The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have arrived at an important point in our studies—a sort of climax—hence we may expect to encounter various difficult passages in elucidating the Gospels. I may therefore be permitted at the beginning of these expositions, to preface the continuation of what was said yesterday with a short survey of the salient features thus far treated.

We know that the nature of mankind's development was essentially different in remote times from what it is today, and we know that the human being shows an increasingly different form as our retrospect reaches farther and farther back to earlier conditions. It has already been mentioned that from our own time, which we may call the Central European cultural epoch, we can look back successively to the Greco-Latin time, to the Egypto-Chaldean period, and then to the era in which the ancient Persian people was led by Zarathustra. Beyond that we arrive at the remote Indian civilization, so very different from ours; and that brings us to a period of cultural evolution that followed immediately upon a great and mighty catastrophe. This cataclysm, running its course in tempestuous events in the air and in the water element, led to the disappearance of that continent which mankind had inhabited before the Indian civilization—ancient Atlantis, situated between Europe-Africa, and America—and to the migration of its people, westward to America and on the other side to the lands of Europe, Asia, and Africa, which had gradually taken on their present configuration. This Atlantean age, especially in the early part, produced human beings who were very differently constituted in respect of their soul from present-day mankind; and what interests us primarily in human evolution is precisely what pertains to the soul, for we know that everything corporeal is a result of psychospiritual development.

What was the nature of the soul life in this ancient Atlantean age? We know that at that time human consciousness was very different from what it became later, and that in a certain respect man had an archaic clairvoyance, but that he was not yet capable of any pronounced self-consciousness, of ego-consciousness. This is achieved only by learning to distinguish oneself from outer objects, and people of that time were not quite able to do this.

Let us imagine for a moment what would happen in our time if we were unable to distinguish ourselves from our surroundings—let us consider the matter in a concise way. Nowadays we ask, Where are the confines of my being? And with a certain justification we answer, from our present-day standpoint, The confines of my human entity are where my skin divides me off from my surroundings. People imagine that they consist only of what their skin encloses, and that everything else is made up of outer objects which they perceive and from which they distinguish themselves. They believe this because they know that if some part is removed from within their skin they are no longer a complete human being, nor can be. From a certain standpoint it is quite correct to say that if you cut off a piece of a man's flesh he is no longer a whole human being.

On the other hand, we also know that we inhale air with every breath; and to the question, where is this air, the answer is, all around us—everywhere where our environment makes contact with us: that is the air we will have within us in the next moment. Now it is outside us, now in us. Cut off this air, remove it, and you can no longer exist. You are less whole than you would be if the hand within your skin were cut off. So the truth of the matter is that we are not bounded by our skin. The surrounding air is part of us, it enters and leaves us, and we have no right arbitrarily to fix the skin as our boundary.

If people would come to understand this—it would have to be arrived at theoretically, as perception provides no means of observing it—it would lead them to ponder on matters not forced upon their attention by the outer world itself. If a man were at all times able to see the air current passing into him, spreading, being transformed, and passing out again, it would never occur to him to say, This hand is more a part of me than the air I inhale. He would count the air as part of himself, and would suspect hallucinations if he fancied himself an independent being capable of existing without his environment.

No such delusion could exist for the Atlantean, for his observation clearly showed him a different state of affairs. He saw the objects in his environment not in sharp outline, but surrounded by colored auras. He did not see a plant as we see it, but more as we see the street lamps on a foggy autumn evening: everything was surrounded by a great colored aura. That was because there is spirit—spiritual beings—in and among all things of the outer world, which the dim clairvoyance still existing at that time enabled the Atlantean to perceive. As the fog fills the space between the lights, so there are spiritual beings everywhere in space. The Atlantean saw these spiritual beings just as you see the fog, hence they constituted for him a kind of vaporous aura investing all outer objects. These themselves were indistinct; but because he saw the spirit he also saw everything of a spiritual nature that streamed in and out of him. And for the same reason he saw himself as a component of his whole environment. He saw currents flowing into his body from all sides, currents you cannot see today. Air is merely the densest substance that enters us: there are far more tenuous ones. Man has lost the power of discerning spirit because he no longer has the old dim clairvoyance; but the man of Atlantis saw the spiritual currents streaming in and out, just as your finger, were it conscious, would see the blood coursing through it and would know that it must wither if it were torn off. Just as the finger would feel, if conscious, so the Atlantean felt himself to be a member of an organism. He felt the currents streaming in through his eyes and ears, and so forth; and he knew that if he were to force himself out of their reach he could not remain a human being. He felt as though poured out into the whole outer world.

The man of Atlantis saw the spiritual world, but he could not distinguish himself from it: he lacked anything like a strong ego sense—self-consciousness in its present meaning. The opportunity to develop this was provided by the fading from his view of all that had emphasized his dependence upon his environment. The cessation of that awareness enabled him to develop his self-consciousness, his egoity, and to do this was the task of post-Atlantean man. After the great Atlantean catastrophe people were organized in such a way that the spiritual world receded from their consciousness, and that they gradually learned to see the outer physical world of the senses ever more clearly and distinctly. But nothing that evolves in the world takes place all at once, but step by step; it proceeds slowly and gradually; and thus the old dim clairvoyance vanished slowly and by degrees. Even today, under given conditions, it is still found as an old heritage in certain people and in mediumistic natures. Something that had reached its climax in a certain era gradually becomes extinct. In the earliest period of postAtlantean times, ordinary people still retained a great deal of the gift of clairvoyance; and what these people saw in the spiritual world was continually supplemented, expanded, and animated by the initiates who were guided to the spiritual world by the methods described in an earlier lecture, and who thus became the messengers of what in former times had been seen to a certain extent by all men.

Better than any external historical research, legends and myths—especially those linked with the oracle sanctuaries—have preserved for us what is true of those old times. In the oracle temples specially selected people were thrown into abnormal states—a dream state, or mediumistic state, as one might say—by reducing them to a consciousness state duller and darker than the ordinary waking state. They were in a condition of diminished consciousness, where they were surrounded by outer objects which, however, they did not see. This was not clairvoyance as it had once existed, but an intermediate state, half dreamlike, half in the nature of clairvoyance. Now, if information was sought concerning certain particular circumstances in the world, or the right mode of procedure in some special matter, the oracles were consulted; for in them was to be found the dim clairvoyance as a heritage of the ancient faculty.

At the beginning of his evolution, then, man was endowed with wisdom: wisdom streamed into him. But this wisdom gradually dwindled away: and even the initiates in their abnormal states—of for they had to be led into the spiritual world by the withdrawal of however, those who were not only initiated in the old sense, but who had advanced with the times and were prophets of the future, realized that a new impulse was indispensable for humanity. An ancient heritage of wisdom had been bestowed upon mankind when it descended from divine-spiritual heights, but it became ever more obscured. In the beginning all men possessed it, then but the few who were thrown into special states of consciousness in the oracles, then only the initiates, and so forth.

The day must come—thus spoke the old initiates who knew the signs of the time—in which this ancient heritage will have dwindled to the point where it is no longer capable of leading and guiding humanity; and this would mean that man would fall a prey to uncertainty and doubt in the world. It would express itself in his willing, his acting, and his feeling. And with the gradual dwindling of wisdom men would become their own unwise leaders: their ego would wax increasingly strong, so that with the recession of wisdom every individual would seek truth in his own ego, would develop his own feelings and will—every man for himself—and men would become ever more isolated, more alienated from each other, and they would understand each other less and less. Since each wants his own thoughts—thoughts that no longer flow out of a unified wisdom—none can understand the other's thoughts; and human feelings, no longer guided by universal wisdom, must eventually come into mutual conflict, as must also human actions. All men would act, think, and feel in opposition to each other, and ultimately mankind would be split up altogether into an aggregation of quarrelling and fighting individuals.

And what was the outer, physical sign that appeared as the expression of this development? It was the transformation mankind experienced in the blood. In very ancient times, as we know, endogamy was customary: people married only within the blood-related tribe. But this custom yielded increasingly to exogamy: the blood of mutually alien tribes became mixed; and that explains the decrease, the dwindling, of the heritage deriving from a remote past.

Let us once more recall Goethe's words which we quoted yesterday:

“My father gave my build to me,
Toward life my sober bearing.
From mother comes my cheerful heart,
My joy in storytelling.”

We connected this assertion with the fact that what the etheric body comprises derives from the maternal element, as handed down from generation to generation, so that every man bears in his own etheric body the legacy of the maternal element, and in his physical body, that of the paternal element. Now, by reason of consanguinity the inheritance, perpetuating itself from etheric body to etheric body, was very potent, and from it derived the old faculty of clairvoyance. The offspring of endogamy inherited with the related blood the old capacity for wisdom in the etheric body. But as blood became more and more mixed—as a result of increasing intermarriage among tribes—the possibility of handing down the ancient wisdom diminished; for as we said yesterday, human blood gradually altered, and the mixing of different bloods obscured the ancient wisdom more and more.

In other words, the blood—bearer of inherited maternal attributes—became ever less fitted to transmit the old faculty of clairvoyance. It simply developed in such a way that people became ever less able to see into the spiritual world. Physically considered, therefore, human blood altered in a manner to render it increasingly incapable of bearing the old wisdom that once had guided man so surely, falling instead more and more into the opposite extreme, becoming the bearer of egotism—that is, of a quality that leads men, as egos, to individual isolation and mutual antagonism. And for the same reason it gradually lost its power of uniting men in love.

We are, of course, still involved in this process of deterioration taking place in the human blood because, in as far as it has its origin in an ancient epoch, it will follow its lingering course to the end of Earth evolution. Therefore an impulse was needed in humanity capable of counteracting this condition. Through consanguinity men would have been led into error and misery, as the old wise men tell us in legends and myths, Men could no longer rely on the legacies of an ancient wisdom: even the oracles, asked for information and advice, divulged only what led to savage conflicts and quarrels. The oracle had foretold, for example, that Laios and Jocasta would have a son who would kill his father and wed his mother. Nevertheless, in the face of this legacy of oracle wisdom, nothing could at that time prevent the blood from falling more and more a prey to error: Oedipus does kill his father and does wed his mother. He commits parricide and incest.

What the old sage meant was this: Once upon a time men possessed wisdom; but even had it been preserved, the development of the ego must inevitably have proceeded, and egotism would have grown so strong that blood would rage against blood. Blood is no longer fitted to lead men upwards when it is guided only by the ancient wisdom. And thus the clairvoyant initiate who gave us the original picture of the Oedipus legend wished to set up a warning for mankind, saying: That is what would happen to you if nothing came to supersede the old oracle wisdom.—And in the Judas legend there is preserved even more clearly an indication of what the old oracle wisdom would have led to. Judas' mother, too, was prophetically told that her son would kill his father and wed his mother, thereby conjuring up untold misery; and it all came to pass in spite of the foreknowledge. This means that the primeval, inherited wisdom is not capable of saving man from the abyss into which he must fall unless a new impulse reaches mankind.

If we now look more closely into the causes of all this we must ask, Why was it inevitable that the ancient wisdom should become unfitted to dominate humanity? The answer to this question can be found by examining nature carefully the origin of the old wisdom in its relation to mankind I have already indicated that in the old Atlantean age a connection existed between the physical body and the etheric body of man that differed greatly from the later relation. In regard to two of the principles of man's nature it can be said that the physical and etheric bodies are so related that they approximately coincide, especially in the region of the head; but this is only the case in our own time. Looking back to the Atlantean period we find the etheric head protruding far beyond its physical counterpart: the etheric body extended past the physical body, particularly in the head region. Now, in the Atlantean epoch human evolution proceeded in such a way that the outline of the physical and of the etheric body became more and more coincident, especially in the head: the etheric body kept withdrawing into the physical body, thereby naturally altering this member of the human being.

That, then, is the essential feature of this phase of human evolution: the etheric body of the human head withdraws more and more into the physical aspect of the head until the two come to coincide. Now, as long as the etheric body was outside the physical head it was subject to conditions quite different from the subsequent ones: it was in touch, on all sides, with currents, with other spiritual beings; and the substance of what thus streamed in and out provided the faculty of clairvoyance in Atlantean times. So the capacity for clairvoyance was due to the incomplete coincidence of the physical and etheric bodies in the head region, a condition admitting from all sides currents endowing the etheric head with clairvoyance. Then followed the time when the etheric body withdrew into the physical body. In a certain way—not completely—it tore itself away from these currents; it began to cut itself off from the currents which had provided the capacity for clairvoyantly penetrating the wisdom of the world. Conversely, when in the old initiations a man's etheric body was withdrawn, his etheric head became interpermeated once more with the surrounding currents, and clairvoyance set in again.

Now, had this contact between the etheric body and the outer world been severed at one stroke, in the middle of the Atlantean age, the old clairvoyance would have vanished far more rapidly than was actually the case. No remnants of it would have remained for the post-Atlantean time, nor would mankind of a later age have retained any recollection of it. As it occurred, however, man preserved a certain contact with the outer currents. And something else took place as well: this etheric body that had cut itself off from the currents of its environment retained, nevertheless, certain remnants of the former capacity for wisdom. Keep well in mind that at the end of the Atlantean epoch, after man had drawn his etheric body into himself, there remained in it a sort of fund, the residue of what had once come to it from without—a small saving, if I may use the term: as if a son had a father, the father is earning money, and the son draws upon him according to his needs. In the same way, man drew upon his environment for all the wisdom he needed, up to the time when his etheric body severed the connection. Keeping to our simile, let us now assume that the son loses his father, there remains for him but a certain portion of his father's money, and he earns nothing to add to it. In time he will come to the end of it and have nothing left. That is the position in which the human being found himself. He had torn himself loose from his father-wisdom, had added nothing to it through his own endeavor, and subsisted on it into the Christian era—indeed, even now he is still living on his inheritance, not on anything he has earned. He lives on his capital, so to speak. In the earliest part of post-Atlantean development a bit of the capital was still left, though without his having himself earned the wisdom: he lived on the interest, as it were, and occasionally requested an additional sum from the initiates. But ultimately the coin of ancient wisdom lost its currency; and when it was given to Oedipus it no longer had any value: this old wisdom did not save him from the most frightful transgression, nor did it save Judas.

That is what took place in the course of human evolution. How did it come about that man gradually exhausted his capital of wisdom? Because in the past he had given access to two kinds of spiritual beings: the Luciferic beings, and later, as a consequence of these, the Ahrimanic or Mephistophelean beings. These prevented him from adding, by his own labor, to the store of old wisdom, for they acted upon his being as follows: the Luciferic beings tended to corrupt his passions and feelings, while the Ahrimanic, the Mephistophelean beings were more concerned with outwardly distorting his view of the world. Had the Luciferic beings not intervened in Earth evolution, man would have developed no such interests in the physical world that drags him down beneath his true status; and if, as a result of the Luciferic influence, the Mephistophelian, the Ahrimanic, the Satanic beings had not taken a-hand, man would know, and would always have known, that underlying every object of the senses there is spirit, and he would look through the surface of the sense world upon the spirit. But Ahriman infused into human observation something like a dark smoke cloud that prevents penetration to the spiritual. Through Ahriman's agency man is enmeshed in lies, in maya, in illusion.—These are the two beings that prevent man from earning any increment to the store of ancient wisdom once bestowed upon humanity; and as a consequence, this heritage has dwindled away and gradually become wholly useless.

Nevertheless, in a certain other respect evolution held to its course. During the Atlantean time the human etheric body merged with the physical body; and it was man's misfortune, so to speak—his fate—to be forced to experience the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in his physical body in this physical world just at a time when he was God-forsaken, as it were. The result was that the old heritage of wisdom became useless precisely by reason of the influence of the physical body, of living in the physical body. How did this happen? Formerly man did not live in the physical body: he gathered his wisdom from his father's treasury, so to speak—from the ancient fund of wisdom. His source of supplies was outside his physical body, because he himself was outside it in respect of his etheric body; and this source finally dried up. In order to augment his fund of wisdom, man would have needed a treasury in his own body. But this he did not have; and consequently, in default of an inner source of wisdom, there remained less and less of it in his etheric body every time he abandoned his physical body at death. After every death, every reincarnation, the sum of wisdom in his etheric body was less: the etheric body became ever poorer in wisdom.

But evolution advances; and just as in the Atlantean age evolution was such that the etheric body withdrew into the physical body, so future development will proceed in such a way that man will gradually emerge again from his physical body. Whereas in a former age the etheric body kept drawing into the physical—ever deeper, up to the coming of Christ—the time then arrived in which the course of evolution changed. At the moment in which Christ appeared the etheric body began to retrace its course; and already in our present time it is no longer as closely bound to the physical body as it was when Christ was present on earth. And as a result the physical body has become even denser than before. The human being, then, is moving toward a future in which his etheric body will increasingly protrude, and in time it will extend as far as it did in the Atlantean epoch.

Here we can pursue our simile a bit further. If the son, who had formerly lived on his father's fund, spends it all and earns nothing additional, his prospects will become increasingly dismal. But if this man now has a son of his own—that would be the grandson—the latter will not be in the same position as his father. The father at least inherited something and could go on spending, but there remains nothing at all for the grandson, nor does he inherit anything: for the time being he is left with nothing whatever. And in a certain way that describes the course of human evolution. When the etheric body entered the physical, bringing along a supply of divine wisdom from the treasury of the Godhead, it still provided wisdom for its physical body. But the Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits prevented all augmentation of this wisdom in the physical body—contrived that none should be added. When now the etheric body begins to emerge again it takes nothing with it from the physical body, and the consequence is that if nothing else had intervened man would be heading for a future in which his etheric body, though belonging to him, would contain no vestige of wisdom or knowledge. And with the complete desiccation of the physical body the etheric body would be destitute as well, for nothing could be drawn from the dried-up physical body. Therefore, if the physical body is not to desiccate in that future period, the etheric body must he provided with strength, with the strength of wisdom. Before emerging from the physical body the etheric body should have been endowed with the power of wisdom. Within the physical body it must have received something it can take out with it. Then, when it emerges—provided it has acquired this wisdom—it can react on the physical body, giving it life and preventing its desiccation.

The future evolution of humanity can take one of two courses, of which one is as follows: Man develops without Christ. In this case the etheric body could bring with it nothing from the physical body, because it had received nothing from it: it emerges empty. But conversely, the etheric body cannot animate the physical body, having nothing to give: it cannot prevent the attrition, the withering, of the physical body. Man would gradually forfeit all the fruits of his physical life: they could furnish nothing out of his physical body, which he would therefore have to abandon. But the very purpose for which man descended to earth was to acquire a physical body in addition to his other principles. The germ of the physical body originated in an earlier period, but without its actual formation man would never fulfill his mission on earth. But the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman have entered the picture; and if man acquires nothing in his physical body, if his etheric body withdraws again with nothing to take with it—having even used up the old store of wisdom—then the earth's mission is doomed: the mission of the earth within the universe would fail of fulfillment. Man would carry over nothing into the future but the empty etheric skull which had been abundantly filled when he originally brought it into earth evolution.

But now let us suppose something were to occur at the right moment which would enable man, as his etheric body emerges again, to provide something for it, to animate it, to penetrate it with wisdom as of old: the etheric body would continue to emerge just the same; but now, endowed with new life, new strength, it could employ these for vitalizing the physical body. It could send power and life back into it. But the etheric body itself must first possess these: it would first have to receive this strength and life; and if it succeeds in this the fruits of man's earth life are saved. The physical body will then not simply decay, but rather, this corruptible physical body will assume the configuration of the etheric body, the incorruptible; and man's resurrection, with the harvest reaped in his physical body, is assured.

An impulse had thus to come to the earth through which the exhausted treasure of ancient wisdom might be replenished, through which the etheric body might be endowed with new life, thus enabling the physical element—otherwise destined to corruption—to put on the incorruptible and to become permeated by an etheric body capable of rendering it immortal, of rescuing it from Earth evolution. And that is what Christ brought mankind—this pervasion of the etheric body with life. The transformation of the human physical body that would otherwise be doomed to death, its preservation from corruption, its ability to wear the incorruptible—all this is connected with the Christ. Life was infused into the human etheric body by the Christ impulse—new life, after the old had been spent. And looking into the future, man must tell himself: When my etheric body will ultimately have emerged from my physical body, I should have developed in such a way that it is wholly saturated by the Christ. The Christ must live in me. In the course of my earth development I must by degrees completely permeate my etheric body with the Christ.

What I have just described to you are the deeper processes that elude outer observation. They constitute the spiritual principle underlying the physical evolution of the world.

But what outer form did all this have to take? What was it that entered the physical body through the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings? The tendency to decay, to dissolution—in short, the tendency to die. The germ of death had entered the physical body. Had no Christ come, this death germ would have developed its full power only at the end of Earth evolution, for then the etheric body would be for all time powerless to reanimate man; and at the completion of Earth evolution, that which had come into being as human physical body would fall into decay and the earth's mission itself would end in death. Whenever we encounter death today we can discern in our present life a portent of the universal death that would occur at the end of Earth evolution. Mankind's ancient heritage dwindles but slowly and gradually, and the possibility of being born again and again, of passing from incarnation to incarnation, is due to the life fund originally given man on his way. As regards his purely external life in the successive incarnations, the possibility for life to exist would not be fully exhausted before the end of Earth evolution; but as time goes on the gradual extinction of the race would manifest itself. This would occur piece by piece, and the physical body would continually wither. Had the Christ impulse not come, man would perish member by member as Earth evolution approached its termination.—At present the Christ-Impulse is but at the beginning of its development: only by degrees will it make its way among men; and only future epochs will reveal—and continue to reveal to the very end of Earth evolution—the full significance of Christ for humanity.

But the various human activities and interests have not all been affected alike by the Christ impulse. There are today many such that have not been touched by it at all, that must await a future time. I will give you a striking example of one whole sphere of human activity which at present has not been influenced by the Christ impulse at all. Toward the end of the pre-Christian epoch—say, in the 6th or 7th Century before our era—the primeval wisdom and power were on the wane in so far as human knowledge was concerned. In connection with other phases of life that wisdom long retained a fresh, young forcefulness; but it declined most noticeably in the matter of knowledge. From the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries B. C. there remained something that may be termed the remnant of a remnant. Were you to hark back even to the Egypto-Chaldean wisdom, not to say that of ancient Persia or India, you would find this wisdom everywhere permeated by true spiritual vision, by the fruits of primeval clairvoyance; and for those endowed to a lesser degree with this faculty the reports of the clairvoyants were available. Such a thing as science other than one based on clairvoyance never existed in the Indian and Persian epochs, nor in still later times; even during the early Greek period there was no science without a basis of clairvoyant research. But then the time approached when this fading clairvoyant research was lost to human science, and for the first time we witness the rise of a human science devoid of clairvoyance—or at least, a science from which clairvoyance was gradually cast out.

Clairvoyance vanishes, as does faith in the revelations of clairvoyants; and during the 6th or 7th Century before the appearance of Christ we see established something we can call a human science, from which the fruits of spiritual research are increasingly eliminated. And this becomes ever more the case: in Parmenides and Heraclitus, in Plato and even in Aristotle—everywhere in the writings of the old naturalists and physicians—you can find ample confirmation that what is known as science was originally permeated by the results of spiritual research. But spiritual science steadily deteriorated and decreased. In connection with our psychic capacity, our feeling and willing, it still endures; but as regards our thinking it is vanishing.

Thus with respect to human thinking, to thinking in terms of science, the influence of the etheric on the physical body had already begun to wane when Christ appeared. Everything of that sort comes about gradually, step by step. Christ came and gave the impulse; but naturally not everyone accepted it at once, and particularly was it rejected in certain spheres of activity. In others it was received, but in the field of science it was positively spurned. Examine for yourselves the science that prevailed in the time of the Roman empire. Look it up in Celsus, where you can read all sorts of rubbish about Christ. This Celsus was a great scholar, but he understood nothing whatever about human thinking as affected by the Christ impulse. He reports:

“There is said to have lived at one time in Palestine a couple known as Joseph and Mary, with whom the sect of Christians originated. But what is told about them is all superstition. The truth is that the wife of this Joseph was once unfaithful to her husband with a Roman captain named Panthera; but Joseph did not know the identity of the child's father.”

That was one of the most popular accounts of the time; and if you follow our contemporary literature you will realize that certain people of the present have not advanced beyond the standard of Celsus. Certainly there are fields in which the Christ-Impulse can take root but slowly, but among those now under discussion it has to this day found no foothold at all. There is one part of man we see withering: it is in the human brain; but when it shall have been influenced by the Christ-Impulse it will revive science in a very different form. Strange as that may sound in this age of scientific fanaticism, it is nevertheless true. That part of the brain assigned to scientific thinking is moving toward a slow death. This illustrates the gradual disappearance of the ancient heritage from scientific thinking. Aristotle still possessed a relatively large store of it, but we see science gradually being drained of it; and science, by reason of the accumulation of external data, will become God-forsaken in respect of its thinking, having nothing left of the old fund. And we see further how it is possible that, no matter how powerfully we experience the Christ, we can no longer establish any contact between the Christ-Impulse and what mankind has achieved in the way of science.

We have tangible evidence of this. Suppose that a man of the 13th Century had been profoundly affected by the Christ-Impulse and had said: We have the Christ-Impulse; like a flood of mighty new revelations it streams to us from the Gospel, and we can permeate ourselves with it.—And suppose further that this man had made it his mission to create a connecting link between science and Christianity: even as early as the 13th Century he would have found nothing in the current science that could have been used for the purpose. He would have had to hark back to Aristotle. Only by collaborating with Aristotle, not with 13th-Century science, would he have been able to interpret Christianity. Science simply became increasingly incapable of making any contact with the Christ principle; hence the 13th-Century scholars had to revert to Aristotle, who still possessed something of the old legacy of wisdom and could thus provide concepts capable of correlating science and Christianity.

But as science grew richer in data and observations it became ever poorer in ideas, until finally the time came when all concepts emanating from the old wisdom disappeared from it. Even the greatest men are, of course, children of their era as far as their scientific activity is concerned. Galileo, for example, could not think from an absolute background, but only as his age thought; and his greatness consists precisely in his having established God-forsaken thinking as such—pure mechanistical thinking. An important revulsion in thought set in with Galileo: the most commonplace phenomena treated by modern physics had quite a different explanation after Galileo's day from what they had previously. Say, someone throws a stone. Today we are told that the stone retains its motion until the latter is counteracted by the influence of another force, the force of inertia. Before Galileo's time a different opinion was held: people were convinced that if the stone was to keep moving it would have to be propelled—something active must be behind it. Galileo taught people to think in an entirely new way, but in a way implying that the world is a mechanism; and the ideal striven for today is a mechanical, mechanistic explanation of the world with the complete elimination of all spirit. And the reason for this is that those portions of the human brain, of the thought apparatus, which constitute the organ of scientific thinking, are already so shrivelled as to be no longer able to infuse new life into concepts, with the result that the latter become more and more poverty-stricken.

One could easily show that science, for all the isolated facts it keeps accumulating, has not enriched the life of mankind by a single concept. Note well that observations are not concepts! Do not imagine that such things as Darwinism and the like have provided humanity with concepts. That is something that others have done—not the scientists, but men who tapped quite different sources. Goethe was such a man: he enriched man's fund of ideas from altogether different sources; and consequently the scientists consider him a dilettante.

The fact is that science has not grown richer in ideas. Far more alive, loftier, grander are those of antiquity. The Darwinian concepts are like squeezed-out lemons: Darwinism merely collected the results of observation and then linked them with poverty-stricken concepts. This trend in science points clearly to the process of gradual death. In the human brain there is a part that is withering, and this is the part that in our time functions in scientific thinking. The reason for this is that the portion of the human etheric body which should animate this shrivelling brain has as yet not grasped the Christ-Impulse. No life will flow into science until the Christ impulse enters the portion of the human brain that is intended to serve science. That is a fact based on the great cosmic laws. If science continues in this way it will become poorer and poorer in concepts, and gradually these will vanish. And increasingly numerous will be the scientists who keep lining up their data, and who will be frightened out of their wits when someone begins to think. Nowadays it is a sore trial for a professor to discover a bit of thinking in a doctor's dissertation submitted to him by some candidate.

But we now have an anthroposophy, and this anthroposophy will increasingly clarify the Christ-Impulse for mankind, thereby imbuing the etheric body with ever more life—with such a wealth of it, in fact, that the etheric body will be able to restore flexibility to that rigid portion of the brain which is responsible for the present trend of scientific thinking. That is an illustration of the manner in which the Christ-Impulse, having in time laid hold on mankind, will reanimate the dying members of the body. The future of the race would see the withering of more and more members; but the flowing in of the Christ-Impulse will increase proportionately with the dwindling of each part; and by the end of the Earth evolution all the parts that would otherwise have perished will be revivified by the Christ-Impulse, which will have saturated the whole etheric body: the human etheric body will have become one with the Christ-Impulse.

