The Rudolf Steiner Archive

And now we must go on to say something about the cases you have with you at Lauenstein.¹

I would like to speak first of that eldest boy of yours, who is sixteen years old, and in whom we can clearly recognise an inferiority occasioned by the failure of the I and astral body to penetrate the physical organisation. He was given into your care comparatively late; you did not, I think, have him with you until he was in his sixteenth year? So you have here a case with antecedents that have already undergone marked development. If the boy could have been taken in hand earlier on and given the advantage of Waldorf School education, then, in the time between the change of teeth and puberty, he would have experienced the principle of authority in the right way. Care would also have been taken, first of all, to watch all the time and see what things really interested him, and then, starting from these, to extend his field of interest. Had this been possible, and if in addition the boy could at the same time have been given lead in gently administered doses, then notwithstanding his inherent difficulties the boy's soul would be today on quite a different level. For it is plain, the boy has interests. He has moreover definite ability. You will however have seen from the quite simple test that we put to him, where the lad's trouble lies.

You will remember, I set him a comparatively simple sum in arithmetic—a problem in subtraction, put in the form that accords with the methods of Waldorf School education. For we always ask, you know: What have I to take from a given number in order to leave another given number as remainder: Thus, we do not, as is usually done in teaching arithmetic, give the minuend and subtrahend, but instead the minuend and the remainder, leaving the subtrahend to be found. This way of stating the problem puts the condition of mind and soul to severer test; on the other hand, the child is helped far more in his development when he has to tackle the problem in this form, than when it is put to him the other way round. As you saw, the boy was able to do the sum, but not able to do it at once. As soon as he had solved the problem, he came up to me with great delight; but it must have been an hour and a half later. He took thus an hour and a half to do the sum, and was happy and delighted when he had found the answer. There was therefore no doubt about it, the boy had the necessary ability, he was able to do the sum. All the members of his organism were in readiness to be directed to the task; there was, so to speak, no “fault in the contact”. The trouble with him is only that he needs longer time. And the reason for this is, that from the very outset his ether body and his physical body offer resistance; they fail to unfold the activity that is proper to them, in spite of the fact that the possibilities for the activity are there all the time.

Follow carefully how the boy's interests work. You will find they remain in the head organisation; they cannot make their way down into the rest of the body. This fact was clearly demonstrated in a little incident that took place during my visit. You saw how the boy came up to us with his little Kodak and wanted to take our photograph. He managed it quite well, carrying the whole thing through with intense interest. Afterwards I tried to suggest to him that he should make another exposure. This would have necessitated his going to fetch a new film; his interest would have had to reach beyond what lay immediately to hand. He resisted the idea, and nothing would persuade him to listen to it. When an interest seizes hold of him in the very movement, here and now—he is ready for it—he is “all there”: but if the situation requires that he should bring the interest down into his metabolism-and-limbs system, then at once his ether and physical bodies set up a powerful resistance. What should one do in such a case?

With a boy already in his teens, it is of course much more difficult than it would have been earlier; we should however set ourselves even now to intervene with our pedagogical therapy. Taking as our starting point things that the boy follows with a certain interest, we should go on from these, widening the circle of his interest in all directions. A great deal can be achieved by recognising and appealing to an entirely healthy instinct that the boy undoubtedly possesses—despite his difficulties. For you must realise that even in persons who are abnormal, healthy instincts are yet always present. And with this boy, you will find that as soon as you draw his attention to objects and processes that call for skilful handling, he will at once begin to experience a widening of his circle of interests.

The boy has, you see, difficulty in following the road that leads from the head organisation to the metabolism-and limbs organisation, and thence, as I have explained to you, out again beyond. This latter part of the journey he accomplishes only with great difficulty, since there is in him no capacity to perceive what is going on there. Even the slight measure of perception that is present in a normal human being is in his case lacking. Once, however, he can be brought to see, he has an object plainly before him, the skilfulness of his own limbs, the sight will fill him with joy. You must get him to do things which will bring this about. An excellent plan will be to give him Curative Eurythmy exercises, to be done with legs and hands, but especially taking care to see that the toes and fingers move with great energy. Then draw the boy's attention to these movements that are going on in his limbs, let him watch himself making the movements.

