and for the mind between death and the next birth. But spiritual science does not see this in an eternally recurring way, but rather in such a way that it recognizes only intermediate states in these repetitions, but traces the total life of man back to an original spiritual state that preceded all life, especially on our planet; so that the lives on earth once had a beginning when man emerged from a purely spiritual existence, and that, after the conditions have once been fulfilled, man will again enter into purely spiritual states, which will contain within them the fruits of all that man has gone through through the various earthly lives.

This is, of course, only an outline, which will be filled in with individual colors in the coming lectures, but which can show the results that spiritual scientific research comes to. If we picture this whole tableau before our mind's eye, then it must be said that for a large part of thinking humanity today, this picture will not only have something incomprehensible, unprovable, but perhaps even something offensive, something that may even provoke irony, scorn and derision. Even when speaking of the nature of spiritual science, a person who wants to relate everything important to him on the right ground of science must raise serious objections. A person who stands on this ground of science must ask himself: What do all the great, not just individual, achievements of science mean in the face of such an argument? What do scientific methods mean, what do seriousness, dignity, exactness mean in the face of spiritual research, what do all the efforts that science has made in recent centuries and decades to achieve certainty, to achieve objective certainty, mean? Spiritual research does not want to work against science, as has often been emphasized, but to be in full agreement with science. Therefore, it must be aware of what science has to object to, not only in terms of its content, but especially in terms of its seriousness and its achievements in recent centuries.

It can rightly be said that spiritual science points out that these sources of spiritual research lie in a certain development of the soul, in that the soul undergoes certain inner processes of perception, feeling and will, undergoes that what is called meditation, so that it has inner experiences, which are of course purely limited to one's own soul, which no one can control but the person experiencing it, and then something like this is presented as a scientific result about the spiritual worlds that cannot be verified. Where does science come in, can it say, on what is precisely the most beautiful achievement of this science, that through the research of the last centuries it only accepts that which can be verified by every person, objectively and everywhere and at all times? External experiments and observations have the peculiarity that everyone can approach them. Not so with that which is achieved and fought for within. When we look at people who experience things in this way within themselves, does the great variety of the contradictory things they constantly express not show how uncertain the experiences are that are given through a mystically absorbed consciousness? By contrast, how the research conducted by individual researchers in the clinic, in the laboratory and so on must agree! It will be pointed out that this could not be otherwise, so that what a person experiences subjectively is thus shown to be unscientific, and this especially because it cannot be checked by anyone else, since the other person cannot look into the soul of the spiritual researcher in question.

Do not these experiences of the soul bear a complete similarity to everything that can be proven to come from some kind of pathological state, from exaggerations of the soul, in ecstasy and so on? If the spiritual researcher objects that he is not willing to accept every vision that occurs in the soul as a research result, but that he proceeds according to certain methods, then one can still object, and this objection seems entirely justified: Yes, but does it not appear in everything that people experience through visions, hallucinations and so on that such people, when exposed to such states of mind, develop a much greater belief in their fixed ideas, in their hallucinations and visions than in what their senses give them externally or what their minds impose on them? When one beholds the rigid and unbending faith of the illusionists, one must become dubious about what the spiritual researcher wants to bring up from the depths of his soul, as something that is not an illusion, that is supposed to have objective existence in the spiritual world. One could say that there could be something that has an objective existence in the spiritual world, but with regard to the validity of such a soul experiment, it must be said that the illusionist has just as much confidence in his delusions as the spiritual researcher has in his research results, which he owes to what comes up from the depths of the soul.

Only someone who has not followed the development of objective research, which one might say is the sound science of the last centuries and decades, can smile at such an objection. It is more weighty than one usually thinks, and is usually thought by those who come to their spiritual-scientific results from a one-sided direction. It must be said, for example, with reference to what is communicated in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, where certain indications are given for the individual soul, that the soul, if it abandons itself entirely to such an experience, has no point of reference to control it. All this shows that one must deal with such an objection, which may even appear trivial to a superficial spiritual researcher, in the most serious way. So much has been said about the nature of, as one might say, untrue ideas that what is said against it can also be applied to spiritual science by saying: everything you present as methods to educate the soul need not be anything other than just a more sophisticated ability to create illusions and hallucinations.

But then, especially spiritual science appears out of place compared to serious, verifiable science when it points out the individual results. The conscientious seeker of truth of the present day, who has become familiar with the developments of recent years, might say: Do you know nothing of all that has happened? You speak of an etheric body or life body that is supposed to have an independent existence from the physical body. Do you know nothing of the fact that until the nineteenth century people believed in something called life force, and that serious scientific efforts have finally dispelled the belief in this life force? Do you know nothing of the following fact: In earlier centuries, it was said that a chemical process takes place in inanimate nature between the individual chemical substances out there. But when the same combination of substances enters the human organism, the so-called life force takes hold of it; then, under the influence of the life force, the individual substances do not interact as we learn in chemistry and physics, but the individual substances interact under the influence of the life force. It was a great advance when this vital force was thrown overboard, when people tried to say that this vital force does not help at all, but that one must proceed in such a way that what can be investigated in the inanimate world can be investigated must be pursued further in the living organism, that one must only take into account the more complicated way in which the substances interact there, and that one does not have to throw oneself onto the quagmire of the life force.

The vital force was dismissed as just such a “scientific redoubt” when it was shown how the effectiveness of certain substances, which in the past could only be thought of as influenced by the vital force, could also be achieved in the laboratory. And because it is not yet the end of the day, science must still set itself the lofty ideal of also considering the composition of substances as they are present in the cell of the plant, and must not lie on the foul bed of a life force when it comes to investigating how the substances and forces work in the organism.

As long as it was not possible to produce certain compositions of matter in the laboratory, it was justified to say that they only came about when the individual substances were captured by the life force. But since we have succeeded – particularly through Liebig and Wöhler – in producing certain substances without the aid of a special life force, since we no longer believe in the life force, it must be said that even the more complicated combinations in the human organism no longer require the help of a special life force. Thus, in the course of the nineteenth century, science was confronted with the lofty ideal that most researchers hold, even if there are also “neo-vitalists.” This ideal will be fulfilled: to recognize the material connections as they assemble in the living organism and to produce them without the aid of a nebulous, mystical life force, which, as the serious scientific research of the nineteenth century has always maintained, is of no use at all because it contributes nothing at all to the objective knowledge of nature.

Anyone who recognizes these facts and, above all, who sees the seriousness and dignity underlying this development of science, may well object: Is it credible that a number of people are now appearing as so-called spiritual researchers who, in the form of their etheric body or life body, are reviving the old life force? Is it not a sign of scientific dilettantism? They may “believe” who know nothing of the ideals of science; but the scientific researcher himself cannot be taken in by what can only appear as a rehash of the life force. Thus spiritual science, one might say, dabbles in a dilettantish way, disregarding everything that belongs to the most beautiful ideals of modern science. It only uses the fact that science has not yet succeeded in producing certain substances found in the living organism in the laboratory, in order to be able to claim for the time being that a special etheric body or life body is necessary for the production of life. It can be said that advancing science will eventually expel this etheric body or life body from the human being. As long as science, in its triumphal march, has not yet succeeded in showing that there is no etheric body and that the combination of the substances of the living organism can also be produced in the retort, as long as the theosophists or spiritual researchers make a fuss about the etheric body, which is just a rehash of the old life force! This reproach could be raised, initially, as a fact of dilettantism.

If spiritual science now says of the sleeping life: affects, drives and desires of the human being are bound to a special astral body, and this emerges from the etheric body and physical body when sleep overcomes the human being and leads an existence of its own, then one can say that it is very easy to speak of an inner soul life if one simplifies matters by not accepting this inner soul life with all the difficulties and riddles that present themselves to science, but by saying: There is an astral body, and what takes place within is bound to it. One can also refer to the progress of science and ask: What about the great progress that has been made, especially in recent decades, to explain the phenomena of sleep life and dream life in purely scientific terms? It would take a long time if I wanted to present to you all the efforts of science – which are to be taken very seriously and with great dignity – to explain the life of sleep and the life of dreams. It would take a long time especially because a large number of research projects have emerged recently that are very much open to discussion.

It suffices to consider one point of view that can show how difficult it is for the serious truth-seeker of the present day to profess what may initially seem like an assertion: the I and the astral body of the human being withdraw from the physical body and etheric body when falling asleep.

If we take a blanket explanation of sleep life, summarizing a large number of different hypotheses and statements about sleep life, it is the following: It is said that to explain sleep life, all that is needed is an unbiased look at the phenomena of the human or animal organism. It shows that waking life consists of the phenomena of the environment making an impression on the sense organs, of them exerting stimuli on the brain. Throughout the whole day they exert such stimuli. How do they affect the brain and nervous system of the human being? They have the effect of destroying the substance of which the nervous system consists. All day long, says modern natural science, we are confronted with the fact that external colors, sounds and so on penetrate our soul, that is, our brain life. This causes dissimilation processes, that is, destruction processes. Certain products are deposited.

As long as these processes are taking place, the human being is unable to bring about the reverse process, that of rebuilding his organism. Therefore, every time we wake up, our inner soul life is destroyed to a certain extent, so that by the time we have become tired, we have destroyed our organism and it can no longer develop an inner soul life; it ceases. We need assume nothing else except that fatigue substances are deposited in our organism through the day's life. We need only assume the attrition of the organic substance, that the organic substance is no longer able to develop its internal processes for a certain time. But then the external stimuli no longer work, and the result is that the inner organism now begins to develop its nutritional processes, the opposite of the dissimilation processes, the assimilation processes, that it now restores the destroyed organic substance, and this is how night sleep is effected. Once the organic substance has been restored, the inner soul life is also restored, and so the waking life can again exercise new stimuli until fatigue sets in again. Thus, we are dealing with what is called the self-regulation of the organism.

Can we not admit that the conscientious truth researcher, who is familiar with the results of today's science, must say: If the alternation of waking and sleeping can be well explained by the self-regulation of the organism, then it is not only superfluous but also directly harmful to impede the progress of such human science by saying that there is no self-regulation, but that something comes from outside the organism because the human being is independent. Since it can be explained entirely by the organism that the alternation of sleep and waking occurs, it is unnecessary and harmful to assume that consciousness is something special and steps out of the organism to develop a special life during the night. Again, one can point out that on the part of spiritual science there is a terrible dilettantism in which only those who do not know the path of science itself believe in order to explain the organism from within.

When people speak of the independence of spiritual life, when they speak of the fact that spiritual life is independent, that we have the human organism as a physical one through our senses and explore through the methods of science how physical occur, while the spiritual is still there, this is something that has often been emphasized, for example by Du Bois-Reymond and also by others who do not readily profess materialism. For example, take any cerebral representation: if you magnify the human brain to such an extent – Leibniz already said this – that you could walk around in it, you would only see material processes in it. But the spiritual life is still something special, and that testifies that one is dealing with a spiritual life that is separate from the processes of physical life. If that is justified, then what Benedict says, for example, shows this: the fact of consciousness is basically no different from the fact of the effect of gravity in connection with matter. Because we see, for example, the physical matter of a celestial body. According to the assumptions of physical science, this exerts the force of gravity, and there is something that is attracted, for example, by the sun. In the past, such effects between the sun and the earth or moon were thought to be something supernatural. But it is just the same as if we have a piece of soft iron and, in addition to it, the power of electricity or magnetism. And when we have the brain before us, with its crowded ideas, passions, affects and so on, it is just the same as the fact that gravity and other forces prevail around the material earth. So why should it be different from another effect, when processes are at work around the brain that occur in the same way as the gravitational processes around the material earth? The earth in connection with gravity and the other invisible forces at work around it is no different from what is at work around the brain in the form of affects, ideas and other processes. How can one have the right, one might ask, to speak of the independence of the spiritual life when one does not ascribe to oneself the right to speak of the fact that gravity is also exerted when there is no attracting body? And one can go on to say: Just as one has no right to speak in such a case in the free space of the universe of a world body developing gravity, so one has no right to speak of a special soul that is not bound to a material existence in a brain.

It should be clear to every serious spiritual researcher that such matters must not be dismissed with an unscientific fanaticism.

If there are already serious objections to the spiritual-scientific assumption about the life of sleep and wakefulness, about the independence of consciousness in general, how can anyone who takes the scientific methods of the present seriously somehow reconcile himself with what spiritual science about repeated earthly lives, about the existence of the human core of our being, which continues to exist after death, which undergoes experiences in the time between death and a new birth, and then reappears in a new, next physical earthly life! This is not only objected to by those who rely on scientific facts, but also by those who today want to be spiritual scientists themselves in many respects: by psychologists, by the soul researchers of the present day. The question is asked: What is the necessary characteristic for the continued existence of the human being? The psychologist of the present can find this in nothing other than in the fact that the human consciousness remembers the conditions it has gone through during life. Continuity of consciousness is what the psychologist of the present particularly focuses on. He cannot concern himself with that which does not fall within the consciousness of the human personality, and he will always have to rely on the fact that although man has a memory of his particular states in his life between birth and death, nothing analogous can be shown for the existence of the human being that comes over from previous earthly lives. Many a serious seeker after truth today will be able to object to many other things that have been presented in the course of this series of lectures. It can be said: You can indeed put forward the idea that certain things in human life appear in such a way that they cannot be explained by the events of the individual life, but that one must assume that a person brings certain abilities, talents and so on with them through birth, so that one can assume that the soul already exists before entering into physical life. But all of this remains a mere daring hypothesis. All this remains insufficient in the face of modern soul research, in that the latter again takes a path that seems to be steering quite conscientiously towards an ideal.

What is presented here can be characterized in the following way: anyone who looks impartially at human life, at how it unfolds with these or those passions, with this or that shade of feeling, with an inclination towards these or those ideas, will, if they place themselves without much hesitation the standpoint of spiritual science, will say: Our education has indeed achieved many things for us; but it cannot explain everything, for we bring with us from birth something that comes from earlier stages of our existence on earth. But, the serious scientist may reply, have we not started to investigate the first childhood life, the childhood life that is not remembered later?

The modern natural scientist or the philosopher might then say: Here the spiritual researcher wants to explain an ingenious person, such as Fexzerbach, for example, by saying that he has brought certain powers with him from his previous life and that this has enabled him to work artistically. But now the following discovery has been made: Such a painter paints with a very special color mood, prefers a certain facial expression and so on, in a very specific direction. If one follows this up, one finds that, for example, in his first years as a child he saw a bust in his room and that a particular way in which the light always fell on it engraved itself on the child's soul. This then reappears later, and it then becomes apparent, one might say, that such impressions are deeply effective and significant. It is possible to explain a lot through this. Spiritual science wants to trace everything back to earlier lives on earth, while perhaps everything can be explained by careful observation and research into early childhood.

One can then point further to modern natural science, which shows through the biogenetic law how man really does go through the animal forms, which are assumed to have passed through the human race in earlier states on earth, in the prenatal state, so that there is justification for showing this. Following on from this, one can say: Where does spiritual science point to something similar, that something is repeated in the individual life that a person has gone through in previous lives on earth? One would have to be able to demand this if, as a legitimate seeker of truth in the present, one is to believe that in this respect spiritual science applies the same seriousness and dignity that is present in a similar claim on the basis of natural science. And so it has come about — and with a certain justification one can say — that once man has acquired a little scientific knowledge about human life, animal life and also planetary life, which is accessible to us through astronomy, he can then give free rein to his imagination, draw conclusions and devise all kinds of other worlds that give a very strong impression of reality. Of course, someone who has no knowledge of natural science will very soon become entangled in contradictions, and his ignorance will soon become apparent as he projects all kinds of things that do not correspond to the results of natural science. But anyone who is familiar with natural science will show that his ideas fit very nicely into what natural science shows. Then he will not be refuted. But who in spiritual science stands up for the fact, one can ask again now, that something like this has not been projected out of such assertions without justification and then developed fantastically? Who guarantees that we take the standpoint that only that which can be investigated by everyone should be valid? Therefore, we would have to embrace this for the simple reason that we see how something emerged in the nineteenth century that is also asserting itself in modern spiritual science.

We have seen that in the nineteenth century in German and French intellectual life, the things that spiritual science asserts have asserted themselves. In 1854, Reynaud published a work, “Terre et ciel”, and Figuier published a work about what happens to man after death. There have been numerous opponents with a scientific education who have said: Yes, what is better, that you invent facts based on natural science about a multitude of human lives on earth, about life after death, and so on, or is it better to accept some other equally fictitious hypothesis about these things?

When such objections are raised, and when they are not raised in a frivolous way, but entirely on the basis of a serious search for truth, then it must be said that they are not objections that arise only from a spirit of contradiction, but that the human soul must raise itself, all the more so because on the other hand one sees again how little conscientiousness on the part of those who want to cultivate spiritual science when “proofs” are presented that human life is an individual one and it is said that one cannot find an explanation for phenomena such as human conscience and the sense of responsibility unless one wants to assume certain tendencies and inclinations from previous lives on earth. Some people say: If I feel responsible, then I must have acquired the disposition for it. Since I have not acquired it in this life, it must have been in a previous one.

It is also said that human conscience is a phenomenon that proves that an inner voice speaks to us that we cannot derive from this life, and therefore we must derive it from a previous one. Then it is also said: You look at the different children of the same parents, they have very different spiritual characteristics. But if everything is supposed to be passed down from parents to children by inheritance, how can such differences be explained, as they occur even in twins? Therefore, one may conclude - so people say - that the children of the same parents have different individualities, which cannot be inherited, but must have been drawn from a previous life into the present one.

The conscientious truth-seeker will object: Do you not take into account the fact that the individuality of a person, as he appears to us, arises from the mixture of the paternal and maternal elements, and that therefore the mixture must be different for each individual child? Should not even twins, because they have different mixtures, have different individualities if they are explained only by inheritance?

This objection is not far-fetched, but one that arises from the matter itself. If you consider everything, you find it perfectly understandable that those who always demand a “controllable” science do not include spiritual science because it is not controllable; and if you consider that such opponents have something significant for themselves, you understand them. They have this for themselves, that there is something else besides the critical spirit in our time. This critical spirit is certainly present, and when spiritual science says something, it immediately calls upon its opponents, who are not only logically irritated but also morally outraged that such theories are put forward. Such opponents are called upon, and criticism is something we see springing up everywhere. And because spiritual science and its ideas are a shock to our time, such criticism is quite understandable.

But alongside the critical spirit, credulity also lives in our time, running after anyone who claims something from spiritual science. The longing to get things in such a way that one can also understand them is not very present in people, it is just as little present as the critical spirit and credulity are strongly present. Thus we see that through credulity, through the acceptance of authority by a gullible public, which accepts all kinds of things from spiritual science, the way is paved for precisely that which has always asserted itself against real, serious spiritual research, namely, charlatanry. It is a challenge to charlatanry when people gullibly run after everything. And it is a great temptation for people when all sorts of things are believed, when they are relieved of the difficulty of really justifying these things before the forum of science, before the forum of the spirit of the age. Even in our time, what is mentioned here is only too widespread. We see how credulity and the most blatant superstition are running rampant. There are hardly two other things in the world that are as closely related as spiritual science and charlatanry. If one cannot distinguish between the two paths, if one accepts everything only on the basis of blind faith in authority, just as by nature some things must be accepted on authority, which is often the case in the present time, then one invites what is rightly criticized by serious truth seekers: the charlatanry that is so closely linked to spiritual science. It is understandable that someone who is unable to distinguish the charlatan from the spiritual researcher might object that it must all be charlatanry.

It is easy to make the transition to the moral and religious spheres. We can characterize the objections that arise in these areas more quickly because they are easier to understand.