The first impetus for this gradual revitalization of mankind, for the resurrection of humanity, was given at a particular moment during a scene most beautifully described in the Gospel of St. John. Think of the Christ as coming into the world a wholly universal Being, and commencing His great work by means of an etheric body completely saturated with His spirit—for the transformation brought about in the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth enabled it to animate even the physical body. At the moment in which the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth, in Whom the Christ now dwelt, became completely a life giver for the physical body, the etheric body of Christ is seen transfigured. And the writer of the John Gospel describes this moment:

Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.

The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it thundered.

What is said is that those who stood by heard thunder; but nowhere does it say that anyone who had not been duly prepared had heard it.

Others said, An angel spake to him.

Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes.

Why? That what had taken place might be understood by all who were near. And Christ clarifies the event:

Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out.

In that moment Lucifer-Ahriman was cast out of the physical body of Christ. There stands the great example which in the future must be realized by all mankind: through the Christ-Impulse the obstacles placed by Lucifer-Ahriman must be cast out of the physical body; and man's earth body must be so vitalized by the Christ-Impulse that the fruits of the earth's mission may be carried over into the time that is to follow this earth epoch.

To-day we will go rather further in outlining the connections we have tried to understand in the course of our recent studies.

The present time, with its many diverse currents, spiritual and material, is extremely difficult to understand; and the effort ends only in perplexity unless we make up our minds to recognise the causes as lying far, far back in the womb of history. Let us look back, as students of Spiritual Science, at the so-called fourth post-Atlantean period.

This begins, as we know, somewhere about the year 747 before the Mystery of Golotha, and closes with the beginning of the fifteenth century, about 1413 A.D. (The figures are of course to be taken approximately, as always in matters of this kind.) Within this period, as we observe it, we can perceive certain forces, connected with and related to each other, but differing fundamentally from all others working in previous and subsequent epochs. This period, in which the development of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul in man's being took place, can be divided into three smaller ones: the first, between the year 747 B.C. (which is the real date of the founding of Rome), ends about 27 B.C.; the second runs from 27 B.C. until about the end of the 7th century; (693 A.D.); the third and last from 693 to 1413 A.D. Since this date, since about 1413, we have the time which brings forth, in its own characteristic way, soul-forces already known to you to some extent. Just as this fourth Post-Atlantean epoch can be clearly distinguished from the three preceding ones (the ancient Indian, Persian, and Egypto-Chaldean) and must also be sharply distinguished from what followed it and what is still to come, so within it the growth is marked by noticeable moments, if we consider its progress through these three shorter periods.

From 747 to 27 B.C. the peoples inhabiting the countries around the Mediterranean come chiefly into prominence. We see a distinct form of soul-life developing among them. History hardly mentions it, because history has no neans of creating the ideas and conceptions which would fit it to deal with the really characteristic features. This epoch, which I have marked off, can be characterised by saying that it is the time when, for inner reasons of human evolution as a whole, the souls of men emancipate themselves from their connection with the universal Spiritual world. If we look back into Egyptian and Chaldean times, during the epoch of the Sentient-soul, we find in human consciousness a decided sense of kinship of the soul with the Cosmos. The Sentient-Soul in man's nature was then able to perceive that man is a member of the whole cosnos. We cannot rightly estimate what is characteristic of the Egyptian, Chaldean or Babylonian stages, unless we take into account the fact that man at that time actually experienced a feeling of kinship with the spiritual Cosmos. Just as the fingers on our hand feel themselves part of us, as it were, so the Egyptian or Chaldean felt himself to be a member of the spiritual Cosmos. A crisis, a veritable catastrophe, overtook mankind in the 8th century before Christ, and in respect of this feeling of kinship with the Cosmos human souls had owed their former feeling of belonging to the Cosmos to the atavistic, dream-like clairvoyance. They did not perceive as we do to-day. In the act of sense-perception they also perceived what profane science ignorantly calls “Animism”—the spiritual, the divine; and through this they felt themselves as belonging to the Spirit of the universe.

This relationship disappeared. The consequences were, on the one hand, numerous phenomena of decadence, but on the other, the whole marvellous culture of Greece, whose civilisation was founded on what man experiences when, as man, he begins to stand alone in the universe. We owe this civilisation to the fact that man no longer felt himself a member of the cosmos, but a totality as man, a being complete in himself. He had in a sense taken his own place in the cosmos, had begun to live a life of his own. If Greek civilisation had retained the soul-constitution for instance, of the Ancient Indian period, with its feeling of connection with the cosmos, it is impossible to imagine that this beautiful Greek civilisation could ever have arisen. All the splendour and glory displayed by Greek civilisation, unequalled elsewhere, developed in the time between the eighth and the first centuries before Christ. Humanity had withdrawn into the citadel of the soul, of the human soul in the true sense. This was the time when humanity began to move towards the Mystery of Golgotha. We must not forget that there is always something in the Mystery of Golgotha which cannot entirely dawn on human understending, even super-sensible understanding. There will always be something unconprehended. It is beyond the power of human conceptions, human feelings, human experiences, fully to grasp what was achieved by the entrance of the Christ into earthly evolution. Therefore the Mystery had, in a sense, so to take place that while it was in progress, human civilisation was not ready fully to share in it; it had to tale its course separately, side by side with ordinary human experience. That is fairly evident, even from history. How much did human civilisation around the Mediterranean notice of what happened in the far-off Jewish province of Palestine, with regard to Christ Jesus? How little did it enter into the consciousness of civilised humanity, even that of Tacitus, who was writing only a century after the Mystery of Golgotha!

On the one hand we have the current of human civilisation, and on the other the stream which brought with it the Mystery of Golgotha: the two run their course side by side. This could happen only because man, civilised man, at the time of the Divine Event, was severed from the Divine, was living a life which had no direct connection with the Spiritual. Thus on the earth itself there took place a spiritual event, which went its way side by side with human civilisation. Such a juxtaposition of outer civilisation with a Mystery-Event is unthinkable in any earlier period. It never had happened before, because in earlier times human civilisation knew and recognised itself as being in connection with happenings in the realm of the Divine-Spiritual. It is very distinctive, very rremarkable, that the secular culture which ran parallel with the Mystery of Golotha was remote from it; man had severed himself from it.

In the second period, which lasted from about 27 B.C. to 693 A.D., mid-European civilisation was not of a kind to enable secular culture to come to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This may sound very strange, considering that Christianity had made itself at home in this secular culture and had spread over the civilisation of mid-Europe; but its expansion took place in the way I have described. The Mystery of Golgotha was isolated, was alone. Certainly, it was accepted as outer dogma to this extent: Christ had come, had called Apostles, had accomplished this or that for humanity, had said this or that about man's relation to the Divine. All this was readily accepted in its outer application by secular culture, but this outer recognition does not alter the fact that in reality all those who accepted Christianity in these early centuries were far removed from an inner understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. With the help of the Gnosis, or of all that had been carried over as treasures of wisdom from the ancient pagan world, they might have come near to facing the question: “What really happened in the Mystery of Golgotha?” They did not do so. They declared everything heresy which might have led to an understanding of it, and tried to accomplish the impossible, to put into trivial forms what never could be confined within such forms, what could be the object only of wisdom's highest aspiration—the Mystery of Golgotha.

Hence the organisations fostered during the early centuries of Christianity were not such as to help people to unite theyeselves with the Mystery; their effect was to encourage in the human soul something very remote from a genuine inner feeling of understanding and partaking in it. The “Church” was an organization rather for the non-understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Anyone who follows up what the various councils, and more especially the intrigues of the Church, strove to accomplish, will find that all thse efforts went towards getting certain dogmatic ideas accepted, and towards inducing people co think of everything connected with the Mystery of Golgotha as law in no real relationship to the life of the human soul. All this led up to a certain point, which can be described, somewhat radically, in the following way. Men tried to accommodate themselves, here on earth, to certain ideas concerning the Mystery of Golgotha and its effects; but the most important thing was not the extent to which they could come to know about it and to absorb it into their souls. It was that they should be able to adopt this belief: “We grasp the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished on its own account, independently of us, and Christ will take care that we are saved!” This tendency gained ground until the reality of spiritual events was relegated to a region quite outside the soul; sacred, spiritual events were not to be thought of as connected with what took place in any human breast; the two were to be as widely separated as possible. Within, this tendency lay the germ of a purpose—unexpressed of course, but active subconsciously—which emerged clearly for the first time at the Council of Constantinople in 869. The aim was to keep the human spirit away from any individual, personal concern with the spiritual, (which was restricted to the Mystery of Golgotha), and therefore from any inclination to understand the Mystery in terms of personal experience. It was to remain incomprehensible. So the Church was able to include more and more people of a purely secular frame of mind, who came to believe that the super-sensible was beyond the range of the human soul, and that human thinking should confine itself to the objects and activities of the physical world. No forces were to be developed out of the human soul which could lead to an independent understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. In certain decrees of this eighth Council of Constantinople it is clearly stated that European humanity might not—because the forces of the human soul were not equal to it—reflect on the realm wherein the life appertaining to the Mystery of Golgotha had taken its course.

In this middle period of the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, lasting from 27 B.C. until 693 A.D. something was accomplished which may be described as the confirming of humanity in the belief that all human knowledge and experience is adapted, only for the palpable “this life”; the impalpable, supersensible realm the “beyond” as it is called, must be always withdrawn from their ken, inaccessible to direct perception. The entire history of those centuries can be understood only by keeping this cardinal fact in mind: The whole policy of the Catholic Church was directed to bringing men to the belief: “The soul can know only the things of this life; as regards the super-sensible, thou must approach this in a way which has nothing to do with thy intelligence or personal knowledge”. The effect of this was that after the close of this epoch, in the eighth and ninth centuries, a sort of obscurity descended on European humanity as regards the connection of the human soul with the super-sensible. And certain later phenomena, among which that of Bernard of Clairvaux is typical, can be explained only by the fact that such men remained in a sense beyond the physical, in “the other world”, their souls absorbed in what is inaccessible to rational human understanding. This enthusiasm for something which undoubtedly lies beyond all human comprehension must be seen in the entire disposition of soul in a Bernard of Clairvaux, if he is to be understood. In his personality we find many traits which are great and powerful in the it effects, for what is capable of a more or less distorted activity is equally capable of a beautiful, great and glorious one. Bernard had characteristics which clearly show him to be a product of that disposition of soul which developed in Western civilisation in the way I have described, during these particular centuries. Many other men resembled him; he is just a typical figure—as, for instance, when he spoke to his followers (who were very numerous) of all that would be bestowed on humanity by the “Crusade” he contemplated. Then came the failure of the whole attempt. How did this devout man speak of the failure? Somewhat this way: If everything, everything goes wrong, may the blame be on me alone, not on the Divine, which must be always right. Even when such a man was convinced of his connection with what he conceived of as the Divine-Spiritual power behind events, he separated the one from the other and said: “Lay the sin at my door: Providence is something that takes its own course in a realm beyond and apart from that of the human soul.

So, at the beginning of the third period of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation, something akin to a darkening descended on humanity—best expressed by saying; that man's horizon no longer extended to the idea of a connection with spiritual currents and impulses. In philosophy of the centuries between the eighth and 15th one finds always the same aim—to prove that human ideas and concept should in no case attempt to grasp the course of spiritual reality, that spiritual reality can only be, and must be, a matter of Revelation, left to the teaching office of the church.—this was reduced to a convenient formula!

Thus had the power of the Church been built up. This power of the Church did not derive purely from theological impulse, but from the fact that man was banished to the physical life of the senses as regards the use of his own forces of knowledge and mental powers, and was not allowed to think of a knowledge of the super-sensible. Hence arose a conception of belief which was not in existence in the early centuries (although it is sometimes antedated), but developed later. It took this form: “Concerning the Divine-Spiritual only faith is possible—not knowledge.” This division between the “truth of Faith” and the “truth of knowledge” was actually made against certain significant historical backgrounds, which should be studied in connection with the things I have indicated.

We have been living since the 15th century, approximately since 1413 A.D., during a period (this will become evident in the third millennium), in which we are concerned in part with the heritage of all that has happened under such influence as I have described. On the one hand stand of the legacies from those days; on the other we have to deal with something coming to view in this, the fifth post-Atlantean period—something entirely new. In the fourth period, when we look back at it, we see that there was then a kind of severance of the human soul from the Divine-Spiritual, a banishment to purely external physical sense-transactions. That was the new thing in the fourth period. It did not exist in the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, as I have already pointed out. We now have to deal with an analogous novelty in our own epoch, and humanity's task,—having entered on an age in which self-consciousness must play an ever greater and greater part—is to distinguish between what is a legacy from time past, and what is newly added to it from our own time. Let us first look at the inheritance, legacy.

We have seen that it consists in man having been constrained to develop his soul-life apart from the super-sensible. Moreover there is another result of this, the more clearly to be seen the closer the events of history are surveyed; indeed, a searching review shows the facts to be unquestionable, admitting of no doubt whatsoever. This fact is that man, confining his soul-force to the sense-perceptible, was willing to be severed from the super-sensible, and finally—since the 15th century—arrived at rejecting the super-sensible altogether. The eighth Council of Constantinople in 869, is characterized by the wish to keep man and a super sensible apart; and from this separation, sponsored deliberately by the Church, spraying the rejection of the super-sensible—the believe arose that the super-sensible might be only a matter of imagination and have no reality. If one investigates the Genesis of modern materialism from an historical, psychological point of view, the Church must be held responsible for it. Of course the Church is only the outer expression of deeper forces working in man's evolution, but to notice how one thing arises from another enables one to understand the course of events. In the fourth post-Atlantean age, the orthodox man would say: “The human faculty of knowledge is adapted only for understanding what is connected with the realm of the senses. The super-sensible must be left to revelation, which may not be contested; to speak against revelation is heresy and can lead only to delusion.”

The modern Marxist, a modern Social Democrat, true scion of this view—which is nothing but the consequence of the Catholicism of earlier centuries—says: “All knowledge worthy of the name is concerned only with sense-perceptible, physical events; there is no ‘Spiritual Science’ because there is no such thing as spirit. ‘Spiritual’ Science is, at best, Social Science, the science of human communities”. Of course this tendency has come to fruition differently in various parts of the civilized world, but the differences are no more than nuances.

Hence, from the ninth century onwards, in the central and western countries of Europe, it becomes necessary to ensure that human soul-life should occupy itself with the super-sensible by “believing” in it, but should know of it only through revelation. The races and peoples of Central Europe were such that they had to be handled carefully; they could not be treated in the same simple way. To say to people: “Your human capacities are limited to eating and drinking and things of the outer world; the super-sensible is beyond you”—that could not be done in Western Europe; but it was done in Eastern Europe, and that is the reason for the cleavage between the Eastern and Western Churches. In Eastern Europe, people really were confined to the sense-world; that was where their capacities had to unfold. That which finally led to the Orthodox religion was to be developed in the Heights of Mystery-experience, quite untouched by anything to do with the senses. What man brought forth out of his human nature was set sharply apart from the true spiritual world, which lived only in the ritual that hovered loftily above mankind.

What was it that had to develop there? In varying shades, the point of view, the perception, better reality belonged only to the physical world of the senses. One might say that forces towards which man adopts an attitude of repression, do not develop, but atrophy. If, then, humanity was restrained for centuries from spiritually grasping the super-sensible, the power of doing so was bound in the end to disappear completely. It is what we find in the modern socialistic views of life, whose misfortune consists—not in their Socialism!—but in the fact that they entirely reject the spiritual-super-sensible, and are therefore obliged to confine themselves to a social structure which takes account only of the animal side of man's nature. This was prepared for by the paralyzing of man's super-sensible forces; hence it follows that men are driven into saying: “Care for our salvation shall not in any way make us unite our soul's knowledge experience with the stream that lives a life on its own—The stream which includes the Mystery of Golgotha”.—With what is this connected?

With the fact that in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the Luciferic forces were especially active. They severed man from the cosmos, because their aim is invariably to isolate man in selfishness, to cut him off from the whole spiritual universe, as well as from the knowledge of his connection to the physical one. Hence, when this severance was at its height, there were no natural sciences. This was Lucifer's doing. The activity which separated sense-knowledge from dogma regarding the super-sensible, was therefore a Luciferic one. Over against it stands the Ahrimanic influence; and these two are the great adversaries of the human soul. The fact that the super-sensible forces of humanity have been allowed to atrophy—leading to a purely animal form of Socialism, now due to break over humanity in a devastating and destructive way—is to be traced to Luciferic forces. The new influence, developing in our age, is of a different nature, more Ahrimanic. The Luciferic element would isolate man, cut him off from the spiritual-super-sensible, and lead him to experience the illusion of being a totality in himself. On the other hand, the Ahrimanic element inspires man with fear of the spiritual, keeps him away from it, fosters in him the illusion that the spiritual cannot be attained by mankind. The Luciferic keeping away of man from the super-sensible might be described as of a more educational, cultured kind, whereas the Ahrimanic, founded on fear of the spiritual, is more ‘natural,’ arising in the age which began with 15th century. And as the Luciferic severance from the spiritual came especially to expression under the cover of Orthodox Christianity of the East, so the Ahrimanic fear, the holding back from the spiritual, makes itself felt especially in the culture of the West, and particularly in the element of American civilization.

Such truths may be unpalatable today, but they are truths nevertheless, and we get very little farther by generalizing—however mystically or theosophically—about the connection of the human with the Divine, or whatever it may be called. We can progress only by recognizing the reality as it is. We can reduce our chaos to order only if we recognize the true characteristics of the different currents running side-by-side. These various currents, springing from their several assumptions, spread out locally, and so everything is confused in the hodgepodge called “modern civilization”. What I am now speaking of as “Americanism” (as collective concept, not applying to individual Americans), is fear of the spiritual, the longing to live only on the physical plane, or at most in what improves into that plane as coarse Spiritualism and such-like, which is not in the real sense, spiritual at all. The mark of Americanism is fear of the spiritual; it is by no means confined to America, but there it lives as a social characteristic, not simply a human one. Above all it is predominant in all science. Science has increasingly been founded on “fear of the spiritual”. Nothing in science is called “objective” unless it excludes as far as possible living conceptions engendered in the inwardness of the soul. No idea, no conception, engendered in the inwardness of the soul, is permitted to intrude into the observation of nature. This is allowed to embrace only what is dead, not the living that is spirit-inwoven. If, in the manner of Hegel, Shelling or Goethe—those genuine representatives of Mid-European thought—anyone introduces the “concept” into observation of nature, he is at once thought to be on the road to uncertainty, for no objective reality is ever expected to be attained through spiritual comprehension or experience. It is assumed that this means bringing in personal bias; that an experiment ceases to be objective directly anytime anything subjective enters into it. That is Ahrimanic. Science is universally “American” in so far as it clings to the fundamental axiom, “Everything subjective must be banished from an observation of Nature” . This is the fundamental result of the earlier severance from the spiritual in the fourth post-Atlantean period.

Thus a new element is added to this legacy—a new element which will make itself felt more and more as a destructive force alongside all that has to develop fruitfully—and consciously—in the future. It is essentially of an Ahrimanic nature; it is fear of the spiritual, and it brings havoc and disintegration into human civilization.

At the transition from the fourth to fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and during the fifth epoch, these impulses became more and more noticeable. With the discovery of America, and the transplantation into America of European ways, fear of this spiritual life appeared there, too; but on the other hand there arose what might be called a tension in human souls, for the native forces of the people in Europe were such that they could not fail to some extent to trace their own connection with the spirituality of the universe. A tension arose at the passing of the forth into the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of civilization, during the centuries in which what is known as “modern history” takes shape. Then came this tension caused by the suppressed spiritual element in the breast of man. Certain people decided that a barrier had to be put up against it, partly because they understood very well what was left of the old inheritance, and partly because they had a very pertinent grasp of the newly approaching Ahrimanic element. This was the genesis of that spiritual current—a much more influential one than most people think, as I mentioned from a different point of view in my last lecture—which tries to perpetuate this keeping of the human soul at a distance from the super-sensible: in other words Jesuitism. Its inner principle is to do everything possible in human evolution to keep man at a distance from any real, conscious connection with the super-sensible. Naturally, this was facilitated by presenting the super-sensible dogmatically as a realm into which human knowledge could not penetrate. But the Jesuit movement knows very well how to reckon with the other side; it wants no such inner relation between modern science and Americanism. In that respect Jesuitism is great: it recognizes the importance of physical science and makes a deep study of it. Jesuits are great spirits in the round of physical, material science, for Jesuitism reckons with the elemental tendency of mankind to fear the spiritual, a fear which must be overcome by leading human nature towards the spiritual world; and accounts on being able to impose this fear on society by saying to people, in so many words: “You cannot and shall not approach the spiritual; we are trustees of the spiritual and we will purvey it to you in the proper way.”

These two currents of thought, Americanism and Jesuitism, play into one another, as it were. This is not something to take casually; and all such matters we must look for the deeper impulses which are active in human evolution. If we try to identify the forces which have brought about the present catastrophe, we shall find it remarkable cooperation between Americanism—in a sense here given—and Jesuitism. And from a wider point of view we see, on the one hand, how the inheritance from earlier times still influences our mental life, and on the other, the advent of something new. If we specify these two impulses as the Luciferic and Ahrimanic, we describe precisely the opposition towards that which must be introduced into the development of mankind for its salvation as true spiritual life. Anyone who approaches with inner sympathy such a figure as Bernard of Clairvaux, who in a certain sense inclines towards the Luciferic, will take account of the following attitude: “Human knowledge is after all directed only towards the physical-material; therefore we direct the soul to seek the divine-spiritual in the fervor of elemental experience.” This is what kindles enthusiasm in a temperament of that kind. We might say that what lives in human souls as a tendency towards this virtual side, lives on in our own time, but there is also the other tendency—towards the dark and somber side. The 12th century had its Bernard of Clairvaux: ours have such figures as Lenin and Trotsky; as in the former century there was an active inclination towards the super-sensible, so now we find hatred for it, although expressed in different words and substance. That is the dark reverse side of those times: there the pouring of the human soul into the Divine mould, here the pouring of man's being into an animal mould, on which alone the social structure is to be built.

These matters can be understood only if one has a clear grasp of one fact, which is far away from present-day comprehension. Our time is credulous in respect of theories, taking the content of ideas and programms as gospel, as I have often remarked. It is reality that counts, not theories and programms. The modern follower of Marx, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, before the world-war, would of course have said: “This is what Marx teaches, Engels teaches, Lassalle teaches, and that is all one needs for salvation.” He was concerned only with the “content” of ideas and programms. In reality it is never a question of that, for ideas are never carried into life in accordance with their content, but by means of forces which are quite distinct from it. No one knows the truth unless he knows that ideas often have so little to do with reality that may arise independently of their content. A splendid programme can be devised, established on a sound scientific basis, fervently longed for as the Marxists longed for theirs, but all to no purpose. For an age as unspiritual as ours, this is playing with fire. Men believe that they are working to realize the content of their ideas, but anyone who knows how things happen in life knows that the reality is quite different. If ideas are not derived from spiritual knowledge they may enter into cultural life as sheer monstrosities—and this applies to the ideas of Marx, which are intended to banish the spirit. However find they may be, they become abortions. It is no use asking in the morning: “Why has it grown light through what has happened on the earth?” One has to turn away from abstract ideas and say: “Daylight has come because the sun is shining”. In going out beyond the Earth one sees the reason for the daylight. Similarly, if we want to understand “to-day”, we must look away from what is happening in the immediate present to what took place in a time long past. Bolshevism cannot be understood except by recognizing it as an after-the fact of the Eighth Ecumenical Council of 869 A.D. You cannot understand it except as a result of the atrophy of the forces which man once had for apprehending the super-sensible world. In order really to understand the happenings of the outer world, in order to confront them, we must perceive this inner connection. For anyone observing the relations of events in history it is the most fearful thing to see how movements which set out to reform the world are concerned only with the “subject-matter” of ideas, and refuse to reckon with their reality, which exists quite independently of whether there content is beautiful or not. Suppose a child is born, a beautiful child; his mother may be charmed. Mothers are sometimes charmed, even when their children are not beautiful! He becomes a good for nothing, a ne'er-do-well, perhaps even a criminal. Is it therefore untrue to say that he was a beautiful child? Have people no right to say that he was? Does his childish beauty contradict the unforeseen things in his life? Just so there have been in many circles men with admirable ideas through which they wanted to reform the world, and these men were admired; yet the ideas became abortions! For ideas themselves are but dead things; they must be animated by being received into the vigorous life of the Spirit.

In reading modern socialistic publications one finds—if certain differences are left out of account—a great similarity between them and writings which express the standpoint of the Catholic Church, although the latter are differently expressed and deal with different realms. For instance, I recently read to you out of a certain brochure. Notice the kind of thought it expresses, it's thought-forms; compare what is said there with the rabid tendencies, whether cultured or not, which led gradually to Bolshevism; compared with the beginning of a publication byKautsky or Lenin; you'll find the same thoughts. One is the development of the other. Nowhere does one get a stronger feeling of Catholicism than in reading certain dogmatic socialist utterances. But something which Catholicism forbids—philosophizing about certain things—has become a passion, a principle: the principle of declaring that all learning comes from the bourgeoisie, and all spiritual development from class-warfare. This principle is the effect of the Catholic principle. Bolshevism may perhaps, in the form of its inception, have only a short existence: but all mankind will have to reckon long enough with what stands behind. Anyone who knows how it all hangs together would not be surprised that Bolshevism should have donned in the place where this way of thinking, in the bestial course it is followed, proceeded under cover of the Orthodox religion, so that the two streams were entirely separate.

We must fathom all these things if we want to be conscious of the necessity for approaching the spiritual life in the right way. Mystical talk about it is out of place to-day. What is needed to-day is to apply spiritual knowledge so as to look into reality and to discover the connections belonging to it; because from such knowledge alone in the correct grasp of the world's events arise; never from a past inheritance, or from fear, or from this elementary new thing I have described, which can but lead deeply into chaos. In this animalised Socialism we see displayed one result of what developed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. It has a Luciferic element in it; the Luciferic “Original Sin” is within it. But what is now developing is the penalty for that general incapacity of human faculties for turning to the super-sensible. These faculties have become truly impotent, and hatred and rejection of the super-sensible arise in their place. There is not merely hatred and original sin, but punishment for the forsaking of the super sensible. (This applies to much that is happening today).

The impulses active in human evolution take on various nuances, and events can be understood only in this light. The peoples of the Italian and Spanish peninsulas have come under the sway of Christianity, in the course of its expansion, as well as the peoples of modern France and the British Isles. We know something of what has been unfolded amongst them. We know that on the Spanish and Italian peninsulas the Sentient-Soul has blossomed forth, on French soil the Intellectual or Mind-Soul; here in Mid-Europe the Ego; and in Eastern Europe in the same way a civilization of the Spirit-is to be looked for, to be active only in the future and at present existing in germs which are now entirely hidden. Good mankind but look at Western Europe and understand its riddles through Spiritual Science. For instance, the characteristics of Italian regions (not those of single individuals, which of course grow out everywhere beyond the common norm) develop differently from those of French or British humanity. This last is so constituted that the nature of the people has a special connection with the Consciousness-Soul. Through living in the Consciousness-Soul man is banished to the physical plane, although not so strongly in the British Isles as in America. The result is that man, caught off first from the super-sensible by ecclesiastical developments, will be led back to union with the Cosmos; but it is only to the outer Cosmos that he is led by the Consciousness-Soul. Therefore the British people, as Britons, find their union with the cosmos only through economic principles. British thought is essentially economic, framed on economic lines. Anyone who grasps the connection of the Consciousness-Soul with the physical world will see this necessity; also that the French national character (not that of individuals), having an affinity with the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, develops chiefly political thinking and feeling; while the Italian and Spanish in the same way have the sensuous side of the mind developed, because the Sentient-Soul is directly connected with the nature of the people. I can only outline this, but it gives an idea of what lies in the characters of the peoples themselves.

If we look on the German essence, developing as it has in the midst of such a tragedy, we see that the Ego dwells within it. The whole of German history becomes clear if we consider this fact, which is disclosed from the super-sensible world. The Ego of man is the principle that is least externally developed; it has remained a man's most spiritual member. Thereby the German, inasmuch as he is connected through the Ego with the spiritual world, is linked with it in the most spiritual way. He cannot achieve any connection with the cosmos economically, politically, or sensuously; he can achieve it only in so far as it manifests in the soul-life of single individuals—as the Ego invariably does—and is then poured out over the people. It comes to expression most characteristically in what may be discerned as the essence of Goethe's genius, of Herder's and Lessing's, as something detached, a state higher than the physical-sensible. Hence comes a certain estrangement from the latter realm, a feeling of not really belonging to matter, when the physical-sensible alone is in question; hence the great amount of “Americanism”, and of the elements which I prefer not to particularise, poured out over Germany during the last decades, have alienated it from the original activity destined for its national Soul.

In a yet higher way Eastern Europe will be connected with the spiritual through its national characteristics—and will develop a still higher civilization and a spiritual sense, as a reaction from what is now taking shape there. But that is a matter of the future; it is not yet in evidence and must first evolve out of the animal character in which it is still confined.