If it should happen that you have to do with younger children who already show signs of this kind of difficulty, where what has been decided upon by the head does not easily find its way down into the rest of the organism, try getting them to touch their feet with their head. In the case of the boy we are considering, it is too late for this, but you may any day receive into your Home quite little children with the same disability. Try it yourselves; you will find it is no easy matter! But for small children it is a very good exercise; they can be brought even to kiss their own toes. Another thing that never fails to help in such cases—and it could prove a real blessing even to your boy—is to get the child to hold a pencil between his great toe and the next, and with the pencil contrive to trace out some letters of the alphabet, and so have the enjoyment of discovering that he can write with his feet. It is quite possible that even at his age this boy of yours could receive very great benefit from such an experiment. For in cases such as his, Curative Eurythmy—and writing with the toes is a kind of Curative Eurythmy!—can be of the very greatest help. Whether also a course of treatment with lead will at his age afford him the help he stands in need of, we shall discover when we begin to make trial with it and note its effects.

All that I have been saying will have demonstrated to you the imperative need for a delicate and fine power of observation. The simple calculation that took the boy an hour and a half to make, the reluctance to go back into the house to fetch a new film—facts like these may seem trifling and insignificant, and yet it is just this kind of thing that we must learn to make the object of careful observation. As we come to do so, we shall realise what an invaluable aid it can be to the educator of backward children if he is sensitive to every little thing that happens with the child he wants to help.

And now you will be wanting to say to me: It looks as though the education of backward children is going to take up all one's time; one will have to be perpetually giving one's whole attention to the children, and will have no time left to meditate, no time in fact to do anything else whatever! That is not the case; and the esoteric nature of a life-work such as you are undertaking should not allow you ever to admit for a moment this point of view. What is wanted is not that you should all day long be constantly on the watch—not that at all, but rather that you should acquire a quick sense for characteristic happenings. If one has already learned how to watch quite a number of children and knows how to make the right use at every turn of one's powers of perception, it is, under certain circumstances, quite possible to carry out a thorough investigation of a single child in five or ten minutes. It does not depend at all on the length of time one devotes to the matter, but wholly on the degree to which one is able to unite oneself inwardly with the act of perception. If people would only realise that one has to really connect oneself inwardly with the phenomena in question then a great deal of time would be saved, especially for those who work in the professions.^E1

Now, there was at Lauenstein another boy, a typical case, a fifteen-year-old epileptic. You could see the same type in the boy we had here before us the other day; only, your boy at Lauenstein is several years older. The first thing that claims our attention in his case is the difficult situation created by the fact that he is at the age of transition to puberty. He has been castrated, has he not? Now what we are concerned with is the process of attaining puberty as it has to go forward in the whole organism. The fact that the boy has been castrated, means that in his case we have to reckon with a phenomenon that manifests in him with extraordinary vehemence—namely, the reaction that is induced as a result of this unnatural influence that has been brought to bear on the evolution of sex. The boy gives indeed every appearance of one in whom the transition to puberty is going to prove difficult. The gradual attainment of puberty is, as we have said, a process that belongs to the whole organism; and the sole significance that castration possesses for the boy at the present time consists in the reactionary influence it has in him upon the attainment of puberty.

The first thing to do therefore is to see that the boy is placed where he will be sure of being treated in the way that is right and necessary for boys who are attaining puberty—that is to say, where care is taken to provide conditions under which such boys have their interest aroused in all the processes that go on in the world in which they find themselves. Boys who are at the age of puberty urgently need Waldorf School education. This boy must not be left to the mercy of his own impulses and emotions; we must try to bring it about that he is continually occupied with something outside himself, and takes a keen interest in the objects and processes that he finds around him. Tell me, how is he getting on at school? Perhaps you can tell me this?

(S. “He can neither read nor write. During the past year we have not even made a beginning with school for him. Frau F. did once begin to teach him reading and writing; it was on the Montessori method, and he did not get on at all, he seemed unable to make any progress. His school attainments have really to be counted as nil.”)