One can say: Just look how what must be the most intimate matter of the human soul, what a person can find for themselves as faith, as their subjective belief, is blown up into an apparent science! And one can object to the spiritual scientist: If you present that as your faith, we will leave you alone. But if you want to impose on others what you present as a teaching from the higher worlds, then that is contrary to the nature and character of how the inner life of man should relate to the spiritual worlds, to religious life in general. If one then also wants to show the fruits in this respect, one can say: One looks at people who, in spiritual-scientific circles, for example, have made the idea of repeated earthly lives their conviction; one can see in them how what is the moral world view is introduced into the most blatant egotism precisely through a spiritual-scientific world view. And one can compare the results of spiritual science with the materialism of the nineteenth century by saying: There were numerous people who were able to go beyond mere material processes with their minds, and who said: I do not see my higher morality in claiming a spiritual world after my death in order to be accepted by it and to continue to live there, but when I do something moral, I do it without hope of a spiritual world, because duty commands me to do so, because I gladly give what is my own egoity.

There have been many for whom the morality of immortality was only a selfish morality. This morality seemed to them to be much less good than the one that lets everything that is done pass into general world life at the death of man. In contrast to this is the morality of those who say that it would make no sense if what they do did not find its compensation in the following life on earth. This law of karma, the opponents of spiritual science can now say, only favors human selfishness; quite apart from such people, who may even say: I recognize many lives in the future. So why should I become a decent person now? I have many lives ahead of me, and even if I remain stupid in the present, I can still become wise and clever in the lives to come. “So one could say that repeated lives on earth are an invitation to lead a comfortable and carefree life. All this shows that the idea of repeated lives on earth is that selfishness, which wants to preserve one's self, is very far removed from selfless morality.

And an objection can be raised to Friedrich Schlegel's view of repeated earthly lives, as they are assumed by the Indians: The view of the human being's life, which rushes from embodiment to embodiment, leads to man being alienated from active, direct intervention in reality, so that he loses interest in everything in which he is to develop. It is easy to notice a certain unworldly eccentricity in those who immerse themselves in spiritual science. A certain spiritual egoism, a certain unworldly doctrine is cultivated as a result. Indeed, it can be seen that such people say: After studying spiritual science for a certain period of time, I lose interest in what I used to love. This is a common occurrence, but it shows that the objection is taken seriously, that the person should work in the world to which he is assigned! It is a serious objection that spiritual science should not alienate people from the direct and strong life of reality, should not turn them into eccentrics who let everything go haywire.

And now religious life! One can say: What is the most beautiful flower, the most glorious flower of this religious life? It lies in devotion, in the selfless devotion of the human individuality, one can say, to a divine beyond the human. The self-loss of the mind, the self-sacrificing devotion of the mind to the divine beyond the human, produces the actual religious mood. But now spiritual science comes and explains to man that there is a divine spark in him, which first expresses itself in a small way in one earth life, but then is developed and becomes more and more perfect, so that the God in man becomes stronger and stronger. That is self-deification instead of selfless devotion to the extra-human divinity.

Yes, one can object with some justification, if one takes the religious view seriously, that by living in one's own divine nature, if it is realized through the various incarnations, the true religious sentiment can be destroyed, as can the life of love. If a person does not feel impelled to live in direct loving devotion, but thinks that he will make up for it in a later life on earth, then he is only loving with a view to making up the balance. And the religious man can say: In the world view of spiritual science, religious life is based on the egoism that man does not have God outside himself, but within himself. And the objection is justified: what a sum of arrogance, pride and self-deification can be established in the human soul as a result!

Those who have such objections do not need to imagine them. But it can be seen from this how dream-like followers of spiritual science can come to such pride and repeatedly to such self-deification. This is why we find such a rebellion against the existence of the divine spark in man in the Occident, against the existence of the human essence before birth. One should not take it lightly, which one can find in a serious truth researcher as such an objection to repeated earthly lives in contrast to the conditions of inheritance.

One objection, which I will read out – and I will not talk about it further so as not to weaken it – is found in Jacob Frohschammer, who can be taken as a type of person who can object to the assumption of a pre-existence of the soul in many ways:

”... The human soul cannot possibly regard itself as a divine essence or as a part of God, not so much because of the Thomistic concern for the unity of God, since they could still be moments in him without damaging his unity, but rather because of the human soul's own consciousness and testimony, which can neither regard itself nor the world as a direct expression of divine perfection or as the realization of the idea of God himself. As coming from God, it can only be considered a product or work of divine imagination; for the human soul, like the world itself, must in this case come from divine power and activity (since nothing can come from mere nothing), but this power and activity of God must, as in the creation of a model, also be effective in the realization and preservation; thus as formative power (not only formally, but also in a real way), therefore as imagination, i.e. as a power or potency that continues to act and create within the world, thus as world imagination, - as this has already been discussed earlier. As for the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls (of souls that are either considered eternal or created temporally, but already at the beginning and all at once), which, as noted, has been rediscovered in more recent times and is considered suitable for solving all kinds of psychological problems, it is connected with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and the incarceration of souls in earthly bodies. According to this, when the parents are conceived, neither a direct divine creation of the souls nor a creative production of new human natures by body and soul takes place, but only a new connection of the soul with the body, thus a kind of incarnation or immersion of the soul in the body, at least partially, so that it is partly embraced and bound by the body, partly it extends beyond it and maintains a certain independence as a spirit, but still cannot escape from it until death breaks the connection and brings liberation and salvation for the soul (at least from this connection). In this state, the human spirit was said to resemble the poor souls in purgatory in its relationship to the body, as they are usually depicted by bungling painters on votive tablets, as bodies half immersed in the blazing flames, but with the upper part (as souls) protruding and gesticulating! Just think what position and significance this view would give to the sexual contrast, the nature of the human race, marriage and the relationship between parents and children! The sexual antagonism only a means of incarceration, marriage an institution for the execution of this fine task, the parents the minions for the detention and incarceration of the children's souls, the children themselves owing this miserable, laborious imprisonment to the parents, while they have nothing else in common with them! All that is tied to this relationship is based on miserable deception!"

If you are a fanatical spiritual scientist, you may smile at such a thing, but fanaticism should be alien to spiritual science. It should understand and truly tolerate that which the soul rebels against. For this reason, this introductory lecture was not given as a “justification” but as a “refutation” of spiritual scientific research. But what will be presented in the next lecture, “How to Justify Spiritual Research?”, will be all the more solid if we can make the objections to be justified ourselves. You may well believe that I do not want to refute spiritual research in truth!

I could only list a very small number of objections here. Many such objections could be made. Some of this can be done in the near future, and the refutation will follow on immediately. But from all that is stated, one can see how man, by undertaking spiritual research, is inwardly summoned to a battlefield, how not only the things that speak for repeated earth lives, for man's passage through a spiritual world, and so on, arise, but how all the counter-arguments can also arise from the dark depths of the soul. It is good when someone who is quietly engaged in spiritual research is also familiar with these counterarguments. Then he will also be able to show the right tolerance towards his opponents. Simply occupying oneself with spiritual science or turning a blind eye or laughing at the objections of one's opponents can never be the way of the spiritual researcher. That this does not have a beneficial effect was already shown in a particular case in the nineteenth century, which I would like to relate here.

In 1869, Eduard von Hartmann's “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published. Even if one does not agree with it, one can still say that it was a good attempt to go beyond the sensory view. Therefore, Eduard von Hartmann had to oppose much of what had emerged as an ideal of science at the time, especially what came from the newly emerging Darwinism. Thus we find much in The Philosophy of the Unconscious that should not have become fashionable in the face of Darwinism. But the one thing that all those who, on the side of Darwinism, could not declare themselves in agreement with this book had in common was that they rose up against Eduard von Hartmann as one who had not familiarized himself with what followed from contemporary natural science. A flood of refutations appeared. It would be a mistake to think that these replies contained nothing but nonsense; some of them were written by people who are outstanding in their own fields, for example, by Ernst Haeckel, the zoologist Oskar Schmidt and others. Among these writings was also one whose author did not name himself, with the title “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent”. In it, a number of cogent arguments were put forward to show how many things in the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” could not be sustained and how its author had thereby demonstrated that he was nothing more than an amateur in the field of natural science. Many people were positively amazed at the ready wit with which this anonymous writer attacked his subject, and Oskar Schmidt, then at the University of Jena, thought that from the standpoint of natural science this was the best that could be said against The Philosophy of Unconscious. Some said: He calls himself us, because he is one of us; and Ernst Haeckel said that he himself could not write anything better against the “Philosophy of the Unconscious”.

So it was no wonder that the first edition of this work, “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent,” was soon out of print. A second edition appeared, and now the author called himself : it was—Eduard von Hartmann! Now some voices ceased that had previously said: he calls himself us, he is one of us. But the significant thing had been accomplished: a man had shown that he knew everything that the most serious opponents could bring against him. Once and for all, it has been proved that one should not believe that, if something can be said against a Weltanschhauung, the author of that Weltanschhauung could not have said it himself.

For spiritual science, this is a vital question. Today, I could not say everything that could be said. But spiritual science must know what objections can be raised against it, and it would only be desirable if some of those who believe they can summon up profound knowledge in order to refute spiritual science with this or that good scientific, exact reason could sometimes consider how much better the person against whom the objection is raised knows the matter than the person who raises it. This is the case with a conscientious spiritual researcher. Of course, he cannot bore his audience by always mentioning all possible counter-arguments. But when something is said in favor of spiritual science, and when many opponents arise, then the latter should first ask themselves whether what they are saying cannot be said by those who represent spiritual science.

The task of the next lecture will be to raise the question: How should the soul correctly relate to the counterarguments that arise from its depths? Is it really true that, because so much can be objected to spiritual science, man really has to position himself as - to put it in a somewhat figurative way - Goethe ultimately has his Faust say: “Could I remove magic from my path”? Are the counter-arguments of spiritual research the same as Faust's attitude towards the counter-arguments of magic? Are they such that a philosopher like Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is right when he says: In the face of world observation, there is really only the following. We see that man is weak in many respects. Why should we not admit this weakness to ourselves, and why should it not be a strength precisely when one comes to terms with one's weakness? How man must admit to himself that he is weak against wind and weather, against volcanic forces and natural disasters! How man must admit to himself that he is weak in the face of what nature inflicts on him when he plants the seed in the earth and the unfavorable weather does not allow it to ripen, which only allows a famine to arise from his diligence! If man must often remind himself of his weakness, why should he not say it, out of honesty: although the mind can rise above itself in many ways, it is also weak and limited and can do nothing about what nature imposes on it; so it can recognize nothing about what our nature is – we must resign ourselves!

If the reasons that have now been put forward were so weighty that the next lecture could not be given, there would be nothing left but such resignation, which not only Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, but many others feel from an honest, truth-loving soul, and who believe that they have to defend the idea that man cannot penetrate into a spiritual world. Because the counter-arguments arise not from a spirit of contradiction but from the nature of things themselves, the dispute about the nature and value of the counter-arguments of spiritual science is not merely a theoretical fact, but something that must arise out of the battlefield of the soul, where opinions wage a seemingly more or less justified war against opinions, and where only through hard struggles can one recognize which of these reasons can remain victorious there. If one faces the inner struggle of the soul openly and unreservedly and can say what speaks for and against a knowledge of the spiritual world, then one does not become a fanatical representative of this or that invented or contrived principle, but one adherer to that principle, and builds up a calm conviction on a foundation of reasons which are only then, and never before, asserted for themselves when they have driven out all opposing arguments from the field of their own soul.

When the seeker of truth seeks his conviction in this way, he may confidently go forward into the future development of spiritual life, for what the earnest seeker of truth has said is true: Whatever is untrue, however often it may be repeated, will be cast out by the ever-developing striving for truth in humanity. But that which is true and has to fight for its existence against opposing arguments, as we can see in the events of world history, finds its way in the development of humanity in such a special way that one can stand before this development of truth into the centuries and millennia and say: And no matter how many covering impressions, that is prejudices and contradictions, are piled up, the truth will always find crevices and cracks to assert itself, to assert itself for the benefit, progress and use of humanity.

Among the many prejudices against spiritual science, as it is meant here, are those that associate the methods of spiritual research, that which can be described as the paths of spiritual research, with an abnormal, pathological mental life. Although anyone who follows more closely what can be said about the course of such soul development, which is to lead to spiritual research, can only come to such a prejudice either out of ignorance, out of lack of knowledge, or out of ill will, this prejudice must be discussed at some point. For there is plenty of ignorance in the sense mentioned, as well as ill will, in the world. I do not wish to go into individual attacks that have been made against spiritual science from this particular quarter, but I would just like to discuss in general terms the possible attacks, the possible objections and prejudices, and show how unjustified they actually are in the face of the nature of true spiritual research. To do this, however, I must briefly present some material from a certain point of view that was already the subject of the lectures I gave here at the beginning of the winter. I must sketch out the way of spiritual research in a very sketchy way.

The way of spiritual research - as has been emphasized here again and again - is a purely inward path of the soul, a path that is only traversed within the life of the soul itself, and it consists of certain activities of the life of the soul, of certain exercises of the soul life, which lead this soul life from the point at which it stands in ordinary life to another point, from which it is precisely in a position to approach what can be called the spiritual world. Now, in summarizing a great deal, I have just dealt with the exercises that the spiritual researcher has to go through in two main groups in one of the lectures I gave this winter. The first exercises consist of forming one's thinking differently, in a certain way, from the way it is in ordinary life: exercises of thinking. They belong to the first group of spiritual research exercises. Exercises of the will, undertaken in a certain way, belong to the second group of spiritual research exercises.

Today, I will have to say a lot, of course in a brief summary, for a full understanding of which it is necessary either to know what has been said in earlier lectures or to read, for example, my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” or the second volume of my “Occult Science”. For I shall endeavor to show how thinking is changed by certain exercises, technically called meditation and concentration of thought, in comparison with ordinary thinking. I do not propose to go into the way these exercises are done, but I may mention at once that in the actual thinking exercises it is a matter of raising into consciousness what is always present in human thinking, and especially in the healthiest human thinking , but which remains more or less unconscious within this healthy human thinking of everyday life, for the reason that we carry out this thinking of everyday life in the sense of what could be called adaptation to the laws, to the processes of the outer world. We do not perceive the external world only through our senses; we think about the external world, we form ideas that become thoughts, we connect these ideas in our thought life. We connect them, when it comes to healthy thinking that belongs to reality, in a very specific, lawful way. Even that which is called logic can only describe how judgments are made, how thinking moves inwardly, so to speak, in order to arrive at what is called truth. The actual process of thinking, the inward activity of thinking, essentially remains unconscious in ordinary thinking. The aim of the first group of exercises is to bring to consciousness what happens in ordinary thinking but remains unconscious, so that we do not merely let our thoughts be woven and live under the compulsion of the currents of the world, but so that our full, conscious will comes to expression in our thinking.

We must realize, when we truly observe the process of thinking and imagining, that we are doing so in the sense that it is imposed on us as a compulsion of the flow of reality. The exercises, which are now particularly thinking exercises, aim to take such ideas and such kinds of ideas into consciousness in the processes that are called meditation and concentration of thought, so that one always has conscious will in the whole process of meditating, of concentrating, that there is no moment when the conscious will does not prevail. And if you have the necessary patience and the necessary stamina and energy to do such exercises, it turns out that you come to detach the activity of thinking, the act of thinking, so to speak, from what ordinary life is the state of being in thought, that one learns to concentrate not only on what is being thought, but on the process of thinking, on that inner weaving and life of the soul that takes place when one thinks. And I have also dealt with the accompanying phenomena associated with this inner discovery, which consists in becoming aware of the thinking activity in thinking. The accompanying phenomenon is this: that one can, to a certain extent, regard one's thoughts themselves, which one is otherwise accustomed to having in one's thinking activity, as something secondary, and indeed, that one can ultimately have them entirely outside one's thinking activity. One begins with certain thoughts, but one passes over to a mere conscious, volitional, fully volitional thinking activity. One is able to switch thoughts on and off and consciously control one's thinking activity. As a side effect of this, one certainly becomes firm and strong in this voluntary use of thinking activity. But at the same time one enters into a certain emptiness of consciousness, into an empty weaving and living of consciousness. Therefore, as I said, these exercises, which relate to mere thinking, must never be undertaken alone. Indeed, the exercises of meditation and concentration are already undertaken in such a way that, by going through them in consciousness, the ordinary element of the will undergoes training at the same time; so that one comes to raise into consciousness what is hidden in the will in ordinary life. And then one comes to find something quite real in ordinary volition, in ordinary will activity, something that is always there, but which otherwise remains stuck down in the unconscious. One cannot will just anything, nor can one pour just any volition into an action without the element I am speaking of being present in the activity. But it remains unconscious. Through those exercises which are based on a kind of concentration, meditation, on an inner, now more, I would say, soul-related activity, one comes to discover what otherwise, by willing, by letting a will flow into the action, unconsciously pours into the willing or into the action, but which one does not look at. Now one discovers it. Strangely enough, one discovers in the will something that resembles consciousness. One discovers a consciousness that is different from the usual consciousness. One discovers – and one must take this, what is now being looked at, not as an image, but as a reality, as a truth – that another consciousness than our ordinary daytime consciousness accompanies us continually, that we are just not aware of this other consciousness, if the paradoxical expression may be used. One discovers another person in the person. One discovers that which can be named: a consciousness that is constantly watching us. And one learns to handle this consciousness, which one thus discovers in the operations of one's will, like the ordinary consciousness. One also learns to connect this consciousness with the results that one has achieved through the thinking exercises, so that the two connect with each other to a certain extent and one is now able to perform soul tasks, which one now knows are completely free from any physical involvement. The latter must be an inner experience, and it becomes an inner experience.

Thus one develops one's soul life into a consciousness that is different from the ordinary one, and one gives this soul life a content by discovering the will in thinking, by discovering thinking as this “activity in itself.” Not in such an abstract way as it is done by ordinary philosophies or other sciences, but in a living way one discovers the thinking activity as a volitional activity. One can now also say that one discovers the will in thinking, and one can say that in the will one discovers a consciousness that can be addressed as a thinking consciousness, just as the ordinary everyday consciousness that we have in life is a thinking consciousness. In thinking, one discovers the will; in the will, one discovers objective thinking that is not otherwise handled by us – if I may use the expression – a thinker in us that is within us, that is objectively present. This essentially characterizes what is to be achieved.

Other accompanying phenomena of this process must also be characterized in order to have a complete picture when one has arrived at discovering thinking as an activity, to find in one's thinking that which can otherwise remain unconscious; I have described this in more detail in earlier lectures. Then one finds oneself confronted with something as one is otherwise confronted with the objects and processes of the external world. But an important, essential peculiarity arises. What one now experiences with the help of the developed thinking and that consciousness of which I have just spoken, that other consciousness than the ordinary one, what one discovers in this way, differs quite essentially from the soul experiences one otherwise has in ordinary life. One may interpret the process more materialistically or more spiritually, but that does not matter, just as it does not matter in the case of today's reflections, which are based on experience rather than interpretation. That which has entered into us through our ordinary experiences, through our perceptions, and which has become thoughts, ideas, is transformed in such a way that it can remain in our memory, in our recollection, as one says, even if, of course, quite different processes are behind this retention. Just as experiences of ordinary perception and ordinary thinking gain the possibility, through a certain process of the soul, of being stored directly in memory, and become, as it were, our memory treasure without our intervention, so it is not the case with those experiences that we make in the way I have just described, with the developed consciousness and the developed will-filled thinking activity. These experiences are made, but they pass by being made, so that one can actually only hold on to them for a moment. They do not become embedded in our organic life. One can compare their fleetingness with the fleetingness of dream experiences. But one is not saying more than a comparison. After all, the dream still has the peculiarity that it can at least be remembered in a certain way directly through itself. What is experienced in the spiritual world in the way described takes place, but does not pass through itself into the ordinary store of memory. And that is the peculiar thing about it: if one wants to face reality in the spirit, one can never proceed in such a way that one can simply extract from one's memory what one has once experienced and then have it again. You would not have it again; instead, you have to experience it anew. Of course, what I have described is slowly preparing itself; it prepares itself through all possible stages. But if you consider all the things described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” for example, what you come to last is what I have just described.