The Western countries of Europe are directly connected by a lawful inheritance, so to speak, with the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Something more recent, but opposed to “Americanism”, lies hidden in the German nature; a certain relation to the spiritual world, sought inwardly in the spiritual itself. The German Soul following its own peculiar nature, has no fear of the spiritual; rather an inclination towards it, such as is to be found, albeit in a higher form, in Goetheanism.—This is plain speaking, of course; but you know that these things are brought forward from knowledge—not from Chauvinism, nor said to please anyone here. You saw in the last lecture that I understand how not to speak flatteringly. One thing, however, must be said: within the German soul—though this is often forgotten in Middle Europe, there is a dormant relation of the human spirit to the super-sensible world which must be cultivated, and which is the exact opposite of everything else now manifesting on the earth. Could we but have recognized this, if only, alas, the last decades had not brought Americanism and Russian thoughts into this realm, how differently the impulse of science in Middle-Europe would have developed! You know for my other lectures that a science of soul and spirit might have flowed from Goetheanism—but it remained a disregarded impulse! Has it really been grasped at all? Not yet—although within its depths lies the true being of Germany, which is, as you will have gathered, a stranger to the others, for they are still to a great extent animated by the legacy of the old, as well as by the new. In Middle-Europe alone has something developed which has more or less emerged from the old and the new.

By many indications we see that Goetheanism is untouched by materialistic science. (Goethe is praised, of course, but an ex-finance Minister—Kreuzwendedich—is made President of the Goethe Society!) What exists in the true, inner element of the German nature will be experienced in other realms as a continual reproach. The easiest way to protect oneself against what by nature one cannot acknowledge, is to slander it. We must look frankly at this. Such a living reproach can be invasively described as “delinquency”. This is a subjective way of escaping from the reproach. Here we touch upon an important psychological fact. The slander will spread further and further, rooted in the uncomfortable feeling that the special relationship of this Ego to the Spiritual does exist. It is necessary, however, to see clearly in these domains, not to shun a clear view of them, as is done to-day. Had we not so much conventionalism and Americanism amongst us, we should discern that German Goetheanism and Americanism are two opposite poles, and we should know that to regard these two currents of the present day with an unprejudiced mind is the only correct attitude to maintain. We should reject all exaggerated patriotism and look facts fully in the face.

Then we should abjure the apotheosis of Americanism in which we have so long and old son, and perceive that this particular element will become more and more active is a real, deep-seeded evil, because fear of the Spiritual is its main characteristic. Those who say otherwise are short-sighted, not judging things in their real setting. Everything arising from the political attitude of the French, from the economic rigidity natural to the British, or from the elemental sensationalism—the so-called “sacred egoism”of the Italian people—all this, in view of the great events now playing their part, is but trivial compared to the especially evil element arising from Americanism.

There are three currents which through their inward relationship had the greatest power of destruction in human evolution, due to their having absorbed the inherited and the new, in different ways. First among them is what I call Americanism, which tends to produce greater and greater fear of the spirit, making the world a mere opportunity for living in the physical. It is quite different when Britain wants to make the world into a kind of commercial mart. Americanism would make it a physical dwelling equipped with all possible comfort, in which man can lead an agreeable and wealthy life. That is the political creed of Americanism, and whoever does not detect it is blind to the facts and merely shuts his eyes and ears. Man's connection with the Spiritual is bound to die out under such an influence. In these forces of Americanism lies what must actually bring the earth to an end, destruction dooming it at last to death , because the Spirit will be shut out from it.

The second destructive element is not only that of Catholicism, but all Jesuitism, which in essence is virtually allied to Americanism. If the latter is the cultivation of the impulse to build up fear of the spirit, so the former seeks to awaken the belief that one should not seek contact with the spirit, which it deems impossible; it wishes Spiritual blessings to be dispensed by those who are called into the teaching office of the Catholic Church. This influence seeks to atrophy forces in human nature which incline to the super-sensible.

The particular indications of the third stream can be seen arising in a terrible form in the East: a social state based on a purely animal, physical socialism. Without plastering it with dogmas, we call it “Bolshevism”, and it will not easily be overcome by mankind.

These are the three distinctive elements in the modern development of humanity. To bring knowledge to bear upon them, so that the events of the present day may be met in the right way, it is possible only through Spiritual Science.

We are presently within an era of events which call for all the sensations of the human soul in the deepest, in the most important sense. We stand in the midst of events which cause that which is always posed as a riddle for our spiritual science—death—very often in relatively short time on earth. We are in a time which spreads out grief and pains about countless souls, and in a time of which we hope that it bears important forces in their laps for the future development of humankind. If so many things are to be born from pain and grief, and if just spiritual science teaches us that many things are to be born from pain and grief, just spiritual-scientific considerations can also stimulate some strength of confidence, some strength of hope in us in this destiny-burdened time. Let me today develop some considerations before you which are not connected directly, but indirectly with the sensations and emotions which can be aroused in this stormy and painful time.

What we see occurring so variously in our present is that human beings leave the physical plane at an early age of their physical existence. Just this is the peculiarity of such events like the present ones that they recall youthful lives from the physical plane. We know that the human being when he goes through the gate of death has to hand over his physical body to the elements of the earth that he is still united with his etheric and astral bodies and his ego at first, while he goes through the gate of death. We know that after a relatively short interval this etheric body is separated from the human being, and that then the human being continues his journey, which he has to do between death and a new birth, with his ego and astral body, united with those members of his spiritual nature that he can get only in the spiritual world.

The etheric body, however, separates from the human individuality and goes through its own way. Now it must strike us that the etheric body of an early deceased human being is in another condition than that of a dead one who attained a normal age. We know that the external natural sciences speak about the fact that forces can change that, however, they cannot get lost. For the external world of the physical existence the natural sciences recognise this truth absolutely that forces never get lost, only change. Spiritual science has to teach to acknowledge this also for the spiritual world. If an etheric body frees itself from a human being who went through the gate of death as young man, then his etheric body could still have supplied the life of this human being on the physical plane for many decades.

An etheric body must be arranged in such a way that it can give all that vitality which the human being has to take up until the highest age. If the human being goes through the gate of death, we say, in his twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth, thirtieth year, his etheric body goes away from him, but this etheric body still has forces through which he could have preserved his physical life up to the sixtieth, seventieth, eightieth year. These forces are in the etheric body, these forces do not get lost. We are to be preoccupied with the question—just in such a time like the present one when so many of such etheric bodies are entrusted to the spiritual worlds: what happens with the etheric bodies of those human beings who went through the gate of death in early youth?—It will be good if we familiarise ourselves—to answer such a question rather thoroughly—with the way the etheric body of a human being goes through, while the human being goes through the life between birth and death.

The external physical body of the human being gets older and older. That it gets older and older does not apply to the etheric body even if that is hard to understand. But the etheric body gets younger and younger to the same degree as the physical body gets older and older. The etheric body arrives at a certain, one could say, childish level of etheric existence in the time when the human being goes through the gate of death in a normal age. So that we must say to ourselves: when we start our physical earth existence with birth, then that is old which has been united as an etheric body with our physical body—we can say comparatively—and gets younger and younger during life and arrives at its childish level when we go through the gate of death. We could also say: if a human being dies in his youth, his etheric body does not get young enough, but it keeps a certain level of its age.—What does that mean really? An example can teach us what that means. Some of you already know this example which I have again to mention here, a concrete example of the last time which could be experienced by a number of our friends.

This concrete example concerns, actually, to a very young child, the little son of a member of ours. It was just at an evening lecture in Dornach when we got to know after the lecture that a boy of seven years, the son of our friend Faiss, was missing. It was soon clear to us that a big misfortune must have happened. A van had come in the late afternoon nearby the Dornach construction, strangely in an area, in which long before no van has probably gone, and will also not after. This van had toppled over at a particular place. This had happened towards evening, nothing else had been noticed; however, the boy was missing. When our friends, together with others, endeavoured to lift the van between ten and twelve o'clock in the evening which had not been lifted by the people to whom it belonged—they had saved themselves it for the next day because the carriage had fallen very unfavourably and was very heavy. When the helpers had succeeded in lifting it, it became apparent that, indeed, the child, the little Theodor Faiss, had passed just at the moment when the van toppled over, and that the carriage had fallen on the child. This child was only seven years old—an exceptionally dear child, a child who had exceptionally nice qualities.

I would like to remind you of a logical consideration which I have often done in our circle to show such a fact in the light of our spiritual science. I have often said that one can mistake cause and effect using external thinking, untrained thinking, and that such mistakes of cause and effect appear exceptionally often. As an example I tried to illustrate this, an example which should be only a metaphor. Imagine that one sees a person in the distance going along a riverbank. One sees him falling into the river, one tries to approach him, and one sees a stone lying just where the person had fallen into the water. One tries to pull out the person from the river: he is dead. What is more obvious than to say: the person tripped over the stone, fell into the river and drowned? This does not need to occur at all in such a way, but here the simple physical investigation may teach us that at the moment when the person entered this place he got a cardiac arrest, without his destiny having to do anything with the stone or anything else. That is why he fell into the water, so that the cardiac arrest was the cause of the fall into the water, while one would say if one makes no effort to come to the cause that the fall into the water is the cause of his death. One would assume the opposite of the right thing.

Cause and effect are distinguished more difficultly if one deals with matters related to the spiritual world. That is why one has to say: in such a case like in the case of this child who really finds his death under such extraordinary circumstances—which were still extraordinary in some other respect—one does not have to remember from a higher point of view that now this has happened: that the removal van came and toppled over and the child got under the carriage by chance; that the carriage is the cause of the child's death. On the contrary, one thinks in such a case correctly spiritual-scientifically that the child's karma had run off, and that basically the carriage went to that place because the boy should find his death; that the carriage brought only about the external conditions to give the boy his death, which was predestined in his karma. One could say trivially: the higher ego of the child wanted to go through the gate of death and ordered the whole situation, all the events that way. Indeed, it would be something totally crazy for the human being, who thinks according to our time, to hear of such an idea. Spiritual science has to show us that something that the materialistically minded human beings of today consider as something crazy corresponds to the truth.

However, it is important that just in this case the etheric body of a seven-year-old child was separated from the individuality of the child, from that which goes then in connection with the ego and the astral body through the spiritual worlds. Now it should not be my object to speak about the further life of this individuality of the little Theodor Faiss, but my task is rather to draw your attention to the fact that the etheric body supplied the physical life with vitality only for seven years; but it had forces in itself to supply a long life with vitality between birth and death. These forces remain in the etheric body. The important matter is that somebody who dealt with our Dornach construction in any spiritual relation since the death of the little Theodor Faiss can now know what came into being from the etheric body of the little Theodor Faiss. Various things of the construction are to be accomplished. We still talk immediately about the Inspirations we have to get down from the spiritual world. One need supporting forces if everything comes down that should really come down from the spiritual world. There it becomes obvious that our Dornach construction is wrapped up by the enlarged etheric body of this child like by an aura since his death—up to a far-reaching circumference. It is possible to really determine the extension of this covering.

When you see the Dornach construction—those who have already seen it, know it, it is a double rotunda [see drawing next page]. Here we have built a heating house in a particular way according to the principles of spiritual science, and then here we have built another house where the glass panes are cut and engraved for the construction. Only by the way, I want to mention that there is the so-called “House Hansi”—this is the house in which we live. Now it is strange that towards the wood, then just along the heating house, dividing this construction in the middle where the glass panes are cut, and here along this house, House Hansi, not enclosing it, this aura of the little Theodor Faiss wraps up the whole construction. So that one enters this etheric aura if one enters the building.

(Bau = construction, Heizhaus = house of the heating system, Haus für Glasfenster = glazier's workshop, Umgrenzung der Aura = boundary of Theodor's aura, Villa Hansi = House Hansi, Wald = wood)

I have often pointed out to you that the etheric body extends if it becomes free of the physical body. Hence, it does not surprise us that this etheric body appears enlarged to us. In this etheric body are the mediating forces through which one finds certain impressions of the spiritual world one needs for the forms and artistic decoration of the construction. Somebody who has to work for the construction knows what he owes to this etheric aura. Never will I hesitate to admit that since the death of this little Theodor Faiss the work is thereby made possible for me that mediating forces are given for the Inspirations in this etheric body of the boy spread out over the construction. It would be much easier not to mention such a matter. One could boast about the fact that one does not have need of such mediating forces. But it does not concern such matters but that one recognises the truth.

If we imagine these just described facts, we get an impression of how it is with an etheric body which must separate from a human life if this life is finished by death in youth. Now it is important to take into consideration that as to us the etheric body of a human being does not remain only like a nebulous formation in which the physical body is embedded. We do also not recognise a physical human body by the fact that we describe it only like a mass of muscles and bones et cetera, but by the fact that we look at it as something like a temple of the godhead, as a microcosm. We only recognise the physical body correctly if we realise that its forms which are stamped on it are really taken out of the whole cosmos that the physical body of the human being is a miracle. Somebody, who can feel the emotions which are expressed in the first conversation of the second mystery drama The Probation of the Soul, can get an idea in which way an individual human being is put into his physical existence concerning his physical body by all kinds of hierarchies; that a whole world of gods aims at it as their goal to put this human being into the physical existence. We get to know so surely which significance this physical body has if we consider the clairvoyant knowledge a little.

The clairvoyant cognition is the cognition which comes about by the fact that the human being pulls out his psycho-spiritual entity from his physical body and that he can then be conscious and perceive outside his body in the psycho-spiritual realm. One cannot recognise any difference between the human being who perceives clairvoyantly and the sleeping human being who has also pulled out his psycho-spiritual of his physical body. However, because the clairvoyant consciousness can perceive outside the physical body, it can gain an idea what happens with the human being during sleep. This schematic drawing may make it easier. We assume that this is the physical body and this is the psycho-spiritual entity of the sleeping human being. Of course, the psycho-spiritual entity is in the physical body when he is awake. We imagine the human being in his sleeping state. The physical body and the etheric body lie there in the bed; they do not contain the astral body and the ego as they contain them when they are awake.

But one would like to say that what the astral body and the ego accomplish in the physical body during the waking state is not stopped completely in sleep. For all that which the human being can perceive at first the human being lying in the bed is lying there as lifeless. For the clairvoyant consciousness this physical human being and this etheric body which lie in the bed are not as lying there lifelessly. The clairvoyant must say something completely different of this sleeping physical and etheric human being. He has to say: during the whole day the area of the earth on which now the human beings are sleeping was shone on by the sun. Now it is night. I talk about the normal circumstances if one sleeps at night and is awake during the day, not about the modern urban or big-city circumstances. Darkness spreads out over the area on which the sun has shone during the day. It is strange, but one notices there that the earth as a being starts to think and the organs with which the earth thinks are these sleeping human bodies.

As well as the human beings think with their brains, the earth thinks with these sleeping human bodies. It perceives continually during the day—and the percipience consists in the fact that it is shone by the sun from the universe, this is the perception of the earth—and at night it processes thinking what it has perceived. The earth thinks, the clairvoyant says, and it thinks using the sleeping human beings. Every sleeping human being becomes as it were a brain molecule of the earth. Our physical body is established so that the earth can think with it if we ourselves do not use it.

But as well as the earth thinks with the human physical body, it imagines—you know what an Imaginative knowledge is,—it imagines everything that is not earthly on earth that belongs to the earth from the whole universe. It imagines that in the etheric body. In the sleeping physical body of the human being one recognises brain parts of the earth, and in the etheric body of the sleeping human being one sees that cosmos imagining which belongs to the earth at first. One can behold this interplay of forces in the etheric body as miraculous pictures which must flow from the etheric world of the earth, so that the events of this earth can take place. As true as the physical human being belongs to the earth, he belongs as an etheric human being to the heavens. Only so we can use our physical body for ourselves as a mental organ because it is created for thinking because, so to speak, the earth gives him off during the waking state. That is why we can only use our etheric body in such a way that it gives us the vital forces because the heavens give it off during the waking state, and because the forces of Imagination of the heavens are transformed to vitality in us during the waking state. So that we will talk not only about our etheric body like about a nebulous thing, but about a microcosmic thing reflecting the heavens in it.

Our etheric body is handed over to us as a particularly perfect creation at our birth. At our birth our etheric body glitters internally and gleams from nothing but Imaginations which come from the big cosmos to it. It is a marvellous reflection of the cosmos. What the human being can get as education, as knowledge, as forces of will and soul during his life, while he grows old between birth and death, this is got out of this etheric body. The cosmic heavenly forces hand over to us what they have to hand over to us during the life between birth and death. Therefore, we are again young as etheric human beings when we have run through a normal life between birth and death, because we have then sucked out everything from this etheric body. If such an etheric body goes through the gate of death which belongs to a youthful body, then there is still a lot of unused heavenly light in it. Hence, it becomes a mediator of such forces as I have told. Completely apart from the fact what the individuality of such a human soul becomes, like that of which I talked before, the etheric body becomes something like a gift of the heavens, a gift of the spiritual worlds. That is why this etheric body can work inspiring in the described sense.

It would go too far to talk about the peculiar karma which has such a human soul who is able to make such a sacrifice. For this cannot be brought about artificially, but it must be connected with the whole karma of such a person. He has to do something that has to play a role in the spiritual world process of humankind as we intend it for this Dornach construction which should surround our spiritual-scientific efforts.

Now, however, consider that we go towards a time, in which many such etheric bodies, even if they are not so youthful concerning their age but their life, are in the spiritual atmosphere. Those who have gone on the bloody battlefields through the gate of death go in another way through the gate of death than somebody who goes in his bed or because of an everyday accident through the gate of death. They go in a certain way through the gate of death so that they reckon with their death, even if more or less in the subconscious—the astral body reckons with the death in a certain way. One can say that this death is always a sacrifice. All the etheric bodies which go up in this way from youthful human beings to the spiritual world have unused forces. A period of human development lies ahead to us in which human souls can consciously look up to the spiritual world and can say to themselves: a time has passed which has sent many unused etheric bodies to the spiritual world. In these unused etheric bodies forces are included, forces of which we can say spiritual-scientifically already today which significance they have for the development of humankind.

If one discusses such a matter, one must expressly point to the fact that that does not apply to every war which took place in the development of the human beings on earth. What happens spiritually and should be considered by spiritual science is not so simple as natural sciences make it easy to themselves. Other wars of former times required that one has to talk about them differently. What I have to say applies to the present destiny-burdened times. Think once the following: at different occasions I had to emphasise that it does not arise from arbitrariness if we cultivate spiritual science today, but that it really lies in the developmental process of humankind that the human beings get to know spiritual science gradually. We know that every epoch of the earth development of humankind has a particular task. We can gather this from different cycles of talks. We can recognise that the welfare of the future development of humankind can only blossom if really the revelations of spiritual science become mental property of more and more souls.

I assume that most of you are warmly enthusiastic for spiritual science, but take into account which difficulties are there with reference to the propagation of the spiritual-scientific truth in the present. Take into account that the human beings outside in the world oppose against this spiritual-scientific truth. Take into account that this truth is defamed, that the human beings consider it as mad, as distorted, as crazy, as a raving. Really impressive examples could be given, but, nevertheless, all the examples would be only a small part of that which basically everybody can feel if he is enthusiastic for spiritual science and faces the world from which he would like that it would take up spiritual science—and does so little today. Now the spiritual scientist may say to himself the following: what has to be accomplished with the bare earth forces of humankind seems to be rather weak compared to the task of spiritual science. But in the immediate future there are the unused etheric bodies which had to carry soul and life through the gate of death on the fields of the events in our time. The etheric bodies with their unused forces become inspiring forces, supporting forces in the immediate future. We only need to get the attitude—now not intellectually, not theoretically, but out of heart and soul—to look up to the heavenly etheric bodies of those who have gone in early youth through the gate of death in our destiny-burdened time.

We need to turn our souls as it were only in praying mood to these etheric bodies, and those who are enthusiastic for spiritual science only need to turn their souls to these forces—and they will have help from these etheric bodies. So that if ardent spiritual living together with these etheric bodies is possible because one is penetrated with a real spiritual-scientific attitude, one also finds those among the various fruits which are in the lap of our destiny-burdened time. For into the souls of the spiritual-scientific enthusiastic human beings of the future that will stream which lies in the forces of the sacrificed etheric bodies of our destiny-burdened time. Through the souls of those who live in the physical body in the next future the forces of the sacrificed etheric bodies can flow if these souls are penetrated with the real attitude. These are heavenly forces, forces of the spiritual world. Then quite different forces are able to prevail in the world to bring spiritual-scientific attitude into the world. We have only to find the possibility to bear witness of that which happens now in the sense of the just given explanation, then these destiny-burdened days are also deeply significant for somebody who stands in spiritual science.

Marvellous, we have said, are the Imaginative formations of the human etheric body. Nevertheless, they are different than they would be unless they had gone through an etheric body of a human being. But also on this field the sentence holds true: nothing comes into being from nothing.—This is not an absolute sentence, but it applies to this field. What a human soul adds as an etheric body, when it enters in the physical existence, gathers forces of the spiritual world which are used up during the physical life. These forces are not from nothing, they are there in the spiritual world. Indeed, one can find them also in the spiritual world, but if anybody wants to find them directly in the spiritual world, it is difficult. One must use much bigger instruments of power. If they have gone, however, once through a physical human being who has died early and show themselves as it were with that which they have in themselves because of the passage through the human being, it is easier to use their help.

All the forces which are in this young etheric body of the little Theodor Faiss, indeed, would also be in the spiritual world, but it would be a spiritual Herculean task to pull them, otherwise. Because they have come along on the detour through the boy, it was substantially easier to be inspired by them. Imagine then what a tremendously great significance for the whole further development of humankind it has that such a big amount of etheric bodies with still unused forces are given to humankind in the next future. But because these, I would like to say that repeatedly, heavenly forces have gone through human beings, they freed themselves as it were from the laws to which they are subjected in the universe outside. It is impossible that in the universe these forces, which are got directly from the universe, are used in a bad sense. Assuming that all the human beings who go now because of the military events or other circumstances through the gate of death, they would not deliver such a sum of etheric bodies if the war had not come. All these forces would also be in the universe, of course; then, however, they could not be used by the human beings, because it would be too difficult to use them. That is why they could not be used, because they would be used up in the lives by the human beings who reached their normal age. This is quite important that these heavenly forces have gone through human bodies. They thereby escape as it were from the usual progress of development. However, this freedom makes that these forces can be also used in another way than to the welfare of humankind.

They can also be used in another way. The human life must develop in the light of freedom. Assuming that Ahriman would really succeed in darkening the thoughts and reason of the human beings, so that they all would reject spiritual science. Then, nevertheless, these etheric bodies would be there, but there would be no spiritual-scientific enthusiastic souls who take these forces into the service of the earth progress. Then Lucifer or Ahriman would be able to intervene and would use these forces either in the world of Lucifer or in the world of Ahriman. Consider that I express something tremendously important with it. I express that it is put as it were into the hands of the human beings in which way the forces are incorporated in the earth process which were given to the world by sacrificial deaths. The fact that these forces can be used to the progress of earth development inspiring that which was aroused by spiritual science.

Otherwise, it could be—if materialism seized all minds or if nationalism spread out in a purely passionate way—that Lucifer or Ahriman would take these forces into their service. Then the earth progress could not have anything of these forces. The deep significance of spiritual science for the human earth development becomes apparent to somebody who considers these connections. He learns to say to himself: how necessary is it that sacrificial forces are used in the right sense in the development, how necessary is it that individual human beings can be touched by the spiritual-scientific attitude.—This spiritual science becomes something holy if one considers it in the connection with the spiritual development, as it expresses itself during our destiny-burdened days. The attitude which can originate from spiritual science becomes something like a prayer which can be summarised in the words: spirit of the world, let us rightly be penetrated with this spiritual-scientific attitude, so that we do not fail to wring that which can be used to the welfare and progress of the earth out of Lucifer and Ahriman.

Our construction should serve like a landmark what spiritual science should become to humankind as an attitude. Hence, it is arranged in such a way that its forms express artistically what spiritual science can give from itself. I would have to speak a lot if I wanted to explain to you what is put into every detail of this construction. You experience all that, if you visit the construction in the course of the years, and join in the matters which should take place there. Today I will only talk about one matter in connection with that which I have just explained.

At an important place of the construction, where it turns eastwards, a sculptural group will be. In this sculptural group should be expressed in particular that which has to penetrate the consciousness of our time to the right degree. This group consists of three figures basically, apart from that which will be added. Three beings find expression in this group. Something like a rock will be there. This rock has a projection forwards, and in this projection is a cave. The central figure stands on the rock projection. You may call it as you want, but you have to see the representative of the earthly human being in it in the truest sense of the word. If you want to see the ideal of the earthly human being in that human being who carried the Christ being for three years of his life on earth, you may also see Christ in this central figure. But this must not happen in such a way that you stand before this group with the consciousness that this should be Christ, but everything must be felt artistically. That is, it must not be interpreted externally as a symbol, but everything must result from the forms themselves.

Here on top is the second being. This being has a humanlike head. The head is really formed in such a way that one can say, a human head reminds of this head. Since this head is so formed that the skull is extremely developed, in particular the forehead. While these parts are relatively immobile with the human being, everything is mobile with this being. Everything is an expression of soul. As well as the human being can move his hands with the fingers, but not this part here, this being can move everything. One notices in the sculptural work that everything is movable. The lower part of the face recedes very much with this being. One may say that the mighty skull arches over the receding face.

I can only discuss some parts, because every single line of this figure is very significant. Then, however, it is the peculiar that a connection exists between that which has atrophied to the larynx with the human being and the ear of this figure. That which is as a little larynx in it bends up and constitutes the lower part of the ears. The upper part is formed by the forehead. On the other side, two formations, reminding of bird wings, adjoin between which a body is spread out resembling a reshaped human face on the whole. Wings and larynx and ear are formed as a unity, so that one recognises: with the wings the being lives in the music of the spheres inside, moves through the space, through the waves of the music of the spheres, and this is located in the ear. With the human being all that has atrophied. Because the human representative lifts the left hand to the figure on the rock, its wings are broken, and it falls off the rock.—You anticipate: this figure is Lucifer who falls off the rock with broken wings.

Here at the bottom, in the cave, is another figure. It does not have bird-like wings, but bat-like wings, a kind of worm-like or dragon-like body and a head again reminding of the human head. But what is a mighty forehead with Lucifer recedes in this lower figure completely, has atrophied. The lower parts toward the mouth are extremely developed with this figure. This figure is wrapped with the gold of the earth. The gold of the earth turns into chains, which tie up this figure therein. This figure writhes because of the effect which goes out from the downward showing hand of the human representative, Christ. This figure at the bottom is Ahriman, who is tied up with the gold of the earth.

What I have just said is, as it were, the idea of the whole. But with this idea I have only pointed to that which it concerns. Never will we adopt the bad habit of the old theosophists who have always worked with symbols, but everything that moves from spiritual science to the human feeling has really to be raised to the artistic realm. Hence, one must not say: these figures express this and that,—but they have to show the relation of the human being, or of Christ, to Lucifer and Ahriman artistically. That is why this cannot be expressed using the old artistic means. Each movement of the fingers, the way as the hands are formed, is important, because something important has to express itself in it. One could have the idea at first that Christ lifts the left hand up and would allow to emit forces which break the wings of Lucifer, so that he falls off. The forces by which Ahriman is tied up would be emitted by the right downward showing hand again. One would have imagined something completely wrong if one had imagined this.

To explain the especially important aspect of that, I may remind you of something that really belongs to the greatest pieces of art up to now: The Last Judgement by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. There one sees Christ pointing the good to the heaven, the bad to the hell. One sees in Christ that he sends the ones to the good world, the others to the bad world. This Christ, as he is shown there, is not from now on the Christ whose true being we should only understand by spiritual science. The Christ who is the true Christ does not condemn, does not praise, using rage or usual love, but has an effect by his own nature. Lucifer's wings are not broken, but he breaks them because of his attitude while approaching Christ. Ahriman ties up himself because of the soul events while approaching Christ. Hence, the downward and upward lifted hands must not have anything that is not pure sympathy with the world. On top, Lucifer cannot endure on his part that the hand of Christ approaches him. The experience of this in himself breaks his wings, Christ does not break them.

That also holds good for Ahriman. Michelangelo did not yet know how to form Christ as He is in reality. The Christ Being is so significant, the understanding of the Christ Being is so difficult that this can only be reached in the course of time. The Christ Who persuades the beings by His nature, so that they condemn or release themselves, is understood in future. Christ in the picture of Michelangelo has something luciferic-ahrimanic because He leads the bad human beings to hell in His rage, the good to the heaven: He is engaged with His passions. In our sculptural group, Christ stands as somebody impersonal, and the beings condemn themselves who approach Him.

You see that the position of the human being in the world is expressed, in which luciferic and ahrimanic forces are included, at an important place of our construction. Beings must find expression that can be found only in the spiritual world. Any naturalism of art, any tendencies of art just in the last times when people were seized by materialism must be overcome by the art we cultivate here. Something novel, also in the field of art, has to enter the world by spiritual science, so that the greatest achievement of art is also overcome which was possible up to now: the Christ figure of Michelangelo in his Last Judgement.