He shows, you see, a certain obtuseness to external impressions. We shall here be under the necessity of applying Waldorf School education in the way we are accustomed to do with quite little children—taking our start, that is, from painting, and so providing the opportunity for the boy to put out into colour whatever is tormenting him inwardly. Get him to paint, and you will see what can be got rid of this way. And then you can go farther with him in whatever direction his own inclinations and abilities indicate.

There can moreover be no question but that we must intervene here also with our therapy. We have not, I think, up to now, prescribed any medicaments? The boy should have algae and belladonna. Therapeutical treatment will consist then of these two remedies. You probably understand in a general way the nature of algae injections, but you will do well to enter a little more deeply into the significance of them; for you should, you know, be ready to make use of them on your own responsibility, in individual cases. Why do we propose for this boy algae injections?

In the algae we have plants that have neither strongly developed root formation nor strongly developed flower formation. It is indeed almost as though flower and root had been telescoped. The leaf organisation is the main thing; everything else is produced from it. In algae therefore, since foliage preponderates, we find no very near relationship to the earth. Nor, on the other hand, is there any very near relationship to the outer cosmos. There is however a relationship to the watery and airy elements that are active immediately over the surface of the earth. Algae—and the same applies also to mushrooms—are plants that are, as it were, completely steeped in the interplay of air and water. And these two kinds of plants have in addition this characteristic in common, that they are strongly attracted to the minute quantity of sulphur which is to be found everywhere today in water as well as in air. Consequently, when these plants are introduced into the rhythmic organism of man, they are peculiarly adapted to restore harmony between astral body and ether body. And harmony between astral body and ether body is precisely what is lacking in a boy of this type.

In cases where we perceive a disturbance due to the ego organisation making too great demand upon the astral body and not allowing it to enter into the etheric body, we must have recourse rather to the mushroom type of plant. The algae, which come nearer to the ordinary plant, are to be used when the physical body and etheric body refuse to allow the astral body to enter—that is to say, when the disharmony is due not to an excessive attraction exerted by the ego organisation, but to a special resistance put up by the ether body.^E2

Then there was a girl you had at Lauenstein. Perhaps you would kindly describe her for us, in accordance with the indications I gave at the time?

(S.: “I too have seen this girl only on that one occasion—a girl with protruding lips. You pointed out that something very serious must have happened to her astral body between the ages of 3 and 4; the child must, you said, have had at that time a violent attack of itching and scratching. The mother confirmed afterwards that high temperatures had occurred at that age, accompanied by irritation and itching. For treatment, nicotiana enema was prescribed; and if that did not help, nicotiana injections were to be given. The girl is fifteen years old.”)

So we have here a girl who has attained the age of fifteen, and in whom we can see quite clearly that the astral organisation has made very weak connection with the organism as a whole. The girl is obviously of that type.^E3 One notices at once that the astral organisation is far too weak to restrain the ego in face of the temptation that always assails man when he eats—the temptation to enjoy the eating too much, to revel in the sweet and pleasant taste of the food. When the astral body is not sufficiently active in the lower region of the face, then the lips will be found to protrude noticeably—a symptom that is due to the excessive pleasure experienced in tasting food and also in the initial process of digestion, that takes place in the mouth. Phenomena such as these have far-back antecedents; obviously they cannot be making their appearance for the first time at this somewhat late stage of childhood. As has been said, I stated at the time that an irregularity must have occurred in the child's development about the 3rd or 4th year.

How can you learn to perceive such facts for yourselves? You can find your way to such perceptions if you set out to do so with the love that I have described to you and upon which you will remember I laid such stress. You must never say: In order to perceive such things, I should have to be clairvoyant. To say that betokens an inner laziness—a quality that must on no account ever be found in one who undertakes the task of education. Long before you attain to the clairvoyance that is required for spiritual research in general, you can beget in yourself the faculty simply to perceive what is really the matter. The power to do this can be born in you, if you approach with loving devotion all that shows itself in the child, and especially just those developments that come with abnormal conditions. What you say to yourself at that moment will be true. There is of course need here for esoteric courage. This esoteric courage can and does develop in man—provided only that one thing does not stand in the way.