Now you will say: So spiritual experiences can only be had and then have to be forgotten. They would have to, if nothing else were added. And the other thing that is added now is at the same time the special fact of spiritual loss, which must be taken into account if one wants to understand the relationship between the healthiest soul life and spiritual research, and how unfounded the prejudices are that somehow spiritual research could have something to do with pathological soul development. The peculiar thing at issue here is that the state of consciousness that is attained through the true, through the right spiritual-scientific path develops. It comes about, it is then there for our soul life. But the ordinary state of consciousness with which we otherwise live in everyday life remains as it was before we entered this other state of consciousness. That is to say, we remain capable of judgment or, for that matter, deficient in judgment in exactly the same way as we were before; we initially remain full of affect or less full of affect in exactly the same way as we were before. At first, it is possible to observe the other person, who one was before and who one has now remained, with the same objectivity with which one can observe today the processes that one went through emotionally yesterday, for example. Just as little is changed in the ordinary consciousness by the fact that one has attained this other consciousness, as the soul life that one went through yesterday is somehow changed by the fact that one looks at it today. And if it is changed, if you fantasize something into it, then the observation is not the one that can lead to any objectivity; then something must have taken place that is not in order. So you face your ordinary mental life in the same way that you face, I would say, a previous mental experience. The ordinary mental life remains completely intact. And if one wants to store up spiritual-scientific experiences, one must first take over into the ordinary consciousness, which has been preserved, that which one has experienced in the spirit, and then one can store it in one's memory in the same way as one can store experiences of the ordinary consciousness. But it is always necessary that the ordinary consciousness stands beside the newly attained consciousness and that what is undertaken for ordinary life is not undertaken with the newly attained consciousness, but with the ordinary consciousness. If, then, one wants to incorporate spiritual-scientific experiences into the ordinary life of thought, which can be preserved in memory, then one must first take them over from the other consciousness. If one wants to recognize that these spiritual experiences are true, then one cannot experience this in the other consciousness – this must be expressly emphasized – but one must judge them with the ordinary consciousness. They must be subjected to the judgment of the ordinary consciousness. Insight into the spiritual facts is gained through the developed consciousness; insight into the truth of these spiritual facts is initially gained through one's completely ordinary, healthy judgment, which remains completely intact if all exercises are completed in the proper manner.

But this is how the consciousness I have just spoken of differs from all pathological mental states. It differs from pathological states of consciousness in that the pathological states of consciousness develop out of the healthy ones – for my sake – that those that can still be considered healthy pass over into the pathological states of consciousness. The altered consciousness replaces the first. But even if you can think in succession: healthy consciousness, sick consciousness, healthy consciousness again, you cannot think in the actual conscious sense that you are normal, reasonable and crazy at the same time. Because then you would not be crazy. In the moment when you can judge your craziness with your normal mind, you are truly not crazy. This is the special fact that must be considered, that all altered consciousness, all morbid consciousness, arises out of the healthy one like a metamorphosis, and that one should never actually speak of a double ego – which has already been criticized by the excellent criminal anthropologist Benedikt – but should speak of an altered consciousness for the usual pathological phenomena.

This simultaneously characterizes the aim of spiritual-scientific exercises, the goal to which what is called spiritual research actually leads the human being. Now it is quite understandable – I say expressly: quite understandable – that anyone who does not immediately grasp the full essence of the matter at hand can easily fall prey to the prejudice: Well, yes, someone has done mischief with their soul life and has arrived at an abnormal soul life. Perhaps one could also, as one otherwise does, quite nicely, for example, in addition to the usual abnormal, morbid soul phenomena, which all basically have to be characterized by the fact that in reality not one consciousness can exist alongside the other but that one must develop out of the other, that one must replace the other. One could, in addition to these abnormal mental phenomena, simply register new ones – that is how it is done – in which one consciousness could exist alongside the other. For anyone who is not familiar with these things can, after all, basically come to no other conclusion than that the person who has come to such a different consciousness is basically subject to abnormal thinking, or also to abnormal volition or feeling in some way.

These things are quite understandable at first, although after all they do not stand in any other field than that in which someone who has reached a certain level of education in agriculture – and this is by no means meant to be disparaging! — can, from his point of view, also regard as a madman the person who, for example, spends the whole day dealing with quite clever mathematical operations, because it is human nature to regard as abnormal everything that one does not think and believe in oneself. Basically, the prejudices that are often brought against spiritual science from this side are nothing more than the instinct of human nature, just as characterized, to accept only that which one can experience inwardly.

Now, however, the fact is that there are indeed many opportunities to confuse true spiritual research with all kinds of nonsense. Spiritual research – that is, in a sense, given by the necessities of life – will initially speak to a smaller, closed circle of people, just as it ultimately happens in other fields. Of course, today those who have the task of speaking to people about spiritual research are often criticized for speaking to all kinds of small circles and the like, for speaking to people who have only just agreed to listen to the things. Yes, but I can see no objective difference between this process and the other, that at the beginning of a semester a number of students are enrolled with some lecturer, and he then also speaks to this closed circle. And unless other nonsense is going on, I cannot see why the closed circle of a lecture hall should be less called a sect, if one wants to use the term, than a number of people who hear something spiritual. But in spiritual science one is initially dealing with things that cannot be easily controlled by the processes and events of the external physical plane. If someone says that a composite body consists of these or those elements, then one can verify something like that immediately by external means. All spiritual-scientific results can also be verified, but it is necessary to first go the way of the spiritual researcher that has been described. So although these things can be verified, they cannot be verified in the ordinary state of mind in which other things that are purely taking place in the external physical world can be verified. Therefore, and I need not make a detailed transition to cite the experience I want to characterize, it happens that in this area, where verification can only be achieved by applying the appropriate means, there is in fact an enormous amount of what can be called a belief in the authority of what is said, what can be called mere empty talk. Yes, societies are easily formed for the purpose of spiritual life, from motives that need not be characterized here, which make tolerance, mutual love and mutual trust their first principle with a certain right. That is a fine principle. But experience has shown many times over that nowhere is there more arguing and disagreement than in such societies. And although such societies have often taken up the cause of venerating truth as the highest, experience shows that in no other field is truth less respected than within societies that claim to have such corresponding goals. And so it happens that within circles where supposedly spiritual science is practiced, much nonsense prevails. And then it is difficult for those who do not get involved in the matter itself, but judge things according to external symptoms and external events, to distinguish truth from nonsense. And now, in the further course of today's reflections, I would like to provide some information that can help to distinguish truth from nonsense in this field. Above all, I would like to emphasize that one should not be too critical of the prejudices that spiritual research has brought to the side just characterized today, that one can even find these prejudices understandable to a very large extent. I will now mention something very specific.

When one has entered the spiritual world in a certain way, when one has had spiritual experiences, that is, when one has come to know spiritual reality, then one arrives at what I have already characterized here several times, but which you can find precisely characterized in the books mentioned – one comes to what is called imaginative knowledge, not because it is just a matter of exercises in the imagination, of mere imagination in the ordinary sense, but because one comes into the position of having to express pictorially what one experiences. Of course, what a person initially has in terms of imagination, and also in terms of how he can put the ideas into words, how he can characterize the ideas, that refers to the physical world. If one is now transported into a completely different world and then does not characterize it differently, namely characterizes this other world as pictorial for oneself, then one forms false ideas about it. What is stated in detail about the spiritual world must always be absorbed with the awareness that everything the spiritual researcher describes flows out of fully conscious will activity, that he is not describing from some vague, indefinite , but that, in contrast to every half-remembered or visionary consciousness, he consciously, with full will, develops that which he presents as imagination, as images for the spiritual experiences. Just as he presents that which he presents in this sense, that everything is permeated by him willfully, so it must also be received in this sense.

To depict spiritual experiences, which are nevertheless really present in the life of the soul, even if they have to be depicted pictorially, it is of course necessary to take pictorial images from ordinary life, so that what is spiritually experienced is characterized by designating one thing with this color, another with that color, and so on. But there is a certain necessity — but now purely in a soul-spiritual sense, not in a physiological-organic sense — for the description of one, let us say, this color, this sound and this tactile experience, for the description of the other to use something else. And just as when speaking in a particular language one does not first explain that this word has this meaning and that word has that meaning, so too, when one describes one's spiritual experiences in concrete terms, the world of images in which one expresses oneself must be there like an inner language, like something through which one visualizes and represents the actual spiritual experience behind it. Now, if such a description of a spiritual experience occurs, and if this or that spiritual being is described in terms of red, blue and so on, which is quite correct and by which it is really represented, not just characterized, then of course the person who receives this description and is completely unfamiliar with the way it is actually meant can say: We know this! We know that from the field of psychology! We are well acquainted with those mental states in which soul experiences arise purely from the inner being as a secondary sense perception or as a hallucination or even as an illusion. It is therefore entirely justified when it is pointed out, for example, that there are people — after certain experiences have been gathered, even one-eighth of all people have this characteristic — who, for example, when they perceive a certain tone without seeing any color, add a color, but in such a way that it becomes quite objective to them. Such color phenomena, which are not evoked by an external impression but which arise from within and join a sound – I do not want to go into the various hypotheses that have been made about this – are called secondary sensory perceptions. And what people can experience in this way can go so far that, for example, when they pick up a printed matter, the individual letters appear to them in different colors according to their content, depending on whether it is an o or an a. In short, the psychiatrist can of course say: we know these things. And he can say this all the more when mental experiences occur that have the full character of sense perceptions but are formed from within as hallucinations. And if one often takes hallucinations that come to mind in a particularly vivid and plastic way, then one can say: Yes, is not the morbid soul life capable of really producing inner effects? And if one then hears what is presented from this or that side, the claim that they have developed in relation to the soul life, one finds exactly the same. The important thing is that, precisely because of the nonsense mentioned, secondary sensations or hallucinatory states very often occur in people who have a particular disposition to them, and then it is claimed that these are “higher experiences”, that they have really received something from the spiritual world. Yesterday, in connection with Faust, I already pointed out that nothing is given from the spiritual world, but these are mere transformations of the inner life of the instincts, which have merely arisen from within the human being. It does not give us more than the normal life of the soul, but rather less, because there is something that works below the level of the normal life of the soul and that only, when it is raised into consciousness, is transformed into things that look like the ordinary life of the soul. But there is a considerable difference between what is attained by true spiritual research and, if one wants to use the expression, true clairvoyance, and what is often called “clairvoyance” in ordinary life.

And this enormous difference will be noticed if you take what has been said: in all the activities of the spiritual researcher, in all the activities of the true clairvoyant, there is full volitional activity, there is no element in the realization of which you are not present, while the vision has the peculiarity that it comes about without the will being active in it. And one can even answer the question, “How does the spiritual researcher differ from the ordinary visionary, from the hallucinator?” — despite the fact that for many this will seem extremely paradoxical — by saying that they differ in that the spiritual researcher never has visions and hallucinations in the usual sense, precisely because his training in spiritual science goes far beyond the possibility of ever having hallucinations or visions in the usual sense of the word. And this is connected with the fact that what is a spiritual research experience, as I have said, must not be directly fixed in the human organization, but must always be experienced anew.

If spiritual-scientific experience were to become established in the organism in its immediacy, it could indeed lead to an illusory life, because it would then arise from the organism through itself, because it would become attached to the organism and the person would lose control over it. He can only be present at the production of impressions if he approaches each one, I might say, as a virgin, as he approaches, for example, an external impression. And only through this virginal approach to the spiritual experience each time can he know that he has an impression from the spiritual world, just as he knows through ordinary life that when he sees an external object, such as a clock, this clock is not hallucinated, but that there really is an external impression. Through what is happening between him and the clock, he can distinguish what he is now experiencing in direct activity in the external physical world from what arises in him that could, for example, force him into some hallucination or illusion. And again, only by maintaining the same spiritual experiences in the same state of virginity, by not forcing them into the physical body, but by constantly renewing them, does he know that he is not confronted with what arises from his own organization, but that he is always confronted with objective experiences that come from a spiritual world And one certainly still learns, if one is really involved in the way described in the living comprehension of the spiritual world, that inner energy, that inner strength, which one needs, in order to come, let us say, to imaginative knowledge, to recognize, curiously enough, as the same strength that dispels illusions and hallucinations. That is what matters. It is not the power by which hallucinations arise that one invokes, but precisely the power by which one dispels illusions and hallucinations and delusions, and whatever else these things may be called.

And so one could also cite something else, which in turn could be made as an objection in a very easily understandable way. When someone who is still inexperienced in these matters hears that a person who describes his spiritual experiences using terms such as 'world of color' or 'world of sound', as you do in my 'Theosophy', for example, illustrates the soul and spirit worlds in this way, he might say: Yes, if one has to come to the conclusion that one can recognize the spiritual world as a colorful world, as a resounding world, on the one hand all of this is considered a hallucinatory, visionary activity, a pathological state; on the other hand, however, we also know – he may object – that someone born blind cannot be brought to such visions, which play out in colorful images, through any process of spiritual schooling, nor can someone born deaf be brought to such auditory hallucinations. And it is very easy to refute this by saying: So we are dealing purely with the development of the person, which depends on the presence of certain organs.

An objection raised from this point of view is of no more value to the person who sees through things than the question: whether someone who has very good thoughts can express these thoughts in a language that he has not learned at the moment. He cannot, of course, express the thoughts in a language that he has not learned, quite naturally. So someone who is born blind cannot express in colors what he experiences mentally. But that does not mean that he cannot experience exactly the same things as someone who is able to express it in colors, that is, who also illustrates it to himself in colors, deliberately expressing it in this way. It is often necessary, though, to really get to know things intimately if one wants to see through the justification or non-justification of objections.

But if one does not look at things according to their inner character, according to their inner being, but according to how they appear externally, then one will very easily find that there are indeed – if I may use the trivial expression – there are some truly crazy people who belong to some movement that calls itself a spiritual research organization, and who come up with all kinds of stuff that can more or less really be put into the category that the psychiatrist is very familiar with. If, for example, someone approaches a psychiatrist and tells him that he is the reincarnation of John, the psychiatrist is fully justified in saying: We are dealing with an ordinary megalomaniac. From a spiritual scientific point of view, we are dealing with an ordinary megalomaniac because the truly reincarnated John would not express himself in such a way. But quite apart from that, it must be clear that when one is dealing with such phenomena, which must truly be described as pathological, one cannot characterize the essence of the matter in terms of it; for one must consider the whole way in which spiritual research has presented itself in our present time. It must be clear that a world-view is dominant today that leaves very, very many people unsatisfied for various reasons. I do not need to explain why various religious worldviews leave many, many people unsatisfied today, because that is too well known. But I need only point out that even those worldviews that are very often built on the so-called solid ground of the scientific way of thinking leave many people unsatisfied, and for two reasons. Firstly, partly because those who adopt the scientific way of thinking really do recognize that, as a rule, the answers to the big questions do not lie in the scientific results, as one can get them, but at most the clues to the questions themselves. For those who can see things clearly, scientific books usually do not lead to answers, but rather to more questions. That is one side of it. On the other hand, however, there are other reasons why building a worldview on a scientific or even on a modern basis today leaves some people unsatisfied. It must be said that building a worldview today on a scientific or historical basis requires a great deal. Above all, it requires making an effort to learn many, many facts and chains of facts. It cannot always be said that those who do not want to build a worldview on the basis of the scientific way of thinking really do so because they realize that nothing satisfactory, nothing easily satisfying, can be built on it; rather, very often it is simply out of laziness, out of an inability to familiarize themselves with the necessary facts and chains of facts. People shy away from dealing with the difficulty that today's science offers, for themselves. And so it turns out that very many people find it more convenient not to go the long way of preparation, which claims a certain scientific basis, but find it more convenient to take in what can actually be absorbed – sometimes as a mere phrase, as a nice saying – that which comes out of spiritual science in some way. One also likes it because it initially ties in with what is of direct personal interest to the individual. One likes it more, it satisfies one more than when one starts with nature and then tries to arrive at some understanding of the human being, insofar as this can be gained from natural science. In this way one has a long and arduous path to tread. Many want to avoid this. That is why people who actually have no opportunity to gain anything for their satisfaction through what the current education offers approach spiritual science, and then they do not develop in spiritual science what comes from spiritual science, but they carry into the spiritual scientific world current what they previously have in their whole organism, in their whole soul.

If someone has something in his whole affect, in his whole emotional life, which, if one describes things symptomatically from an external point of view, can be described as a tendency towards megalomania – I know very well that I am only expressing one symptom here – then it can of course very easily happen that this tendency towards megalomania is now brought into the spiritual scientific movement. And then it is quite natural that the person concerned connects what he hears about the human being, not in an objective way with the human being, but with what he himself develops through his tendency to feelings and emotions. And then it just happens that when he learns about the law of repeated earthly lives, he naturally finds it very satisfying when he can dream up some way to be, say, the reincarnation of so-and-so. But there is one who considers things rationally is quite clear about the fact that what the person in question has brought into spiritual science has led him to such an idea and that spiritual science cannot have led him to this idea. And anyone who takes into consideration what is only a very brief mention of the path of spiritual research in the last chapter of my 'Theosophy' — he does not even need to get to know it anymore — and who then still really takes it seriously with what can be gained from today's official psychiatry, from recognized psychiatry, cannot possibly come to the idea that something can be contributed to the illness of the soul life from the spiritual scientific path itself. Conversely, however, spiritual-scientific activities can be distorted and caricatured by what is brought into spiritual science by people who have the necessary aptitudes for it. Someone could enter the spiritual-scientific world-view current enter, let us say, the world of the stock exchange instead of the spiritual-scientific current of thought, and he might have such tendencies that develop into megalomania; then he would naturally live out his megalomaniacal ideas in all kinds of fantasies related to the world of the stock exchange. He might see himself as a special stock market king or something similar. If, instead of entering the world of the stock market, he enters the world of the spiritual-scientific school of thought, he will live out the same tendencies by considering himself, for example, to be the reincarnation of John the Baptist.

And so one can say: in a certain sense spiritual research itself suffers from the fact that many people who have failed in their quest for a worldview because of what is otherwise offered today for the quest for a worldview come into some spiritual research current and then clothe in all kinds of spiritual scientific ideas that which they would otherwise have lived out in a completely different way. It is easy to observe that especially in circles composed of people who, because of a failed world-view aspiration, profess a spiritual-research direction, many of them approach spiritual research precisely at the moment when they become disillusioned with what the external world can offer them. Now just think about what is actually happening here. Before this, the person lived with his predispositions, which naturally had to lead to some abnormality of the soul life at some point. This abnormality of the soul life would certainly have occurred. But at the moment when it is still hidden, when he no longer really knows his way around the outside world, he turns to some kind of spiritual research direction. The consequence of this is that he cannot be saved in the way I will shortly indicate, but that he carries what is stirring within him into the spiritual research direction. And because of all these facts it may just happen that because such a spiritual research direction is otherwise looked upon with envy, it is blamed for having caused mental illness in such people. Of course, on the one hand, every sane psychiatrist and every sane spiritual researcher will be quite clear about the true process. Now, in order to understand more in this field, it will be good to consider once more how the two types of consciousness, of which has been spoken, do not really have to behave in such a way that one develops from the other, that one replaces the other, but that they exist side by side, that full consciousness is present for two soul lives, but that they do not fall apart. These two souls should not be understood as more than what is already characterized in the concrete. This, then, is what must be borne in mind.