One is allowed to express such things, if one emphasises, on the other side, what must not be forgotten: the fact that of course this construction can only be a primitive start. Everything is imperfect, everything is elementary, everything is only a start, but the start should already be something novel. The fact that everything is imperfect, this can be known of course, but one has to point to something that should come as an impulse in the whole human life.

Take into consideration that it suggests itself to pass a gift of the cosmic existence indifferently, which consists of the unused forces of human etheric bodies. Take into consideration that these forces could become a prey of Lucifer and Ahriman if the human being did not find the possibility to serve the welfare of the earthly development. There we have touched a tremendous secret of our earthly development: the secret of the relation of the Christ Impulse to the impulses of Lucifer and Ahriman. This relation of the Christ Impulse to the impulses of Lucifer and Ahriman can be understood by humankind more and more in the next future. Lucifer's and Ahriman's forces prevail in the world, and the human being must become with the help of his Christ consciousness like a being who sits in a boat which is always exposed to the storms Lucifer and Ahriman excite. The boat has to roll from side to side, however, it finds its way through the sea whose living substance consists of Lucifer and Ahriman, through which, however, the human being steers his Christ boat.

We do not come together in our branches to learn this or that theoretically what spiritual science can reveal to us, but we come together that everything that lives in our souls is filled with an attitude which can flow from this spiritual science. It does not depend on that which we think of spiritual science, but how we think, feel and will. Whether the smallest or the biggest what we can observe in the earth development of humankind stands before our soul eyes, everywhere can come before our eyes that it is necessary for the human being of the future to familiarise himself just with the significance of the triad of Christ, Lucifer, and Ahriman. Michelangelo could not correctly see, the past times could not correctly see this triad existing there in the world. But one will only recognise Christ properly by His being when one sees Him in His relation to that which works in the world like the North Pole and the South Pole: Lucifer and Ahriman.

Some of these matters are to be discussed for those who can be present still during the next days. Today I wanted to put on your souls that which allows spiritual-scientific attitude to appear to us as something very important also for important matters which can appear in the spiritual world in the next future to somebody who is able to understand also spiritually what happens physically.

One may beg the good gods and spirits guarding the earth and humankind that they give the human beings strength, so that that can happen which must happen for the welfare of humankind.

Above there the unused etheric forces of the human beings are who went through death in their youth. But human hearts and human souls have to be here on earth which look up to these forces, so that these forces can be brought in the correct direction of development by them. It depends not only on it that there above the forces are which could also become a prey of Lucifer and Ahriman, but it concerns that here below human souls are in physical bodies that send their pious mood to these sacrificial etheric bodies. It will depend on that in which sense the forces flow in the human development which are created on the fields on which the blood runs on which sacrifices are offered on which pains are suffered.

This shows the contribution of spiritual science to the course of the human development if that which can be recognised only by spiritual science is really seized by a number of human beings.

What can come into being from the present destiny-burdened days, I would like to express it in the end in some pragmatic words before your souls once again:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation's sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit-land.

In these lectures, of course, it can be a question only of describing certain ways of approach and therapeutic methods, as revealed by Spiritual Science. The short time at our disposal makes it impossible to enter into details. My own opinion, however, is that at the beginning of the work which it is the aim of Spiritual Science to carry through in the domain of medicine, the most important thing is for our point of view and our method of approach to be made quite clear. In certain specific details this point of view has been carefully followed in the preparation of our remedies. How we can proceed to form more general conceptions in special cases of illness will perhaps not be so immediately evident, but in describing certain principles of method to-day I will do my best to indicate matters which will help in this direction also.

The human organism in health and in disease—or rather in its state of health and in its approach towards health—is really unintelligible unless the so-called normal functions are regarded as being, fundamentally, metamorphoses of those functions which must be called into action in order to combat pathological conditions. And here we must always take account of the fact that the human organism is inwardly filled with processes which are not the same as those in the outer world. To begin with, let us remind ourselves that everything man takes into himself from the plant world, for instance, must be worked upon by the digestive system before it can be carried to a higher stage of life. The process of vitalization must be an activity of the human being himself; indeed, the human organism could not exist without it. Now it must be clear to us from the outset that the plant-covering of our earth is passing through the opposite process from that which takes its course within the organism of man. When we speak of a process of vitalisation along the path traversed by the foodstuffs in the organism—that is to say of a curve ascending, as it were, from the essentially inorganic to the state of vitalisation, from there to a condition which can be the bearer of feeling and finally to a condition which can be the bearer of the Ego-organisation—when we speak of the transformation of the foodstuff up to the point where it is received into the astral organism (the bearer of feeling), we are describing a process of increasing vitalisation of what is taken in through the food.

The reverse occurs in the plant. In all the peripheral organs of the plant, that is to say in the development of the plant from below upwards, in the production of the leaves and blossoms, we have, fundamentally speaking, a process of devitalisation. The vitality per se is preserved for the seed only. If we are speaking of the actual plant itself—for the seed in the ovary really represents the next plant that will come into being, that which is stored up for the future plant—if, as I say, we are speaking of the plant, it is not a process of vitalisation that is taking place from below upwards. The vitality is drawn from what is stored up by the earth out of the warmth and sunlight of the previous summer. The strongest life-force inheres in the root-nature, and there is a gradual process of devitalisation from below upwards.

In flower-petals which contain strong ethereal oils, we have an expression of the most powerful devitalising process of all. Such a process is, for instance, often connected with the actual production of sulphur. The sulphur is then contained, as substance, in the ethereal oil of the petals—or is at any rate closely akin to it and is responsible for the process whereby the plant is led over into the realm of the most delicate inorganic substance—which is still, however, on the borderline of the organic. It is essential to realise what it is that we are bringing into the human organism when we introduce plant-substances. The plant is engaged in the opposite process from that which occurs in the organism of man.

If we start from this and turn to consider illness and disease, we shall say to ourselves: Plant-substance—it is the same with other substances in outer Nature, and to a much higher degree with animal-substance—plant-substance is really opposed to that which unfolds in the human organism as a tendency to generate this or that process. So that when, without any kind of preconception, we study the process of nourishment in man, we must admit that all foodstuff introduced into the organism is something which this organism has utterly to transform. Fundamentally speaking, all nourishment is the beginning of a certain poisoning. Actual poisoning is only a radical metamorphosis of what arises in a mild form when any foodstuff is brought into touch, let us say, with the ptyalin. The further course of the digestive process, namely what is brought about by the activity of the kidneys which I described to you, is always a process of eliminating the poisoning. So that we pass through the rhythm of a mild poisoning and its elimination simply when we eat and digest our daily food. This represents the most delicate metamorphosis of the process which arises in greater intensity when a remedy is introduced into the organism. That is why in the nature of things it is nonsense to be fanatical about medicine that is ‘free from poison.’ It is nonsense because the only point at issue is this: In what way are we intensifying what already happens in ordinary digestion by introducing something into the organism that will give rise to a process more foreign to this organism than ordinary digestion?

A very profound understanding of the human organism is necessary before we can estimate the value for it of an external remedy. Let us begin with something that is always present as a remedial agent in the human organism—the iron in the blood. The iron in the blood unceasingly plays the role of a remedial agent, protecting man from his innate tendency to disease. I will describe it to you, to begin with, in a primitive way. You know that if the brain, with its weight of some 1,500 grammes, were to rest upon its base, the cerebral blood-vessels there would obviously be crushed. The brain does not rest upon its base but swims in the cerebral fluid, and in accordance with the principle of buoyancy, loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of fluid displaced. Thus the brain presses on its base with a weight of only about 20 grammes, instead of 1,500 grammes. This is a fact of fundamental importance because it shows us that the force of gravity is not the determining factor in that which underlies the functions of the brain, in Ego-activity, for instance. This Ego-activity and also, to a great extent, conceptual activity—in so far as it is not volitional but purely conceptual, ideative activity—is not dependent on the gravity of the substance in question but on the force of buoyancy. (I am speaking here entirely of the physical correlate, namely, the brain activity.) It is dependent on the force which strives to alienate the substance from the earth. In our Ego and our thoughts we do not live in the element of weight, but in the force of buoyancy.

The same thing holds good for much else in the human organism—above all, the iron-bearing corpuscles swimming in the blood. Each of these corpuscles loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of fluid displaced. And now, if our soul-being lives in the force of buoyancy, just think what this possession of iron-bearing blood corpuscles must mean for the whole life of feeling and perception, indeed for the whole life of the organism. In other words: If in a given case there is irregularity in what is going on in the blood simply as a result of the buoyancy of the iron-bearing corpuscles, we know that iron in some form or other must be introduced, but in such a way, of course, that the iron will unfold a right action in the blood, and not elsewhere.

In terms of Spiritual Science, this means that the relation of the etheric to the astral organism of man is bound up with the iron-content of the blood. And if we understand how the activities of heart and lungs lead over into the realm of life all that is taken up by the organism, and how the kidneys in turn lead this over into the astral organism, we shall not be far from the realisation that balance must reign here. If there is no balance, if either the etheric or the astral activity becomes too intense, the whole organism is bound to fall into disorder. The possibility, however, of promoting the corresponding balance, of enabling the organism to lead the necessary amount of foodstuff into the domain of the kidney activities, is provided by regulating the iron-content in the blood. And by imbuing the actual dynamic element in the blood either with weight or with the force of buoyancy—according to how we regulate the iron-content—we are thereby regulating the whole circulation of blood, which in turn reacts upon the kidney activities. In adding to or decreasing the iron-content we have brought about a fundamental regularisation of the blood circulation: that is, of the interplay between the etheric and astral parts of man.

And now let us take a concrete case. Suppose we have flatulence as a primary symptom. I am choosing a crude example for the sake of clarity. What does flatulence indicate to one who has insight into the human organism? It indicates the presence of aeriform organisations in which the astral organism is working with excessive strength and which are being dispersed too slowly. They are formations which have been brought about by the astral organism—which works, of course, in the gaseous being of man—and they conglomerate instead of forming and dissolving in the regular way. That is what is happening when flatulence is present. Now because the astral activity is excessively strong it influences the whole activity of the senses, especially the activity of the head. The astral activity congests and does not properly distribute itself in the organism; hence it does not work as it should into the metabolic processes, but turns back to the system of nerves and senses with which it is more closely related. And so we shall very soon find that something is amiss with the system of nerves and senses, too—or at all events we may assume that here is a complex of symptoms where the nerves and senses are not working in the right way. And now I must add something in connection with the irregular working of the nerves and senses.

Physiology really talks nonsense about the nerves and senses. Forgive me for saying this—I am expressing myself radically only in order that we may understand each other. You must take such statements with the familiar ‘grain of salt,’ for if I compromise too much in what I say we shall not find it so easy to understand these things.

Supersensible observation of the human organism reveals that any given function which can be demonstrated in the sense of objective empiricism, is, from the higher point of view, the material reflection of something spiritual. The whole human organism is the material reflection of Spirit. But the interaction between the Spirit and soul and the physical-organic nature of man is by no means so simple in the case of the system of nerves and senses as is generally imagined.

Take the physical organisation of man. It is not true—as many people would like to assume—that with the exception of the nervous system and the senses, the physical organisation constitutes one whole, and that the nervous system is inserted into this structure in order independently to serve the life of soul. That is putting it rather radically, of course, but if we come down to the practical considerations underlying the physiological theory, something of the sort comes to light. That is why it is almost impossible to-day to form any rational opinion of functional diseases, nerve-troubles and the like, as they are often called. There is nothing in the human organism that does not belong to the whole organism; that does not interact with other organs. It is not a question of the rest of the organism being left to its own devices and an independent nervous system being inserted, heaven knows by what divine power, in order that the organism may become soul! Look for evidence of this and you will not need to look far. The nervous system is primarily that from which the formative, rounding-off forces of the organism go out. The form of the nose, the form of the whole organism is shaped, fundamentally, by the influences proceeding from the nervous system. The kidney system radiates out the forces of matter, and the nervous system is there to give the organism its forms, both inwardly and outwardly. To begin with, the nervous system has nothing to do with the life of soul; it is the moulder, the form-giver of the human organism, inwardly and outwardly. In short, the nervous system is the sculptor.

In the early stages of individual development, a certain portion of nerve-activity which the organism does not use for formative functions separates off, as it were, and to this the being of soul adapts itself more and more. That, however, is secondary; we must observe this separation of a part of the nerve-process in very early childhood, and the adaptation of the soul-life to these formative principles, if we are to get down to the empirical facts. There is no question of the nervous system being laid into the human organism as the result of some kind of divine ordinance to form the basis for the life of volition, feeling and thought. The life of nerves and senses comes into being with a sort of hypertrophy, part of which is preserved, and to this the activity of the soul then adapts itself. The primary function of the system of nerves and senses is formative, form-giving. The forms of all the organs are sculptured by the system of nerves and senses.

If you want to verify this, begin by taking the senses that have their seat in the skin, are spread out over the whole skin—the senses of warmth and of touch—and try to envisage how the whole form of the human organism is plastically moulded by these senses, whereas the forms of the special organs are built up by other senses. Sight itself is due to the fact that something remains over from the formative force proceeding originally from the visual tract for the building of the cerebral organs, and then all the psychical elements developed in the faculty of sight adapt themselves to this “something” that has been left over.

We shall never have real insight into the being of man if we do not realise that as metabolism goes on unceasingly within us, day by day, year by year, our organs must first be provided for by all that radiates out from the kidneys, and then rounded off. The substance that is radiated out by the kidneys must continually be rounded off, worked upon plastically. Throughout the whole span of man's life this is done by the nerve-organs which extend from the senses towards the inner parts of the human organism. Higher sense-activity, image-building mental activity and the like, are simply the result of an adaptation of the being of soul to this particular tract of organs.

Now, if flatulence in the complex of symptoms confirms the fact that the astral organisation is working too strongly, this shows that the excessive astral activity is tending in the direction of the formative forces of the senses. In the upward direction and towards the periphery there is not only a congestion of astral activity, but these gas-bubbles, which are really striving to become organs, are rounded off still more completely. In other words, as the result of excessive activity on the part of the kidneys, a continual attempt is being made in the upper man to hold back the Ego-organisation above and not to allow what passes into the organism through the blood to return in the proper way. Hence, associated with the complex of symptoms of which I am now speaking, we shall often find cramp-like conditions, even fits, which are due to the fact that the astral forces are not passing rightly into the rest of the organism. If they are congested above, they do not pass into the other parts of the organism. In these other parts of the organism we notice cramp-like phenomena which are always due to the fact that the astral forces are being held back. In such cases the astral nature is being checked, and by studying a complex of symptoms of this kind in the light of the super-sensible, we can eventually relate the outer facts to their inner causes.

Think of it: the astral is held back above, and as a result the metabolism is drawn upwards; the astral body is not making proper provision for the kidneys, and even less for the stomach; the stomach which is receiving too little from the astral organism begins to fend for itself. Outwardly, there will be colic and cramp-like conditions of the stomach. Again, spasmodic conditions may arise in the sexual organs because they are not properly permeated by the astral organisation, or there may be stoppages of the periods, due to the fact that the Ego-organisation is held back above.

Now let us ask ourselves: How can we influence irregularities of this kind? The best thing, to begin with, is to realise that the magical names given to illnesses merely serve the purpose of conventional understanding; the essential point is to observe what really groups itself together and interweaves among the several symptoms. But we must be able to judge of the nature of these symptoms. Suppose we are considering the function attaching to a flower containing sulphur. If a flower contains a certain amount of sulphur, this means that an active process is on its way to an inorganic state which is still akin to the organic. If we introduce a remedy prepared from such a flower, or even the sulphur produced by the flower, into the human organism, the processes in the digestive tract will be roused to greater activity. The stomach, and subsequently the intestinal activity, will be stimulated by a decoction of flower-petals containing sulphur, because, as I have already said, a process of devitalisation which must be reversed is taking place in the plant. And again, indirectly, the irregularity which has appeared in the action of the kidneys is stimulated to a strong reaction, and we have, to begin with, the possibility of counteracting the congestion above by means of a strong counter-pressure from below. (The forces working here are for the most part only fleeting in their effect, but if we give temporary help to the organism it will usually begin to help itself.) The astral organisation will, as it were, again be drawn into the digestive tract, and the result will be a cessation of the attacks of colic and gastric convulsions. Such a remedy by itself, of course, will suffice only in the rarest cases. It will probably be adequate when the gastric trouble is slight. The organism must never be over-stimulated; whenever it is possible to use a weaker remedy we should avoid a stronger one.

Suppose we have before us a complex of symptoms such as I have just described. The disturbance being very severe, we will assume that demands are being made on the overactive astral body by an excessive activity on the part of the kidneys. The astral body works with undue strength into the sense-organisation, which is thereby weakened and undermined. As sense-organisation it is not really undermined, but the astral organism is working in it so strongly that the formative forces of the nerves and senses are, as it were, smothered by the activities of the astral organism. Neither the sense-organs nor the system of nerves and senses as a whole are in themselves less active, but they do not work in their own characteristic way. They take on, as it were, the organisation of the astral and become as active as the astral organism itself. This means that they are not rightly performing their form-giving functions. We must apply something whereby this astral activity is lifted out of the system of nerves and senses: namely, a remedy that works upon the system of nerves and senses which stands in closest connection with the outer world and which, as organisation, is nearest of all to the inorganic state.

The physiology of the senses is fortunate because in the sense-organs there are so many inorganic, so many purely physical and chemical elements. Think how much in the eye lies in the domain of pure optics. A great deal in the eye can be beautifully depicted if one treats it merely as a kind of photographic apparatus. In saying this I want only to indicate that we are co-ordinated with the outer world precisely through the sense-organs, and that the senses are channels through which the outer world flows into us by way of the inorganic.

Now when it is a question of giving support to this particular activity of the nerves and senses, we can do it very well by introducing silicic acid into the organism, for silicic acid has an affinity with these inorganic activities at the periphery. We drive the astral organisation out, as it were, by means of the forces inherent in everything that underlies the formation of silicic acid, for this inclines so very strongly, even in outer appearance, towards the inorganic state. When silicic acid is present in any flower you will invariably find that the flower is brittle or prickly, pressing on to the inorganic state. Thus we can relieve the sense-organs by administering silicic acid, and also by supplying the organism with more sugar than it has in the ordinary way. Sugar, too, is a substance that is so worked upon in the human organism that it finally comes very near to the inorganic. Thus everything we introduce by way of sugar relieves the sense-organs. If conditions allow, this process can also be strengthened by the administration of alkaline salts, which are well calculated to relieve the nervous system of astral activity. These are matters which should be verified by a series of empirical investigations.

Spiritual Science thus enables us to arrive at guiding principles. With the faculty developed by intuitive knowledge we can perceive, for instance, the after-effects of sugar, particularly in those parts of man's nervous system which run from the central nervous system to the senses; the after-effects of silicic acid tend towards the peripheral activities unfolding in the senses. These things can all be verified and proved. And so, when a severe complex of symptoms such as I have described, is present, we shall find the following of benefit: remedies composed simply of alkaline salts, which do much to relieve the nerve-activity of the astral nature; of sugar (not of course administered in the ordinary amount but in an unusual one); and of silicic acid.

The best remedial effects of these substances will be obtained simply by the administration of a proper preparation of the roots of chamomile. It may surprise you that I speak of a root, but the points of view intersect and we must realise that when the symptoms are severe, sulphur and blossom-products are not efficacious. What we do need is a substance that is contained still in a highly vitalised state in the plant, so that the long process it has to undergo will make the reaction vigorous enough. If we introduce a suitable dosage of these substances, as they are found in the root of the chamomile, into the digestive tract, the reaction in this case will not be strong enough to allow the vitalisation to take place at the point of transition from the intestines to the blood; what is contained particularly in the sugar and silicic acid, but also in the alkaline salts, will simply be forced through in an untransformed state. This gives the kidneys a chance to absorb it into their radiations, and the substances so absorbed are then impelled by the action of the kidneys towards the sphere of activity of the nerves and senses, which are thereby relieved of the astral functions.

If we really have insight into these matters, if we realise that this mode of therapeutic procedure leads to the best results, much can be learnt. Moreover, we can very easily be led to other things. We can see how what is absorbed is transformed in the human organisation: thereupon the activity of the kidneys sets to work, receiving what is supplied to it along the channels of the blood and radiating it out; the plastic activity then reacts in its turn. Then we begin to perceive that this plastic activity in its pure form is restored by the administration of silicic acid, sugar and alkaline salts. To super-sensible vision, silicic acid, alkaline salts and sugar, in the right proportions, form a kind of human phantom; something like a phantom is there before us if we think of these substances in regard to their form-building forces. They are pre-eminently sculptors; they bear the plastic principle within them—as is evident even in their outer formation.

The strong action of silicic acid is due, in the first place, to the fact that when the substance appears in the inorganic realm, it has the tendency to form itself into elongated crystals. The results obtainable with silicic acid could not be reached with substances which have the tendency to develop into rounder, less elongated crystals. With such substances it might conceivably be possible to cure a hedgehog but not a human being, whose very principle of growth shows tendencies to elongation.

Those who have no feeling for this artistry in Nature—an artistry with which the organism is moulded chiefly by the activity of nerves and senses-cannot discover in any rational sense the relations between substances in the outer world and what is taking place in the human organism. Yet there is indeed a rational therapy—a therapy which is able to perceive processes which run their course in the outer world, are broken down, as it were, in the human organism, and can then be radiated out by the kidneys and taken hold of, finally, by the plastic activity of the organisation of nerves and senses.

Let us take another example. Suppose that the radiating action of the kidneys, instead of being too strong, is too weak—that is to say, too little of the foodstuff is being drawn up into the astral organisation.

All that I described in the previous complex of symptoms is due to excessive working of the astral organism. The astral organism is active particularly in the upper man and holds itself aloof from the activities of digestion, heart and lungs; and as an accompanying phenomenon we shall find the formation of phlegm and the like, which is quite easy to understand. Thus in the previous case we have to do with an excessive astral activity.

Now suppose that the astral activity is too feeble. The radiating activity of the kidneys is unduly weak, so that the astral organism is not in a position to supply to the formative, plastic forces what it ought to give them when it enters their domain. The formative force cannot then work itself into the astral organism because the latter does not reach sufficiently to the periphery. The result is that no active contact is established between the formative force and the force proceeding from the circulation of the food-substances and their distribution. The substance is distributed without being taken in hand by the formative force. Insufficient plastic force is unfolded and the substance is abandoned to its own life; the activity of the astral body is too fleeting and does not work properly in the transformation of the substances.

Such a state of affairs may certainly be regarded as a complex of symptoms. How it will express itself? Above all, that which is coursing in the blood-vessels will not be taken up in the proper way by the feeble action of the kidneys; that is, by the astral organisation which is working with insufficient power. It collapses, as it were, resulting in hæmorrhoids or excessive menstruation. The contact fails and the metabolism lapses back into itself. In this condition of the organism it is specially easy for a state of ‘fever of occult origin’—as it is called—to arise, or a condition of intermittent fever.

And now the question is: How can we attack this complex of symptoms? The activity of the astral organism is too feeble. We must stimulate the action of the kidneys in order that sufficient material may be sent up into the astral organism. The best thing to do here is to restore the balance between the etheric and astral organisms. Then, simply on account of what passes from the digestive tract into the system of lungs and heart, we get the proper transition to the activity of the kidneys. We obtain a kind of balance, and in many cases we can control it precisely by regulating the iron-content in the organism which governs the circulation. This will now stimulate a strong, inner activity of the kidneys which will be demonstrated outwardly in a change in the excretions of urea through the kidneys, as well as through the perspiration. This will be quite evident. But of course in very many cases we must realise that this balance is always very delicately poised, and that only in the crudest cases will the remedial agent in question here, which man already bears within him, be of assistance.

Whereas in the digestive tract substances containing sulphur in some form are the most effective, and in the system of nerves and senses (the formative principle) substances such as silicic acid and alkaline salts, pure metals are the substances which regulate the balance between the forces of gravity and buoyancy. We need only try out how they must be applied in order to restore the disturbed balance in the most varied ways. We start from iron. According to the complex of symptoms, the most suitable metal may be gold, or perhaps copper. If the form of disease makes us sure of our ground, highly important results will be obtained from the pure metals. If the interplay between the functions of form-building and the breaking-down of form is such that there is too little form-building and this state of affairs becomes organic—if, therefore, the primary cause of the trouble is that the relation between the system of heart and lungs and the kidney system is upset—we shall achieve the best results with iron.

But if, as the result of lengthy disturbances in the processes, the organs themselves are impaired, and have already suffered from a lack of plastic activity because the plastic forces have not been able to reach them, we may have to apply quicksilver. Because quicksilver already has the forces of form, the durable metallic drop-form within itself, it has a definite effect upon the lower organs of man. In the same way we can discover definite connections between metals and the organs of the head that have been attacked and injured, for instance when the nervous system itself is involved. But here it will be a good thing not to confine ourselves to setting up a stable balance as against the vacillating balance. This is extraordinarily difficult. This balance is just like a very sensitive pair of scales. We try in every possible way to make the scales balance and it is almost impossible. We shall get at it more easily, however, if we do not merely concern ourselves with the balancing, but with the pans themselves. We can give support, for instance, to the working of the iron by introducing sulphur into the digestive tract, and providing a counter-action in the nerves and senses system by means of alkaline salts. Then in the middle, rhythmic system of man we shall have iron at work; potassium, calcium or alkaline salts in the nerves and senses, and sulphur in the rhythm of digestion. That is the better way to set about restoring the balance.

Now the remarkable thing is that we find the very opposite state of affairs in the leaves of certain plants. If, for instance, we prepare the leaf of urtica dioica, the ordinary stinging-nettle, in the right way, we have a remedy composed of sulphur, iron and certain salts. But we must really know how to relate the devitalising force that is present in the plant to the vitalising force that is present in the human organism. In the root of urtica dioica it is indeed true that the whole sulphur-process is tending gradually to the inorganic state. The human organism takes the opposite course, and so transforms the sulphur by way of the albumen that it gradually brings the digestion into order. The iron in urtica dioica works from the leaves in such a way that in the very seed, and thereby once more in next year's leaves, this plant thrusts apart the very thing that brings together the rhythmic process in the human organism. In fact, the stinging power of the nettle leaves is this destructive process that must be overcome if the rhythmic process in the human organism is to be regulated. Again, the alkaline salt content of the plant is least of all transformed into inorganic matter. Therefore it has the longest way to go. It goes right up to the nerves and senses organisation; goes up quite easily because, in any case, with the complex of symptoms we are now considering, the activity of the kidneys is asleep and suppressed. In the human organism we have actually the opposite of what is expressing itself outwardly in the formation of the plants. But there is no need to confine ourselves merely to plant-remedies; synthetic remedies may also be prepared and cures effected by combining the substances I have mentioned in a suitable dosage.

These are matters which will gradually transform therapy into a rational science, but a science that is really an art, for it can no more exclusively be science than a man who is not an artist can be a sculptor. He may have a splendid knowledge of how to guide his chisel and how to mould the clay, but there must always be an element leading over into the realm of art. Without this, true therapy is impossible. We must really get the right touch—in a spiritual sense, of course—for determining the dosage. This will not suit all those who would like to turn medicine into a pure science, but it is true, nevertheless.

And now let me indicate, merely by way of example, another state of affairs that may arise. There may be a disturbance of the interaction between what the organism produces by way of inorganic material, as a preliminary to leading it over into the realm of organic life, and the subsequent intervention of the etheric body and the action of heart and lungs. A disturbance may arise here. The greater the age of a man, the more apparent is the disturbance. The digestive tract and the vascular system are not working properly together. When this sets in, we must remember that the consequence will be an accumulation of the products of metabolism. If the substances are not being properly distributed in the organism, the natural result is an accumulation of the products of metabolism. And here we come to the whole domain of diseases of metabolism, from the very mild to the most severe forms. We must realise that in such cases something is amiss with the activity of the kidneys, too, for the reason that because of the antecedent congestion the kidneys are receiving nothing which they can radiate out.

This gives rise to highly complicated forms of disease. On the one hand the action of the digestion and the kidneys provides nothing by way of material upon which the plastic, form-giving activity can work, and on the other, as the result of a stultification of this plastic activity, we have a disturbance of the organic balance from the other side. The plastic force, too, gradually ceases to function. The products of metabolism spread themselves out in the organism but fail, little by little, to be received into the field of the plastic activities and used as modeling material. And then there arise certain metabolic diseases which are so highly resistant to treatment. The proper course is to stimulate in the digestive tract, and then also in the domain of heart and lungs, all that is akin to elements that are on their way to the inorganic state—akin, that is, to the sulphuric or phosphoric elements connected, in the blossoms of plants, with the ethereal oils. We attempt to stimulate this in the digestive system and in the system of heart and lungs; also we stimulate the activity of the kidneys and thereby help the plastic forces. In this type of disease it is of great importance to bring influence to bear on the digestive apparatus.