It is strange, and at the same time significant, that these inner intuitions are so little noticed by the very people who are, comparatively speaking, well able to have them. Anthroposophists have many an opportunity to pay heed to such inner intuitions! For they have these intuitions, far more than is supposed, but they fail to attend to them—the reason being that in the moment when they should do so, they find themselves assailed by a vanity that is hard to overcome. With the discovery of faculties not known before, all manner of impulses that spring from vanity begin to crop up in the soul. Along with the other characteristics of our age that I described for you in my lecture yesterday, as well as on several other occasions, we have to reckon also a tendency to grow vain and conceited, for it is a tendency that is terribly prevalent in present-day mankind.

This is a matter that should receive serious consideration from those of the present-day Youth—and you yourselves are of course among the number—who are devoting their lives to some great and noble calling. There is in our time great need that young men and women should rise up among us and exercise a regenerating influence upon mankind; and what I am now going to say is not said out of misunderstanding of the Youth Movement of our day, nor from lack of understanding, but out of a true understanding of it. It is a necessity, this Youth Movement, it is something of quite extraordinary significance; for those older people who can understand it, the modern Youth Movement is interesting in the highest degree. Not a word shall be uttered here against it. Nor shall we attempt to deny that there is only too often a deplorable lack of readiness on the part of the older generation to understand this Youth Movement, and that a great many plans have suffered shipwreck just because the Movement has not been taken seriously enough, just because people have not troubled themselves to look into it sufficiently. But the Youth Movement does need to beware of one thing when it sets out to undertake specific practical tasks; and it is incumbent on those of us who have had experience in the matter to call attention to it, for it makes one seriously apprehensive for the whole future of the Movement. I mean a certain vanity that shows itself there on every hand.

This vanity is not so much due to a lack of education and culture, but is rather the consequence of an inevitable situation. For the will to action necessitates of course a strong development of inner capabilities, and then it follows all too easily that under the influence of Ahriman vanity begins to spring up in the soul. I have had opportunity in my life to make careful and intimate observation of persons who were full of promise—persons too of the most various ages of life—in whom one could see again and again how with the dawn of the Age that has followed Kali Yuga, vanity began to grow and thrive in their souls. It is not, therefore, only among the Youth that the vanity shows itself. What concerns us at the moment however is the special form of it that manifests in the Youth and that has in point of fact hindered them from developing the right and essential character that lies inherent in present-day Youth, waiting to be developed. Hence the phenomenon with which we are so familiar, this endless talk of “missions”, of great tasks, with all too little inclination to set to work upon the details, to take pains about the small things that require to be done in carrying out these tasks.

These will emphatically be need in the future for what has been described in simple words as devotion to detail.

Devotion to detail and to little things is something which the Youth of our time need to develop. They are far too apt to revel in abstractions; and this revelling in abstractions is the very thing that can then lure them with irresistible force into the snare of vanity. I do beg you to bethink yourselves of the difficulties that beset your path on this account. Make it a matter of esoteric striving to master this tendency to vanity; for it does indeed constitute a real hindrance to any work you undertake.

Suppose you want to be able to speak to some fellow human being from out of an intuitive power of vision. The things you need to behold in him are by no means written plain for all to see; and you may take it that statements made about backward children from the ordinary lay point of view are generally false. What you have to do is to see through what lies on the surface, see right through it to the real state of affairs. If therefore you want to come to the point of being able to say something to him out of intuitive vision, what do you need for that? You need to tell yourself with courage and with energy—not just saying it at some particular moment, but carrying it continually in your consciousness, so that it determines the very quality and content of your consciousness:—“ I can do it.” If, without vanity, in a spirit of self-sacrifice, and in earnest endeavour to overcome all the things that hinder, you repeat these words, not only feeling them, but saying them to yourself over and over again, then you will begin to discover how far you are able to go in this direction. Do not expect to find the development of the faculty you seek, by spinning out all manner of theories and thoughts. No, what you need to do is to maintain all the time this courageous consciousness, which develops quite simply of itself when once you have begun to fetch up from the depths of your soul what lies hidden there, buried (metaphorically speaking) beneath an accumulation of dust and rubbish.