Now the question may be raised: Does this spiritual research as such have any positive significance for ordinary life, for the external life in the physical world? One might think that it has no significance, because it has just been said that what is experienced in the spiritual world cannot flow directly into ordinary consciousness. But the following can happen, for example. It can happen that a person in the spiritual world perceives this or that moral impulse, a moral motive that can only be recognized from the spiritual world. Our moral view from the spiritual world can certainly be enriched. Likewise, our natural view from the spiritual world can be enriched. Now, let us consider the case that one receives a moral impulse from the spiritual world through a spiritual experience, that is, an impulse to do this or that in ordinary physical life. Then, according to what has been discussed, this moral impulse, which is first experienced in the spiritual world, must be taken over into the ordinary physical consciousness and justified there, yes, placed in the world in the same way as moral impulses are otherwise placed in the world. In this way all possibility will be removed that a person might appear in the world and say: I must now do this or that, because this is my mission – a phrase that one hears very, very often precisely in the areas that I could only characterize by saying: 'Nonsense is being done with it'. The true spiritual researcher will never receive motivation from the spiritual world in this way. What he receives from the spiritual world enters his ordinary consciousness, and he now develops those ideas that are adapted to the external physical world, and with his will impulse he enters into this physical world, just as if one received an impulse to recognize some scientific connection. One will not present this scientific connection from the outset as an illumination, but will take it over into ordinary consciousness, test it against common sense and against all that one has so far known in the field of natural science, and will now begin, having taken it over, to place it in the system of natural scientific knowledge that one has developed. If one bears this in mind, it will never be possible to come into conflict or disharmony with the outer physical life. But someone who, on the basis of impulses that are compulsively inherent in him, as compulsive drives, ascribes this mission to himself can come into such a conflict, into such a disharmony, which then, of course, because it comes only from within him, is not at all adapted to the outer world, will fit into the outer world as badly as possible. He will tend to be a destructive individual rather than one who could enrich social life through what can be experienced in the spiritual world. The path that leads to spiritual research thoroughly familiarizes one with all these things. And it must be said that everything that is otherwise added to the described training group of thinking and will is essentially there to ensure that, on the one hand, the human being does not bring anything unhealthy into his spiritual life from the ordinary physical life, that he is truly free with his spiritual and soul life from his bodily life, and on the other hand, that he does not caricature what can be experienced in the spiritual realm by taking it, not into healthy reason and normal affect life, but into the pathological realm of affect life. But if what actually underlies experience in the spiritual world is developed in a healthy way of this kind, then one not only has something healthy in the spirit-research way, but one has something that is healthy-inducing, one really has something that also helps people in terms of their health. But it must proceed as I have described or at least outlined it today. Confusions, which then lead to the most unfortunate prejudices, will always occur.

In this way spiritual research comes to a deeper understanding of the human soul, to a vision of more in the human soul than can be seen in this human soul with the ordinary soul mood. And if one does not misuse the word, one can call such a view of what lives in the soul beyond the ordinary soul life a mystical view of one's own soul. One can call such a life a life in mysticism. Again, it is quite understandable when someone who is a layman in these matters says: Yes, we know mysticism quite well; we have come to know it quite well, only we call it mystical madness. For there is indeed a pathological condition that can be strictly defined and is called mystical madness. It leads from a purely pathological basis to a kind of soul-vision that is purely organic and physiological, for example to an inner brooding in which one then comes to find all kinds of religious visions of a visionary kind within oneself. In short, there is what is called mystical madness in psychiatry.

Someone who is grounded in spiritual research will not want to criticize the psychologist, although there are, of course, enough people who believe that they also understand spiritual science. He will not say: When you speak of mystic madness, you are dealing with a person who is sacred to God and to whom more is revealed than to others. No, the healthy spiritual researcher also describes the mystic madman as a mystic madman, just like the psychiatrist himself, in exactly the same sense and also with the same caution, which I do not need to go into today. In regard to everything that has natural, healthy justification, spiritual science stands completely on the ground of natural science, denying nothing that is accepted as justified by natural science, not even in the matters that have just been discussed. And so the spiritual researcher, without lapsing into dilettantism, can, if he is able to judge things, quite properly and positively agree with the psychiatrist on all pathological phenomena that are externally designated as symptoms of madness, be it as mystical madness, religious madness or the like. He will never deny that these things exist and occur here and there in a specific case.

But if true spiritual research is really done with inner energy, then it does indeed happen that certain types of abnormal mental life are healed and balanced out through what the person concerned experiences mentally, in the way it has been described today. If the person who does such exercises, as indicated today and as described in more detail in the books mentioned, comes to true mysticism, to that which can objectively occur in the human soul as spiritual-soul experience, then he may even have had a tendency, a disposition, to mystical madness before: this will disappear, it will be corrected! All false mysticism in the sense indicated is dispelled by true mysticism. And it can go much further. A tendency towards megalomania, or other things, can be overcome by finding one's way into spiritual-scientific life in this way. Not to mention the fact that the more and more this living in the spiritual-soul life is intensified, the energies that are developed there can also assert themselves further, into the life of the body. But I do not want to go into this chapter today, which can only be discussed in detail and in a special way. Thus, in this limited field, which has been discussed today, there is not only something healing in delving into spiritual research – and this could actually be extended in a certain way to all phenomena of the morbid soul life – but there is also something healing about it. And it must be understood in this sense. One must always be clear about the fact that what appears as spiritual research can easily be confused with the abnormal soul life because it deviates from the experiences of ordinary soul life, and that the abnormal soul life can also be confused by its carrier himself, of course, with that which is healthy soul life. And there one experiences the strangest things even with the bearers of abnormal mental life, when they turn to spiritual research. There is now so much available in the literature for the possibility of progressing to a certain degree on the spiritual research path that anyone, and anyone can use it safely, provided they follow the instructions. Now let us suppose that someone wants to make progress. At first he is driven by an inner impulse, a urge to advance. Often it is curiosity, a desire for sensationalism, to look into the spiritual world. In the course of his striving, however, he very often fails to achieve what he initially imagines. The reasons why this or that is not achieved, the reasons why this or that is achieved wrongly, are sufficiently explained in the books mentioned. However, because he does not really want to enter into the spiritual-scientific world-view current, the person concerned is unwilling to say that he is not making progress or that he is coming to a caricature of spiritual-scientific thought, and does not admit that he has neglected this or that, but is often inclined to say: the prescriptions are to blame; I have come to this or that which seems abnormal to me, the prescriptions are to blame or the person who gave the prescriptions. And especially when there is some kind of morbid disposition, a belief is very easily formed that can be characterized by a kind of persecution mania precisely towards the person who has given the instructions in any way, in order to make the soul's journey into the spiritual world through exercises. This is a very, very common phenomenon, one that occurs again and again and can be exploited, because of course it is very easy to refer to the testimony of such people. I do not wish to refer to individual cases, but only to show how, through the introduction of a morbid mental life into the spiritual-scientific world-view, the spiritual-scientific world-view as such can indeed be misunderstood. Therefore, anyone who wishes to become acquainted with this spiritual-scientific world-view would do well to become acquainted with it where it can be recognized in its essential nature.

And there it will be found that what I have said in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is true, all that I have described today and otherwise: that man comes to certain harrowing experiences that can throw him off balance in a certain way, but not as an objective fact, as something that emerges from within. For all these reasons it may happen that in various writings dealing with such things - I have expressed this in the book mentioned - there is much talk of the dangers connected with the ascent into the higher worlds. The descriptions of such dangers are indeed apt to make fearful minds look upon this higher life only with shuddering. Yet it must be said that this danger exists only when the necessary precautions are disregarded. If, on the other hand, every precaution is taken that true schooling of the spirit provides, then the ascent will take place in such a way that the power of the manifestations will surpass in magnitude what the boldest imagination can conceive. And when it is said that man learns to recognize impending dangers at every turn, so to speak, he must face these dangers boldly and courageously. It is possible for him to make use of such forces and paths that are withdrawn from sensory perception. And he is threatened by temptations to take hold of precisely these forces in the service of a selfish, unhealthy interest or to use these forces in the wrong way due to a lack of clear thinking about the conditions of the sensory world. But if all the rules are really observed in the appropriate way, there can be no question of entering into an unhealthy soul life. And if they are not observed in the appropriate way, then one should not be surprised if what is to be achieved is not achieved. After all, this is what spiritual science has in common with other things in life. If someone is supposed to learn something at school and instead of going to school always goes behind the school, he will not achieve what is to be achieved at school either. Although this is a very trivial comparison, it is still an apt comparison.

There could be much more said about the various errors and prejudices that can be held against spiritual science. But anyone who is deeply immersed in this spiritual science itself knows that much of it is different from what one is accustomed to in ordinary education and worldviews today. Much is different. For example, a critic of my book 'Theosophy' recently said: Well, various things are claimed there, but they should first be examined objectively. If it is claimed that one can see this or that in the spiritual world, then, according to this critic, the objective test would be to sit five or six spiritual researchers down together on both sides and have them give their spiritual research experiences about one and the same thing. If they agree, then from this critic's point of view it is said to be self-evidently correct. The man criticized the book “Theosophy”. But if he had really read it – and one is almost tempted to believe that he is not at all able to understand a book written in this way – then he would have had to recognize that this path is out of the question; but that the only correct examination is possible if he tries to set out on the path of spiritual research himself. Everyone can investigate and will find that everything is confirmed by his own research. Why all this is possible is something I have recently discussed in a note on the sixth edition of my 'Theosophy'. But one must simply engage with the subject itself. Today one must already be able, I would say, to rise to the point of view that spiritual science is something that is, in a true, genuine sense, a continuation of the scientific way of thinking that the dawn of modern times has brought; but precisely because it, like natural science, wants to penetrate into the processes of the senses, into the spiritual world, and explore its secrets, it must also proceed differently than the natural scientific way of thinking, which is directed only at the external. And when one has understood the matter in this way, one will find that, basically, the way in which spiritual science is received does not differ so much, after all, in terms of understanding and also in terms of ill will, from the way in which other spiritual movements were received that were unusual for conventional views. Certainly, anyone who wants to attain higher spiritual experiences has a long, long way to go before they can get there. But today we live in a time of human development when everyone can develop to a certain extent within themselves, which can at least lead them to the conviction, to the own-achieved conviction, of what the spiritual path is. To understand that the results of spiritual science are true, one need only have common sense; this has been emphasized many times here. For the one who can research them can only recognize and confirm their truth through the common sense that he must have in addition. And when it comes to natural science, it is easier to say that a spiritual science initially leads one to questions that nature poses, that it enriches one's entire knowledge of nature, than that it simply deals with the so-called “meaning of life” in a philistine, pedantic way. It does find the meaning of life, but in a different way than one often imagines.

So, what is necessary for understanding spiritual research does not necessarily mean that one has to go a long way oneself, and also what one needs in the present, so to speak, for the security of one's soul – for that security that one can gain when one knows that this soul goes through births and deaths, that does not belong to temporality but to eternity - one does not even need to approach spiritual research itself; rather, when the spiritual researcher describes what he has researched and presents this description appropriately, then one already has in it what is needed. I have often mentioned this here, but it cannot be repeated often enough: just as little as one needs to feel the need to have the fact itself in front of one, but finds satisfaction in the picture, so it is the case that for certain soul needs one really has enough in the description that the one who is a spiritual researcher gives. Indeed, he can have what he wants for his soul's needs not only through his spiritual research, but also by drawing it from the spiritual worlds and carrying it down into the world in which he himself lives, by describing it for himself. That it is also necessary today to indicate those exercises by means of which one can take certain steps in spiritual research does not depend on the fact that only he can have the fruits of spiritual research who enters into the spiritual world itself, but on something quite different. It is connected with the fact that present-day humanity has indeed reached a point in its development where it no longer wants to accept things merely on authority, where it really wants to develop to at least that degree, that it can say: I can also judge to a certain extent what the spiritual researcher says. Therefore the development of spiritual research will take the course that a larger number of people will be found who take the first steps, which already lead very far, in the field of spiritual research, in order to be able to accept - without relying on authority and not only on the mere sense of truth, which is also sufficient for the needs of the soul - that which is brought from the spiritual worlds through spiritual research. For the needs of the soul, self-research would not be necessary. But for the needs of the time, self-research will develop more and more. For the needs of the soul, it is just as sufficient to hear what the spiritual researcher says as it is for the ordinary person not to carry out chemical experiments in a laboratory, but to accept the results of chemistry for ordinary life. Let each one now beat his breast and say to himself how much of his scientific knowledge he has accepted on authority. Undoubtedly, if we look at the matter in terms of truth, belief in authority has never been as great as it is today, although to many people this seems a completely paradoxical statement.

When all these things are taken into consideration, it must be said that spiritual science must indeed be something that wants to place itself in the spiritual development of humanity, from the present into the future, not because it ascribes this mission to itself only from spiritual worlds, but because one can recognize, according to what lives in humanity today as a need, as a possibility for development, that spiritual science is just as necessary for further development as Copernicanism was in the dawn of modern times, as Galilean science was, as Keplerian science was. He who sees through these things will not be able to despair, nor will he be able to become fainthearted in the face of all the misunderstandings that are brought against spiritual research. He will not become fainthearted, but rather, when he considers the great examples of history, he will see how, again and again, everything that has to be integrated as something new into the spiritual development of humanity is met with prejudice. Just as Copernicanism had to face prejudices, and as in the ecclesiastical field it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that it was allowed to be believed, so too must spiritual science, in principle, face prejudices.

But anyone who has followed the course of truth through human historical development for a little while knows that truth is something that is intimately related to the human soul. One can misunderstand the truth, but even if it were so misunderstood in a time, in an age, that it would have to disappear for the time being, it would rise again! For it has forces by which it forces its way through the narrowest crevices of the rocks of prejudice in the course of human development. One can hate the truth. But anyone who hates the truth will ultimately only be able to disadvantage himself. You can push the truth back in any age, but the truth cannot be completely suppressed, for the reason that it is, figuratively speaking, the sister of the human soul. The human soul and the truth are sisters. And just as discord can sometimes break out between siblings, but agreement will always come again when they remember their common origin in the right way, so too, when discord and hatred and misunderstanding breaks out between the human soul and the truth, there will always come times when it will be recognized from both sides, when it will be confirmed from both sides, that truth and the human soul belong together and have one origin in the eternal spirit of the world. Therefore, anyone who sees through such things, as I have tried to express figuratively, will be able to say with justification, as expressed in a proverb with which I will conclude today's reflections, in one of those proverbs that are said in certain regions of Germany: “A proverb - a truth”. Yes, it is a proverb and a truth: you can squeeze the truth, but you cannot crush it!

Dear attendees, for some time now, I have had the honor of speaking here in this city about topics in the humanities. Since our friends have also requested such reflections this year, I will try to offer such reflections here in these fateful times. But it will be understandable, dear attendees, that at least today's introductory reflection is directly related to what is happening in our fateful times, which touches our soul and our heart so deeply. In our time, we do not want to avert our attention from all the immense sacrifices that have to be made, the duties and the high demands that this time places on us. We do not want to say a word that cannot be spoken with this nuance of feeling and that can be spoken with certainty to those those who are fighting on the fields, where today it is not spoken by words, where it is spoken by actions, by suffering and blood, by the commitment of the whole person, one would not want to speak a word that is not spoken to those in spirit who have to stand up in these fields for the great events of the present!

For today's lecture, I have chosen a question, esteemed attendees, that may arise when one allows oneself to be influenced by the many things that confront the Central European people today from all sides, one might say not only from Europe but from the world: The question is raised: Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”?

But – and this is the point of my remarks – my concern is not so much to answer this question in front of you here in great detail, but rather to show how this question arises in our present day; or rather, how it is possible that this question arises. For it may be [made] clear from my remarks that it is not up to us here in the middle of Europe to answer this question, but it is very much up to us to feel this question so deeply, for coming times, like a warning to history, to feel it from the core of our Central European being.

It is said of the great battles fought by the ancestors of the Central European peoples and the peoples of antiquity that the peoples went into battle singing, which were meant for the great ancestors, [who] were therefore meant for the great ancestors because these peoples had the deep-seated conviction that the spirit of the ancestors was directly present in the atmosphere in which the peoples breathed. In such a way, wherever human feeling was originally incorporated into the world view, the question of inheritance, which is now so much discussed in material science, was always understood in the spiritual sense. If one speaks of heredity in materialistic science as if only the characteristics of living beings were inherited by their physical descendants through physical means, then one must, where the great moral and spiritual events take place in the course of human development, one must speak of the fact that not only are the qualities of the ancestors present in the following times, but that the spiritual and moral aspects are also alive and well among the descendants, and that what has been passed down from the ancestors to the culture of the descendants is something that the later generations have to do.

Of course, we cannot talk here about all the ancestors, including those of our own time, who come into consideration when we are dealing with German, Central European nature. We would like to highlight two spiritual ancestors of German development, Schiller and Fichte.

One of these personalities comes directly from the country in which we find ourselves here; the other connects original German intellectual life from more northern regions, also in personal and human friendship, with what the great Württemberger Schiller achieved; the other personality we want to choose today to let their impulses work on us a little more sensitively, is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. And, dear honored attendees, I have not chosen this starting point to stir up sentimental feelings, that is far from my mind, but because I believe that there is indeed something like a spiritual magic that emanates from the last moments of the earthly lives of these two spiritual heroes. For this reason, not for sentimental reasons, we can look back on the last moments of Schiller and Fichte's earthly lives through the intimate way of contemplating German spirit, and I would say with such familiarity, especially with these two personalities, who spent their soul in the physical human body.

The younger Voß tells us what Schiller's last days and last moments were like. There he stands before us, this death of Schiller, this death of which we are convinced when we look at the course of Schiller's life, that despite having occurred early, it occurred so late only because Schiller's strong soul, because his powerful spiritual impulses wrested this death from the decaying body over the years! And we can follow him from the descriptions we have - this Schiller - of how he is still present in the last days, even spiritually and emotionally, how his body already bears the marks of death. We follow him into this hour of death according to the descriptions of Voß and with deeply moved hearts we follow how Schiller's spirit, fighting with the darkening forces of the body, repeatedly looks through the once so fiery eyes; how he then let himself be - Schiller - his youngest young child, how he, from the depths of his soul, through his spirited eyes that have now died in death, turns his last glance to this little child, as if he had something important to say to him; how he then returns the child, turns away, turns his face to the wall. We, the honored attendees, get the feeling that we have to identify with this child to some extent. The person who described this scene says: “It was as if Schiller still wanted to say to this child, ‘I couldn't be enough of a father to you; I still had so much to do for you’.”

One would like to say: the whole German nation can feel this way, as Schiller's child, and can relate these words to itself. Schiller died as if he still had much, much to say to his people. And the feeling arises from this, from contemplating such a scene, as it is necessary for this German nation to immerse itself in the impulses that emerged from Schiller's spiritual power and that are to be taken up in every age in order to to the goals of human evolution in the way that the German people are predisposed to do: to bring forth more and more of the fruits that were contained in the blossoms that Schiller once gave them.

And when we look at the other personality, at Johann Gottlieb Fichte's last days, we might say that the contemplation of his last days penetrates us just as deeply, just as directly into our hearts and souls. He often considered – Fichte, the great philosopher of humanity and at the same time the great philosopher of his people – whether he should take a direct part in the great struggle for Germany's freedom that had to be fought in his last years, whether he should take a direct part in this great struggle as a fighter. He then believed that he could achieve more through his mental strength than through physical strength. But Fichte's wonderful and equally talented wife devoted herself to caring for the sick and brought the military hospital fever home to him. He had to care for his wife. She recovered, but the illness passed to Fichte. And so, in a sense, he became an indirect victim of the German struggle for freedom.

But now he stands before us, the man who, out of the strength of his will, gave birth to a world of the spirit, as he was in his last moments. His thoughts were focused only on what had been achieved by the German armies fighting in the west. And when he had to lie down and the feverish dreams mingled with the ideas that had been so energetically clear throughout his entire life, these feverish dreams were filled with images of the battles he heard about; he, the philosopher, felt himself in the midst of the fighters. The philosophical thoughts that he had felt sprouting in his soul immediately merged with these, one might say, so real, in relation to the real phenomena of the time, and the philosopher saw himself, even in his feverish thoughts, deeply connected with what was moving his time.

His son approached his deathbed and a medicine was brought to him. He felt so abandoned in his feverish dreams, so united with the great task of his time, that he said, “I do not need any medicine,” and pushed the medicine back with his hand, “because I feel that I will recover.” He recovered – albeit to his death – but his spirit lives among us. And, as it may seem, one gets a good insight into the nature and essence of the people they now call a “barbarian people” if one turns one's gaze a little to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. At the time when the German people had to fight for their recognition from the depths of their humiliation, it was Johann Gottlieb Fichte who, not only from a theoretical-philosophical basis, but also from the connection he felt between his own soul and the soul of the German people, sought to provide clarity for himself and this people about this German people's very essence.