Now the activity of the kidneys and the excretion of sweat are in a certain sense polar opposites; in other words they are intimately related to one another. And if, as a consequence of what I have described, the kidneys are not acting properly, we shall always find that there is less perspiration. Great attention should be paid to this, for whenever there is a decrease in the perspiration, we may be sure that something is amiss with the action of the kidneys. What is happening, as a rule, when the perspiration decreases, is that the kidneys are like a machine which has nothing to work upon but continues to act, while the products of digestion are already congested and are spreading unduly over the organism. If by the outer or inner application of sulphur treatments (for we can work just as well from the skin as from the kidneys themselves) we succeed in stimulating the digestive tract to such an extent that it, in turn, stimulates the activity of heart and lungs so that material is again supplied to the kidneys, instead of lying fallow before it reaches them, we may also succeed in getting the better of these diseases of metabolism.

But in all these matters we must be quite clear that the human organism is something that does not want to be absolutely cured, but only stimulated to unfold the healing process. This is a fact of supreme importance. In the state of illness, the human organism wants to be stimulated to unfold the healing process. If the healing is to be permanent we must actually limit ourselves to giving a mere stimulus. For a cure which apparently happens at once leads much more readily to relapses than a cure which merely stimulates the healing process. The organism has first to accustom itself to the course of the healing process, and is then able to continue it by virtue of its own activity. In this way the organism binds itself much more intimately to the healing process, until such time as the reaction again sets in. If for a certain length of time the organism can be made to adjust itself to the healing process, that is the best possible cure, for then the organism actually absorbs what has been transmitted to it.

I have been able only to give you certain hints as to method, but you will realise that in what I call a spiritual-scientific enlightenment of physiology, pathology and therapy, it is a question of understanding that man is not an isolated being but that he belongs to the whole Cosmos, further, that in connection with any process taking place in the human being in an ascending curve, let us say, we must seek outside man, in Nature, for the descending curve. In this way we shall be able to modify curves that are ascending too abruptly. Medicine indeed demands in a certain respect a knowledge of the whole world. I have given only a tiny fragment, but it indicates that there must be an entirely different understanding of the nature of urtica dioica, colchicum autumnale, or indeed of any other plant. The plants themselves must tell us whither their descending tendency is leading.

Take the case of colchicum autumnale, the autumn crocus. First you must perceive when you approach this plant that the time of the year in which it appears is not without significance for its whole structure, for this brings about a certain relation to the devitalising process. That the devitalisation is very slight in colchicum autumnale, you can see from the very colour of its petals and the time of its flowering. If you then experiment with colchicum autumnale, you will find that the human organism must exert itself up to a very high level to bring about the opposite vitalisation, that is to say—if I may express it crudely—to get the plant dead and then alive again. Indeed, this whole process plays right up into the thyroid gland. And now you have the basis for a series of investigations with colchicum autumnale as a remedy for enlargements of the thyroid gland.

Let me assure you once again that there is no question of a profitless, amateurish abuse of modern scientific methods, but rather of giving guiding lines which will actually lead to more tangible results than mere experimentation. I do not by any means say that this cannot also be fruitful. It does indeed lead to certain goals, but a great deal passes us completely by, especially many things we can learn by observing Nature. Although it is not difficult to produce a synthetic preparation composed of iron, sulphur and alkali, it is a good thing to know how all these substances are brought together by Nature herself in a particular plant. Even in the production of synthetic remedies we can learn very much by understanding what is going on in Nature outside.

It would be fascinating to enter into many things in detail, and I think that some of our doctors will have done so in other lectures. A great deal, too, can be found in our literature, and there are many subjects which I hope will soon be dealt with there. I am convinced that as soon as these matters are presented in a clear, concise form and people are not afraid to go straight ahead, they will take this point of view: “Yes, I must above all heal if I want to be a doctor, and so I will turn to what, in the first place, seems rather against the grain. If it really helps, I cannot do otherwise than try to profit by it.”

In this sense I think it would be a good thing if as soon as possible we could produce literature of a kind that would be a bridge between Spiritual Science and modern material science. It would encourage the opinion that these things help and so they cannot after all be such utter nonsense! I am quite sure that when our work is properly in train, the verdict will be that it does indeed help.—And here I will conclude. Try it all out and you will find that it will help. That too, will not be without significance, for many things that are used in orthodox medicine do not help. And between what does and does not help there must play all that we would like to introduce from the side of Spiritual Science.

Lawrence Bros, Ltd.
London and Weston-super-Mare
(9107)

In these lectures we are naturally able to present only a few indications as to a method of approach to therapeutic issues, as revealed by spiritual scientific study. The short time at our disposal makes it impossible to enter into details. My own opinion, however, is that at the beginning of the work that it is spiritual science's aim to carry through in the domain of medicine, the most important thing is to make our viewpoint quite clear. This viewpoint has been carefully applied in certain specific details in the preparation of our remedies. It may not be immediately evident how this more general viewpoint can be extended to specific cases, but in describing certain principles of method today I will do my best to suggest thoughts that may help in this direction also.

The human organism in its states of health and disease—or, to say it better for our purpose today, in its states of being healthy and becoming healthy—cannot really be understood unless the so-called normal functions are regarded as being, fundamentally, simply metamorphoses of the functions that must be called into action in order to combat pathological conditions. We must always take into account the fact that the processes within the human organism are different from those unfolding in the outer world. To begin with, we must remember that everything the human being takes into his digestive tract from outside in the plant world, for instance, must be worked through so that man can further enliven it. The process of vitalization, the enlivening, must be an activity of the human being himself; indeed the human organism could not exist without undertaking this enlivening.

We must be clear from the outset that the plant covering of our earth is passing through the opposite process from that which takes its course within the human being. When we speak of a process of vitalization along the path taken by human nourishment through the organism, we have to do with an ascending curve, a curve ascending from the essentially inorganic, as it were, to the state of vitalization—to the living state—and from there to a condition that can be the bearer of sensation and finally to a condition that can be the bearer of the ego organization. When we speak of working through our nourishment up to the point where it is received into the astral organism, to the point where it is received into that which bears the world of sensation, we are speaking about a process of increasing enlivening of what is taken in through nourishment.

The reverse occurs in the plant. In all the peripheral organs of the plant, that is to say in the development of the plant from below upward, in the production of the leaf and blossom processes, we have a process of devitalization, fundamentally speaking. The vitality is preserved for the seed alone. If we are speaking about the initial plant—for the seed in the ovary really represents the next plant that will come into being, that which is stored up for the future plant—if, as I say, we are speaking of the initial plant, vitalization does not take place from below upward. The vitality is sucked up from what is stored by the earth out of the forces of the sun's warmth and light from the previous year. We find the strongest life force in the root nature, and there is a gradual process of devitalization from below upward.

When we reach the flower petals of plants that contain strong ethereal oils in their blossoms, we have an expression of the most powerful devitalizing process of all. Such a process is often connected with an actual working through of sulfur, for instance. Sulfur is then contained, as substance, in the ethereal oil of the blossom, or it is at least near the ethereal oils of the blossom and is actually responsible for the process whereby the plant is led over into the realm of the most weightless inorganic substance—which is still, however, on the borderline of the organic, of the living. It is exceptionally important to realize what we are bringing into our organism when we introduce plant substances. The plant is engaged in the opposite process from that which occurs in the human organism.

If we proceed from this and turn to consider actual illness, we must say to ourselves that the plant element—and it is the same with other substances in the outer world, and to a much higher degree with the animal element—is really opposed to what unfolds in the human organism as a tendency to call forth this or that process. When we look into the process of nourishment in the human being without prejudice, therefore, we must admit that all food introduced into the human organism is something that this organism must utterly transform, reverse. Fundamentally speaking, therefore, all nourishment is the beginning of a kind of poisoning. We must be clear, then, that actual poisoning is only a radical metamorphosis of what arises in a mild form when any food is brought into contact, let us say, with the ptyalin. The further course of the digestion, particularly what is brought about by what I have described to you as the kidney activity, is always a process of eliminating the poisoning. Thus we pass through the rhythm of a mild poisoning and its elimination when we simply eat and digest our daily food. This represents the most mild metamorphosis of the process that arises in greater intensity when a remedy is introduced into the organism. That is why it is nonsense to be fanatical about medicine that is “free from poison.” It is nonsense, because the only point at issue is this: in what way are (we intensifying what already happens in ordinary digestion by introducing something to the human organism that is more foreign to this organism than what we ordinarily digest?

Real understanding of the human organism is necessary before we can estimate the value of an external remedy for this organism. Let us begin with something that is continually present within the human organism as a remedy—the iron in the blood. The iron in the blood continually plays the role of remedy, protecting us from our innate tendency to become ill. I will describe this to you, to begin with, in a primitive way. You know that if our brain were to rest upon its base with its weight of some 1,500 grams, the cerebral blood vessels there would obviously be crushed. The brain does not rest upon its base but floats in the cerebral fluid and, in accordance with the principle of buoyancy, loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of fluid displaced. Thus the brain presses on its base with a weight of only about 20 grams instead of 1,500 grams.

This is a fact of fundamental importance because it shows us that the force of gravity is not the determining factor in what underlies the functions of the brain, in ego activity, for instance. This ego activity and also, to a great extent, conceptual activity—in so far as it is not will activity but purely conceptual activity (I am referring now to the physical correlate of this, the brain activity)—is not dependent on the gravity of the substance in question but on the force of buoyancy. It relies on the force that wants to alienate substance from the earth. With our ego and with our thoughts, we are living not in gravity but in levity, in buoyancy. This comes to light in a powerful way when we study the matter.

The same thing that is true for the brain holds good for much else in the human organism—above all, for the iron bearing blood corpuscles floating in the blood. Each of these corpuscles loses as much of its weight as the weight of the volume of fluid displaced. Now, if we live with our soul-being in a force of buoyancy, just think what having more or less of these iron-bearing blood corpuscles must mean for the whole life of feeling, indeed for the whole life of the human organism. In other words, if in a given case there is an irregularity in what is going on in the blood simply as a result of the buoyancy of the iron-bearing corpuscles, we know that iron must be introduced in some way, but in such a way, of course, that makes it possible for the iron to unfold its proper activity in the blood and not elsewhere.

In terms of spiritual science, this means that the relationship of the etheric organism to the astral organism of the human being is bound up with the iron content of the blood. And if you understand how the heart-lung activity leads over into everything that is taken up in the human being in the vitalizing process, and how the kidney activity in turn leads what has been vitalized over into the astral organism, you will not be far from the insight that balance must prevail here. If balance does not prevail, if either the etheric or the astral activity becomes too intense, the whole organism is bound to fall into disorder. You can provide the means, however, of calling forth the appropriate balance, of enabling the organism to lead the necessary amount of food into the domain of the kidney activity, by regulating the iron content in the blood. And by imbuing the actual dynamic element in the blood either with weight or with buoyancy—according to how you regulate the iron content—you regulate the general circulation of blood, which in turn reacts upon the kidney activity. In adding to or decreasing the iron content you bring about an essential regularization of the blood circulation, that is, of the relation between the etheric and astral organisms of the human being.

Now let us take a concrete case. Suppose we have flatulence as a primary symptom. I am choosing a crude example for the sake of clarity. What does flatulence indicate to one who has insight into the human organism? It indicates the presence of aeriform organizations in which the astral organism is working too strongly and that are not being dissolved quickly enough. They are effects of the astral organism—which works, of course, in the gaseous being of man—and they conglomerate instead of forming and dissolving in the regular way. Thus we have a predominance of the astral organization's activity, which expresses itself physically in the airy aspect of the human being. This is what is happening when flatulence is present. Because the astral activity is too strong, it influences the whole activity of the senses, especially the activity of the head. The astral activity becomes congested and does not distribute itself properly in the organism; hence it does not work into the metabolism as it should but recoils on the nerve-sense system with which it is more closely related. We soon find something amiss with the nerve-sense system too—or at least we may assume that we have a complex of symptoms in which the nerve-sense system is not working properly.

Now I must say something in connection with the irregular activity of the nerve-sense system. Physiology really speaks nonsense about this nerve-sense system. Forgive me for saying this—I am expressing myself radically simply so that we may understand each other better. You must naturally take such statements with the familiar grain of salt, but if I compromise too much in what I say we will not find it as easy to understand these things. Supersensible observation of the human organism reveals that any given function that can be demonstrated by sense-oriented empiricism is, from the higher point of view, the sense-perceptible reflection of something spiritual. The whole human organism is the sense-perceptible reflection of something spiritual. But the interaction between the soul-spiritual realm and the physical-organic in the human organism is by no means as simple in the case of the nerve-sense system as is generally imagined.

If you look only at the physical organization of the human being, it is not true—as many people would like to assume—that with the exception of the nervous system and the senses the physical organization constitutes one whole, and that the nervous system is inserted into this structure in order to serve the life of soul separately. It is not usually described quite so radically, of course, but if we come down to the practical considerations underlying the physiological theory, something of this sort comes to light. This is why it is almost impossible today to form any rational opinion of what are often called functional diseases, nervous disorders and so on. There is nothing in the human organism that does not belong to the entire organism and that does not interact with other organs. The rest of the organism is not simply left to its own devices while a separate nervous system is inserted, heaven knows by what divine power, in order that the organism can bear a soul.

If you look for evidence of what I am maintaining here you will find it in a twinkling! The nervous system is primarily that from which the formative, rounding-off forces of the organism proceed. The form of your nose, the form of your whole organism is shaped, fundamentally, from the nervous system. The kidney system rays out the forces of matter in a radial direction, and the nervous system is there to give the organism its forms, both inwardly and outwardly. To begin with, the nervous system has nothing to do with the life of soul; it is the shaper, the form-giver of the human organism, inwardly and outwardly. It is the sculptor.

In the early stages of individual human development, a certain portion of nerve activity that the organism does not use for formative functions separates off, as it were, and the soul element increasingly adapts itself to this position. This is secondary, however. If we notice this separation of a part of the nerve process in very early childhood, and the adaptation of the soul life to these formative principles, then we really get down to the empirical facts. There is no question of the nervous system being incorporated into the human organism as the result of some kind of divine ordinance in order to form the basis for the life of will, feeling, and thought. The nerve-sense life is born through a sort of hypertrophy, part of which is preserved; to this preserved part the activity of the soul then adapts itself, while the primary function of the nerve-sense system is formative. All the organs are shaped from the nerve-sense system.

If you want to verify this empirically, begin by taking the senses located in the skin, spread out over the entire skin—the senses of warmth and of touch—and try to see how the whole form of the human organism is sculpturally formed by these senses, whereas the forms of the special organs are shaped by other senses. That we are capable of seeing is due to the fact that something remains over from the formative force proceeding originally from the visual tract for building the cerebral organs, and then the soul elements we develop in the faculty of sight adapt themselves to this “something” that has been left over.

We shall never have real insight into the human being if we do not realize that as metabolism is going on within us continually, day by day, year by year, our organs must first be provided for by what rays out from the kidneys in a radial direction and is then sculpturally rounded off. The substance that is radiated out by the kidneys must be continually rounded off sculpturally. Throughout the whole span of man's life this is done by the nerve organs that extend from the senses toward the inner parts of the human organism. Higher sense activity, image-forming activity and the like, are simply the result of an adaptation of the soul element to this particular tract of organs.

This should convince us that if the astral organization is working too strongly in the complex of symptoms of flatulence, the excessive astral activity is tending in the direction of the formative forces of the senses. Thus there is a congestion of astral activity in the upward direction and toward the periphery of the human organism; not only do we find congestion, but there are actually gas bubbles that are rounded off still more completely, which are really striving to become organs. In other words as the result of excessive kidney activity, a continual attempt is being made in the upper human being to hold back the ego organization above and to prevent what passes into the organism through the blood from returning in the proper way. Associated with this complex of symptoms, then, we often find cramps that are due to the fact that the astral forces are not passing in the right way into the rest of the organism. If they are congested above, they do not pass into the rest of the organism. In the rest of the organism, then, we notice cramp-like phenomena that are always due to the fact that the astral forces are being held back. By studying inwardly a complex of symptoms of this kind, looking at it with the help of the super-sensible, we can eventually relate what we behold outwardly to what can be beheld inwardly.

Think of it: the astral is held back above, and as a result the entire metabolism is drawn upward; the astral body is not making proper provision for the kidney organs and even less for the stomach; the stomach, which is receiving too little from the astral organization, begins to fend for itself. What you see outwardly is colic and cramp-like conditions of the stomach; cramps may also arise in the sexual organs because they are not properly permeated by the astral organization, or there may be stoppages of the menstrual periods, due to the fact that the ego activity is held back above.

Now let us ask ourselves: how can we influence irregularities of this kind? If you want to be clear about this it is best to realize that the magical names given to illnesses merely serve the purpose of conventional understanding. What is really essential is to see what groups itself together and interweaves the individual symptoms. But we must be able to appraise the importance of these symptoms.

Suppose we are considering the function associated with a flower containing sulfur. If a flower contains a certain amount of sulfur, this means that a process is strongly on its way to the inorganic, a process that is still akin to the organic. If we introduce into the human organism a remedy prepared from such a flower, or even from the sulfur itself, the processes in the digestive tract will be stimulated to greater activity. The stomach and especially the intestinal activity will be stimulated by a decoction of flower petals containing sulfur, because, as I have already said, a process of devitalization that must be reversed is taking place in the plant. The irregularity that has appeared in relation to the kidney activity is indirectly stimulated to a strong reaction, and we have, to begin with, the possibility of counteracting the congestion above by means of a strong counterpressure from below. (The forces working here are for the most part only fleeting in their effect, but if we give temporary help to the organism, in most cases it will begin to help itself.) The astral organization will again be drawn into the digestive tract, as it were, and the result will be a cessation of the attacks of colic and stomach cramps. Of course such a remedy by itself will suffice in only a few cases. It will probably be adequate when the stomach cramps are slight. We must never over-stimulate the organism; whenever it is possible to use a weaker remedy we should avoid a stronger one.

Suppose we encounter a complex of symptoms like the one I have just described. The disturbance being very severe, we will assume that demands are being made on the over-active astral body by an excessive kidney activity. The astral body works with undue strength into the sense organization, which is thereby weakened and undermined in a certain way. It is not really undermined as a sense organization, but the astral organism is working in it so strongly that the formative forces of the nerve-sense organization are drowned, as it were, by the mere activity of the astral organism. The sense organs or the nerve-sense organization in general is not less active, but it does not work in its own characteristic way as nerve-sense organization. It takes on the organization of the astral organism, as it were, and is active in the way that the astral organism is active. This means that it is not performing its form-giving functions properly. We must use a remedy here through which the astral activity is lifted out of the nerve-sense organization. We can only do this if we use a remedy that stands in closest connection with the outer world and that works upon the nerve-sense organization which, as organization within the human being, is nearest of all to the inorganic.

The physiology of the senses is fortunate because in the sense organs there are so many inorganic, which is to say so many purely physical or at most chemical, elements to be explained. Think how much in the eye lies in the domain of pure optics. A great deal in the eye can be depicted beautifully if it is treated merely as a kind of photographic apparatus. In saying this I only wish to indicate that we are coordinated with the outer world precisely through the sense organs, and that in our senses we have channels through which the outer world flows into us by way of the inorganic.

Now when we need to give support to this specific nerve-sense activity, we can do so very well by introducing silicic acid into the human organism, for silicic acid has an affinity for this inorganic aspect at the periphery. We drive the astral organization out, as it were, by means of everything that underlies the silicea, which inclines very strongly, even outwardly, toward the inorganic. When you find silicic acid in a flower, you invariably discover that the flower is thorny, bordering on the inorganic. Thus we can relieve the sense organs by administering this silicic element on the one hand, and on the other hand by supplying the organism with more sugar than it ordinarily has. Sugar, too, is a substance that is worked through in the human organism in such a way that it finally closely approximates the inorganic. Thus everything we introduce by way of sugar relieves the sense organs. If you are able to, you may also strengthen this process by the administration of alkaline salts, which are particularly able to relieve the nervous system of astral activity. These things must be verified by a series of empirical investigations.

Spiritual science thus enables us to arrive at guiding principles. In the activity developed by intuitive knowing, for example, we can see the aftereffects of sugar, particularly in those parts of the human nervous system that run from the central nervous system to the senses; the aftereffects of silicic acid tend toward the peripheral activities unfolding in the senses. These things can all be verified and proven. When a severe complex of symptoms such as I have described is present, it will therefore prove beneficial to administer remedies composed simply of alkaline salts, which work very strongly to relieve the nerve activity of the astral nature, of sugar (not, of course, administered in the ordinary amount but in an unusual one), and, as I have suggested, of silicic acid.

The best remedial effects of these substances will be obtained if you simply administer the roots of camomile boiled in the appropriate way. It may surprise you that I speak of the root, but the different aspects under consideration here intersect, and we must realize that when the symptoms are severe, blossom products are not enough. What we really need is a substance that is still contained in a highly vitalized state in the plant, so that the long process it has to undergo will make the reaction vigorous enough. If we introduce into the digestive tract a suitable dosage of these substances as they are found in the root of the camomile, the reaction in this case will not be strong enough to allow the vitalization to take place at the point of transition from the intestines to the blood; what is contained particularly in the sugar and silicic acid, but also in the alkaline salts, will simply be forced through in an untransformed state. Thus the kidney activity has a chance to absorb it into its radiations, and the substances absorbed in this way are then impelled by the kidney activity toward the nerve-sense activity, which is thereby relieved of the astral functions.

If we really have insight into these matters, if we realize that this way of proceeding therapeutically leads to the most healthy results, much can be discovered. Furthermore, we can very easily be led to other things. We can see how what is absorbed is transformed in the human organization, how the activity of the kidneys sets to work, receiving what is supplied to it by the channels of the blood and radiating it out; we can see how the plastic activity then reacts in its turn. Then we begin to see how this plastic activity in its pure form is restored by the administration of silicic acid, sugar, and alkaline salts. To super-sensible vision, silicic acid, alkaline salts, and sugar, mixed in the right proportions and viewed intuitively, form a kind of human phantom. Something like a phantom is there before us if we picture these substances in their formative force. They are pre-eminently sculptors, these substances; they bear the plastic principle within them. This is evident even in their outer formation through intuitive vision.

The strong effect of silicic acid is due, in the first place, to the fact that when the substance appears in the inorganic realm it has the tendency to shape itself into elongated crystals. The same results attainable with silicic acid could not be achieved with substances that have the tendency to develop into rounder, less elongated crystals. With such substances it might conceivably be possible to cure a hedgehog but not a human being, whose very principle of growth shows tendencies to elongation.

Those who have no sense for this artistry in nature—an artistry through which the organism is shaped, shaped chiefly by the nerve-sense activity—cannot discover in any rational sense the relationships between substances in the outer world and what is taking place in the human organism. Yet there is indeed a rational therapy—a therapy that is simply able to perceive processes that take place in the outer world, that are broken down in the human organism and can then be radiated out by the kidney activity and taken hold of by the plastic activity of the nerve-sense organism.

Let us take another example. Suppose that the radiating action of the kidneys, instead of being too strong, is too weak—that is to say, too little nourishment is being sucked up into the astrality. Everything I described in the previous complex of symptoms is due to excessive working in the astral organism, because it is active particularly in the upper human being and holds itself aloof from the activities of digestion, heart, and lungs. As a phenomenon accompanying this complex of symptoms, we find the formation of phlegm and the like, which is quite easy to understand. Thus in this complex we have to do with an excessive astral activity. Now suppose that the astral activity is too weak. The radiating activity of the kidneys is too weak, so that the astral organism of the human being is not in a position to supply what it should to the formative forces when it penetrates into their domain. The formative force cannot then work itself into the astral organism, because the latter does not reach sufficiently to the periphery. The result is that no active contact is established between the formative force and the force proceeding from the circulation of the food substances and their distribution. The substance is distributed without being taken in hand by the formative force. Not enough of the plastic force is present, and the substance is abandoned to its own life; the activity of the astral body remains too fleeting and does not work properly in the transformation of the substances.

We can certainly regard such a state of affairs as a complex of symptoms. How does it express itself? Above all, what is coursing through the blood vessels will not be absorbed in the proper way by the weak kidney activity, that is, by the astral organization working insufficiently. It collapses, as it were, resulting in hemorrhoids or excessive menstruation. The contact fails, and the metabolism lapses back into itself. In this condition of the organism it is particularly easy for a state of “fever of unknown origin”—as it is called—to arise, or even a condition of intermittent fever.

Now the question is: how can we approach this complex of symptoms? The activity of the astral organism is too weak. We must stimulate the renal activity so that through this activity enough substance may be drawn up into the astral organism. Something occurs now to which I have already pointed. The best thing to do here is to restore the balance between the etheric and astral organisms. Then, simply due to what passes from the digestive tract into the system of lungs and heart, we get the proper transition to the activity. We obtain a kind of balance, and in many cases we can control it precisely by regulating the iron content in the organism, which governs the circulation. This will now stimulate a strong, inner kidney activity, which will be evident outwardly in a change of excretions of urea, both through the kidneys and through the perspiration. This will be quite evident. But of course in many cases we must realize that this balance is always very unstable and that only in the crudest cases will the remedy in question here, which we already bear within us, be of assistance.

In the digestive tract substances containing sulfur in some form are the most effective, and in the nerve-sense system (which we now understand as the formative principle) substances such as silicic acid and alkaline salts are most effective; it is pure metals that are the substances to regulate the balance between gravity and buoyancy. We must only explore how best to apply them in order to restore the disturbed balance in the most varied ways. We begin with iron. According to the complex of symptoms, the most suitable metal may be gold, or perhaps copper. If we determine the form of the disease of the human organism, we will be able to achieve the most important results with the pure metals. If in the interplay between the functions of form-building and breaking down form there is too little form-building and this state of affairs becomes organic—if, therefore, the primary cause of the trouble is that the relation between the heart-lung system and the kidney system is upset—we will achieve the best results with iron.

If as a result of lengthy disturbances in these processes the organs themselves are already impaired, however, and have already suffered because the plastic activity has not been able to reach them—if the organs are already formed incorrectly due to an inadequate amount of plastic activity—we may have to apply mercury. Because mercury already contains the forces of form, the durable metallic drop-form within itself, it has a definite effect upon the lower organs of the human being. In the same way we can discover definite connections between metals and organs of the head that have been attacked and formed incorrectly, for instance when the nervous system itself has been attacked. In such a case, however, we must not confine ourselves to simply setting up a stable balance in opposition to the vacillating balance. This is extraordinarily difficult. This balance is just like a very sensitive pair of scales: we try in every possible way to bring the beam of the scale into balance, but it is very difficult. We shall approach it more easily, however, if we concern ourselves not merely with the beam but with the pans of the scale themselves. We can achieve a state of balance, for instance, by supporting the effect of the iron, introducing something sulfurous into the digestive tract and providing a counteraction in the nerve-sense organism by means of alkaline salts. Then in the middle, rhythmic system of the human being iron will be at work, which in this situation distributes itself beautifully; in the nerve-sense organism potassium, calcium, or alkaline salts will be at work, and in the rhythm of digestion sulfur will be at work. This way of attempting to restore the balance is better.

The remarkable thing is that we find the very opposite in the leaves of certain plants. If, for instance, we prepare the leaf of urtica dioica, the ordinary stinging nettle, in the right way, we have a remedy composed of sulfur, iron, and certain salts. But we must really know how to relate the devitalizing force that is present in the plant to the vitalizing force that is present in the human organism. In the root of urtica dioica, the whole sulfur process is tending gradually to the inorganic. The human organism takes the opposite course and transforms the sulfur by way of the protein in such a way that it gradually brings the digestion into order. The iron in urtica dioica works from the leaves in such a way that in the seed (and thereby in next year's leaves) this plant shatters the very thing that brings together the rhythmic process in the human organism—the process in the stinging nettle is the opposite. In fact, the stinging power of the nettle leaves is this destructive process that must be overcome if the rhythmic process in the human organism is to be regulated. Again, the alkaline salt content of the plant is least of all transformed into inorganic matter. Therefore it has the longest way to go, going right up to the nerve-sense organization; it goes up quite easily because, with the complex of symptoms we are now considering, we know that the kidney activity is asleep, is suppressed. In the human organism we actually have the opposite of what is expressing itself outwardly in the formation of the plants. But there is no need to confine ourselves merely to plant remedies; synthetic remedies may also be prepared and cures effected by combining in a suitable dosage the substances I have characterized.

These are matters that will gradually transform therapy into a rational science, but a science that is really an art, for without art, therapy cannot become a complete science any more than a person who is not an artist can be a sculptor. An individual may have a splendid knowledge of how to guide his chisel and how to mold the clay, but there must always be something leading over into the realm of the artistic. Without this, true therapy is impossible. We must really achieve the right touch—in a spiritual sense; of course—for determining the dosage. This will not suit those who would like to turn medicine into a “pure” science, but it is true nevertheless.