Generally speaking, people are not able to achieve anything of this kind in the realm of pedagogy. They could do so if only they would set themselves seriously to bring to life within them a certain truth. Let me explain to you how this can be done.

Try to accustom yourselves to live your way every evening into the consciousness: In me is God. In me is God—or the Spirit of God, or what other expression you prefer to use. (But please do not think I mean just persuading yourself of this truth theoretically—which is what the meditations of the majority of people amount to!) Then, in the morning let the knowledge: I am in God shine out over the whole day. And now consider! When you bring to life within you these two ideas, which are then no longer mere thoughts, but have become something felt and perceived inwardly, yes, have even become impulses of will within you, what is it you are doing?

First, you have this picture before you: In me is God;

and on the following morning, you have this picture before you: I am in God (see Figure 3, right). They are one and the same, the upper and the lower figure. And now you must understand: Here you have a circle (yellow); here you have a point (blue). It doesn't look like that in the evening, but in the morning the truth of it comes to light. And in the morning you have to think: Here is a circle (blue); here is a point (yellow). Yes, you have to understand that a circle is a point, and a point a circle. You have to acquire a deep, inner understanding of this fact.

But now, this is really the only way to come to a true understanding of the human being! You remember the drawing I made for you, of the metabolism-and-limbs man and the head man (see Figure 1.). That drawing was nothing else than a realistic impression or record of what you have before you now in this simple figure for meditation. In the human being it becomes actual reality; the I-point of the head becomes in the limb man the circle—naturally, with modifications. Adopting this line of approach, trying, that is, to understand man inwardly, you will learn to understand the whole of man. You must, first of all, be quite clear in your mind that these two figures, these two conceptions, are one and the same, are not at all different from one another. They only look different from outside. There is a yellow circle; here it is too! There is a blue point; here it is too! Why do they look different? Because that drawing is a diagram of the head, and this a diagram of the body. When the point claims a place for itself in the body, it becomes the spinal cord. It makes its way in here

and then the part it plays in the head organisation is continued in the spinal cord. There you have the inner dynamic of the morphology of man. Taking it as your starting point, you will be able, by meditation, to build up a true anatomy, a true physiology. And then you will acquire the inner intuition that can perceive in how far the upper and lower jaws are limbs; for you will begin to see in the head a complete organism in itself, sitting up there on the top of the human being, an organism whose limbs are dwarfed and have—in process of deformation—turned into jaws. And you will come to a clear perception of how teeth and toes are in polarity to one another. For you have only to look at the attachments of the jawbones, and you can see it all there before you—the stunted toes, the stunted hands and feet.

But, my dear friends, meditation that employs such pictures as I have been giving can never take its course in the kind of mood that would allow us to feel: Now I am going to settle down to a blissful time of meditation; it will be like sinking into a snug, warm nest! No, the feeling must be continually present in us that we are taking the plunge into reality—that we are grasping hold of reality.

Devotion to little things—yes, to the very smallest of all! We must not omit to cultivate this interest in very little things. The tip of the ear, the paring of a finger-nail, a single human hair—should be every bit as interesting to us as Saturn, Sun and Moon. For really and truly in one human hair everything else is comprised; a person who becomes bald loses a whole cosmos! What we see externally—we can verily create it inwardly, if only we achieve that overcoming which is essential to a life of meditation. But we shall never achieve it so long as any vestige of vanity is allowed to remain—and vestiges of vanity lurk in every corner and crevice of the soul. Therefore is it so urgent, if you want to become real educators, and especially educators of backward children, that you should cultivate, with the utmost humility, this devotion in the matter of little things. And when you have made a beginning in this way in your own sphere, you can afterwards go on to awaken in other circles of the Youth Movement this same devotion to little things.