And we are immediately pointed to one character trait, of this people in its deepest essence, when we consider how Fichte, at one of the most difficult times for the German spirit, held his significant “Speeches to the German Nation,” and how he made three questions the starting point of his reflections. And we are strangely touched by these three questions that Fichte raised in his “Speeches to the German Nation” at the time. The first is: “Whether it is true or not true that there is a German nation and that its continued existence in its peculiar and independent essence is now in danger?”

Today, esteemed attendees, we hardly want to raise this question again, given what the German essence has become, especially through the Schiller-Fichte period, but the final sentence still goes deep into our hearts; and we too can say of our present: “whether this nation in its peculiar and independent essence is currently in danger?” The second question is: “Whether it is worth the effort to maintain it or not?” The answer is given by what the German spirit achieved in the nineteenth century for the development of the world. The third question, which Fichte develops out of his view of the world in particular, was this: “Whether there is any sure and effective means of this preservation, and what this means is?” Fichte then linked these three questions to the considerations that form the content of his “Discourses to the German Nation”.

World history is moving fast in our present times, and we must also count the past century as such. It is impossible, after all that has emerged in intellectual life from the seeds sown by the Schiller-Fichte period, to still profess, to directly profess the answers that Fichte himself gave to these questions. But all the more one feels related when one lets oneself be imbued by the Central European, by the German essence, with the way Fichte at the time gave his answer in his “Discourses to the German Nation”, namely to these three questions.

Fichte tried, so to speak, to put together this answer of his from two parts, first from a consideration of the essence of the German people. Because, after all, he wanted to speak to the German people. Fichte tried – admittedly, we will not try this in the Fichte way today, but we have to answer such questions [with the powers that we have in turn received from this Fichte way] – he tried to answer these questions by examining the peculiarities of the German language. He believed he could see how this language differs in its folklore from the languages of those peoples who were then in conflict with the German peoples. And he believed that he could deduce the essence of this from the fact that the German people, from the very roots of their development, had connected themselves with the source of their language, that they had developed this language directly from these roots of the language in an uninterrupted sequence and had remained with this language, and that they had embodied in this language what they had to develop out of their soul.

While the Romance peoples, according to Fichte, suffered a break in their development, they had gone along with that feeling and sensing embodied in the German language up to a certain point of this development, but then adopted a foreign language and now in a foreign linguistic body, live the mental peculiarities, whereby a break in development has occurred and what Fichte seeks in the meaning of the German essence, the original freshness and immediacy with which the national essence expresses itself, has been lost.

What we can fully acknowledge today is not what Johann Gottlieb Fichte believes he has gained in knowledge by this path, because this scientific consideration has passed over it, although these insights are true in their root, in one direction. But that is not what Fichte arrived at. Rather, what we still find fruitful today is the way in which Fichte approaches the essence of his people.

For what did Fichte want? He wanted to recognize the nature of the German people by visualizing this nature as emerging from the innermost, most secret roots of the human soul without any break in development. He believed that such a people were secure in their future, indeed in their eternity, that they were in uninterrupted development and in connection with the roots of inner life, as he repeatedly expressed, with the deepest essence of soul life.

But that, dearest present, is basically also the keynote of all the spiritual-scientific reflections that I have been allowed to present here in this hall for years. In this respect, this spiritual-scientific reflection is connected in its innermost essence with the nature of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

To what extent these roots of the human soul lead to spiritual knowledge – we will have to talk about this tomorrow, to what extent what is being sought here really points to Fichte in the true, right sense – only a few words will be said about this now.

From all the considerations that I have been allowed to present here, it has emerged that this spiritual science wants to be – in contrast to a merely external science that reflects on the senses and the mind bound to the brain – that this spiritual science wants to be a science that arises directly from the activity of the innermost human core, from the realization that this human core – which, in contrast to the mortal body, is the eternal and imperishable part in man, can be detached from the ordinary view of the outer senses and the intellect during the life of the body by means to be discussed tomorrow, so that it can be active free of the body and able to look into the spiritual world, so that one's own spiritual essence becomes an immediate reality.

In the deepest sense, spiritual science seeks to appeal to this human self-core, which stems from the source of spiritual life. In this respect, spiritual science is in complete contrast to science, which merely passively surrenders to external impressions and merely allows itself to be approached by what external observation and dissection of the intellect can yield in relation to this observation. Spiritual science stands in contrast to the mere passive reception of a science! Spiritual science wants to be - if the word may be used without arrogance - a valiant science that does not arise from passivity, but from activity, from appealing to the roots of life, from drawing on this innermost source of the roots of life.

And when these roots have been unearthed by appealing to spiritual vision, which confronts a spiritual world in such a way that it first produces the spiritual sense organs – to use a Goethean expression, the spiritual eyes and ears – out of itself, in order to direct them into the spiritual world and to perceive this spiritual world as real as physical eyes and ears can perceive the sensual world as real, as truly, then spiritual science may feel that it is a disciple of that which Johann Gottlieb Fichte sensed, that he willed.

And just when one considers, esteemed attendees, the way in which Fichte knew he was connected to the whole idiosyncrasy and nature of the German character, then one can know that the special dispositions for letting the spirit ascend to the spiritual heights really do exist in this German character. “What kind of philosopher one is” – Fichte once coined a phrase – “depends on what kind of person one is.” And he showed that he wanted to be a German human being. That is why he became the German philosopher that he was. So what kind of philosopher was Johann Gottlieb Fichte? The one who incessantly appealed from the mere world of the senses to the spiritual world and emphasized what was so beautifully expressed in his lectures at the University of Berlin in 1811 on the “Facts of Consciousness,” where he said: “What I have to say to you presupposes a special spiritual sense. Those who only want to accept what the external senses perceive will not understand me. For them, I speak as a single seer among a crowd of the blind-born.

Fichte's striving was directed towards the contemplation of the spirit, towards the experience of the spiritual weaving and essence in the world and in the human soul, and he felt that it welled up from the innermost stirrings of his people's lives. And so we see, not in the striving towards the spiritual, but in the deep disposition of this spiritual research and search with the innermost sources of the personality, to connect the innermost stirrings of human life; in this we see in Fichte the core, the expression of the Central European people, the German people.

Therefore, we find that Fichte emphasizes this concisely, which, as a worldview, must be based on the contemplation of the spirit. One needs only to say a few words, [dear attendees], about what Fichte used to express something of the innermost part of his research and striving, which he knew to be identical with the striving of the German national spirit; and one gets a characteristic of what is actually meant by it.

Thus Fichte's wonderful words, spoken by himself in the “Speeches to the German Nation”, are just as much a characteristic of the deepest human striving as they are of the deepest spiritual inclinations of his people, and he characterizes both when he says:

Time and eternity and infinity beholds them

– he means the philosophy that he sought [from the innermost roots of the vital impulses of his people] –

in its origin from the appearance and becoming visible of that One, which is in itself absolutely invisible and only in this invisibility of His is grasped, truly grasped.

All persistent existence that appears as non-spiritual life is only an empty shadow, cast out of seeing and mediated many times over by nothingness. In contrast to this, and through the recognition of this as a manyfold mediated nothingness, seeing itself is to rise to the recognition of its own nothingness and to the acknowledgment of the invisible as the only true.

But, dear honored attendees, Fichte did not express what he felt was the innermost essence of his quest only in such abstract words. Our spiritual scientific observations have often led us to show how spiritual science can establish in man a conviction based on good foundations, that the eternal core of being can be experienced in man, that consciously passes through the gate of death in order to enter into a new existence in the spiritual world after a time of purely spiritual experience. And spiritual science, which is an active science, which wants to be a brave science without arrogance, wants to be a science based on the active powers of the soul, does not speak in an indefinite way about life after death, it seeks to grasp the peculiarity of the human being in order to show how it progresses into the spiritual world. There it also knows how to speak of it, not merely in an abstract way, but in a concrete way, as the soul knows itself as living, as living can know through those cognitions that we will talk about tomorrow, which the soul can gain when it is outside the body, when it looks outside the body at this body, as if it were an external object, as if it were something external.

Just as the other science speaks of the things of the sensual world, of the things that are seen through the senses, so spiritual science speaks of that seeing that looks back from the spiritual world at the physical world and is able to bring it into a relationship.

Where Fichte attempts to approach the second part of the third question he raised, which is this means for the development of his people, he makes a peculiar remark. Fichte seeks this means in a radical national education that changes the view that lies before him. We cannot speak today - [since time truly does not permit it] - about the details of Fichte's ideas; but in a radical change of all educational principles, Fichte seeks to see that which, in his conviction, is most conducive to the development of his people. An education that does not merely go to externals, but goes to the deepest “roots of the stirrings of life”. And here Fichte feels, when he speaks of it, that this educational ideal differs greatly from what people, according to previous views, had to consider possible in education. He now puts himself in such a position as if he were looking from his horizon, into which his ideal really shines, and wants to look down on what he considers to be outdated [old educational principles]. And he now describes how that which has become obsolete appears to him. He describes it again in the characteristic words of his 'Addresses to the German Nation', words which are easily overlooked but which must strike a deep chord in anyone who has absorbed the more recent spiritual science. Fichte says:

Time appears to me

- the time, namely, in which the old educational principles have prevailed -,

seems to me like a shadow that stands over its corpses, from which an army of diseases has just driven it out, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the formerly so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already taken her in and are surrounding her with a warm breath of love; the secret voices of her sisters are already joyfully greeting her and welcoming her; she is already stirring and expanding within all directions, to develop the more magnificent form into which she is to grow; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or, if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

Now, dear readers, if we take the insights of spiritual science as they can be developed in our time, and if we try to symbolize, from the way spiritual science shows it, this way in which man looks back at his body after death, how he feels about this body, if one wants to create a symbol for something that one wants to evolve from, then one cannot develop a better symbol than that which Fichte has developed. Must we not say:

In the best that we seek, lives that which was absorbed in Fichte, which lived in its great ancestor. For was he not truly with the best that we seek, that must be sought in the transition of human development to a spiritual life? And does it not mean something that Fichte brings this search into intimate connection with the German essence? Precisely what the German essence is becomes so vivid when one - not in abstract theory, but in human, living feeling - takes in what Fichte gives in his “Addresses to the German Nation” and allows oneself to be somewhat influenced by it.

It is very remarkable that in Fichte we have one of the philosophical representatives of the German nation in a period of this nation's development, [at a time] when it was indeed facing a tough test, when it had already gone through centuries of development, questioning the innermost essence of this nation, posing the great inner question of destiny: “What is a German, actually?”

With that, dear attendees, we have something that is truly characteristic of the German character. One is English, French, Italian through that which is imprinted in one through national peculiarity. One is English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian at some point in time. But, as can be seen from Fichte's words, one is never German, one becomes German continuously; because Germanness stands before Germanness as a lofty ideal. And the German looks up humbly at this ideal and asks himself: How do I become German?

And so, in this becoming German, the impulses of becoming human basically come together. Part of developing what characterizes the German character is – one would almost like to say, if the word were not absurd – the elevation of the national feeling of the German to general humanity in the sense of the word coined by Schiller for something else: “To which nation do you profess yourself?” And the answer could be: “To none of the existing ones.” And why none of the existing ones? “Because of German nationality!” For that is the characteristic difference of German nationality, and that emerges precisely from Fichte's so annoying words: it is the essence of Germanness to strive for the essence of the universally human, to search relentlessly: How do you become human? How to become a human being in the most universal sense of the word? There is an apparent contradiction in this; but the contradiction is in everything that is alive; the contradiction is the characteristic of the living. And this – what could be called a characteristic of Germanness, which lies in an eternal striving for [universal] humanity – this becomes clear to us again so beautifully in Fichte's words.

Fichte wants to provide an answer to the question of who can actually be considered a German. And he says in the “Addresses to the German Nation”, which can be described as one of the most German of German intellectual products:

[...] whoever believes in spirituality and freedom of this spirituality, and wants the eternal further development of this spirituality through freedom, that, wherever it is born and in whatever language it speaks, is of our race, belongs to us and will join us.

In this, we also have something of the universal striving that is expressed when one considers German striving in its truly inner sense, or - to use this word of Fichte's again - at the “roots of the stirrings of life”.

And basically, dear attendees, all the strength that can arise from such a view of life lies in every word that Fichte spoke, but especially in those words that he spoke to express the consciousness that arose from this view of the world, which was precisely suited to his nature. One is tempted to say: Just as the soul forces express themselves as spirit and at the same time as will, and express themselves as eternal inner becoming, so it sounds to us when Fichte - not from a theoretical consideration, but from the context of all human soul forces - expresses himself about the immortality of man, how he now turns his gaze to the countless stars that are in the cosmos, [and suns] and the planets that move when he turns his gaze to high mountains, to the rocks, the clouds that surround them, to the forests and rivers, when he turns his gaze to the three realms of nature, and then turns back to the human soul, and that which expresses itself to his consciousness, expressed something like this in a speech he gave to his Jena students:

And you stars [and you clouds and you rocks], you mountains all, when you all collapse once, when lightning flashes through you, when the elemental forces crush you, so that not a speck of dust of you remains, you tell me nothing about the nature of my own soul. This defies your power, this is eternal, as you are not eternal.

Spiritual science today must speak differently about these things because it draws the appropriate conviction from sources of knowledge. But in Fichte's starting points, a disposition for spiritual science arises from a knowledge that is at the same time a will, from a will that is at the same time knowledge, a willing knowledge that the eternal human soul, which passes through birth and death, is grasped in the immediate becoming and in the coexistence with this eternal life of the human soul knows the personality as connected with eternity.

And the tone that arises from such consciousness pervades as a fundamental tone the discourses that Fichte gave in order to make his people aware in fateful times of what they have to defend, what they hold as their richest treasure in the depths of their souls, and what they have and must defend against all the world. It is the striving for universal humanity – arising out of the essence of his people.

And, as if to confirm what Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the philosopher, expresses, stands Schiller, the great, urgent poet, who, from the mystically deep essence of the South German, especially the Swabian spirit, and who had also been uplifted by Goethe's ideas to that striving which, arising from the striving of a single nation, seeks to give birth to the most universal of all human strivings.

Today, Schiller is not sufficiently appreciated for the way he raised his people to a [level of education] when he created a work that is particularly great because of the level of education, the nobility of education and the intellectual atmosphere from which the work arose. I am referring to the work that is most easily overlooked, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. One could also say that Schiller tried to answer the question for his people through this work: How does man achieve freedom? And in the highest style, he approaches the riddle of human freedom. I would like to say: There is no intellectual height, there is no human-filled, feeling-filled depth from which Schiller does not want to draw the means to answer the question: What is human freedom?

Schiller says to himself that human freedom can be compromised in two ways in the highest style. First, there is that to which man must submit in logical necessity if he is to follow his reason, which chains conclusion to conclusion.

Man may feel outwardly free in such logical activity, inwardly he is not free, for he is a slave to logical necessity; and in submitting to it, he is not free, man. Nor is he free when he has to submit to the senses driving feeling, the natural necessities of nature's necessity.

Man can become unfree in these two ways.

But how does he become free? Oh, he becomes free in the manner of Schiller when he succeeds in detaching from his inner depths that which rests hidden as the core of his being, that which is not directly perceived between birth and death, that which can only be perceived when it is detached from its hidden existence and when the being ascends on the one hand into the spiritual region, in order to develop such inner impulses there, whereby the soul becomes master in the world, where it would otherwise be a slave, when it can ascend into the realm of spirituality and freely interact within it, as a child freely interacts in its play.

Then the soul feels free in spirit and when it can descend again into the body, but does not lose the spirit, but descends with the spirit into what is necessary for the senses, and handles the senses in such a way that what the eye sees, what the ear hears, that the hand seizes, that in the sensual the spirituality is seen through, everything spiritual is sensually experienced, everything sensual is spiritualized, that the higher self in the self, for which Schiller strove by writing these letters, is experienced.

One may ask, does it not signify a high flowering of human development when, out of the forces of a people, not a philosophical-theoretical answer to the highest human questions is given, but an answer from the full range of human feeling, as Schiller gave it? It was then that Schiller also raised the significant question: What are the aberrations of humanity and humanity?

On the one hand, there is the “barbarian”; the “barbarian” in whom the case arises that he is overwhelmed by his instincts and human impulses due to his principles. Man cannot become such a “barbarian,” because he must come to love his principles so that he is not enslaved, but carries his drives up into the spiritual world of his principles, so that he wants to do what he must do because he loves it. And a savage is the person – [that is the other aberration] – when he lets his instincts overwhelm his principles.

Thus there came a point in deepest German sensibility when the question was raised: How does man find true humanity between the realms of the wild and the “barbarian”? So that which is in the highest sense spiritual-idealistic conscience in the German people has sought the true human.

Can they call the members of a people who have sought the true human being between the cliffs of “barbarism” and savagery, can they call this people “barbarians”?! This question could arise from many things like a refrain and keep coming back to us: Why do they call this people [Schiller's and Fichte's] a “barbarian people”? Does it depend on what means this war must seek today? [Everyone could have known that before it began!] It is childish to talk about what means the war must seek; it is worthy of a true observer of human development to ask: what must be defended?

And we have sought a little what needs to be defended by presenting to our minds, if only in a few strokes, the legacy of Schiller and Fichte. And truly, these great men of ours felt this way about the connection of the German essence with what they themselves wanted in the sense of the most general human striving. And what became known long after Schiller's death as words that can be considered a legacy shows how Schiller, with what has been somewhat characterized here, places himself in the essence of his people. In this time, let us bring to mind the words that he spoke in view of what the Germans have to do to stand up to a world of opponents.

He who forms the mind must ultimately prevail,
because
finally, at the goal of time, if the
world has a plan, if human
life has any meaning at all, finally
must prevail custom and reason,
the brute force of form succumb
and the slowest people will catch up with all
the fast fugitives.

Ihm

—dem Deutschen —

ist das Höchste bestimmt,
und so wie er in der Mitte von
Europens Völkern sich befindet,
so he is the core of humanity,
the flower and the leaf are the people.

He is chosen by the world spirit, during
the struggle of time
to work on the eternal construction of human education
to preserve what time brings,
therefore he has appropriated what was previously foreign
and preserved it within himself.
Everything that was valuable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with time,
he has preserved;
the treasures of
centuries are not lost to him.
Not to shine in the moment and
to play its role, but to win the great
process of time. Every nation
has its day in history, but
the day of the German is the harvest of

all time.

Schiller spoke such words of legacy for his people, no doubt from a deeply moved heart, from a heart that felt the pulse of his nation.

We, the soul behind what is, as the war was, so cruelly necessary, cruelly necessary for that which truly did not arise from the German spirit, but rather arose to a great extent from that which is not of the German spirit.

The childish saying that the German has a particular penchant for militarism does not need to be discussed in particular in our country; but perhaps - when we are repeatedly confronted with the refrain: “Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a ‘barbarian people’?” - perhaps this question may be transformed to some extent into the other. Could anyone believe that when a world at war is advancing against Germany with a strength of two and a half to one, as if against a fortress, that the Germans would fight by reciting Schiller's poems or Fichte's philosophy to the cannons? Only those who expected this can speak of what is now being spoken of so often in the world.

But is everything that is said true? I will merely hint at the way in which a great mind, an outstanding mind of modern times, has thought about the German character, about the character that we are trying to conjure up in our minds through some of the traits of the Fichtean and Schillerian way of thinking. This way of thinking is connected with everything that the universal spirit, as manifested in Goethe, has brought before our eyes, and which is, after all, the center of German development for the time being. Now, what Fichte and Schiller have become is at the same time the Goethean essence. I would say that what the American Emerson speaks of is not only the essence of Goethe, but also of Schiller and Fichte.