And now let me describe another possible situation. There may be a disturbance of the appropriate interaction between the inorganic element that the human organism produces as a preliminary to leading it over into organic life, and the subsequent intervention of the etheric body, of the heart-lung activity. The older an individual is, the more apparent is this disturbance in human development. In this case the digestive tract and the vascular system are not working together properly. When this happens, we must remember that the consequence will be an accumulation of the products of metabolism. If the substances are not being distributed properly in the organism, the natural result is an accumulation of the products of metabolism. Here we come to the whole domain of diseases of metabolism, from very mild cases to the most severe forms. We must realize that in such cases something is also amiss with the kidney activity due to the fact that because of the preceding congestion the kidneys receive nothing to radiate out.

This gives rise to highly complicated forms of disease. On the one hand the activity of digestion and the kidneys provides no material upon which the plastic, form-giving activity can work, and on the other hand, as the result of a stultification of this plastic activity, we have a disturbance of the organic balance from the other side, so that the plastic force, too, gradually ceases to function. The products of metabolism spread themselves out in the organism but fail, little by little, to be received into the field of the plastic activities and used as modeling material. When this happens, certain metabolic diseases arise that are very difficult to treat. The proper approach to treatment here is to stimulate in the digestive tract, and then also in the heart-lung tract, everything that is akin to elements that are on their way to the inorganic state—akin, that is, to the sulfuric or phosphoric elements in the blossoms of plants, connected with or bordering on the ethereal oils. By doing this we stimulate a renal activity in the organism and thereby help the plastic forces. In this type of disease it is very important to bring influence to bear on the digestive apparatus.

The kidney activity and the excretion of sweat are in a certain sense polar opposites, and they are intimately connected to each other. If the kidney activity is disturbed as a consequence of what I have described, we will always find that there is less perspiration. Great attention should be paid to this, for whenever there is a decrease in perspiration, we may be sure that something is amiss with the kidney activity. When perspiration decreases, what is happening as a rule is that the kidneys operate like a machine that has nothing to work upon but continues to act, while the products of digestion are already congested and are spreading improperly in the human organism. We may succeed in getting the better of these metabolic diseases if we apply sulfur treatments either inwardly or outwardly (for we can work just as well from the skin as from the kidneys themselves). By doing this we may succeed in stimulating the digestive tract to such an extent that it in turn stimulates the heart-lung activity so that material is again supplied to the renal activity; then this material does not lie fallow without reaching the renal activity.

In all these matters, however, we must be quite clear that the human organism does not wish to be absolutely cured but only to be stimulated to unfold the healing process. This is a fact of supreme importance. In the state of illness, the human organism wishes to be stimulated to unfold the healing process. If the healing is to endure we must actually limit ourselves to giving a mere stimulus. A cure that apparently takes place immediately leads much more readily to relapses than a cure that merely stimulates the healing process. The organism must first accustom itself to the course of the healing process, and it is then able to continue it through its own activity. In this way the organism binds itself much more intimately to the healing process, until such time as the reaction again sets in. Before this happens, however, the organism settles down. If the organism can be made to adjust itself to the healing process for a certain length of time, this is the best possible cure, for then the organism actually absorbs what has been transmitted to it in the healing process.

I have only been able to give you certain hints as to method here, but you will realize that with what I call a spiritual scientific illumination of physiology, pathology, and therapy, we are trying to understand that the human being is not an isolated being but belongs to the whole universe. We must also see that with any process taking place in the human being in an ascending curve, let us say, we must seek outside the human being in nature for the descending curve. In this way we will be able to modify curves that are ascending too abruptly, and so forth. Medicine demands knowledge of the whole world in a certain sense. I have been able to offer only a tiny fragment, of course, but this fragment should make clear to you that there must be an entirely different understanding of the nature of urtica dioica, colchicum autumnale, or indeed of any other plant, the plants themselves must tell us where their descending tendency is leading.

When you approach the colchicum autumnale, the autumn crocus, you must understand that the time of year in which it appears is not without significance for its whole structure, for this brings about a certain relation to the vitalizing process. That the devitalization is very slight in colchicum autumnale you can see from the very color of its blossom and the time of its flowering. If you then experiment with colchicum autumnale as a remedy, you will find that the organism must exert itself to a very high level to bring about the opposite vitalization, that is to say—if I may express it crudely—to kill the plant and then make it alive again. Indeed, this whole process unfolds right up into the human thyroid gland. Now you have the basis for a series of investigations with colchicum autumnale as a remedy against enlargements of the thyroid gland.

Let me assure you once again that there is no question here of a wasteful and amateurish abuse of modern scientific methods. Instead we are giving guidelines that will actually lead to more tangible results than pure experimentation. I am not by any means saying that such a pure experimentation cannot also be fruitful. It does indeed lead to certain goals, but with this method a great deal passes by us completely, especially many things we can learn by observing nature. Although it is fine to produce synthetically a preparation composed of iron, sulfur, and alkali, it is good to know how, in a particular plant, all these substances are synthetically brought together in a certain way by nature herself. Even in the production of synthetic remedies we can learn a great deal by understanding what is going on outside in nature.

It would be fascinating to enter into many things in detail, and I think that some of our doctors will have done so in other lectures. A great deal, too, can be found in our literature, and there are many subjects that I hope will soon be dealt with there. I am convinced that as soon as these matters are presented in a clear, concise form and people are not afraid to go straight ahead, they will take this point of view: “I must above all heal if I want to be a doctor, and so I will turn to what appears antipathetic to me at first. If it really helps, I can only try to profit from it as well as from what is to be found in the standard literature.”

I think it would be good if as soon as possible we could produce literature of a kind that would offer a bridge between spiritual science and modern sense-oriented science. It would encourage the opinion that these remedies help, so they cannot after all be such utter nonsense! I am quite sure that when our work is properly in motion, the verdict will be that it does indeed help. And here I will conclude. Try these things and you will see that they help. This too will be significant, for many things that are used in orthodox medicine do not help when they are applied. Everything that we would like to introduce from the viewpoint of spiritual science can unfold in the struggle between what does and does not help.

I have often characterized spiritual science, as it is meant here, in these lectures. It seeks to be a true continuation of the natural scientific world view, indeed of natural scientific research in general, in that it adds to those forces of the human soul that are used when man faces the external sensory world and uses his senses and mind to explore it, which is connected to the brain, that it adds to these forces, which are also used by all external science, those forces that lie dormant in the soul in ordinary life and in the work of ordinary science, but can be brought out of this soul, can be developed and thus enable the human being to relate in a living way to what, as spiritual laws and spiritual entities, interweaves and permeates the world, and to which man, with his innermost being, also belongs, belongs through those powers of his being that pass through birth and death, that are the eternal powers of his being. In its entire attitude, in its scientific attitude, this spiritual science wants to be a true successor of natural science. And that which distinguishes it from natural science and which has just been characterized must be present in it for the reason that, if one wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, one needs other powers for the spiritual world in the same way that natural science penetrates into the natural world. One needs the exposure of the cognitive faculty in the human soul, of cognitive powers attuned to the spiritual world.

Today, I want to show in particular that this spiritual science, as it is presented today as a starting point for the spiritual development of people in the future, is not brought out of spiritual life or placed in spiritual life by mere arbitrariness, but is firmly anchored in the most significant endeavors of German spiritual life, even if they have perhaps been forgotten due to the circumstances of modern times. And here we shall repeatedly and repeatedly encounter – and they must also be mentioned today, although I have repeatedly presented them in the lectures I have given here last winter and this winter – when we speak of the German people's greatest intellectual upsurge, of the actual summit of their intellectual life, we must repeatedly and repeatedly encounter the three figures: Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.

I took the liberty of characterizing Fichte, as he is firmly rooted in German intellectual life, in a special lecture in December. Today I would like to draw particular attention to the fact that Fichte, in his constant search for a fixed point within his own human interior, for a living center of human existence, is in a certain sense a starting point for endeavors in spiritual science. And at the same time — as was mentioned in particular in the Fichte lecture here — he is the spirit who, I might say, felt from a deep sense of what he had to say, as if through a dialogue with the German national spirit. I have pointed out how Fichte, in contrast to Western philosophy, for example, to the Western world view, is above all concerned with attaining a higher human conception of the world by revealing the human inner powers, the human soul powers. For Fichte, the human ego, the center of the human soul, is something that is constantly being created within the human being, so that it can never be lost to the human being, because the human being not only shares in the existence of this center of the human being, but also shares in the creative powers of this human being. And how does Fichte imagine that this creativity in man is anchored in the all-creative of the world? As the highest that man can attain to when he tries to immerse himself in that which weaves and lives in the world as the Divine-Spiritual. As such supreme spiritual-divine, Fichte recognizes that which is volitional, which, as world-will permeated by world-duty, pulses through and permeates everything, and with its current permeates the own human soul, but in this own human soul is now grasped not as being, but as creativity. So that when man expresses his ego, he can know himself to be one with the world-will at work in the world. The divine-spiritual, which the world, external nature, has placed before man, wants, as it were, to enter into the center of the human being. And man becomes aware of this inner volition, speaks of it as his self, as his ego.

And so Fichte felt himself to be at rest with his self, but at the same time, in this rest, extremely moved in the creative will of the world. From this he then draws the strength that he has applied throughout his life. From this he also draws the strength to regard all that is external and sensual, as he says, as a mere materialized tool for the duty of the human being that pulsates in his will. Thus, for Fichte, the truly spiritual is what flows into the human soul as volition. For him, the external world is the sensitized material of duty. And so we see him, how he wants to point out to people again and again throughout his life, to the source, to the living source of their own inner being.

In the Fichte lecture, I pointed out how Fichte stood before his audience, for example in Jena, and tried to touch each individual listener in their soul, so that they would become aware of how the All-Creative lives spiritually within. So he said to his listeners: “Imagine the wall!” Then the listeners looked at the wall and could think the wall. After they had thought the wall for a while, he said: “Now think of the one who thought the wall.” At first the listeners were somewhat perplexed. They were to grasp inwardly, spiritually, each within themselves. But at the same time, it was the way to point each individual to his own self, to point out to him that he can only grasp the world if he finds himself in his deepest inner being and there discovers how what the world wills flows into him and what rises in his own will as the source of his own being. Above all, one sees (and I do not wish to repeat myself today with regard to the lecture I gave here in December) how Fichte lives a world view of power. Therefore, those who listened to him — and many spoke in a similar way — could say: His words rushed “like a thunderstorm that discharges its fire in individual strikes”. And Fichte, by directly grasping the soul, wanted to bring the divine spiritual will that permeates the world, not just good will, to the soul; he wanted to educate great people. And so he lived in a living together of his soul with the world soul and regarded this precisely as the result of a dialogue with the German national spirit, and it was out of this consciousness that he found those powerful words with which he encouraged and strengthened his people in one of Germany's most difficult times. It was precisely out of this consciousness that he found the power to work as he was able to do in the “Speeches to the German Nation,” inspiring his people to a great extent.

Like Fichte's follower, Schelling stands there, especially in his best pages, one could say, like Fichte, more or less forgotten. If Fichte stands more as the man who wants to grasp the will, the will of the world, and let the will of the world roll forth in his own words, if this Fichte stands as the man who, so to speak, commands the concepts and ideas, then Schelling stands before us as he stood before his enthusiastic audiences – and there were many such, I myself knew people who knew the aged Schelling very well – he stands before us, not like Fichte, the commander of the world view, he stands before us as the seer, from whose eyes sparkled what he had to communicate enthusiastically in words about nature and spirit. He stood before his audience in Jena in the 1790s, at what was then the center of learning for the German people. He stood in Munich and Erlangen and Berlin in the 1840s. Everywhere he went, he radiated something of a seer, as if he were surrounded by spirituality and spoke from the realm of the spiritual.

To give you an idea of how such a figure stood in the former heyday of German intellectual life in front of people who had a sense for it, I would like to bring you some words about the lecture, which were written down by an audience member, by a loyal audience member because he met Schelling again and again: Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert. I would like to read to you the words that Schubert wrote about the way Schelling stood before his audience, “already as a young man among young men,” back in the 1790s in Jena. About this, Schubert, who was himself a deeply spiritual person, writes of a person who has wonderfully immersed himself in the secrets of nature, who tried to follow the mysterious weaving of the human soul into the dream world and into the abnormal phenomena of mental life, but who was also able to ascend to the highest heights of human intellectual life. This Schubert writes about Schelling:

Two things stand out in these words of the deep and spirited Schubert. The first is that he felt - and we know that it was the same with others who heard Schelling - that this man speaks from direct spiritual experience, he shapes his words by looking into a spiritual world and thus shapes a wisdom from direct spiritual experience that deals with this spiritual world.

That is the significance, the infinitely significant thing about this great period of German idealism, that countless people then standing on the outside of life heard personalities such as Fichte, such as Schelling and, as we shall see in a moment, Hegel, and from the words of these personalities heard the spirit speak, looked into the realm of these geniuses of the German people. Anyone who is familiar with the intellectual history of humanity knows that such a relationship between the spirit and the age existed only within the German people and could only exist within the German people because of the nature of the German people. This is a special result that is deeply rooted in the very foundations of the German character. That is one thing that can be seen from this.

The other thing is that, in this period, people were formed who, like Schubert, were able to ignite their own relationship to the spiritual world through these great, significant, impressive personalities. From such a state of soul, Schelling developed a thinking about nature and a thinking about soul and spirit that, one might say, bore the character of the most intimate life, but also bore the character of which one might say shows how man is prepared, with his soul, to descend into all being and, in all being, first of all into nature, and then into the spirit, to seek life, the direct life. Under the influence of this way of thinking, knowledge becomes something very special: knowledge becomes inner experience, becoming part of the experience of things.

I have said it again and again: It is not important to place oneself today in some dogmatic way on the ground of what these spirits have said in terms of content. One does not even have to agree with what they said in terms of content. What matters is the way of striving, the way in which they seek the paths into the spiritual world. Schelling felt so intimately connected — even if he expressed it one-sidedly — with what lives and moves in nature that he could once utter the saying, “To know nature is to create nature.” Certainly, in the face of such a saying, the shallow superficial will always be right in comparison to the genius who, like Schelling, utters such a saying from the depths of his being. Let us give the shallow superficialist the right, but let us be clear: even if nature can only be recreated in the human soul, in Schelling's saying, “To recognize nature is to create nature,” means an intimate interweaving of the whole human personality with natural existence. And for Schelling this becomes the one revelation of the divine-spiritual, and the soul of man the other revelation. They confront each other, they correspond to each other. The spirit first created itself in soulless nature, which gradually became ensouled from the plant kingdom to the animal kingdom and to man, as it were, creating the soil in which the soul can then flourish. The soul experiences the spiritual directly in itself, experiences it in direct reality.

How different it appears, when rightly understood, from the spiritual knowledge of nature which is striven for as the outcome, let us say, of Romance popularism. In the development of the German spirit there is no need to descend to the level of tone which the enemies of Germany have now reached when they wish to characterize the relation of the German spiritual life to other spiritual lives in Europe. One can remain entirely on the ground of fact. Therefore, what is to be said now is not said out of narrow national feelings, but out of fact itself. Compare such a desire to penetrate nature, as present in Schelling, where nature is to be grasped in such a way that the soul's own life is submerged in that which lives and moves outside. Compare this with what is characteristic of the Western world view, which reached its highest level with Descartes, Cartesius, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but has been continued into our days and is just as characteristic of Western culture as Fichte's and Schelling's striving is for German culture. Like Fichte and Schelling later on, Cartesius also takes up a position in relation to the world of nature. He starts by taking the standpoint of doubt. He also seeks within himself a central point through which he can arrive at a certainty about the existence of the world and of life. His famous “Cogito, ergo sum” is well known: “I think, therefore I am.” What does he rely on? Not, like Fichte, on the living ego, from which one cannot take away its existence, because it is continually creating itself out of the world-will. He relies on thinking, which is supposed to be there already, on that which already lives in man: I think, therefore I am — which can easily be refuted with every night's sleep of man, because one can just as well say: I do not think, therefore I am not. Nothing fruitful follows from Descartes' “I think, therefore I am”. But how little this world view is suited to submerging into nature with one's own soul essence can best be seen from a single external characteristic. Descartes tried to characterize the nature surrounding the soul. And he himself sought to address the animals as moving machines, as soulless machines. Only man himself, he thought, could speak of himself as if he had a soul. The animals are moving machines, are soulless machines.

So little is the soul out of this folklore placed in the possibility of immersing itself in the inner life of the external thing that it cannot find inspiration within the animal world. No wonder that this continued until the materialism of the eighteenth century and continued - as we will mention today - until our own days, as in that materialism of the eighteenth century, in that material ism that conceived of the whole world only as a mechanism, and which finally realized, especially in de Lamettrie in his book “L'homme-machine”, even came to understand man himself only as a moving machine. All this is already present in germinal form in Cartesius.

Goethe, out of his German consciousness, became acquainted with this Western world view, and he spoke out of his German consciousness: They offer us a world of moving atoms that push and pull each other. If they then at least wanted to derive the manifold, the beautiful, the great, the sublime phenomena of the world from these atoms that push and pull each other. But after they have presented this bleak, desolate image of the world, they let it be presented and do nothing to show how the world emerges from these accumulations of atoms.

The third thinker who should be mentioned among those minds that, as it were, form the background of the world view from which everything that the German mind has achieved in that time through Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing and so on has sprung, is Hegel. In him we see the third aspect of the German mind embodied at the same time. In him we see a third way of finding the point in the soul through which this human soul can feel directly one with the whole world, with that which, in a divine-spiritual way, pulses, weaves and permeates the world. If in Fichte we see the will grasping directly in the innermost part of man, and in Schelling, I might say, the mind, then in Hegel we see the human thought grasped. But in that Hegel attempts to grasp the thought not merely as human, but in its purity, detached from all sensual sensations and perceptions, directly in the soul, Hegel feels as if, in living in the living and breathing and becoming of pure thought, he also lives in the thought that not only lives in the soul, but that is only meant to appear in the soul, because it reveals itself in it, as divine-spiritual thinking permeating all of the world. Just as the divine spiritual beings scatter their thoughts throughout the world, as it were, thinking the world and continually fashioning it in thought, so it is revealed when the thinker, alone with himself, gives rise to pure thinking, thinking that is not borrowed from the external world of the senses but that the human being finds as thinking that springs up within him when he gives himself to his inner being. Basically, what Hegel wants, if one may say so, is a mystical will. But it is not an unclear, dark or nebulous mysticism. The dark, unclear or nebulous mysticism wants to unite with the world ground in the darkest feelings possible. Hegel also wants the soul to unite with the ground of the world, but he seeks this in crystal clarity, in the transparency of thinking; he seeks it in inner experience, he seeks it in the world of thoughts. In perfect clarity, he seeks for the soul that which is otherwise only believed in unclear mysticism.

All this shows how these three important minds are endeavoring from three different sides to bring the human soul to experience the totality of reality by devotion to the totality of reality, how they are convinced that something can be found in the soul that experiences the world in its depths and thus yields a satisfying world view.

Fichte speaks to his Berlin students in 1811 and 1813 about attaining such a world picture in such a way that it is clear that he is well aware that one must strive for certain powers of knowledge that lie dormant in the soul. Fichte then says to his Berlin students in the years mentioned: If one really wants to have that which must be striven for in order to truly and inwardly grasp the world spiritually, then it is necessary that the human being finds and awakens a slumbering sense, a new sense, a new sense organ, within himself. Just as the eye is formed in the physical body, so a new sense organ must be developed out of the soul in Fichte's sense, if we are to look into the spiritual world. That is why Fichte boldly says to his listeners in these years, when, as far as he could achieve it in his relatively short life, his world view has reached the highest peak: What I have to say to you is like a single seeing person entering a world of blind people. What he has to say to them about the world of light, the world of colors, initially affects them, and at first they will say it is nonsense because they cannot sense anything.

And Schelling - we can already see it in the saying that Schubert made about him - has drawn attention to intellectual intuition. What he coined in his words, for which he coined a wisdom, he sought to explore in the world by developing the organ within him into an “intellectual intuition”. From this intellectual intuition, Schelling speaks in such a way that he could have the effect that has just been characterized.

From his point of view, Hegel then opposed this intellectual view. He believed that to assert this intellectual view was to characterize individual exceptional people, people who, through a higher disposition, had become capable of looking into the spiritual world. Hegel, on the contrary, was thoroughly convinced that every human being is capable of looking into the spiritual world, and he wanted to emphasize this thoroughly.

Thus these minds were opposed to each other not only in the content of what they said, but they were also opposed to each other in such profound views. But that is not the point, but rather the fact that they all basically strive for what can truly be called spiritual science: the experience of the world through that which sits in the deepest part of man. And in this they are united with the greatest spirit who created out of German folkhood, with Goethe, as Fichte, Hegel and Schelling have often said.

Goethe speaks of this contemplative power of judgment in a beautiful little essay entitled “Contemplative Power of Judgment”. What does Goethe mean by this contemplative power of judgment? The senses initially observe the external physical world. The mind combines what this external physical world presents to it. When the senses observe the external physical world, they do not see the essence of things, says Goethe; this must be observed spiritually. In this process, the power of judgment must not merely combine; the concepts and ideas that arise must not merely arise in such a way that they seek to depict something else; something of the world spirit itself must live in the power that forms concepts and ideas. The power of judgment must not merely think; the power of judgment must look at, look spiritually, as the senses otherwise look. Goethe is completely at one with those who have, as it were, provided the background for the world view, just as they feel at one with him. Just as Fichte, for example, when he published the first edition of his seemingly so abstract Theory of Science, sent it to Goethe in sheets and wrote to him: “The pure spirituality of feeling that one sees in you must also be the touchstone for what we create.

A wonderful relationship of a spiritual kind exists between the three world-view personalities mentioned and minds such as Goethe; we could also cite Schiller, we could also cite Herder, we could cite them all, who in such great times drew directly from the depths of German national character.

It must be said that all that was created in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and in the others, contains something that is not fully expressed in any of them: Fichte seeks to recognize the spiritual world by experiencing the will as it flows into the soul; Schelling turns more to the mind, Hegel to the thought content of the world, others to other things. Above all of them, as it were, like the unity that expresses itself in three or so many different ways, hovers that which one can truly call the striving of the German national spirit itself, which cannot be fully expressed by any single personality, but which expresses itself as in three shades, for example, in relation to a world view in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Those who do not stand as dogmatic followers or opponents to these personalities – one could be beyond such childishness today, that one wants to be a follower or opponent of a spirit if one wants to understand it in its greatness – but have a heart and a mind and an open feeling for their striving, will discern everywhere, in all their expressions, something like the German national soul itself, so that what they say is always more powerful than what is directly expressed. That is the strange and mysterious thing about these minds. And that is why later, far less important personalities than these great, ingenious ones, were even able to arrive at more significant, more penetrating spiritual truths than these leading and dominant minds themselves. That is the significant thing: through these minds something is expressed that is more than these minds, that is the central German national spirit itself, which continues to work, so that lesser minds, far less talented minds, could come, and in these far less talented minds the same spirit is expressed, but even in a more spiritual scientific way than in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel themselves. They were the ones who first, I might say, set the tone and for the first time communicated something to the world, drawing it from the source of spiritual life. Even for geniuses, this is difficult. But once the great, powerful stimulus had been provided, lesser minds followed. And it must be said that these lesser minds in some cases captured the path into the spiritual worlds even more profoundly and meaningfully than those on whom they depended, who were their teachers.

Thus we see in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, how he strives in his own way for a spiritual science, and in such a way that he seeks a higher human being in the sensual human being who stands before us, who is grasped by the outer senses and outer science , whom he calls an etheric human being, and in whom lie the formative forces for this physical human being, which are built up before the physical body receives its hereditary substance from the parents, and which are maintained as the sum of the formative forces when the physical body passes through the gate of death. Immanuel Hermann Fichte speaks of an ethereal human being, of an ethereal human being who is inwardly strengthened and filled with strength, who belongs to the eternal forces of the universe just as the human being here belongs to the physical forces of the hereditary current as a physical human being, probably because of his association with his father, who was a good educator for him.

And one would like to say: How carried to higher heights we find the Fichtean, the Schellingian striving in a man who has become little known, who almost belongs to the forgotten spirits of German intellectual life, but in whom is deeply rooted precisely what is the essence of the German national spirit - in Troxler. Troxler - who knows Troxler? And yet, what do we know of this Troxler? Under the influence of Schelling, in particular, he wrote his profound > Blicke in das Wesen des Menschen in 1811 and then gave his lectures on philosophy in 1834. These lectures are certainly not written in a piquant way, to use the foreign word for something foreign, but they are written in such a way that they show us: A person is speaking who does not just want to approach the world with the intellect, with which one can only grasp the finite, but one who wants to give the whole personality of the human being with all its powers to the world, so that this personality, when it immerses itself in the world's phenomena, brings with it a knowledge that is fertilized by the co-experience, by the most intimate co-experience with the being of the world. And Troxler knows something about the fact that among those powers of the soul that are initially turned towards external nature and its sensuality, higher spiritual powers live. And in a strange way, Troxler now seeks to elevate the spirit above itself. He speaks of a super-spiritual sense that can be awakened in man, of a super-spiritual sense that slumbers in man. What does Troxler mean by that? He means: The human spirit otherwise thinks only in abstract concepts and ideas that are dry and empty, mere images of the external world; but in the same force that lives in these abstract concepts and ideas, there also lives something that can be awakened by man as a spiritual being. Then he sees in supersensible images the way one can see external reality with the eyes. In ordinary cognition, the sensory image is present first, and the thought, which is not sensory-pictorial, is added in the process of cognition. In the spiritual process of cognition, the supersensible experience is present; this could not be seen as such if it did not pour itself through a power that is natural to the spirit into the image, which brings it to a spiritual-descriptive sensualization. For Troxler, such knowledge is that of the super-spiritual sense. And what this super-spiritual sense bypasses, Troxler calls the supersensible spirit, the spirit that rises above mere observation of the sensual, and which, as spirit, experiences what is out there in the world. How could I fail to mention to those esteemed listeners who heard a lecture like the one I gave on Friday two weeks ago that in this supersensible sense and supersensible spirit of Troxler, the germs — if only the germs, but nevertheless the germs — lie in what I had to characterize as the two paths into spiritual science,

But there is another way in which Troxler expresses it wonderfully. He says: When the human being is first placed in his physical body with his soul, with his eternal self, when he stands face to face with the moral, the religious, but also with the outer, immediate reality, then he develops three forces: faith, hope and love. These three forces, which he continues to develop, he develops in life within the physical-sensual body. It simply belongs to the human being, as he stands in the physical-sensual world, that he lives in faith, in love, in hope. But Troxler says: That which is proper to the soul of man here within the physical body as faith, as justified belief, is, so to speak, the outer expression of a deeper power that is within the soul, which, through this faith, shines into the physical world as a divine power. But behind this power of faith, which, in order to unfold, absolutely requires the physical body, lies supersensible hearing. This means that faith is, in a sense, what a person makes out of supersensible hearing. By making use of the sensory instrument for supersensible hearing, he believes. But if he frees himself from his sensory body and experiences himself in the soul, then the same power that becomes faith in the sensory life gives him supersensible hearing, through which he can delve into a world of spiritual sound phenomena through which spiritual entities and spiritual facts speak to him.

And the love that a person develops here in the physical body, which is the flowering of human life on earth, is the outer expression of a power that lies behind it: for spiritual feeling or touching, says Troxler. And when a person delves deeper into this same power, which lives here as the blossom of the moral earthly existence, of the religious earthly existence, when he delves deeper into this love, when he goes to the foundations of this love, then he discovers within himself that the spiritual man has organs of feeling through which he can touch spiritual beings and spiritual facts just as he can touch physical facts with his sensory organs of feeling or touching. Behind love lies spiritual feeling or touching, as behind faith lies spiritual hearing.

And behind the hope that a person has in this or that form lies spiritual vision, the insight through the spiritual sense of seeing into the spiritual world.

Thus, behind what a person experiences as the power of faith, love and hope, Troxler sees only the outer expression of higher powers: for spiritual hearing, for spiritual feeling, for spiritual beholding or seeing. And then he says: When a person can give himself to the world in such a way that he gives himself with his spiritual hearing, spiritual feeling, spiritual seeing, then not only do thoughts come to life in him that so externally and abstractly reflect the external world, but, as Tro “sensible thoughts”, thoughts that can be felt themselves, that is, that are living beings, and ‘intelligent feelings’, that is, not just dark feelings in which one feels one's own existence in the world, but something through which the feelings themselves become intelligent. We know from the lecture just mentioned that it is actually the will, not the feelings; but in Troxler there is definitely the germ of everything that can be presented in spiritual science today. When a person awakens to this seeing, to this hearing and sensing of the spiritual world, when in this feeling a life of thought awakens through which the person can connect with the living thought that weaves and lives in the spiritual world, just as thought lives in us essentially, not just abstractly. Troxler feels his striving for spiritual science so deeply. And I would like to read a passage from Troxler from which you can see just how profound this striving was for Troxler. He once said:

"In the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body, or assumed that the soul was a kind of covering for the face within this body, that the soul had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and that the soul was the higher inner man... In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously dreams, in jest, an entire inward, spiritual man who carries all the limbs of the outward on his spirit body."