And then it will indeed become possible for you to receive, for example, indications that are afterwards verified from external evidence—as happened, you remember, in the case we are considering. And here I must say in connection with this very case, I have occasion to find grave fault. The same kind of thing happens only too often in connection with the various undertakings that have been begun within our anthroposophical movement. The situation was as follows. Here was a girl concerning whom I told you that a kind of abnormality must have occurred in her development between the third and fourth year. You question the mother, and the mother confirms that it was so. What did you do then? Please tell me, honestly and sincerely: What did you do, when the mother confirmed the fact? (Silence.) Please be esoterically honest and tell me the truth, you three: what did you do? (Silence.) If you had done the right thing, you would now be telling me: “We danced and jumped until we made a hole in the ceiling!” And the after-effect of this jumping for joy would be still expressing itself today—and not merely in words, it would be shining out from you like a light.

That is what you need—enthusiasm in the experience of truth. This enthusiasm is an absolute sine qua non: you cannot get on without it. For years it has been so terribly painful to me, the way the members of the anthroposophical movement stand there as if they were rooted to the spot—and the young too, almost as much as the old. But now consider what it means, That they can stand there so impassively. Look at Nietzsche! What a different sort of fellow he was—even if he did get ill from it! He made his Zarathustra become a dancer. Can't you become dancers—in the sense Nietzsche meant it? Why, you should be leading lives of joy—deep inner joy in the truth! There is nothing in the world more delightful, nothing more fascinating, than the experience of truth. There you have an esotericism that is far more genuine, far more significant than the esotericism that goes about with a long face. Before everything else—and long before you begin to talk about having a “mission”—there must be this living inner experience of truth.

The girl had, when three or four years old, an occult fever. It is even called that in the medical world—one of those instances where medicine has retained an earlier form of speech. When a doctor does not know what is the cause of a fever, he calls it an “occult” fever. This occult fever, then, made its appearance. During the period round about the third and fourth years, the astral body was particularly weak. The physical body and the ether body reacted to this and developed too strongly; and then the astral body was unable to keep up with them. It is exceedingly important that we take cognisance first of all of this fact: at the age of three the growth of the astral body suffered a significant check, the child's astral body became stunted and cramped within itself. I must come to its aid. It must receive help to make up for what has been lost; and this help can be given through education, by awakening the child's interest in many directions. Tell me now, how has it been with this girl at school?

(S.: “We are not having the girl with us in the Home, she will come only for treatment. She was in a school for giving special help to backward children up to the beginning of her sixteenth year, and can read and write, and work with numbers up to about a thousand. In all other respects we have really no knowledge of the girl, we had her there only in order for you to see her. Enema containing nicotiana was prescribed.”)

It will be important to treat this girl with Curative Eurythmy.^E4

As a result of the stunting of the astral body, a strong tendency to deformation has, you see, made its appearance in the upper organism. The child has about her an extraordinarily animal look, the reason being that all that part which belongs to the organs of mastication is deformed. We have already been making very careful tests here in the Clinic of the influence of nicotiana juice in counteracting deformation; and this girl is just a case in point, where it will be able to do its good work. So you see it will be possible right away to begin—slowly—to make some progress. The nicotiana juice is given by the mouth, to start with; and then one has to watch carefully—one must acquire an eye for such things—to see whether the organs of mastication are beginning to come more under the control of the organism. For, as it is, the organs of mastication lie almost entirely outside the realm of the child's control. They just hang there—limp. The child can thus be treated with nicotiana juice given by the mouth in suitable decimal of dilution, beginning with the sixth and going up to the fifteenth. If it should turn out that this does not work strongly enough, we shall have to resort to injection of nicotiana juice in a high potency into the circulation, so that it may make direct contact there with the astral body and enable us to achieve in this way what we failed to achieve when we administered nicotiana juice by ingestion.

I have also a further suggestion to make. The nicotiana juice is intended to work within the astral body and remain there, and it will perhaps be good if we try to prevent its influence from entering too powerfully into the ego organisation—if we try, that is, to arrest it before it reaches the ego organisation. This result can be induced by giving—not often, perhaps only once a week—a weak sulphur bath.