And I cite a non-German critic of the German character, which developed in the nineteenth century from the seeds germinated by Schiller, Fichte, and Goethe; I quote the words of a thinker who was at the height of American intellectual life [and who spoke these words not in German but in English] – Emerson – to raise the question: how did the “barbarian people” and their culture affect the people of the nineteenth century who understood something of German culture?

Emerson, the great American, says:

One quality in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.

Thus the American sees the German essence represented by Goethe, concentrated in Goethe, that the German essence is that everything is based on truth!

Emerson continues in English:

In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of their conviction. In France, people are delighted to see brilliant ideas, wherever they may lead. In all these countries, however, talented men write within the limits of their talents. If what they write stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours.

Not a single German says this, as I said!

The German mind has neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's practical understanding, nor, finally, the American adventurousness. What it does have, however, is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands that a writer stand above things and simply express himself on them. There is intellectual activity, so what is it advocating? What is the man's opinion? Where does it come from? Where does he get all these thoughts?

I am quoting an English speaker!

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

Written in English!

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

For this reason, the terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and points of view with a certain superficiality.

- written in English! —

and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they are and with the way in which they express themselves, Goethe speaks

— whom Emerson regards as the representative of the German nation —

the head and content of the German nation, not because he has talent, but because truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. No matter how excellent what he says is, he has something else in mind that is even better. [...] He has that fearsome independence that arises from dealing with the truth.

So, dear attendees, in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the most enlightened minds of the nineteenth century could think and speak about German nature. Why do they call the people, about whom such talk must be had, a “barbarian people”? It sounds to us again and again as a refrain [against]. We do not need to answer the question, in view of the fact that we only need to raise it.

Another thing, ladies and gentlemen, very briefly, one would like to say: months before the war, lectures were held in one of the southern cities of Great Britain about the German spirit, lectures about the German spirit and intellectual life, in order to make this German intellectual life - the lectures have also been translated and are available in book form in German – to make this German intellectual life, as it is said in the preface of the book, a little more accessible to people who, as the English author says, know all too little about this intellectual life. He explicitly states which people he means – he speaks of English journalists. I don't know how much they have learned from these lectures, the journalists, after the trials we are now experiencing in their judgment of the German character.

But perhaps the words of a directly English, not an American, man, spoken not long before the war [in university lectures intended to educate English journalism] and intended to educate journalism about German nature, perhaps these words may also be given a little consideration. What is communicated here is not said in America by Emerson, but in England, in English, about German nature, German intellectual life:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen knew the spirit of science unquestioningly; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, primarily by thousands of German researchers.

One almost feels embarrassed, but it was first spoken in English.

Imagination, feeling, will asserted their right to be heard beside or beyond reason, and under their transformative pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful. The irrational was recognized as a source of enlightenment; wisdom was drawn from the child and the flower; science, philosophy and poetry came close together. In England, this revival of the imagination gave birth to noble poetry, but left science and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the period is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical, and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.

In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a reflection of present-day Germany, the Germany of restless, bold will and action, and we can understand all the better why the great citizen of the world, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable place as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

And in these lectures, in which, one would like to say, the spirit is so thoroughly discussed, including Hegel, who summarizes German essence in the most crystal-clear thought-images – Hegel, whose memorial tablet we see on the house across the street – there we also find the words.

[Dear attendees], yes, I am only saying this because I have not completely forgotten Goethe's dictum: People say that self-praise stinks; but they don't like to talk about what someone else's censure smells like. It is difficult to rise above such words, but, aren't they, if the words have been said in English, perhaps an excuse if they are repeated in Germany. Months before the war, they were spoken at the same university in Manchester: “No German words are more deeply imbued with the juice of national ethics than those that describe these things: true, thorough, loyal.” “True, thorough, loyal.” One could almost be proud of this characteristic from across the Channel, [dear lady present]. But in the short time available to us for today's reflection, let us add something that relates to these words.

I speak to you as someone who spent his youth in Austria, among a group of people who, coming from very different circumstances, longed for the moment when, in a great deed or in some larger context Austrian culture could merge with German culture – in other words, a group of people who sensed something of what is now so moving our Central European souls, [sensed something of the pulse of the times]. And I remember a word that used to resonate a lot in the ears of those who only felt something of the pulse of the times: I remember a word, the word “Herbstzeitlose”. And where did the word “Herbstzeitlose” come from? I will hint at it very briefly.

In the 1970s, there was a liberal party in Austria [after the Parliamentary Congress], a party made up of talented individuals, led by [Eduard] Herbst. He represented a certain abstract liberalism, a liberalism tailored to the pattern of English parliamentarians. At the Congress of Berlin, under the predominant influence of the English statesmen of the time, Austria was given the mission of working down to the southeast, which then found expression in the occupation and later annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and all that Austria understood to be its mission.

At that time, Austria incurred the wrath of the Russian Pan-Slavists, precisely because of British influence; for Britain sent Austria against the aspirations of Russian influence on the Balkan Peninsula. Those in Austria who were Herbstians at the time opposed this mission. But Bismarck knew how this was connected with the whole of modern development, how, under the influence of England, the Russian resentment was rekindled. At that time, a certain impulse of Austrian politics arose towards the southeast, and Bismarck knew that this had to happen. He found that those who did not understand this in Austria, under the influence of [Eduard] Herbst, were the “Herbstzeitlosen” (literally: “autumn crocuses”). And just as a witty man who understands his time can be devastating, so the Herbst party destroyed the dictum of the “Herbstzeitlosen”. Words formed by personal power that act like personal forces in the world.

So what were the Central European people like? They accepted the fact that they were 'barbarians' in those days, that they were understood in England as part of a southeastern mission. They held on to it until 1914. They did everything they could. They were thorough and loyal to what the English statesmen had instructed the Central European peoples to do at the time: they were true, thorough and loyal, these Central European peoples!

We need only state this, and then the fact, [dear ladies and gentlemen], that England is now on the side of the power whose resentment against both Germany and Austria led it to set them against each other. [And I have to ask]: Is leaving the ground on which it once stood also true, thorough and faithful? If today's events follow from what was thus determined, why do they call the people who carried out what once seemed right to them a “barbarian people”? The question sounds to us again and again as a refrain from current events!

Now, esteemed attendees, I do not want to make an assertion, but rather pose a question: Could it not be related to the very essence of the German world view that what sometimes seems so terribly significant to others is illuminated differently in the light of the world view of Schiller, Fichte and Goethe?

One point should be made – I know that this can be addressed as a rather questionable point – but that is not the issue, but rather to remain “true, thorough and faithful”, to remain true, thorough and faithful to the world view of Goethe, Fichte and Schiller.

Although the destruction of the cathedral of Reims is not as bad as one might see – I myself saw this cathedral in 1906 in a rather fragile state, I am one of those who will not let anyone in their admiration of the cathedral – nevertheless, in view of what is available as an expensive legacy to the people of Schiller, Goethe and Fichte in the form of a worldview, the following may be said:

It is deeply true for this people in a certain respect that beauty pulses through the entire structure of the world, that beauty lies in the construction of the entire structure of the world. And one feels deeply a word that Goethe spoke and Novalis, [the great poet], spoke again in a similar way, a word that, in the Goethean style, goes something like this:

What would all the eons of stars be, all the suns, all this beauty, if they did not ultimately shine into a human eye, and out of a human eye looked spiritualized and ensouled!

And in Novalis: “From such a worldview comes the thought of how all that takes place in the cosmos is integrated and combined and organized and together makes the soul and spirit in what ultimately is the human being. That is why Novalis calls this human structure, that which we encounter in the human being in its structure, a holy temple. And the contact with this holy temple itself, he describes as something that must arouse the most sacred feelings in the human soul. The temple of the highest is the human body.

The human body is the highest physical expression of the spirit for such a world view as that of Fichte, Goethe and Schiller.

And our fateful time, like every difficult time of war, makes it necessary to ruthlessly destroy thousands upon thousands of works of art that must be the highest works of art for the worldview of Goethe, Schiller and Fichte: human bodies! The German Weltanschauung has a sense not only for human works of art, but for the highest, at least earthly-highest divine work of art, for man himself. And the German Weltanschauung asks: May one not, in the face of the highest reverence, may one not cry out when human works of art have to be damaged in a time when thousands of them are being mowed down?

I know that this is a thought that is not understood everywhere. [But I also know] that once all the fruits of Goethe's, Schiller's, Fichte's conception of the world have ripened, this thought will stand as a thought, not of a “barbarian culture,” but as a thought of a spiritual high culture.

There is much hatred and rejection of the German character in our day! And when the question is raised, “Why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a ‘barbarian people’?” when you look at this German character, you will not find the answer in this German character. Then this question changes into another question: Is it perhaps the case that what is hurled at the people – who are besieged like people in a fortress, what is hurled at the people, who are to be starved out – is The insult of “barbarism” is hurled at this people, therefore, in order to cover up what one is ashamed to say about the true causes of the situation in which one stands in relation to the besieged people whom one wants to starve?

Of course, esteemed attendees, there is also much within this humanity, besieged on all sides, that can be called hatred, that can be called antipathy; but let it be said frankly and freely: I do not believe that the roots of German life are connected with this antipathy, this national hatred, in the long run. I do not believe it in a nation that was capable of loving the English genius of Shakespeare more than the English people themselves, I do not believe it in a nation that was capable, in its prime, and as a poet must be recognized, I do not believe that a people could turn to one of the English poets of more recent times, to Byron, and, in the second part of Faust, produce a character who was inspired by Goethe as a result of his study of Byron. Byron appears to him – [Goethe took up this idea] – as Euphorion, the child who was the child of Faust and Helena, who emerged from the marriage of the highest cultural blossoms for Goethe.

But [is it not something that resounds there and offers us purely contemporary] as a characteristic of this Euphorion, does it not correspond intimately to us, do we not feel from what Byron-Euphorion is for Goethe, what the right word is at the time? [Goethe has Euphorion say]:

No, I have not appeared as a child
The youth arrives in armor;
He has joined the strong, the free, the bold
In spirit, already.

And do you hear the thunder on the sea?
There, valley after valley thunders back,
Army after army in dust and waves,
In urge upon urge, to pain and agony.
And death
Is the command [...]
That is simply understood.
Should I look on from afar?
No! I share the sorrow and the need.

When the German Goethe wanted to express something that was so close to his heart, his love led him to take the foreign model!

No, one cannot believe, need not believe that there is anything else that is German than the search for the noblest human spirit and that it is only this search of the German soul [for the noblest human spirit] that is often spoken of in today's style, that one does not understand; and because one does not understand it, one hates it.

Schiller, too, was never deceived about it. He, who not only said but also did what he expressed in the words I quoted, who knew how to transform all human nature, wherever he encountered it, into German nature – artistically and spiritually – he, Schiller, never deceived himself. His words are beautiful, showing us how he had no illusions when he looked to France and England:

Two mighty nations wrestle
For sole possession of the world;
To swallow up all countries' freedom,
They brandish the trident and the lightning.

Gold must every landscape weigh for them
And, like Brennus in the rough times,
The Frank lays his brazen sword
In the scales of justice.

The British extend their merchant fleets
Greedily like polyp arms;
And the realm of the free Amphitrite
He wants to close, like his own house.

No, Schiller did not fool himself, but in the German striving he saw general human striving:

The world loves to blacken what is radiant
And drag the sublime into the dust.

He says this in particular about the [heroic] spirit in the Maid of Orleans, who expresses it in such an epoch-making way in the human being. And how did she stand up, this French national heroine, [the Maid of Orleans], who had to defend France against England's claims? How did she, who was spat upon and reviled by Voltaire and is still not treated nicely by Anatole France [in the present day], how did she stand before Schiller's spirit, and how did he embody her in German poetry, which has become so dear to us?

Being German does not mean rebelling against anything national in the world; but this German identity carries with it the duty to embody with all means what the German soul is in the German body.

It has already been pointed out [dear attendees] that after all, one really does not need to be German to express words that suggest how the German essence is integrated into the essence of the world.

Yes, I know a man who once tried to visualize the highest that earthly culture can produce, using three brilliant thinkers. The third of these brilliant thinkers, on whom this man climbs, was Novalis, the profound German poet. The man I mean contemplated Novalis and he said the following to himself – he expressed beautiful thoughts – he said to himself – one does not need to go along with what he said – he said: Yes, what Sophocles has his characters act out, is ultimately all human action. And if a spirit were to descend from another planet [and come to Earth], it might be that it would not be at all interested in these people, [in what the characters of Sophocles do or] what Ophelia, Desdemona, or Hamlet himself accomplishes; [because] these are earthly matters that do not interest a genius from another planet. But there is something – [so this man opined] – on Earth among people that would most certainly interest the geniuses of other planets, [if they could descend]. The human soul has also soared up to that, the man opined. And he cites Novalis, the quintessentially German poet, as an example of such a soul that has produced something that would interest geniuses. He has spoken beautiful words in reference to Novalis and to what Novalis can be for humanity. Listen to the beautiful words he said about the quintessentially German poet Novalis:

But if he needed other proof, it would lead him among those whose works almost stir to silence. It would open the gate of the realm where some loved it for its own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [by one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the borders of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are only in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, for a moment, humanity has ruled, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm.

So says the man. What Novalis says belongs to the lights by which the earth announces itself to the spiritual realm.

Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a [strange] reason; [but the people I am talking about have come out of the little village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong [to] the earthly community.

So, a German once lived after this man, who produced writings that are not only valuable for souls on earth, but for souls that are not of this earth. In Novalis, the German, such a soul lived for the man. Who is the man who spoke such words about Novalis? Yes, I have to say it: Maurice Maeterlinck!

You, esteemed attendees, know what he – [Maeterlinck] – has since said about the German “barbarians”: the question resounds again like a refrain: if things are as you say they are, then why do you call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”? For if we look at what is sacred to us, if we pay attention to what Schiller and Fichte are not only for us, but what they impose on us as an obligation, to all that we must defend in their souls and out of their souls, as German essence, then we arrive at a conviction, [which is only a paraphrase of what I have said]: one becomes German ceaselessly, and Germanness stands before our soul like an ideal. Indeed, we then feel something of the fact that it is ultimately the [innermost] “roots of life's impulses” that lead to those highest fruits of the spirit, which are expressed in Schiller's valiant poetry, in Fichte's valiant wisdom, which now stand at the walls of Germany, which are now defended by cannons and swords [and other things] around German territory; so we confidently feel the necessity of the life of the German spirit, feel with the times and in time and feel above all with the troops in the west and east, who defend the German spirit with their fresh youth, and we feel justified in this defense of the German spirit, of which we feel that it was not only something, but that it contains the potential for what it is yet to become: an ever higher and higher quest for the spiritual and ever more spiritual. And if they want to cut off the German spirit's lifeline today and take away its light, if they want to oppress it to the point of affecting its physical substance, the German knows that the German spirit has not yet reached completion, that what it has achieved is only the beginning.

And when we hear the word “barbarians” used to describe “German culture that has grown old” [das alt gewordene Deutsche Kultur], which only had to embody itself for a time in that in which the whole world now embodies itself, but which has the highest spiritual goods to defend, then we once again ask ourselves the question: why do they call the people of Schiller and Fichte a “barbarian people”? And then we answer, not by trying to give a direct answer to this question, history will give that answer, and we can await that answer from history in peace. But some of what can be said with regard to German striving with regard to spiritual science will be said tomorrow; [also in connection with our Zeitgeist].

But to the question that was raised, we answer with the feeling that tells us: This German spirit has not yet been fully realized. It still has work to do, and it must retain the light and air of life. So we do not answer theoretically, not abstractly, so we answer, I think, dear ladies and gentlemen, from the depths of our hearts to all that lives in this fateful, fateful time – we answer with the words:

The German spirit has not yet achieved its purpose.
It lives in hope for the future,
It hopes for future deeds full of life;
In the depths of its being, it feels a mighty
Secret that must still mature to be effective.
How can the desire for its end arise in the power of the enemy
The wish for his end may arise without understanding:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
Which holds him in the roots of being?

Dear Attendees!

Spiritual research, as it is meant in the lectures that I have been holding here for years now, has, as is well known, basically not only opponents and antagonisms from those sides from which other worldviews their nature have opponents and opposition – materialism has opponents in spiritualism, spiritualism in materialism, idealism in realism and so on – and in a certain sense it can still be said today that spiritual science is fought against by all possible ideological directions. And so the question must arise: What is the essential reason why spiritual science in particular is so strongly rejected by the current zeitgeist as a whole?

I have already repeatedly drawn attention to what is important in relation to this question. The peculiar thing about this spiritual science is that the opposition does not arise from the fact that one gets to know this spiritual science more closely, that one studies it in order to be unable to agree with it, but rather that the opposition is mainly based on the fact that there is little inclination on either side to get involved in the actual essentials, in the meaningfulness of this spiritual scientific direction.

Instead, people invent all kinds of characteristics that this spiritual science must have according to their own ideas, without any knowledge of it. They think something like this: From what I know and from what I have heard said offhand from this quarter or that, this spiritual science wants this or that. Or rather, one thinks even differently, one thinks: it must want this or that. So in this or that sense it is naturally reprehensible.

And then the peculiarity emerges – and precisely this peculiarity can be observed if one delves deeper into the relationship between spiritual science and other currents of world view. The peculiarity then emerges that many people assert this or that against spiritual science on the assumption that it can affect spiritual science, while in truth the fact is that, as regards what these people assert, one is in complete agreement as a spiritual scientist in the sense in which spiritual science is meant here, that one has nothing at all against what these people say, that they only believe that, because one is precisely on the point of view of spiritual science, one must object to this or that.

So the peculiar thing is, dear attendees, that spiritual science is very often fought by those with whom it actually agrees entirely in all the positive things it demands.

One particular area that must be illuminated by the light that has just been mentioned is the subject of today's reflection: “Healthy mental life and spiritual research”. For it will be seen time and again that the very ways and methods of spiritual scientific research, the paths taken by spiritual science, are presented by those who, under the influence of today's habits of thought, believe they have built their views on the foundation of pure natural science. beliefs on the foundation of pure natural science. It will be found time and again that these methods and procedures are treated as something unhealthy, as something diseased, or at least lumped together with something diseased. And in this case, ladies and gentlemen, one cannot even say that the cause of such misunderstandings lies solely with those who develop misunderstandings from this side, but the causes lie in completely different circumstances, which will also be considered in the second part of today's reflection.

But first I would like to develop some essentials with regard to the types of spiritual science procedure, in order to show, by means of the actual method of spiritual research, how little justification there is for pointing to this method as something that could even remotely be connected with a somehow pathological soul life. In doing so, I shall today refrain from what I have often allowed myself to present here over the years; I shall refrain from a more detailed description of what the human soul has to accomplish in order to enter upon the path of spiritual research and to follow this path. A detailed description of the soul's inner processes can be found in the books already mentioned here: in the second part of my “Outline of Esoteric Science”, also at the end of my “Theosophy” and in detail in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Much will be derived from these writings with regard to the methods. Today, however, I would like to describe the effect of the spiritual research path on the human soul, not so much what the spiritual researcher has to do, but rather how his soul is affected by what he has to accomplish.

One of the essential things that the spiritual researcher has to accomplish in order to move into the spiritual world is, as has often been emphasized, a certain transformation, a development of thinking, of human thinking. After all, we also distinguish the three human soul powers: thinking, feeling and willing. All three soul forces undergo a certain transformation under the influence of the spiritual scientific path, a certain inner development in the life of the soul.

One such direction of development now relates to thinking. What happens, we might ask, to what a person calls their thinking when they want to become a spiritual scientist? In a certain way, an impulse is given to thinking – an impulse given out of the arbitrariness of the soul – so that this thinking becomes something other than it is in ordinary life. In ordinary life, thinking develops thoughts. These thoughts are there to depict some external reality. It is said that one has a true thought in that this true thought refers to a reality that it depicts. Such an aim of thinking is perfectly healthy for everyday thinking and also for thinking in the ordinary sense of the word scientific.