Troxler then draws attention to others who have more or less sensed this other side of the nature of the world from the depths of German spiritual endeavor. Troxler continues:

"Lavater writes and thinks in the same way, and even when Jean Paul makes humorous jokes about Bonnet's undergarment and Platner's soul corset, which are said to be , we also hear him asking: What is the purpose and origin of these extraordinary talents and desires within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthly shell? Why was I stuck to this dirty lump of earth, a creature with useless wings of light, when I was supposed to rot back into the birth clod without ever wriggling free with ethereal wings?"

Troxler draws attention to such currents in German intellectual life. And then he comes up with the idea that a special science could now arise from this, a science that is a science but that has something in common with poetry, for example, in that it arises from the human soul, in that not a single power of the soul, but the whole human soul, surrenders itself in order to experience the world together with others.

If you look at people from the outside, Troxler says, you get to know anthropology. Anthropology is what arises when you examine with the senses and with the mind what the human being presents and what is revealed in the human being. But with this one does not find the full essence of the human being. What Troxler calls in the characterized sense, spiritual hearing, spiritual feeling, spiritual seeing, what he calls supersensible spirit, superspiritual sense, that is part of it, in order to see something higher in the human being. A science stands before his soul, which does not arise out of the senses, not out of mere intellect, but out of this higher faculty of knowledge in the human being. And Troxler speaks very characteristically about this science in the following way. He says - Troxler's following words were written in 1835 -:

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

In the 1830s, Troxler became aware of the idea of anthroposophy, a science that seeks to be a spiritual science based on human power in the truest sense of the word. Spiritual science can, if it is able to correctly understand the germs that come from the continuous flow of German intellectual life, say: Among Western peoples, for example, something comparable to spiritual science, something comparable to anthroposophy, can indeed arise; but there it will always arise in such a way that it runs alongside the continuous stream of the world view, alongside what is there science, and therefore very, very easily becomes a sect or a sectarianism. , but it will always arise in such a way that it runs alongside the continuous stream of world view, alongside what is science there, and therefore very, very easily tends towards sectarianism or dilettantism. In German spiritual life — and in this respect German spiritual life stands alone — spiritual science arises as something that naturally emerges from the deepest impulses, from the deepest forces of this German spiritual life. Even when this German spiritual life becomes scientific with regard to the spiritual world and develops a striving for spiritual knowledge, the seeds of what must become spiritual science already lie in this striving. Therefore, we never see what flows through German intellectual life in this way die away.

Or is it not almost wonderful that in 1856 a little book was published by a pastor from Waldeck? He was a pastor in Sachsenberg in Waldeck. In this little book – as I said, the content is not important, but the striving – an attempt is made, in a way that is completely opposed to Hegel, to find something for the human soul, through which this human soul, by awakening the power slumbering in it, can join the whole lofty awakening spiritual world. And this is admirably shown by the simple pastor Rocholl in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck in his little book: 'Contributions to the History of German Theosophy' — a small booklet, but full of real inner spiritual life, of a spiritual life in which one can see that one who has sought it in his solitude finds everywhere the possibility of rising from the lonely inner experience of the soul to broad views of the world that are hidden behind the sensual one and yet always carry this sensual one, so that one has only one side of the world when one looks at this sensual life. One does not know what one should admire first in such a little book, which must certainly make a fantastic impression today – but that is not the point; whether one should admire more the fact that the simple country pastor found his way into the deepest depths of spiritual endeavor, or whether one should admire the foundations of the continuous flow of German intellectual life, which can produce such blossoms even in the simplest person. And if we had time, I could give you hundreds and hundreds of examples from which you would see how, admittedly not in the field of outwardly recognized, but more in the field of forgotten spiritual tones, but nevertheless vividly surviving spiritual tones, are present everywhere in such people who carry forward to our days what can be called a spiritual-scientific striving within the development of German thought.

As early as the first edition of my World and Life Views, which appeared more than a year and a half ago under the title of Riddles of Philosophy, I called attention to a little-known thinker, Karl Christian Planck. But what good did it do to call attention to such spirits, at least initially? Such spirits are more tangible as an expression, as a revelation of what is now alive, what is not expressed in the scientific activity in question, but nevertheless supports and sustains this scientific activity in many ways. Such spirits arise precisely from the deepest depths of the German character, of which Karl Christian Planck is one. Planck has written a book entitled 'Truth and shallowness of Darwinism', a very important book. He has also written a book about the knowledge of nature. I will mention only the following from this book, although basically every page is interesting:

When people talk about the earth today, they talk, I would say, in a geological sense. The earth is a mineral body to them, and man walks on it as an alien being. For Planck, the Earth, with everything that grows on it and including man, is a great spiritual-soul organism, and man belongs to it. One has simply not understood the Earth if one has not shown how, in the whole organism of the Earth, the physical human being must be present in that his soul is outwardly embodied. The earth is seen as a whole, all its forces, from the most physical to the most spiritual, are grasped as a unity. Planck wants to establish a unified world picture, which is spiritual, to use Goethe's expression. But Planck is aware – in this respect he is one of the most characteristic thinkers of the nineteenth century – of how what he is able to create really does emerge from the very depths of the German national spirit. He expresses this in the following beautiful words in his essay 'Grundlinien einer Wissenschaft der Natur' (Foundations of a Science of Nature), which appeared in 1864:

“He is fully aware of the power of deeply rooted prejudices against his writing, stemming from previous views. But just as the work itself, despite all the unfavorable circumstances that arose from the author's overall situation and professional position,” namely, he was a simple high school teacher, not a university professor — “a work of this kind was opposed, but its realization and its way into the public has fought, then he is also certain that what must now first fight for its recognition will appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German views of nature and spirit.

What our medieval poetry has already unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation in the maturity of the times. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, which has been afflicted with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram von Eschenbach describes it in his “Parzival”)” - this was written in 1864, long before Wagner's ‘Parsifal’! “Finally, in the strength of its unceasing striving, it attains the highest, it gets to the bottom of the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what poetry has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which is attained by its hero, conversely receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the lasting knowledge of nature and of spirit itself.

Thus speaks he who then gave the summary of his world picture under the title “The Will of a German”, in which an attempt is really made, again at a higher level than was possible for Schelling, to penetrate nature and spirit. In 1912, this “The Will of a German” was published in a new edition. I do not think that many people have studied it. Those who deal with such things professionally had other things to do: the books by Bergson, by that Bergson — his name is still Bergson! who has used the present time not only to revile but also to slander in the truest sense what has emerged from German intellectual life; who has managed to describe the entire current intellectual culture of the Germans as mechanistic. I have said here before: when he wrote that the Germans have descended from the heights on which they stood under Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Schelling and Hegel, and that now they are creating a mechanical culture, he probably believed that the Germans, when they march up with cannons, would declaim Novalis or Goethe's poems to their opponents! But from the fact that he now only sees—or probably does not see—guns and rifles, he makes German culture into a completely mechanistic one.

Now, just as the other things I have been saying during this period have been said again and again in the years before the war, and also to members of other nations – so that they must not be understood as having been prompted by the situation of war – I tried to present Bergson's philosophy in the book that was completed at the beginning of the war, the second edition of my “Weltund Lebensanschauungen” (World and Life Views). And in the same book I pointed out how, I might say, one of the most brilliant ideas in Bergson's work, infinitely greater, more incisive and profound — here again we have such a forgotten 'tone of German intellectual life' — had already appeared in 1882 in the little-known Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss. At one point in his books, Bergson draws attention to the fact that when considering the world, one should not start with the mineral kingdom and then the plant and animal kingdoms, and only then include man in them, but rather start with man; how man is the is original and the other entities in the continuous flow, in which he developed while he was the first, has rejected the less perfect, so that the other natural kingdoms have developed out of the human kingdom.

In my book Rätseln der Philosophie (Mysteries of Philosophy), I pointed out how the lonely, deep thinker, but also energetic and powerful thinker, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss, in his book Geist und Stoff (Mind and Matter), and basically in fact, even earlier than 1882, this idea in a powerful, courageous way, - the idea that one cannot get along with Darwinism understood in a purely Western sense, but that one has to imagine: if you go back in the world, you first have the human being. The human being is the original, and as the human being develops further, he expels certain entities, first the animals, then the plants, then the minerals. That is the reverse course of development.

I cannot go into this in detail today – I have even dealt with this idea several times in lectures from previous years – but I would like to mention today that this spiritual worldview is fully represented in the German spiritual movement of the 1880s in the book by Preuss, 'Geist und Stoff' (Spirit and Matter). I would like to read to you a key passage from my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” so that you can see how a powerful world view, which is part of the whole current that I have characterized for you today, flows into the spiritual life of humanity in weighty words. Preuss says:

The center of this new doctrine is man, the only species on our planet that recurs: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers started with natural objects and then went so astray that they could not find the way to man, which Darwin only managed in the most miserable and thoroughly unsatisfactory way by seeking the progenitor of the Lord of Creation among the animals, while the naturalist should start with himself as a human being, and thus gradually return to humanity through the whole realm of being and thinking! It was not by chance that human nature emerged from the evolution of all earthly things, but by necessity. Man is the goal of all telluric processes, and every other form emerging alongside him has borrowed its traits from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos... When his germs had emerged, the remaining organic residue no longer had the necessary strength to produce further human germs. What emerged was animal or plant...

In 1882, what the human soul can experience spiritually, presented within German intellectual life! Then Bergson comes along and by no means presents the thought in such a powerful, penetrating way, connected with the innermost life of the soul, but, one might say, in a slightly pursed, mincing, more and more indeterminate way. And people are overwhelmed by Bergson and do not want to know about Preuss. And Bergson apparently knows nothing about Preuss. But that is about as bad for someone who writes about worldviews as it would be if he knew about it and did not say anything. But we do not want to examine whether Bergson knew and did not say, or whether he did not know, now that it has been sufficiently proven that Bergson not only borrowed ideas from Schopenhauer and expressed them in his own words, but also took ideas from the entire philosophy of German idealism, for example Schelling and Fichte, and seems to consider himself their creator. It is indeed a special method of characterizing the relationship of one people to another, as Bergson now continually does to his French counterparts, by presenting German science and German knowledge as something particularly mechanical, after he has previously endeavored - which is probably not a very mechanical activity - to describe these German world-view personalities over pages. After a while, one realizes that Bergson could have kept silent altogether if he had not built his world view on the foundations of the German world view personalities, which is basically nothing more than a Cartesian mechanism, the mechanism of the eighteenth century, warmed up by a somewhat romantically understood Schellingianism and Schopenhauerianism.

As I said, one must characterize things appropriately; for it must be clear to our minds that when we speak of the relationship of the German character in the overall development of humanity, we do not need to adopt the same method of disparaging other nationalities that is so thoroughly used by our opponents today. The German is in a position to point out the facts, and he will now also gain strength from the difficult trials of the present time to delve into the German soul, where he has not yet succeeded. The forgotten sides of the striving for spiritual science will be remembered again. I may say this again and again, after having endeavored for more than thirty years to emphasize another side of the forgotten striving of German knowledge.

From what has emerged entirely from the British essence of knowing directed only at the outside world, we have the so-called Newtonian color theory. And the power of the British essence, not only externally but also internally, spiritually, is so great that this Newtonian color theory has taken hold of all minds that think about such things. Only Goethe, out of that nature which can be won from German nationality, has rebelled against Newton's theory of colours in the physical field. Certainly, Newton's theory of colours is, I might say, in one particular chapter, what de Lamettrie's L'Homme-Machine can be for all shallow superficial people in the world. Only the case with the theory of colours is particularly tragic. For 35 years, as I said, I have been trying to show the full significance of Goethe's Theory of Colours, the whole struggle of the German world-view, as it appears in Goethe with regard to the world of colour, against the mechanistic view rooted in British folklore with Newton. The chapter 'Goethe versus Newton' will also come into its own when that which lives on in a living, active way, even if not always consciously, comes more and more to the fore and can be seen by anyone who wants to see. And it will come to the fore, precisely as a result of the trials of our time, the most intimate awareness of the German of the depth of his striving for knowledge.

It is almost taken for granted, and therefore as easy to grasp as all superficially taken for granted things, when people today say: science is of course international. The moon is also international! Nevertheless, what individuals have to say about the moon is not at all international. When Goethe traveled, he wrote back to his German friends: “After what I have seen of plants and fish near Naples and in Sicily, I would be very tempted, if I were ten years younger, to make a journey to India, not to discover anything new, but to look at what has been discovered in my way.” Of course, science is international. It is not easy to refute the corresponding statements, because they are self-evident, as everything superficial is self-evident. But as I said, it is also international like the moon. But what the individual nations have to say about what is international from the depths, from the roots of their national character, that is what is significant and also what is effective in furthering the development of humanity from the way in which the character of each individual nation relates to what can be recognized internationally. That is what matters.

To this day, however, it cannot be said that precisely that which, in the deepest sense, represents the German character has made a significant impression on the path of knowledge in the period that followed. Within the German character itself, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel initially had such a great effect that posterity was stunned and that it initially produced only one or the other, one or the other side, that even un-German materialism was able to gain a foothold within the German spiritual life. But it is particularly instructive to see how that which is primordially German works in other nationalities when it is absorbed into them. And Schelling, for example, is primordially German. Schelling has had a great effect, for example within Russian spiritual life. Within Russian spiritual life, we see how Schelling is received, how his powerful views of nature, but especially of history – the Russian has little sense of the view of nature – are received. But we also see how precisely the essentials, what matters, cannot be understood at all in the east of Europe. Yes, it is particularly interesting – and you can read more about this in my writing “Thoughts During the Time of War” – how this eastern part of Europe in the nineteenth century gradually developed a complete rejection of precisely the intellectual life not only of Central Europe, but even of Western Europe. And one gets an impression of German intellectual life when one sees how this essential, which I have tried to bring out today, this living with the soul in the development of nature and the spirit, cannot be understood in the East, where things are accepted externally. In the course of the nineteenth century, consciousness has swollen terribly in the East, especially among intellectuals – not among the peasants, of course, who know little about war even when they are waging it. The intellectual life of the East is, however, a strange matter. I have already explained it: Slavophilism appears in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the 1830s, precisely fertilized by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; but it appears in such a way that Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are only taken superficially , quite superficially, so that one has no inkling of how Fichte, Schelling and Hegel — the tools of the will, of the soul, of thinking — actually live objectively together with what outwardly interweaves and lives through the world. And so it could come about that this Russian element, which in terms of its sense of knowledge still lived deeply in medieval feeling, took up Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in such a way that an almost megalomaniacal view of the nineteenth century, which in literary and epistemological terms is really a kind of realization of Peter the Great's Political Testament, whether falsified or not.

What did they know about the German world view over there! In one of my recent lectures, I showed how Goethe's “Faust” truly grows out of what we, once again, can allow to affect our souls as a German world view. But we have only to hear Pissarew — who as a Russian spirit is deeply influenced by Goethe — speak about Goethe's Faust, and we shall see how it is impossible not to understand what is most characteristic and most essential to the German national soul. Pissarew says, for example: “The small thoughts and the small feelings had to be made into pearls of creation” - in “Faust he means the small thoughts, the human feelings that only concern people! “Goethe accomplished this feat, and similar feats are still considered the greatest victory of art; but such hocus-pocus is done not only in the sphere of art, but also in all other spheres of human activity."

It is an interesting chapter in the history of ideas that in the case of minds such as Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky or Khomyakov, for example, precisely that which lives great and significant as inwardness, but as clear inwardness, dark and nebulous sentimentalism, has continued to live in such minds and we could cite a long line right up to the present day, precisely from Russian ideological minds - how in this Russian ideological mind the conviction has generally formed: that which lives to the west of us is an aged culture, a culture that has outlived itself; it is ripe for extinction. The Russian essence is there, that must replace what is in Central Europe and they also meant Western Europe in the nineteenth century, especially England - what is in England.

This is not something I have picked out at one point or another, but it is a consistent feature of Russian intellectual life, which characterizes those who matter, who set the tone. In Kireyevsky's work, this intensifies around 1829 to a saying that I will read in a moment, and one will see from such a saying that what is heard today from the East did not just arise today, but that it is deeply rooted in what has gradually accumulated in this East.

But before that, I want to cite something else. The whole thing starts with Slavophilism, with a seemingly scientific and theoretical focus on the importance of the Russian people, who must replace an old and decrepit Europe, degenerating into nothing but abstract concepts and cold utilitarian ideas. Yes, as I said, this is something that is found again and again in Russian intellectual life. But where does this Slavophilism actually come from? How did these people in the East become aware of what they later repeated in all its variations: the people in Central and Western Europe have become depraved, are decrepit; they have managed to eliminate all love, all feeling from the heart and to live only in the mind, which leads to war and hatred between the individual peoples. In the Russian Empire, love lives, peace lives, and so does a science that arises from love and peace. Where do these people get it from? From the German Weltanschauung they have it! Herder is basically the first Slavophile. Herder first expressed this, which was justified in his time, which is also justified when one looks at the depth of the national character, which truly has nothing to do with today's war and with all that has led to this war. But one can point out that which has led to the megalomania among the so-called intellectuals: We stand there in the East, everything over there is old, everything is decrepit, all of it must be exterminated, and in its place must come the world view of the East.

Let us take to heart the words of Kirejewski. He says in 1829: “The fate of every European state depends on the union of all the others; the fate of Russia depends on Russia alone. But the fate of Russia is decided in its formation: this is the condition and source of all goods. As soon as all these goods will be ours, we will share them with the rest of Europe, and we will repay all our debts to it a hundredfold.”

Here we have a leading man, a man repeatedly lionized by the very minds that have more often than not rejected the ongoing development of Russian intellectual life. Here we have it stated: Europe is ripe for destruction, and Russian culture must replace it. Russian culture contains everything that is guaranteed to last. Therefore, we are appropriating everything. And when we have everything, well then we will be benevolent, then we will share with the others in a corresponding manner. That is the literary program, already established in 1829 within Russian humanity by a spirit, in whose immaturity, in whose sentimentality even Fichte, Schelling and Hegel have worked.

There is a remarkable conception in the East in general. Let me explain this in conclusion. For example, in 1885 an extraordinary book was published by Sergius Jushakow, an extraordinary book, as I said. Jushakow finds that Russia has a great task. In 1885, he finds this task even more directed towards Asia. Over there in Asia, he believes, live the descendants of the ancient Iranians – to which he also counts the Indians, the Persians – and the ancient Turanians. They have a long cultural life behind them, have brought it to what is evident in them today. In 1885, Yushakov said that Westerners had intervened in this long cultural life, intervening with what they could become from their basic feelings and from their worldview. But Russia must intervene in the right way.

A strange Pan-Asiaticism, expressed by Yushakov in a thick book in 1885 as part of his program! He says: “These Asiatic peoples have presented their destiny in a beautiful myth—which is, however, true. There are the Iranian peoples over there who fought against Ahriman, as Jusakhov says, against the evil spirit Ahriman, who causes infertility and drought and immorality, everything that disturbs human culture. They joined forces with the good spirit Ormuzd, the god of light, the spirit that gives everything that promotes people. But after the Asians had received the blessings of Ormuzd within their spiritual life for a while, Ahriman became more powerful. But what did the European peoples of the West bring to the Asians, according to Jushakow? And that is quite interesting. Yushakov argues that the peoples of the West, with their cultural life, which in his view is degenerate and decrepit, have crossed over to Asia to the Indians and the Persians, and have taken from them everything that Ormuzd, the good Ormuzd, has fought for. That is what the peoples of the West were there for. Russia will now cross over to Asia – it is not I who say this, but the Russian Yushakov – because in Russia, rooted in a deep culture, is the alliance between the all-fertility-developing peasant and the all-chivalry-bearing — as I said, it is not I who say it, Yushakov says it — and from the alliance of the peasant and the Cossack, which will move into Asia, something else will arise than what the Western peoples have been able to bring to the Asians. The Western peoples have taken the Ormuzd culture from the Asians; but the Russians, that is, the peasants and the Cossacks, will join forces with poor Asia, which has been enslaved by the Westerners, and will fight with it against Ahriman and will unite completely with it. For what the Asians, under the leadership of Ormuzd, have acquired as a coming together with nature itself, the Russians will not take away from them, but will join with them to fight against Ahriman once more.

And in 1885, this man describes in more detail how these Western peoples actually behaved towards the Asian people plagued by Ahriman. He does not describe the Germans, for which he would have had little reason at the time, but he, Yushakov, the Russian, describes the English. And he says of the English that, after all they have been through, they believe that the Asian peoples are only there to clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight among themselves with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English baubles. And further, in 1885, Yushakov said: “England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples who inhabit the rich peninsula; I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland – I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this state of affairs, which is as glorious as it is sad.”

It is likely that these sentiments, which were not only expressed by Jushakow in 1885, but also by many others, led to Russia initially not allying itself with the Asians to help them against Ahr Ahriman, but that it first allied itself with the “so brilliant as it is sad state” of England in order to trample the “aged”, “marshy” Europe into the ground.

What world history will one day see in this ring closing around Central Europe can be expressed quite simply. One need only mention a few figures. These few figures are extremely instructive because they are reality. One day, history will raise the question, quite apart from the fact that this present struggle is the most difficult, the most significant, the greatest that has occurred in the development of human history, quite apart from the fact that it is merely a matter of the circumstances of the figures: How will it be judged in the future that 777 million people are closing in on 150 million people? 777 million people in the so-called Entente are closing in on 150 million people and are not even expecting the decision to come from military valor, but from starvation. That is probably the better part of valor according to the views of 777 million people! There is no need to be envious about the soil in which a spiritual life developed as we have described it, because the figures speak for themselves. The 777 million people live on 68 million square kilometers, compared to 6 million square kilometers on which 150 million people live. History will one day take note of the fact that 777 million people live on 68 million square kilometers, ring-shaped against 150 million people on 6 million square kilometers. The German only needs to let this fact speak in this as well as in other areas, which prevents one from falling into one-sided national shouting and ranting and hate-filled speech, into which Germany's enemies fall.

I do not want to talk now about those areas that do not belong here and that will be decided by weapons. But we see all too clearly how, today, what one wants to cherish and carry as German culture is really enclosed, lifted up above the battlefield of weapons, enclosed by hatred and slander, by real slander , not only hatred; how our sad time of trial is used to vilify and condemn precisely that which has to be placed in world history, in the overall development of mankind, in this way. For what is it, actually, that confronts us in this German intellectual life with all its conscious and forgotten tones? It is great because it is the second great flowering of insight and the second great flowering of art in the history of humanity. The first great flowering of art was Greek culture. At the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the development of Germany produced a flowering of which even a mind like Renan said, when, after absorbing everything else, he became acquainted with the development of Germany in Goethe and Herder: “I felt as if I were entering a temple, and from that moment everything that I had previously considered worthy of the divinity seemed to me no more than withered and yellowed paper flowers.” What German intellectual life has achieved, says Renan, comparing it with the other, is like differential calculus compared to elementary mathematics. Nevertheless, on the same page on which he wrote these words to David Friedrich Strauß, Renan points to that current in France which, in the event of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, called for a “destructive struggle against the Germanic race”. This letter was written in 1870.

This German intellectual life has been recognized time and again. But today it must be misunderstood. For how else could the words be found that are spoken in the ring that surrounds us!

If we look across, not with Yushakov's eyes, but with unbiased eyes, to Asia, we see a human culture that has grown old, that also strove for knowledge, but that strove for knowledge according to an old, pre-Christian way. There, the ego is sought to be subdued in order to merge into the universe, into Brahman or Atman, with the extinction of the ego. This is no longer possible. Now that the greatest impulse in human history, the Christ impulse, has become established in human history, the ego itself must be elevated, strengthened, not subdued as in Oriental spiritual life, but on the contrary, strengthened in order to connect as an ego with the spiritual-divine in the world, which pulsates and weaves and lives through the world. That is the significant thing, how this is again shining forth in the German spiritual striving. And this, which is unique and which must be incorporated as one of the most essential tones in the overall development of humanity, is what is coming to life in the 6 million square kilometers, compared to the 68 million square kilometers. This fact must be obscured from those who, as I said, do not fight with weapons, but who fight with words and slander this Central European spiritual life. They must cover this fact with fog. They must not see it. But we must admit it to ourselves, we must try to explain to ourselves how it is possible that these people can be so blinded as to fail to recognize the very depth of this connection of one's own soul with the spiritual life outside in the world.

Boutroux, who traveled around here in Germany for a short time before the war and even spoke at universities about the spiritual brotherhood of Germany and France, now tells his French audience how the Germans want to grasp everything inwardly. He even makes a joke: if a Frenchman wants to get to know a lion or a hyena, he goes to the menagerie. If an Englishman wants to get to know a lion or a hyena, he goes on a world tour and studies all the things related to the lion or the hyena on the spot. The German neither goes to the menagerie nor on a journey, but withdraws into his room, goes into his inner self, and from that inner self he creates the lion or the hyena. That is how he conceives of inwardness. It is a joke. One must even say that it is perhaps a good joke. The French have always made good jokes. It's just a shame that this joke is by Heinrich Heine, and Boutroux has only repeated it.

But now, when you see how these people want to cloud their minds, you come up with a few things. You wonder: How do these people, according to their nationality, seek to delude themselves about what German nature actually is? For the Russians, it must always be a new mission. I have also described this in my booklet: “Thoughts during the time of war”. They must be given the opportunity to replace Western European culture, Central European culture, because it is the destiny of the Russian people – so they say in the East, anyway – to replace the abstract, purely intellectual culture built on war with a Russian culture built on the heart, on peace, on the soul. That is the mission.

The English – one would not want to do them an injustice, truly, one would like to remain completely objective, because it really does not befit the Germans to speak in a one-sided way based solely on national feelings. That should not happen at all; but when one hears, as in the very latest times in England, declaiming that the Germans live by the word: “might is right,” then one must still remind them that there is a philosophy by Thomas Hobbes, an English philosophy, in which it is first proved in all its breadth that law has no meaning if it does not arise from power. Power is the source of law. That is the whole meaning of Hobbes's doctrine. After it has been said from an authorized position - there is also an unauthorized authorized position, but it is still an authorized position in the outside world - that the Germans live by the rule “might makes right”, that they have have come far by acting according to the principle “might is right,” I do not believe that one is being subjective when one objects that this is precisely an English principle that has become deeply ingrained in the Englishman. Yes, one can well say: they need a new lie. And that will hardly be anything other than a terminus technicus.

The French – what are they deluding themselves with? They are the ones we would least like to wrong. And so let us take the word of one of their own poets, Edmond Rostand. The cock, the crowing cock, plays a major role in Edmond Rostand's play. He crows when the sun rises in the morning. Gradually, he begins to imagine that the sun could not rise if it were not for him crowing, causing the sun to rise. One has become accustomed – and that is probably also Rostand's idea – to the fact that nothing can happen in the world without France. One has only to recall the age of Louis XIV and all that was French until Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and others emancipated themselves from it, and one can already imagine how the conceit arises: Ah, the sun cannot rise if I do not crow for it. Now, one needs a new conceit.

Italy – I heard a not insignificant Italian politician say before the war: Yes, our people have basically reached a point, so relaxed, so rotten, that we need a refresher, we need something to invigorate us. A new sensation, then! This is expressed in the fact that the Italians, in order to dull their senses, have invented something particularly new and unprecedented: a new saint, namely, Sacro Egoismo, Holy Egoism. How often has it been invoked before Italy was driven into the war, holy egoism! So, a new saint, and his hierophant: Gabriele d'Annunzio. Today, no one can yet gauge how this new saint, Sacro Egoismo and its hierophant, its high priest, Gabriele d'Annunzio, will live on in history!

On the other hand, we can remain within the German spirit and consider what is truly interwoven with this German spirit and what was unanimously felt by the Germans of Austria and Germany, on this side and on the other side of the Erz Mountains, as the German people's – not in the Russian sense of mission, but in the very ordinary sense – world-historical mission. And here I may well conclude with the words to which I have already drawn attention when, speaking of the commonality of Austrian intellectual culture with German, I also spoke of Robert Hamerling. In 1862, when he wrote his “Germanenzug”, the future of the German people lay before Robert Hamerling, the German poet of Austria, which he wanted to express by having the genius of the German people express it, when the Germanic people move over from Asia as the forerunners of the Germans. They settle on the border between Asia and Europe. Robert Hamerling describes the scene beautifully: the setting sun, the rising moon. The Teutons are encamped. Only one man is awake, the blond youth Teut. A genius appears to him. This genius speaks to Teut, in whom Robert Hamerling seeks to capture the representative of the later Germans. Beautifully he expresses:

To whom will the word break out of the depths of the soul
As your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the strings
His innermost being? To whom do the senses draw so magnificently
Into the blue of heaven, granite hieroglyphics
Of the soul's upsurge and the narrowness of life?
Who finally ties the strands
of the searching thought to the stars
so boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Whom leads so high, so deep his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps the near and the far so faithfully?
Where does every earthly and heavenly zone
reflect itself as in your thinking, O Teuton?