Tomorrow we will speak about the other cases that you have at Lauenstein, and I shall be particularly glad to be able to consider with you the interesting phenomenon of albinism, which we have opportunity to study in two of your children. One of them is fifteen years old and the other a much younger sister of hers. (Dr. Steiner asked Dr. Vreede [the original leader of the Mathematical-Astronomical Section at the Goetheanum] if she had drawn their horoscopes, and she handed them to him. The dates were 6th December, 1909, approximately 4 a.m., and 18th May, 1921, approximately 3 a.m., both at Jena.) How does Uranus stand? Did you not find any special constellations? (Dr. Vreede replied that she had—namely with Uranus and Neptune. In the case of the elder girl, Neptune was in opposition to Uranus.)

Such children always show two main characteristic peculiarities: fair hair; and poor sight, with the variation in the eyes. These are the essential phenomena of albinism. No more than a superficial study is required to discover that in albinos we have to do with an organisation that is very feeble at assimilating iron, but on the other hand assimilates sulphur with the greatest ease. The organisation resists iron; it resists dealing with it, and this applies especially to the periphery of the body; assimilation of iron stops short of the periphery. Sulphur, on the other hand, is driven to the periphery; and not only so, but driven even out beyond it. That is how it comes about that in the region of the hair, you see, all around, a sulphur-aura, which pales and bleaches the hair and takes the strength out of it. And in the eyes (which are formed comparatively independently, being built into the organism from without, in the embryo time)—in the eyes you have a still more striking manifestation of a sulphur-aura. Here it has the effect of fairly forcing the eyes to betake themselves out of the etheric into the astral. In such children we see the eye plucked right out of its “grotto”, the etheric body of the eye left disregarded and its astral body very much to the fore and fully engaged.

Very important questions arise at this point. If we consider the “forming” of man, we find that he stands in connection on the one hand with the telluric forces that divulge themselves to us in the substances of the earth, and on the other hand, with the whole cosmos. He is dependent on both. Both sets of forces are present in the individual process of evolution, as well as also in the stream of inheritance. Let us take first, in considering these two children, the stream of inheritance. Neither in the case of the father nor of the mother is there any indication of albinism. They are both perfectly normal human beings. There was however somewhere in the antecedents—was it a grandmother, of whom it is reported that she had signs of albinism? (Frl. Dr. K.: “It was a sister of the mother.”) An aunt, then. Albinism has been known in the family; that is all that need concern us at the moment. A tendency to albinism is present in the antecedents. And did you not tell me that there had been other cases in the Saal region, also at Jena? (Frl. Dr. K.: “Yes, two children; and one adult, aged thirty-two, who is already married. Of these three, in only one case had there been albinism before in the family history.”) It would seem, therefore, that albinism is in some way endemic to a certain part of the country, but meets also with many counter-influences. And so in fact it makes its appearance quite sporadically! Only under certain circumstances will an albino be born there. The equation will immediately suggest itself: How does it come about that an albino is born in a particular territory?

In the case of an albino we have, as we have seen, a sulphurisation process working outwards, so that little sulphur islets occur in the aura, in the periphery. And now we look round in the native environment of the children to see where we can find sulphur. The whole valley of the Saal abounds in iron sulphide. Iron and sulphur are thus present in combination. You can study first the presence of iron in the neighbourhood, and then again the presence of sulphur; and you can take special note of the whereabouts of the beautiful pyrites (iron sulphide). These delicate and lovely cubes of pyrites with their beautiful golden gleam are a characteristic product of the valley of the Saale. Other regions nearby yield gypsum. Gypsum is, as you know, calcium sulphate with 20 per cent water. So that here again we have an opportunity to study sulphur—this time in combination with calcium. This kind of study of the soil will throw light for us on all that lives in the atmosphere etc.; and so we shall have first of all to give ourselves to the study of that which comes out of the ground and is connected with the absorption of sulphur and iron. For we have here a territory that is also very rich in iron, and the question arises: How does this opposite relationship come about in this territory in regard to earth and man, in the earth has a great power of attraction for iron, while the human being cannot attract iron at all, or only with difficulty? What constellations must be present to cause the human being to be particularly disposed to reject the iron and accept the sulphur?