For the spiritual researcher, however, this thinking, which is justified in everyday life and must be applied unconditionally in ordinary science, is only the starting point of his path of research. The spiritual researcher must devote himself to such inner activities that he does not turn his attention so much to the content of the thoughts within the thought process - this, as I said, is important for other things, not primarily for the spiritual research path. So the attention is not turned to the content of the thoughts, but - is, after all, a specific activity, an inner accomplishment. The attention is diverted - this is essentially the culture of this thinking that is meant here - the attention is diverted from the content of the thinking and is directed entirely to the inner activity of thinking that is being done.

The thinker captures himself in the act of thinking, focusing so strongly on this thinking, on what is actually going on inside him, that this attention is completely diverted from any thought content - yes, that it to such an extent that the content of thought is completely expelled from consciousness, and the person ultimately comes to do this himself in an inner process of activity that is thinking, but which is not filled by certain thoughts relating to anything.

But as a result, one experiences the peculiarity in the thought process of bringing something to consciousness that, in ordinary life and in ordinary science, must not be brought to consciousness in this thought process, because otherwise the judgment about external, sensually real things is clouded.

A volitional process is hidden at the basis of our thought process. This, which is the will to think, which is actually an unconscious volitional process in the thought process, is detached from what thinking otherwise is in life, and the soul holds consciousness solely and exclusively on this inner volitional reality of thinking. In this way, through an inner, spiritual-soul process, which is absolutely real, something is detached from the thinking of ordinary life, in the same sense, only spiritually-soul-like, not physically, something is — as in the chemical process that separates hydrogen from oxygen, just as hydrogen is released from water, just as hydrogen is released from water, in exactly the same sense — only transferred to the soul-spiritual. So it becomes a scientific method that is well recognized in the outer life, and it is simply transferred to the soul-spiritual.

What one arrives at can only be experienced, dear attendees, of course only be experienced. And what is experienced is that one has now detached a process of the will from the thought process, and one now knows that by living in it, one no longer lives in the physical body. At first this sounds fantastic to anyone who is not familiar with these things. It also sounds fantastic to many who believe that their habitual thinking is based on solid scientific ground, and therefore view something like what has just been said as fantastic from the outset.

Nevertheless, the more one continues to pursue the development of thinking described above with perseverance and iron energy in one's soul, the more one becomes aware of how, in the end, one really lives in an element that only experiences the will present in the thinking process in the soul; but experienced in such a way that the experience is free from the body.

You experience this freedom from the body in two ways, through two things. The first is that you can have the – and it is not too strong a word to use – harrowing experience of realizing that, when you have come as far as just described, one's own corporeality, and one's physical experiences, which one otherwise experiences as belonging to oneself, that one has these outside oneself, as one otherwise has mountains, tables and chairs [– just external facts –] in front of oneself in physical perception. Being outside of the physical body is experienced by no longer having the physical body within one's subjective experience, but rather having it as an external object. This is one thing.

The second thing, however, is that a very definite transformation of thinking takes place through the processes that have just been described. Ordinary thinking, which a person must develop in everyday life and in ordinary science, has the peculiarity - and must have the peculiarity - that the thoughts it develops can be remembered. For a healthy life of soul within the physical body, it is a necessity that the thoughts that are developed about external things or about the inner processes of the soul should, if we may use the rough expression, stick to them as they live and can later be brought up again from this life of soul. This possibility of recalling the thoughts we have experienced, this ability to remember, must be connected with the healthy life of the soul in our everyday life and ordinary scientific work.

I have often mentioned here how this healthy soul life would be disturbed if such an ability to remember did not exist back to the point in time when we can become aware of our self in childhood, in our first childhood. A soul life that has an interruption in the continuous ability to remember, that could not recognize that its experiences belong to its self, that would be a sick soul life.

Such illnesses of the soul do exist. There are people who experience a condition in which they are completely rational and can carry out intelligent actions, but they forget how they have seen this or that happen in their inner life or how this or that has developed in their inner life. Because their I is interrupted in them, this I that is so intimately connected with the ability to remember, such people can nevertheless appear to have a sick soul life in their ability to remember, despite the fact that they carry out intelligent actions.

So, dear ones, the ability to remember is connected with the nurturing of thoughts in thinking.

It is quite different with the inner soul activity that one enters into when one carries out in the soul what has just been described. Then one has the opportunity to really weave in an initially indeterminate experience. You know full well that you are immersed in a new reality, one that is essentially different from the external sensory reality and also from the reality that can be grasped by the mind.

But what one experiences, which initially shows itself in images, so-called imaginations, weaving through the reality of the will - you will find this explained in the books mentioned - shows itself in such a way that it cannot pass into the ability to remember as it is immediately. And that is an essential part of this higher thinking. Because there is no other term for it, it should be called: This higher thinking, which is developed out of thinking, cannot be remembered so directly. It belongs to a world in which one now lives and moves, a world that is in constant becoming, a world that flits by. It could initially be compared to fleeting dreams that do not imprint themselves on memory, where these dreams are different from the ordinary dreams of everyday life.

If you take this immediate psychic experience that has just been described, then you can say: you experience a certain content of the soul; it is not immediately imprinted on the memory as it is, [in such a way that you could later say, “What did I experience back then?”] and that you would not need to relive the experience, but could simply remember it. That is not the case! If you want to have what you have experienced spiritually back again, then it must be experienced again in the same way. And you can recognize from this that you are really in the spiritual world, that no memory remains of what you remember in the spiritual world. You can recognize it precisely from this!

And you can tell something else too: you can tell that everything that, like ordinary, everyday thinking, leaves memory traces, that this is dependent in its process on the physical body of the person as its tool. And it is precisely the spiritual researcher who, in this respect, can fully agree with certain directions of modern science. It is precisely the spiritual researcher who realizes that this ordinary thinking cannot take place without the physical organism, the nervous system and that which is connected with the nervous system in the rest of the physical organism being set in motion. And through the - again, roughly speaking - imprinting of the life of thought in the bodily life, the remnants of memory remain.

In this way, one can learn to distinguish between what has really been experienced in the spiritual [from what] is only conceived and bound to the physical. And precisely by recognizing the spiritual experience of the kind described, by realizing that it is basically only there in the experience itself, in its process itself, one learns to recognize it, [learns to] distinguish it from everything that is bound to physical corporeality. Because in the moment when any remnant remains in the physical human being, the bodily life is also involved.

However, ladies and gentlemen, if you want to penetrate into spiritual science, you have to make more precise distinctions. You might now ask: So is there no way for the spiritual researcher to remember what he has once experienced in the realm of the spirit in the way described?

To speak correctly, I have always used a word that I would like to draw attention to. I have used the word: “The spiritual experience does not immediately imprint itself on the memory.” Not “immediately”; but when it has been experienced, when this spiritual experience has been made, then it can be allowed to flow over into the ordinary presentation. It can be converted into an ordinary thought, and this ordinary thought can then be remembered in exactly the same way as one can remember an external life process. One has formed an idea of it. The idea is retained, but the life process is not carried along in life. If one wants to have it again, then one must relive it, exactly as with an outer life process, which also does not itself live on in memory, but only in the idea that one has formed of it.

Exactly as it is with the external life process, so it is in the spiritual experience. Not the spiritual experience as such passes over into memory, but only that which has arisen when one has first allowed the spiritual experience itself to flow into the ordinary life of thought through the exercise of the will.

The process of detaching the spiritual and soul life from the bodily life takes place as I have just described. But this side must not remain the only one. And so all the inner soul processes that are intended to point the way to the spiritual world are described in the books mentioned. They are designed in such a way that this development of the soul life, as it has just been characterized, is paralleled by another development. And just as the one development directs thinking in a certain direction through an inner impulse, so the other development directs the will life of the person, the will, to a certain development, which in turn is not present in ordinary life and of which ordinary science, including ordinary spiritual science, can know nothing.

As I said, today we are not here to repeat things that have often been discussed here, but to describe the effects. We can cultivate the will of the human being by looking at this will, as one would otherwise only look at external objects. In ordinary life, one has will. You have volitional impulses that arise from opinions, from external concerns and the like. But if you want, what is wanting flows so closely with what is carried out as an action and the like, or it remains contained in the sensation of desire, that the actual volitional process is not looked at. Even the self-observation that is often referred to as mystical, which so easily believes it can achieve certain [goals] that it sets itself, this self-observation also knows nothing of a real observation of the will.

This real observation of the will must in turn be achieved through long, energetic and persistent soul work. In this way, the human being comes to give the striving a certain form: to become a spectator of his own will. But then something very strange happens. By striving to become a spectator of one's own will, by striving, so to speak, to look at one's own will as one otherwise looks at external mineral or plant or other entities, one gradually loses oneself completely as a matter of course, one ceases to be a spectator, so to speak.

So the strange thing happens that what one must energetically strive for – to be a spectator of one's will – is that in the process of developing this spectator role, one's will is extinguished like itself! You really do extinguish yourself by trying to look more and more at your will, you extinguish yourself!

On the other hand, the will that one gazes upon will bear less and less the character of the will, the character of wanting. What one has previously experienced as volition will appear to one as a superficial configuration of the inner soul existence. And from this surface, as it were, something emerges from the underground through this surface, through something that one knew nothing about before, one learns to recognize that something is hidden beneath the surface of the will.

What I am going to tell you now is not just an image, not a metaphor or an illusion, but a full reality, a reality that is even more real than any external, tangible event! That which springs forth out of the will, which always remains unconscious in everyday life, is, yes, it is consciousness itself. One experiences that one carries within oneself during one's whole life an inner, invisible, unconscious spectator of one's whole volition.

This other person in the person is quite real. It is present in every human soul, and it can only be seen by directing one's gaze to the volition. And in that, as it were, one's own consciousness is extinguished, [through the surface of the will another, higher consciousness emerges] that takes the place of the ordinary consciousness, it is the reality of the will that is brought out of thinking through spiritual development in the way indicated above. So it is a different consciousness from the everyday consciousness that is now released from the activity of the will.

And now, instead of merely looking at the world with our ordinary consciousness, we learn to look at a [new] world with this consciousness that we ourselves have born out of the surging and driving of our will.

But that which has developed out of the will, that which one gets to know as a power of the will and soul, must connect with that which develops out of thinking. This consciousness that has broken out of the will must, I would say, connect spiritually and chemically with that reality of the will that has broken out of thinking. Then the inner spiritual man is present - who now knows himself as the spiritual man completely free from the bodily and at the same time knows himself in a spiritual reality, just as the sensual man with his eyes and ears knows himself in the physical-sensual reality.

If one were to develop only that which can be brought out of thinking, one would enter into an ever more anxious, one might even say fearful, state of mind, into a feeling of inner loneliness. By detaching from thinking that which can be detached from it, one actually only finds oneself, oneself weaving and existing in spiritual becoming - in a spiritual process of becoming. The one-sided experience of this could be compared to the ability to stretch out one's hands everywhere, to make grasping movements everywhere, but not being able to grasp anything. One would experience one's own spiritual-soul reality, but not a spiritual-soul reality outside of oneself. This spiritual-soul reality outside of one is experienced by the fact that the consciousness, which has been hinted at, is raised out of the will-being. And in and through this consciousness, in this and through this consciousness, one now experiences a spiritual external world, as one experiences an external physical world through the senses.

You see, dear attendees, that in all striving for spiritual research, it is important to develop something within the soul that makes that soul completely independent of all physicality. And the processes that really develop the soul are solely soul-spiritual processes. Everything that happens for the further development of the soul, all these are intimate, inner soul processes in which the body cannot participate; because they consist precisely in their essence, that the spiritual-soul is drawn out of the physical. From this it follows that the physical body as such cannot have any part in the development of real methods of spiritual research, because their essential nature consists precisely in making oneself independent of everything physical.

At the moment one believes that through some physical process, which must be stripped away to such an extent that even memory is immediately excluded, one can enter into the spiritual world through some physical process, one is completely mistaken.

And now, dear attendees, ask yourselves: how can it be possible to somehow bring about an unhealthy human experience through methods that lead people to experience something that is completely free from their physicality? How can physicality be ruined, how can it be affected by something that is precisely what it is because it makes itself independent of all physicality? It will admittedly take a while before it is recognized in wider circles of those people who have a scientific mind, that true spiritual scientific methods - and these are only those that really lead into the spiritual world - make man independent of all corporeality, so that it is absurd to speak of an ill soul life in any connection with the spiritual research methods! For it is precisely spiritual research – when it is based on such premises as those just briefly characterized – that must agree with true natural science regarding everything that modern science has to say about the dependence of soul life on physical experience.

Even ordinary memory, which is thus an entirely soul power that is part of healthy soul life, even ordinary memory knows: spiritual research is linked to the tools of the body, because thinking must work in such a way that the fabric of thought sends its waves into the physical realm and thus gives the physical realm its due by developing thoughts that are capable of being remembered.

Spiritual research has come to a deep insight with regard to the share of bodily life in the life of the soul. And it is only a delusion and a misconception when some scientific school claims that true spiritual research wants to deny the dependence of ordinary thought or will life on the body. It is precisely through this spiritual research that it becomes clear that what is to be independent, soul-spiritual life must first be released from ordinary soul life.

But the ordinary life of the soul is such – and it is precisely from the point of view of the liberated life of the soul that one experiences it – the ordinary life of the soul is such that it is everywhere submerged in the ordinary life of the body and thus dependent to a certain extent on this life of the body.

And further, in the spiritual scientist's research, it is shown how other expressions of the soul, other experiences of the soul, which are rightly counted among the pathological experiences of the soul, are also bound to the life of the body. When the natural scientist comes and says: We know visions, we know hallucinations, we know illusions - we must, even if we have not researched all the details, definitely take the view that an illusory, a hallucinatory soul life is at the root of this, that the bodily tool that has to be used by the soul life is not functioning in the right way. When the natural scientist says this, he will find that the true spiritual researcher is in complete agreement with him. This is because the combination of visions, hallucinations and illusions with that which has just been described as developing in true spiritual research means combining things that are as different as day and night.

The development of soul powers, which spiritual research requires, lies in the exact opposite direction to the processes in the soul that lead to hallucinations, visions or illusions. And anyone who is in the process of developing spiritual research abilities knows that they should not devote themselves to that part of the soul which can lead to visions, illusions or hallucinations, but that he should devote himself to those forces in the soul which alone are fruitful for him, which alone lead him to something that is suitable for dispelling, combating and dispelling hallucinations, illusions and visions. The development of spiritual research into the life of the soul lies in an intensification of this, in something that makes visions, hallucinations or illusions healthy. Because hallucinations, visions and illusions make the human being dependent on the life of the body in a much greater degree than the ordinary life of the soul, which he develops in everyday life, this healthy ordinary life of the soul, makes it appear dependent on the body.

This does, of course, touch on a sensitive issue, in that spiritual researchers are perhaps misunderstood not so much by natural science as by a school of thought that also claims to be spiritual research. And here we touch on the area where some people claim that true spiritual research - which is difficult - should not be difficult. Understanding a watch is difficult; but you get involved with it if you want to understand it; but the deep secrets of the world and the secrets of the soul should not be difficult to understand!

But those who shy away from the difficulty of spiritual research find an easy way to look into the spiritual world, precisely by resorting to a visionary, hallucinatory life – even if this hallucinatory world appears in all kinds of guises. And the evil is that spiritual research is all too easily lumped together by those who do not like to get involved with the differences with all the amateurish goings-on that claim visions, hallucinations instead of true spiritual insight.

The spiritual researcher takes the following stand on these matters, and stands by it so firmly that what he has to advocate becomes spiritual research practice. He takes this standpoint: the ordinary mental life that makes us familiar with the physical environment in a healthy way, and with much of what can be grasped about the physical environment through the mind that is tied to the brain, this mental life is bound to the whole human body in its thinking, feeling and willing. The normally organized human body is the tool for this outwardly healthy spiritual life. If true enlightenment is to occur, so that one really looks into a spiritual world, then the human being must rise above this normal, ordinary looking at things, which is bound to the body, to a healthy body. He must make his looking more comprehensive. And above all, he must make it more suitable, more subject to the will. He must do it in such a way that, while a large part of what takes place in ordinary mental life remains unconscious precisely because the body serves as an instrument, in spiritual contemplation man cannot be as passive as he is in ordinary contemplation, but must be active in everything he contemplates; he must develop will, inner activity. In short, in true clairvoyance, the human being's experience becomes broader than that which is bound to the body.

But what is seen in hallucinatory, visionary, illusionary soul life is more bound to the body. Because it is usually not the whole body that is seen, but only a part of the body – so that another part of the body is even paralyzed – it is more bound to the body than the ordinary spiritual life that is unfolded in everyday life.

So that one does not, through visions, hallucinations or illusions, gain access to a spiritual world that can give one more insights than the outer world of the senses. On the contrary, one does not gain access to a supersensible world, but to a subsensible world. One uses a smaller part of one's body as a tool than in ordinary life, in which one uses one's whole body as a tool.

But this is also why hallucinations, visions, illusions are less subject to arbitrariness, less subject to acts of the will than the perceptions of ordinary life; while true clairvoyance is a more active process, that is, it is more subject to the will than this perception of ordinary life. And the images that arise in hallucinations, visions and illusions are much more bound to the body than the images of ordinary memory. And if man were clever, he would value the occurrence of the images of ordinary memory more highly than all the fantasies that live in visions and hallucinations and illusions, insofar as they are bound to the body in the way described. He would realize that it is only his need for sensation that leads him to appreciate not what he sees in everyday life, but to appreciate more what is rare, what one produces through some rare process - to appreciate this more for the exploration of the secrets of life than the everyday observation. And in this unfortunate, psychic sensationalism lies a multitude of aberrations that consist in an amateurish spiritual worldview.

It is gratifying to be able to point out that one has this or that medium. The spiritual researcher, who says yes to everything from his consciousness; you don't have to believe that. He says yes just as in everyday life everything comes from his consciousness. You can't be sure. You don't have to believe it. But if you have a medium, you can be sure, because the will plays no role in it, everything happens in natural processes. Real, will-free science is present!

The true spiritual researcher knows that the field of vision into the world is narrower for the medium – although nothing should be said against some research methods involving mediumship, I have already spoken about this here – but the true spiritual researcher sees that the field of vision into the world is narrower for the medium, not wider, but narrower than for ordinary observation in everyday life. In ordinary observation, in ordinary science, which simply come about with healthy senses and with a healthy mind, one experiences many more of the secrets of existence than through any kind of mediumship, through which one can only experience something strange - something strange because under abnormal conditions a smaller field of vision is overlooked. (Interjections: “That's wrong!”; “Oh oh!”).

But that is precisely what it is about, that for true clairvoyance this field of vision must be expanded, that this field of vision must be expanded precisely by the fact that what one otherwise experiences in terms of world secrets in ordinary life undergoes an addition, in order to experience what is now being experienced, completely independently of all physical activity!

It is therefore, esteemed audience, that a number of people are gradually coming to recognize, precisely from the genuine, true conditions of natural science, how all development in clairvoyance to the opposite side, from which, wherever the human soul develops, when it falls into hallucinations, mediumship and the like due to a downgrading of healthy life.

I have already indicated, dear attendees, that it will take quite a while before the recognition of such a spiritual path can be achieved on the basis of genuine science. Because the people who still call what is presented as the essence of spiritual research wrong will still be around for a long time! These people belong in the same category as those who initially rebelled when the Copernican worldview was introduced into human history; these people belong among those who are not counted on when it comes to the further development of because they are naturally subject to the law that everything that enters world development may initially appear to be wrong, or at least to be something dreamy, crazy, fantastic. [...]

But this, esteemed attendees, already indicates how, basically, I would say, the balance between spiritual science and natural science is slowly coming. Little by little, natural science will realize that the true spiritual researcher is indeed on their ground.

But today there is still a danger that must be faced directly, and it comes from another side. This danger is not to be sought among those who, perhaps because of well-founded habits of thought, are opponents of spiritual science because they are scientists, true, honest scientists; but the danger lies with those who often believe themselves to be true followers of spiritual science; for spiritual science has to shake off much of its coat-tails, if I may use the rough expression, that clings to it. And above all, it has to draw a clear dividing line between the paths it takes and that have been characterized, and those that lead into the hallucinatory, visionary and so on, into the media, and that do not broaden the field of vision in relation to everyday life, but narrow it.