And what once lived over there in Asia, what the Germans brought with them from Asia like ancestral heritage, it stands before Robert Hamerling's soul. It stands before his soul, what was there like a looking into the world in such a way that the ego is subdued, the corporeality is subdued, in order to see what the world is living through and weaving through, but what must emerge in a new form in the post-Christian era, in the form that it speaks out of the fully conscious ego, out of the fully conscious soul. This connection with the ancient times in the striving of the German people for the spirit, how beautifully Robert Hamerling expresses it:

But however proudly you aspire, high above other swarms, you will always keep the ancient, sacred fire: the dream-filled, drunken rapture of God, the blessed warmth of heart of the ancient Asian homeland. This holy ray, a temple fire of This holy ray, a temple fire
Of humanity, free of smoke, with pure flame
Glow away in your chest and soul mate
You remain and pilot your rudder!
You only strive because you love: your boldest thinking
Will be devotion that wants to sink into God.

Thus the German-Austrian poet connects the distant past with the immediate present. And indeed, it has emerged from this beautiful striving of the German soul, which we have tried to characterize today, that all knowledge, all striving wanted to be what one can call: a sacrificial service before the Divine-Spiritual. Even science, even the recognition of the spiritual, should have the effect of a sacrificial service, should work in such a way that Jakob Böhme could say: When one searches spiritually, it is so that one must bring it to go its way:

Walking in God – And striving in God –
And dying in God – And being buried in God.

Hamerling expresses this by having the German Genius say to Teut:

You strive only because you love: your most daring thought
will be devotion, sinking into God.

The affinity of the German soul with God is so beautifully expressed here. This shows us how deeply rooted true spiritual striving is in the German national character. But this also clearly gives rise to the thought in our soul, the powerful thought, that one can ally oneself with this German national spirit, for in that which it has brought forth in spiritual achievements - one current guides the other - this German national spirit is at work. It finds expression in the great, immortal deeds that are being accomplished in the present. In conclusion, let me summarize in the four lines of the German-Austrian Robert Hamerling what emerges as German faith, German love, German hope of the past, present and future, when the German unites with what is the deepest essence of his people. Let me summarize what is there as a force – as a force that has confidence that, where such seeds are, blossoms and fruits must develop powerfully in the German national character despite all enemies, in the German national character – let me summarize what is there as a force in his soul, in the words of the German-Austrian poet Robert Hamerling:

And if ever the German name
should prove a hostile day,
From ocean to ocean will run
The course of the German spirit!

[ 1 ] When clairvoyant consciousness comes to life in the elemental world, it finds beings there who are able to develop a life in that world which man only acquires within the physical world. These beings do not feel their self—their ego—as man feels his in the physical world; they permeate that self with their will much more than man does his; they will their own existence as it were, and feel their existence as something which they give to themselves through their will. On the other hand, with regard to their thinking, they have not the feeling that they are creating their thoughts, as man creates his; they feel all their thoughts as suggestions, as something which is not in them but in the universe, and which is streaming out of the universe into their being. Thus in these beings no doubt can ever arise but that their thoughts are the reflection of the thought-order poured forth into the universe. They do not think their own thoughts, but cosmic thoughts. With their activity of thought they live in cosmic thoughts; but they will their existence. Their life of feeling is shaped in accordance with this will and thought of theirs. They feel themselves to be a link in the whole cosmic system; and they feel the necessity of willing their existence in a manner corresponding to that system.

[ 2 ] When the clairvoyant soul grows familiar with the world inhabited by these beings, it comes naturally to an idea of its own thinking, feeling, and willing. These faculties of the human soul could not be unfolded within the elemental world in man's etheric body. Human will would be only a weak, dreamlike faculty in the elemental world, human thought merely an indistinct, fleeting world of ideas. No feeling of the ego would come into existence there at all. For all these things it is necessary for man to be invested with a physical body.

[ 3 ] When the clairvoyant human soul ascends from the elemental world into the spiritual world proper, it experiences itself in conditions which diverge still further than do elemental conditions from those of the physical world. In the elemental world there is still much that is reminiscent of the physical world; but in the spiritual world man confronts entirely new conditions. He can do nothing there if he has only the ideas which are to be gained in the physical world. All the same, man's inner life as a human soul in the physical world must be so strengthened that he will bring over from that world into the spiritual world that which makes a sojourn there possible. If such a strengthened life of the soul were not brought into the spiritual world, man would simply lapse into unconsciousness there. He could only be present there in the same sort of way in which a plant is present in the physical world. We have, as human souls, to bring with us into the spiritual world all those things not really existing in the physical world but manifesting themselves there nevertheless as if they were existent. We must be able to form conceptions in the physical world, which, though prompted by that world, do not directly correspond to any thing or occurrence in it. Every delineation of things in the physical world, or description of physical occurrences, is meaningless in the spiritual world. [ 4 ] What may be perceived with the senses, or expressed in conceptions applicable in the physical world, does not exist in the spiritual world. On entering the latter, everything to which physical ideas can be applied must, so to speak, be left behind. But ideas which have been so formed in the physical world that they do not correspond to any physical thing or process, are still present in the soul when it enters the spiritual world. Naturally some of these ideas may have been formed erroneously. If these are present in the consciousness on its entering the spiritual world, by their very being they prove themselves as not belonging to that world. They act in such a way as to impress on the soul the urgency of returning to the physical world or the elemental world, in order to exchange these erroneous ideas for the right ones. But when the soul brings correct ideas into the spiritual world, what is related to them in that world presses to meet them; the soul feels in the spiritual world that actual beings are present there, who actually are in their whole inner substance what only appear as thoughts within itself. These beings have a body, which may be called a thought-body. In this body they experience themselves as independent beings, just as man experiences himself independently with the physical world.

Now amongst the conceptions acquired by man, there arc certain thoughts saturated with feelings which are adapted to strengthen the life of the soul in such a way that it is able to receive an impression from the beings of the spiritual world. When the feeling of self-surrender, such as must be developed for the faculty of transformation in the elemental world, becomes so much intensified that in that surrender the being into which we are transformed is felt not merely as sympathetic or antipathetic, but can live again in its own special way in the soul surrendered to it, then the faculty of perception of the spiritual world is coming into existence. Then one spiritual being speaks, as it were, in one way to the soul, another in another way; and a spiritual intercourse ensues, which consists in a language of thoughts. We experience thoughts; but we know that we are experiencing beings in these thoughts. To live in beings who do not merely express themselves in thoughts, but arc actually present in those thoughts with their individuality, is to live with the soul in the spiritual world.

[ 5 ] With regard, however, to the beings of the elemental world, the soul has the feeling that they have the cosmic thoughts flowing into their own individual beings, and that they will their own existence in conformity with this universal thought streaming into them.

[ 6 ] But with regard to the beings who need not descend to the elemental world to gain that which man can only gain in the physical world, and who attain that stage of existence in the spiritual world, the human soul has the feeling that they consist wholly of thought substance ; that not only do the cosmic thoughts flow into them, but that the beings themselves actually live in that movement of thought with their individuality. They entirely allow the cosmic thoughts to think themselves within them in a living way. Their life consists in the apprehension of this cosmic language of thought, and their willing consists in their being able to express themselves in thought. This thought-existence of theirs reacts vitally upon the universe, for thoughts which are beings converse with other thoughts which are also beings.

[ 7 ] Human thoughts are the reflection of this spiritual life of thought-beings. During the period through which the human soul passes between death and rebirth, it is woven into this life of thought-beings, just as it is woven into physical existence between birth and death. When the soul enters physical existence through birth, or rather through conception, the permanent thought-entity of the soul works in a shaping and inspiring way on the fate of that soul. In human destiny what has remained of the soul from the earth-lives preceding the present one, works in the same way as pure living thought-beings work in the universe.

[ 8 ] When clairvoyant consciousness enters this spiritual world of living thought-beings, it feels itself to be in a completely new relationship towards the physical world. The latter confronts it in the spiritual world as another world, just as in the physical world the spiritual world appears as another one. But to spiritual sight the physical world has lost everything which can be perceived of it within physical existence. All those qualities seem to have vanished which are grasped with the senses, or the intellect which is bound up with the senses. On the other hand, it is obvious from the standpoint of the spiritual world that the true, original nature of the physical world is itself spiritual To the soul's gaze, looking from the spiritual world, there appear instead of the previous physical world, spiritual beings unfolding their activities in such a way that through the converging of those activities that world comes into being which, looked at through the senses, is the very world that man has before him in his own physical existence. Seen from the spiritual world, the qualities, forces, materials, etc., of the physical world disappear as such, and are revealed as mere appearances. From the spiritual world man sees only beings, and in them lies true reality.

[ 9 ] Similarly from the elemental world, when beheld from the spiritual world, there vanishes everything which is not actual being. And the soul feels that in this world too, it has to do with beings who, by letting their activities converge, cause an existence to become manifest which through the organs of sympathy and antipathy appears as elemental.

[ 10 ] The essential part of projecting one's life into supersensible worlds consists in the fact that beings take the place of the conditions and qualities which the consciousness has around it in the physical world. The supersensible world reveals itself ultimately as a world of beings, and whatever exists in addition to those beings is the expression of their actions. Indeed, both the physical world and the elemental world appear as the deeds of spiritual beings.

[ 1 ] Through the Leading Thoughts which have been sent out from the Goetheanum during the past weeks to the members of the Anthroposophical Society, the soul has been directed to the Beings of the spiritual kingdoms with whom man is connected from above, just as, from below, he is connected with the kingdoms of Nature.

[ 2 ] True self-knowledge may become the guide through which man finds his way into these spiritual kingdoms. And when such self-knowledge is striven after in the right way, then the understanding will be awakened for what Anthroposophy is able to make known through its insight into the life of the spiritual world. But self-knowledge must be practised in the true sense, not as a mere rigid gazing into one's inner being.

[ 3 ] By means of such a true self-knowledge one arrives in the first place at what lives in memory. In thought-pictures, the shadow of what was a direct and living experience in the past is called up into consciousness. Anyone seeing a shadow will, out of an inner impulse of thought, be guided to the object which threw the shadow. He who bears a memory within him cannot in this direct way turn the eye of his soul to the experience which lives on in the memory. But when he truly reflects on his own nature he will be obliged to say to himself: that he himself, in his soul-being, is what his experiences have made of him—those experiences which throw their shadows into the memory. The memory-shadows appear in the consciousness; in the soul there shines what in the memory is shadow. Dead shadow lives in the memory; living being lives in the soul in which the memory is active.

[ 4 ] It is only necessary that this relationship of the memory to the actual soul-life should be made clear; and in this striving for clearness in self-knowledge a man will then perceive that he is on the path to the spiritual world.

[ 5 ] Through memory, man is looking at the spiritual in his own soul. But in the ordinary consciousness he does not arrive at a real grasp of what he thus looks upon. He looks in the direction on something; but his look meets with no reality. Anthroposophy, out of Imaginative Knowledge, shows the way to this reality. Through it we are referred from the shadow to that which gleams and shines. Anthroposophy does this, in that it speaks of the etheric body of man. It shows how the physical body is active in the thought-shadow pictures; but how in the gleaming and shining the etheric body lives.

[ 6 ] With the physical body man is in the sense-world; with the etheric body he is in the etheric world. In the sense-world he has his environment; in the etheric world also. And Anthroposophy speaks of this latter environment as the first of the hidden worlds in which man is living. It is the kingdom of the Third Hierarchy.

[ 7 ] Let us now approach speech in the same way that we have considered memory. It issues from within man just as does the memory. It connects him with a certain state of being, as memory unites him with his own experiences. In words, too, there is an element of shadow. This is deeper than the shadow of the thoughts of memory. When man inwardly casts the shadow of his experiences as his memories, his own hidden self is active in the whole process. He is there when the light casts the shadow.

[ 8 ] In speech there is also a process of shadow-casting. The words are the shadows. What is it in this case that shines? Something stronger shines, because words are stronger shadows than are the thoughts of memory. The element in the human self which in the course of an earthly life can produce memories, cannot create words. Man must learn these in connection with other human beings. Something which lies deeper in him than that which casts the shadow of memory must take part in this process. In this case Anthroposophy speaks from Inspired Knowledge of the astral body, as in the case of memory it speaks of the etheric body. The astral body is added to the physical and etheric bodies as a third part of the human being.

[ 9 ] This third part, too, has a cosmic environment about it. This is made up of the Second Hierarchy. In human language we have a phantom of this Second Hierarchy. As to his astral body, man lives within the province of this Hierarchy.

[ 10 ] We may go still further. In speech a portion of man's being is engaged. When he speaks he brings his inner being into motion. That which surrounds this inner being remains at rest. The movement of speech wrings itself loose from the human being while he remains at rest, but the whole man comes into motion when he brings into activity all that belongs to his limbs. In such movement man is no less full of expression than in memory and speech. Memory expresses his experiences. The nature of language consists in its being the expression of something. In the same way the man whose whole being is in motion expresses something.

[ 11 ] Anthroposophy points out that this ‘something’ is another part of the human being. From Intuitive Knowledge it speaks of the ‘real Self’ or ‘I.’ This too, it finds, has a cosmic environment, namely the First Hierarchy.

[ 12 ] When man approaches the thoughts in his memory he meets with the first supersensible element—his own etheric being. Anthroposophy points out to him the cosmic environment corresponding to it. When man considers himself as one who makes use of language he finds his astral being. This is no longer comprehended in that which only acts inwardly, like memory. It is seen by Inspiration as that which in the act of speaking shapes a physical process out of the Spiritual. Speech is a physical process. At its foundation lies an activity which proceeds from the sphere of the Second Hierarchy.

[ 13 ] When the whole man is in motion there is a more intense physical action than in speech. Not merely a part of man is moulded, the whole man is given shape; and in the physical being which lives and moves in form, the First Hierarchy is active.

[ 14 ] In this way, then, true self-knowledge can be cultivated. But in doing this man does not grasp his own Self alone. Step by step he comprehends the parts of his body: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the Self. And by comprehending these he also reaches up, step by step, to higher worlds which like the three kingdoms of Nature, the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms, belong, as the three spiritual kingdoms, to the whole Universe in which his being is unfolding.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 15 ] 69. The Third Hierarchy reveals itself as pure soul and spirit. It lives and moves in all that man experiences in the soul, in his inner life. Neither in the etheric nor in the physical could any processes arise if this Hierarchy alone were active. Soul-life alone could exist.

[ 16 ] 70. The Second Hierarchy reveals itself as soul and spirit that works in the etheric. All that is etheric is a manifestation of the Second Hierarchy. This Hierarchy, however, does not reveal itself directly in the physical; its power extends only to etheric processes. Only etheric and soul-life could exist if the Third and the Second Hierarchy alone were active.

[ 17 ] 71. The First and strongest Hierarchy reveals itself as the spiritually active principle within the physical. It makes the physical world into a Cosmos. The Third and the Second Hierarchy are the Beings who minister to it in this activity.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 18 ] 72. As soon as we approach the higher members of man's being—the etheric, the astral body and the Ego-organisation—we are obliged to seek for man's relation to the beings of the spiritual kingdoms. It is only the physical body's organisation which we can illumine by reference to the three physical kingdoms of Nature.

[ 19 ] 73. In the etheric body the Intelligence of the Cosmos becomes embodied in the human being. That this can happen, requires the activity of cosmic Beings, who, in their combined working, shape the etheric body of man, even as the physical forces shape the physical.

[ 20 ] 74. In the astral body the spiritual world implants the moral impulses into the human being. That these can show forth their life in man's Organisation, depends on the activity of Beings who are able not only to think the Spiritual, but to shape it in its reality.

[ 21 ] 75. In the Ego-organisation man experiences himself, even in the physical body, as a Spirit. That this can happen, requires the activity of Beings who themselves, as spiritual Beings, live in the physical world.

Today we first have to talk about Jesus' conversation with his foster mother, who had gradually come to an understanding with her son. A tremendous change had taken place in her. The spirit of the other Mary, the physical mother of Jesus from the spiritual worlds, had descended upon her. She now carried it within her. The conversation between Jesus and his mother proves to be of great significance for the real understanding of the mystery of Golgotha from the point of view of spiritual scientific research. The mother understood Jesus better and better. It was a kind of intuitive understanding. Now Jesus was able to speak about the threefold pain he had experienced. What he said was like a kind of summary of what had been going on in his soul since the age of twelve. He spoke to his mother about his experiences from the age of twelve to eighteen. He spoke of the great teachings of Bath-Kol. He spoke of how no one had been able to understand him, how he could not speak of what was pushing him to tell someone. He told his mother that even if the old teachings had been there, the people to understand them would have been lacking.

Then he spoke of the second kind of painful experiences. He spoke of those events before the ruined sacrificial altar, he spoke of how he had penetrated into the old mysteries, in which the divine spiritual beings had descended directly, and how a descent had taken place in this respect as well. Instead of the good old pagan gods, demons were present at the sacrificial feasts. He spoke of the great cosmic events, of the Our Father in reverse, as it were. It was an extraordinary conversation he had with his mother. He spoke of how he had had to recognize how Lucifer and Ahriman fled before the gates of the Essenes and came to the other people who could not follow the strict rules of the order. He spoke of all this. It was like a retelling of his life so far. It was a conversation that was shaped by the fact that the words were not just words of the narrative, that the words did not just contain what usually lies in words, but what he said was the innermost experience expressed in words, pain and suffering expressed in words, transformed into infinite love, pain that had been transformed into love and goodwill. These words flowed over to the mother like realities. It seemed like a piece of the soul itself that passed from Jesus to the mother. In just a few hours, everything that was more than a mere experience came together. It was a cosmic experience in the truest sense of the word. Jesus of Nazareth could only speak words, but a part of his soul lay in these words. And much would have to be related if one wanted to characterize what the Akasha Chronicle gives. So it came about in the course of this conversation that it stood clearly before Jesus' soul at which point the development of mankind had arrived. Now it dawned on him with an ever clearer awareness that the Zarathustra soul was in him. Thus he felt how he, as Zarathustra, had gone through the development of humanity at that time. What I am saying to you now were not the words that Jesus spoke to his mother, but he expressed himself in a way that she could understand. What he felt there made the secret of human development clear to him. The impression of how Jesus feels and experiences this inwardly while speaking to his mother is incomparable. He speaks to his mother about how each human age has its own particular powers and that this is of great importance. There was once a human age, the ancient Indian culture, when people were particularly great because their whole lives were glowing with the childlike, sun-like powers of early childhood. Today, we still have some of these powers in us from our first to seventh year.

Then there was a second period, the ancient Persian time, which was inspired by the forces that now work in humans between the ages of seven and fourteen. Then Jesus turned His attention to the third age, the Egyptian time, in which the forces ruled that now work in man from the age of fourteen to twenty-one, when the sentient soul plays a major role in the individual development. In this Egyptian time, the astronomical and mathematical sciences were cultivated.

And now the question arose in Jesus: In what age do we now live, what can a person experience between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight? And he sensed that what dominated the outer life were the forces that had been poured out over Greco-Latin culture, but that these were also the last forces. The meaning of the individual human life stood in its full impact before the eyes of Jesus of Nazareth. From the twenty-eighth to the thirty-fifth year, man then passes the middle of life and begins to live towards his old age. There are no new life forces left; the inherited forces of the gods are exhausted. The ascending forces are there up to this point, they are consumed up to the middle of life. What now? Nowhere was there anything new to be seen from which forces for humanity could arise. Humanity would wither away if nothing new happened. Jesus had to live through this crisis for a certain time, and then the Zarathustra ego, whose possession had only recently flashed before him, dissolved. He had identified himself so completely with the evolution of humanity that the Zarathustra ego left him during his words to his mother. Only the three veils remained, and Jesus became again what he had been at the age of twelve, but with everything that he had been able to absorb through his experiences as Zarathustra. Now it was like an impulse that drew him to the Jordan to John the Baptist. And there descended into Jesus of Nazareth that which had to flow rejuvenatingly into the process of humanity so that humanity would not wither away: the Christ-Being. This Christ impulse moved in at a time when people were least prepared to receive it. With their minds, people could feel drawn to Christ, but there was no longer any of the wisdom and power of the earlier ages. So Christ initially only worked as a power, not as a teacher. But even today, humanity is not particularly far in its understanding of the Christ impulse.

The effectiveness of Christ did not initially depend on the understanding that was shown to him. For three years, the Christ essence descended upon Jesus of Nazareth. That a God entered a human body was not only a matter for human beings, it was also a matter for the higher hierarchies. Until then, no God had experienced being incarnate in a human body. That is the staggering thing: the life of a God in a human body during these three years. But it was necessary for the advancement of humanity to become possible again.

At first the Christ-Essence was only loosely connected with the man Jesus of Nazareth, but more and more densely it united with his body until the crucifixion in a continuous development. Since then, humanity has not increased in understanding of spiritual things. Otherwise, a contemporary event such as Maeterlinck's book “On Death” would be impossible. That is a foolish book. It says: When man is disembodied, then he is indeed a spirit, then he can no longer suffer. — That is just the opposite of the truth. It is always the spirit that must suffer, not the body. As the individuality increases, so do the pains, the feelings. It is therefore impossible for today's man to understand the pain suffered by the embodied God.

One of the women wanted to look for Jesus in the grave. He was a spiritual body. Christ was not to be sought with physical senses. The Crusades in the Middle Ages were a repetition of this search. It was the same vain search. And it was precisely at the time of the Crusades that German mystics arose who sought to reconnect with Christ in the right way. Christ also worked where his teaching was not; he worked as a power in all of humanity. After the baptism in the Jordan, the Christ was still loosely bound to the body of Jesus. The first to meet him was Lucifer. He brought into play all the powers that can be developed in an entity in terms of inciting pride. “If you acknowledge me, I will give you all the kingdoms of the earth.” This attack was quickly repulsed. For the second temptation, Lucifer and Ahriman came together, wanting to evoke fear and anxiety in Christ with the words, “Throw yourself down.”

The third time Ahriman appeared alone with his demand: “Say that these stones become bread.” This question of Ahriman left an unresolved remainder; it was not completely answered. That this could not happen is connected with the innermost forces of the development of the earth, insofar as human beings are part of it.

There is something here like the money question. This is connected with the Ahrimanic question. Ahriman retained some of his power over Christ Jesus. This was shown in Judas Iscariot. This unresolved question is at work in the betrayal of Judas.

It was also mentioned that it was only possible in the darkness for the Christ impulse to communicate itself to Earth at the crucifixion. Whether it was a solar eclipse or whether the darkness came from something else cannot be said with certainty today. Finally, a very urgent request for these revelations to be kept secret.

Today we'll clarify how one should answer questions that approach one in esoteric life. An esoteric should never answer: “What is the heart?” by saying that it's the cause of blood circulation, for he shouldn't give physical causes for things. Everything physical, all of our organs and the whole human being are only symbols of something spiritual, of what higher hierarchies have created. Spirits of Motion already worked on our blood circulation on the old Sun. Then Spirits of Form descended and pressed forms and signs on all created things; and so the heart is only a sign for work that higher hierarchies did on us.

Everything that surrounds us is just maya. Good Gods created this world of maya for men, as it were, like a flower out of the real world so that man develops through it, kindles his ego on it, and penetrated it to get back to the world of real things once again. A man definitely needs this world of maya in his present condition. That's the way one should interpret Goethe's saying: for what is this beautiful world, the starry heavens there except for man to be delighted by it? This is a seemingly naïve expression for the fact that the world in this form and as we perceive it with our physical senses is really only there for us. For in reality, in the world of real things, everything appears with its spiritual causes behind it.

The world of maya doesn't exist for minerals, plants and up through cold-blooded animals. But it exists for warm-blooded animals, although the latter have no ego that could become ignited by it. These animals give a clairvoyant the impression that they have been brought into evolutionary conditions that they're not adapted to, and this upsets one. That's why the humanoid apes give one such a grotesque impression.

As we should become ever more aware, an esoteric should wrest himself away from maya and connect himself with the world of real things. He can only do this through the meditations from the spiritual worlds that are given by the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings, those personalities who support the work of the higher hierarchies. For instance, they gave a concentration exercise that enables us to help in the work on evolution. It may take hours and many attempts, but if an esoteric concentrates on the place where he feels the heart in him, he'll notice that his thoughts don't remain with the heart he's concentrating on—they ray or pour out from there, and he'll see something like a rising, shining star whose center is the archetype of what the heart is the sign for. And the star's lines and rays will begin to resound and the sounds will become words, the primal words that created the heart out of the world of real things. And when the words are translated they're the words of the prayer to the Sunday spirit: Great embracing Spirit, many archetypes sprouted out of your life. (See EL 58) The star's rays are always the words: You were. Whereas the lines in between are the other words.

Thus an esoteric arrives at such an experience through correct, serious exercises. Although many don't do their mediations intensely enough, one who does can penetrate the world of real things, and depending on what he brings with him, he'll feel comfortable or repelled by it. The latter gives him pain and suffering, but necessarily so. For the good Gods can only tolerate what fits into their world; everything else is rejected.

An esoteric may often still have qualities that he's not fully aware of but which work on his development and that he's made aware of by certain indications. If an esoteric does his exercises diligently and correctly, and he wakes up at night with a feverish feeling, he can oppose this with a psychic coldness; and then he has a definite feeling that he's not alone, that he has awakened a doppelganger in himself through his esoteric training. Who is that? And what does he want? The good Gods have, as it were, hired certain Luciferic spirits to keep the qualities of men that don't belong in their world out of it. One of them is Samael, who counteracts our hate and envy. We notice him through the feverishness that befalls us as long as we're still full of these defects.

Another being becomes active if an esoteric hasn't overcome a certain untruthfulness that we're all guilty of, and that often lies so deep in our subconsciousness that we don't notice it. For instance, someone may decide to go to a theosophical meeting in another city because it would be instructive and good for him. But in reality he has quite different motives for going there, for instance, he wants to meet somebody there, but he doesn't admit this real reason to himself. Another dishonesty that's hard to notice is the following. We often think that enthusiasm is driving us into spiritual worlds, whereas we only want to wallow in the enjoyment of the feeling that results from occupying oneself with such things. Now if we do our exercises correctly and we want to press into spiritual worlds, we might get a feeling of being choked or of someone sitting on our chest. The Luciferic being who causes this is Azazel. He hinders us from entering the spiritual world before we've gotten rid of all lies.

If we do our daily duties in a lazy, inattentive and careless way, we might have a drowning feeling on awaking, as if our air was cut off and we were melting and flowing away.

The attention that we should pay to the surrounding world is of greater importance than most people think. If we exercise with real joy, it's a big help in pressing into spiritual worlds. For we should think of the spiritual causes behind every thing and encounter. Spiritual beings have to do what we don't do, because the work must be done.

Here's an example of how inattentively we often do our work. A new educational program was being started at a school, and all its teachers had to take an exam. The humane school inspector told himself: I won't ask the older teachers what they learned at the seminar long ago—they wouldn't remember it. I'll only ask them what they taught every day. But it turned out that many of these teachers did not know what they'd had their students repeat to them maybe twenty times. That's how little they'd been paying attention.

Like these teachers, we're often not thinking about our work. And the being who has to make adjustments for this is called Azael in occult parlance.

These three things are direct defects. A fourth quality we must also get rid of is avoiding one's karma, instead of courageously going to meet it. Under such circumstances if we want to press into the world of real things, we'll wake up in the morn with a feeling of being fettered, as if we were returning to a prison, and our whole body will hurt. This is brought about by Mehazael.

Of course exoterics must also bear the consequences of their defects, but they become manifest in them differently—as corporeal diseases for instance—and they don't become aware of why they got something like that. An esoteric should gradually bring everything into his consciousness, and esoteric schools help him with this. Of course what we perceive of such a school with our senses is only a very small part of it—a faint, outer sign. Just as everything physical, also sensations that we perceive, are only symbols for realities, so what an esoteric school looks like on the physical plane is only a symbol for what it is on the spiritual one. When such a school forms, it's mostly the case that a man immerses himself say in the heart through concentration. The experience forms itself into a formula in him which he can pass on to a number of pupils, whereby they're reconnected with spiritual realities. Our closing mantra expresses this creative force that's active in the spiritual.

In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
The eyes of sense,
That through them I may see
The lights of bodies.
And the spirit has imprinted in my body
Reason and sensation
And feeling and will,
That through them I may perceive bodies
And act upon them.
In the spirit lay the germ of my body.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.
And I will incorporate into my spirit
The super-sensible eyes
That through them I may behold the light of spirits.
And I will imprint in my spirit
Wisdom and power and love,
So that through me the spirits may act
And I become a self-conscious organ
Of their deeds.
In my body lies the germ of the spirit.