Someone who has become established in any field of natural science, let us say – because this must be of particular interest to us for our topic today – let us say in the scientifically based psychiatry of today, who has become established in such a field today, who has experience through faithful and faithfully meant scientific research , what the seriousness of the methods of procedure in natural science means, who is familiar with the efforts in the genuine sense of truth, which prevails in the field of natural science today, where it appears truthfully and honestly, must, in a certain way, be given attention if he is still unable to approach spiritual science simply because of his habitual way of thinking. And if it happens to him, which can easily happen, that he does not immediately get to know spiritual science where it is represented by its serious methods - by methods that are just as serious as the scientific methods - if he does not get to know this spiritual science in these sources, but gets to know it through all kinds of followers and if he then throws this following together with what true spiritual research is, there is a danger.

I do not want to talk about appearances, dear attendees, I do not want to talk about the fact that today there are still people who see an essential thing in how one feeds oneself in order to get on the path of a certain spiritual research! Whether one is a vegetarian or not is a matter of taste; it depends on other things. There may be certain advantages and benefits; but with regard to the intimate development of the soul, which generates the forces that have been mentioned and leads to the spiritual world, what one eats or does not eat has nothing to do with it, directly. It can make the physical life, which goes hand in hand with it, more comfortable; but it has nothing to do with it directly. You cannot eat your way up into the spiritual world by not eating certain things, for example. And anyone who believes that you can eat your way up into the spiritual world through such external materialistic processes or not eat – let's say starve – is just as much on the wrong track as someone who, out of his materialism, what de La Mettrie, whom I quoted the day before yesterday as the father of modern materialism, saw as the influence of the food of a meal, the substances ingested, on the actual life of a person. These things are indeed plausible.

It is plausible, for example, much more plausible than anything that the spiritual researcher has to bring forward in further development, it is much more plausible when de La Mettrie says: What power joy has over us. Joy awakens in a sad heart; it passes over to the souls of the fellow diners and is expressed in those charming songs in which the French excel. And then de La Mettrie points out – draws attention to the fact, which is certainly true – that Erasmus of Rotterdam and Fontenelle, for example, would not have become the geniuses they were if just a small cog in their brain had developed differently than it did.

The truths that come from this side are characterized above all by the fact that they are self-evident, so self-evident as to be trivial, but they do not touch on the subject of true spiritual science. Because a statement like that – de La Mettrie makes it in relation to Fontenelle and Erasmus – can even be taken further. If you think of it as even more exaggerated, you can say: Well, if Erasmus' mother had been murdered by some bandit before Erasmus was born, then the whole of Erasmus would not have come into being. There you can see the dependence of the spiritual life on the physical.

Yes, esteemed attendees, that is the essential point: the opponent of spiritual science does not even suspect from this side how true spiritual research basically agrees with his trivialities. I do not want to speak of other external appearances either, but unfortunately a spiritual research world view is often judged by those external appearances, which, for example, express themselves - if it were not discussed, there would be no need to comment on it - in the fact that certain ladies who consider themselves to be spiritual researchers wear their hair short - if they are men, they wear their hair long - that they wear certain clothes and so on. Well, of course, all such frippery can be lumped together. But there is a much more serious area - the one that is most certainly likely to give rise to the worst attacks and opposition to spiritual science in the near future, and in the more distant future.

With true natural science, for example, and with true psychiatry, spiritual science will be able to fully agree. The spiritual researcher will readily concede to the psychiatrist that there is, for example, a certain pathological mystical disposition, and that simply due to some characteristic of the human body, a person shows a certain urge for inner brooding; that he then comes up with the idea of wanting to find the solution to great world riddles in a certain chaotic inner emotional life. That such drives are connected with the life of the body, that is what the psychiatrist of today will have to assert. In this the spiritual researcher will be in complete agreement with him! And he can do so because that which he, as a soul-spiritual being, must develop in order to enter the spiritual world must be made independent of the bodily, and must therefore also remain independent of a possibly diseased bodily.

Anyone who adopts the perspective that spiritual research must take must look at precisely such a process of a strengthened soul life, even in the case of a pathological, mystical disposition of the soul. And so, if you yourself had a mystical disposition, this morbid mystical disposition could be viewed like an object from the outside. And you would come to a healthy judgment about your own work if you strove for a true, healthy spiritual-scientific point of view.

In this area, it will depend on distinctions. The spiritual researcher would have to show, with regard to certain spiritual phenomena, how spiritual realities around him are experienced in such a way that the experiences can only be expressed in colorful images. You will find such colorful images described in my Theosophy and in Occult Science in Outline. When such colored pictures, such auric pictures, arise out of true spiritual research, one must be clear about the fact that they are developed with the inner will for that which is really spiritually experienced, and that such a description of a spiritual experience of color is not made in a passive letting-upon-oneself of some color impression (which, however, can also be a hallucination).

With regard to hallucinations in this area, the spiritual researcher is in complete agreement with the psychiatrist, who is grounded in natural science. The spiritual researcher knows that such perceptions can naturally arise out of the sick soul life. There are people who simply experience very definite inner color experiences when they read certain words, when certain letters affect them; there are people who, when something unpleasant is said to them, hear it only in the left ear; when something pleasant is said to them, in the right ear, and so on. These things belong entirely to the sphere with which bodily life is connected - more intimately connected with soul life than in the case of ordinary, everyday views of the world.

But the spiritual researcher stands on the same ground as the natural scientist with regard to these things. And more precisely than the natural scientist, he can see how such involuntary hallucinatory vision arises from the body's predestined devotion to its own processes, while in true clairvoyance, free, independent activity of the will, independent of the body, is involved in every detail that one experiences in relation to the spiritual world. When a person succumbs, let us say, to delusions or obsessions, the spiritual researcher will perhaps stand even more firmly on the ground occupied today by the scientifically trained psychiatrist, with regard to these areas in particular, and be clear about the fact that certain ideas that arise and exert a compulsion on the person that he cannot resist are conditioned by the fact that the life of the body has been pathologically altered. But with his spiritual life freed from the life of the body, he will be able to look more closely at this bondage of all involuntary, abnormal ideas to the body and its functions as a natural scientist himself. If only one would realize ever more deeply that true spiritual science need not be in disharmony with what natural science asserts as a justified demand.

But, dear assembled guests, although it is true that the spiritual researcher arrives at something that is outside of him, even if it is his own self, and fundamentally cannot even change his body if he does not , although this is absolutely correct, there will nevertheless be more and more people who believe that they recognize in a certain development that is bound to the body that which also leads to real insights into a completely different world than the ordinary one. And there will be confusion among them; and these are often precisely those who lean on all kinds of spiritual-scientific, even real spiritual-scientific worldviews, and these spiritual-scientific worldviews are often judged by them.

There are people, let us say, who from the outset are afflicted with some kind of predisposition to abnormal mental life. If they had remained outside of a spiritual-scientific current, then, of course, they would have come to madness themselves in the course of a certain time. Now, due to some circumstances, they have come close to a spiritual-scientific worldview. Instead of giving themselves up to all kinds of crazy ideas outside, they then give themselves up to their crazy ideas within this school of thought. Because then, if one does not distinguish, one can of course very truly say: Well, the school of thought has driven the person concerned crazy! - But in the end, what are such statements worth?

They remind you again and again, dear attendees, of that old woman who looked after the great anatomist Hyrtl in his last days; and when he died, she went out into the street and said: Yes, now Hyrtl has died! That's what happens when you spend so much time studying! Then a stroke strikes him down! Hyrtl lived to be eighty-four years old!

This should be considered proof that, in this case at least, studying was less harmful than drinking wine and beer is for some people, and that a stroke can strike at a much earlier age.

Equally clever are those judgments that are often made when someone, afflicted with some kind of mental illness, has spiritual scientific views and after some time shows himself to be crazy - when it is said: If he had not come to this spiritual science, he would not have gone crazy!

The truth is this: one can, of course, just as well as through cleverness, come to spiritual science through madness and just as well through one's weak abilities come to madness there, or through some other kind of abnormal abilities come to madness, if one is unsatisfied by this or that in life. One goes here or there to find satisfaction, and then, of course, believes that one can feel comfortable in what initially seems difficult, by indulging in strange, unclear ideas that one has no desire to clarify, one believes that one can free oneself from some of life's pressures. The amount of spiritual research attributed to this side, which must therefore be characterized, cannot be exhaustively stated!

This, however, demands, demands more and more that it be pointed out that by its very nature, all spiritual research methods cannot, under any circumstances, be related to any kind of pathological mental life, because they are built precisely on freeing oneself from everything that can cause pathological mental life.

But just as I was able to point out certain dangers and adversities that are asserted against spiritual science in detail, so it can be said that with regard to its representation in social life, in human life in general, it is all too easily lumped together with all sorts of amateurish, even fraudulent, charlatan-like paths. And because these things, dear attendees, are now being discussed in more materialistic circles of world outlook, the spiritual researcher must necessarily point out how he draws a strict dividing line between what he, in an honest striving for truth, pursues only as a goal of truth, and all the various things that are asserting themselves in a field where one can so easily rely on superstition and on the credulity and for all kinds of impure goals, people try to spread alleged spiritual science or - as it is also called - occultism, so that people are confused by all kinds of secretions of what occult knowledge is supposed to be, and when they have been confused, they have a certain power over them - even if in our time it is said over and over again: it is the time when we have finally freed ourselves from the old belief in authority and when people profess “free judgment”.

Well, the truth of what this claim is based on is not so far away. It is true that people boast about it very much, saying that in earlier times people believed in the dogmas of the church fathers. Yes, for those people the church fathers were called Tertullian, Gregory of Nazianz, Irenaeus and so on; for modern people, who in their opinion - and that they have the opinion is perhaps even more harmful than it was for the old people that they did not have it. For modern people, who believe that they do not look to any authorities, the “church fathers” today are called: Helmholtz, Haeckel, Darwin, Dubois-Reymond and so on - they are only secular church fathers. They are spoken of more as a principle; but the dependencies on them are quite the same. We must not believe that credulity and superstition have particularly diminished in our time. They have only taken on a different form.

And so the true spiritual researcher is necessary so that he is not confused, especially in the present fateful time, with what, under the guise of an alleged occult science, pursues all sorts of dishonest and corrupting goals. So that he cannot be lumped together with it, for this is happening more and more every day: everything, even the most crass and foolish superstition, is lumped together with that spiritual science which, in fact, has a brighter, clearer, more illuminated thinking than even ordinary science, as can be sufficiently proven.

And here attention must be drawn to an apparent phenomenon, because otherwise errors could all too easily arise in this field if it were not known what the spiritual researcher wants to discard; it is positively a duty to draw attention to certain things that are also connected with our present momentous world-historical events. The following is mentioned only, as already stated, to set forth spiritual science in its purity and to draw a line against dishonesty. Only individual facts are singled out, and only for the reason that they are discussed in newspapers hostile to spiritual science.

For example, a personality who lives in the western part of Europe, in a capital city of the western part of Europe, published a kind of “almanac”, a yearbook, every year for years. Such a yearbook for 1913 has already been published in 1912. In this yearbook for 1913, which appeared in 1912, the words were written, esteemed attendees, with reference to the development of Austria - the words were: the one who believes that he will govern will not govern; on the other hand, another young man, who is believed to not yet govern, will govern. And in the almanac that was printed in 1913 for 1914, these things were repeated.

The credulity of our time, the foolish superstition, can of course easily believe in all sorts of prophecies. And how many will have believed in prophecy in this area!

Perhaps people will believe less in prophecy when they know that almost simultaneously with the appearance of this passage in the said almanac, the following sentences appeared in a very ordinary Parisian newspaper, “Paris-Midi”: “It is said that it is wished that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria be assassinated at the right time.

The personality who wrote such things in her almanac is probably connected with certain circles that pursue this or that goal through all kinds of underground channels. And anyone who is serious about spiritual research must also show that they agree with serious, scientific thinking in this area, even if it initially comes from the field of materialism, and not with the fraud that, under the guise of prophecy, pursues all kinds of charlatanistic or dishonest goals. The same personality who published this almanac and supposedly knew how to predict what would happen as a prophecy of the future, went from Paris to Rome in the first days of August 1914 to influence certain people there in their way to do certain things, which then contributed to the well-known interest in current events, or at least was supposed to contribute something.

The personality who wrote such things in her almanac is probably connected with certain circles that pursue this or that goal through all kinds of underground channels. And anyone who is truly sincere in their spiritual research must also show that they agree with serious, scientific thinking in this area, even if it initially comes from the field of materialism, and not with the fraud that pursues all kinds of charlatanistic or dishonest goals under the guise of prophecy. The same personality who published this almanac and supposedly knew how to predict what would happen like a prophecy of the future, went from Paris to Rome in the first days of August 1914 to influence certain people there in their way to certain things, which then contributed at least something to the well-known interest in current events, or at least should contribute something.

Because, as already mentioned, these things are publicly discussed, the spiritual researcher must point out that all unhealthy response of the human soul to this or that “revelation” based on such foundations must be rooted out by true spiritual research! True spiritual research will not work towards the unhealthy, but towards the healthy. For true spiritual research is not capable of obscuring thinking or making man stupid in regard to the outer real processes of life. Everything that paralyzes spiritual life and leads it astray, as has been described, also clouds thinking and makes it dull to the sober realities of life. Everything that broadens, these spiritual explorations that expand one's view beyond ordinary life, also enlightens one's healthy judgment of this ordinary life. This does not force people to be deceived under the influence of superstition, but it does lead to a clearer and brighter understanding of life's circumstances.

In this area, spiritual science still has much to offer and much strength to give. For today, esteemed attendees, one does not notice how, I might say, dull the weapon of thought has become, how much thoughtlessness always prevails!

In conclusion, let me give you another example of this, which will show you where unhealthy thinking lies and that this unhealthy thinking does not lie in spiritual science.

I would like to say: chance has just brought it home to me, which I now have to explain in relation to the following. Some time ago, dear attendees, I gave a lecture in a city in Austria. There I developed thoughts that I had also developed here in Munich, partly in the lecture that I gave here months ago, about the world view of German idealism, partly in the lecture that I gave here the day before yesterday about the individual national souls.

I think that all healthy thinking will be able to at least recognize this – however one may critically view it – at least recognize that when one truly looks into the spirits of the people, into the individual national souls, certain characteristics present themselves, so that the individual national soul differs from the other in a certain way.

I also presented this in that city in Austria. Not only did a confused mind in a newspaper at the time go on about this truth, which he did not understand at all; he also said: I would have taken the opportunity, because the military power relations in the east and West and Central Europe happened to have brought about antagonism, to now also construct a spiritual antagonism. Well, that was a confusion that one can absolutely conceive in a “daily paper”. But that was not enough; rather, a reprint of what was in that “daily paper” at the time appeared in a German magazine. And in a German magazine, a man writes - according to him, he is an Austrian German - the following words, really the following words:

"The critic's accusation that Steiner has constructed opposing cultures from the current constellation of powers is justified. With the best will in the world, I am unable to perceive any essential difference between Central European and Western and Eastern European culture, as Steiner does. In my opinion, European culture is essentially completely the same.

Consider the light of thought that such a claim casts! Consider it, honored attendees! Yet the same man even finds the opportunity to say:

“Intellectual life has also developed in this direction and is absorbed in this pursuit. The wild greed of the European man of culture for the possession of earthly goods would degenerate into a predatory struggle of all against all if individuals were not constrained by iron state structures.”

Now I ask you: Did the “human individuals” today declare war, or did those at the heads of the states?

So with a complete slap in the face of what is accessible to the simplest thought, people are beguiled! Such things exist in the world of that thinking, which one does not want to recognize as unhealthy today because one has become too indifferent to it. Instead, one finds, the less one is aware of it in particular, in what is contained in true spiritual science, that which is intended to mislead people, that which is intended to create confused ideas in people.

Truly, the spiritual researcher could, if he found it somehow compatible with his otherwise sound character, could fall into a certain complacency when he sees the confusion of ideas prevailing today as a result of a very common-place thinking - but which in truth turns out to be quite unhealthy compared to the healthy thinking life of spiritual research.

It is possible – one must, I would say, as with Hamlet's words: “Writing table here!”, so that one can write it down – it is possible that a person exists who is able to tie something like this to humanity! And it is possible that a magazine exists that prints something like this! The person who publishes the magazine is called: Dr. Friedrich Maier and lives in Tübingen. And attention must be drawn to such things so that one can see where unhealthy thinking and spiritual life exist.

In this case, dear attendees, if one or the other might be surprised that I say such things with apparent zeal – as one might always believe in such a case – perhaps out of wounded, personal vanity, I can in this case provide the counter proof, I can adduce the counterproof from the journal itself – although anyone who knows me and is familiar with how I represent spiritual science will trust me when I say that whether what I do and say is praised or criticized by someone else is of as little personal concern to me as possible! Truly, whether someone praises or criticizes what I do and say is of as little personal concern to me as possible. But when it is a matter of pointing out where there is public mental illness or health, then I feel called upon to have my say, precisely from the point of view of pure spiritual science.

As I said, I can prove that I am not dealing with vanity here; for I have published a brochure - “Thoughts during the Time of War. For Germans and those who do not believe they have to hate – Berlin 1915). These are – admittedly with somewhat different examples, but essentially – exactly the same thoughts that I expressed at the time in Linz an der Donau and in other lectures, which I – as I have explained here – on the diversity of the European national souls. The thoughts are contained in it, of which the magazine I have just mentioned has spoken in such a way, as it has been suggested, has spoken in such a really nonsensical way. The next issue of this magazine contains the continuation of the article. In any case, it continues in the same vein. And at the end of the same issue there is a section in which the brochure 'Thoughts During the Time of War' is discussed. And there this book is particularly praised. Part of the article was written in August 1915, the rest in [October] 1915. So in this [...] article, alongside the article in which the foolishness in question is mentioned, there is also a laudatory review of the book that says exactly the same thing! So here we have a case, ladies and gentlemen, which I just wanted to highlight, that should really be seen, and from which it can be seen how true spiritual science is often placed in the overall spiritual life of humanity. I have often pointed out how the spiritual and cultural conditions of the present demand that from now on and into the future, spiritual science must be incorporated into the development of humanity.

Of course there will be people for a long time to come who will denounce, defame and fight spiritual science. But spiritual science, firmly rooted in the ground it has managed to gain through the foundations it has laid today and in the past, will always and forever have to be aware that the truth, if it is the truth – and if it is the truth is the truth, it will always and always have to be aware that the truth, if it is the truth, will find its way through the narrowest cracks, no matter how large the masses of rocks of prejudice and slander and opposition that arise, which only leave the small cracks for the truth to pass through.

Therefore, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, allow me to conclude these reflections of today, which only sought to hint at a truly healthy soul life in connection with spiritual research, with what lives in the spiritual researcher who carries the fundamental nerve of his science within him as the source that gives him convincing power and certainty of action and will.

To this spiritual researcher - to put it figuratively - the human soul appears as a sister of truth. And by cherishing this thought, he says to himself: One can fight the truth, but it will always and again assert itself through the truth power within it, even if the fight should make its existence difficult in a certain period of time. One can even suppress the truth with force, suppress it for a certain period of time; not suppress it for the entire developmental history of humanity.

The suppressed truth will emerge again and again, because the human soul and the truth are siblings. And even if, as is otherwise the case with siblings, they live in a kind of disharmony and alienation in certain periods of time, There will always be periods of time when truth and the human soul will come together in their brotherly relationship and remember their origin, their common origin, their paternal source in the world. And this common paternal source in the world for truth and the human soul, which is at the same time the source for all true soul-searching, is what spiritual science, in healthy endeavor, seeks to find. This is the world spirit itself, interweaving and permeating from eternity to eternity, into which, starting from the point of origin of matter, to penetrate is the task and goal of all true and healthy spiritual research.