Here we come into the realm of the cosmic; we have to set about investigating the constellations that were present at birth (we cannot of course do it for conception). And this will lead us to ask whether there were not in the case of these children who are albinos, quite special constellations, constellations moreover that can only seldom occur. We shall have to find what we can learn, not from the planets that move more quickly, but from the constellations of the planets that take a long time to revolve, such as Saturn and Uranus. You see, therefore, to what kind of questions such cases will lead us. We must first find the right questions to ask; when once we have the questions, then we are ready to begin our study.^E5

Now, for these children also, I would like to prescribe a little course of treatment, basing it on the indications I have given today. We will talk of that tomorrow.

I gather from a remark that was made to me this morning, that you are wanting something more than is contained in the lectures. These (you feel) go too much in the direction of “devotion to detail”—too much, that is, in the direction that you need! But I am really entirely ready to meet you in this matter, and propose to use here the new method I have been using with the workmen at the Goetheanum. For there I have allowed it gradually to come to this—that I ask them on what I am to speak; so that, ever since a certain date, the workmen themselves have been specifying the themes they want dealt with in the lectures. And now they can never complain that they do not get lectures on subjects they want to hear about.

• 1. Curative home in Jena-Lichtenhain, founded by Franz Löffler, Siegfried Pickert, and Albrecht Strohschein.
• E1. Rudolf Steiner visited Lauenstein on 18th June, 1924, almost immediately after the Home was opened. The children were brought to him; and having first had a good look at each in turn, talking with the child and enquiring into the history of the case, he explained to us how this or that condition had come about, and gave indications for therapeutical treatment and education.
  
  The explanations and advice given by Rudolf Steiner on the occasion of this visit were noted down, and provide in each case a most valuable addition to the words spoken by him in this course. Wonderful, above all, was the example Rudolf Steiner set us in the whole way in which he met the children, entering with loving and devout interest into every single detail of their condition. For the little group of us who were taking part together in these first beginnings of the work of Curative Education, the whole visit was a deep experience, and the memory of it continues to be cherished in the “Institutions for the Education and Healing of Children in Need of Special Care”. Some of the indications and instructions given by Rudolf Steiner will be added here as Notes to the Course.
  
  As regards this boy, Rudolf Steiner told us that he is lacking in brain sand (the calcareous concretions of the pineal body). The convulsions and the whole general condition must go back to some fright to which the mother had been subjected during pregnancy. (Enquiry afterwards confirmed this.) He added that one must, in such cases, always ask how things were with the mother during pregnancy. The convulsions, he said, were a secondary effect.
  
  For therapy, Rudolf Steiner prescribed injections of thyroid gland secretion. The medicament must enter the body in a centripetal direction, in order to evoke a reaction that works centrifugally. The preparation should still contain epithelial cells. On the day following the injection, the fever curve, also the pulse and the breathing, should be measured, quantitatively and qualitatively.
  
  In addition, the boy should drink a full glass of Levico water in the course of each day, diluted in the proportion 1:8.
  
  Curative Eurythmy: O, I (ee), L.
• E2. When this poor feeble-minded boy, who was as a rule excessively restless, was brought to Rudolf Steiner, he became for the moment quite peaceful and at rest, and the finer side of his nature, which was generally overlaid and hidden, suddenly revealed itself in a truly beautiful manner. Rudolf Steiner took particular interest in the boy's sense-perceptions, and proved to us that he cannot see far into the distance. When his bad teeth were alluded to, Rudolf Steiner pointed out that his finger nails also were soft and weak. The following notes of the conversation were made at the time: “Did you not notice anything particular about the mother? This is a case where we can see evidence of a remarkable karma. The astral body is over-ripe. Something is working in from the preceding incarnation. The time between death and new birth has been quite short, with the result that the soul has brought into this incarnation something of the astral body of the former incarnation. The boy still has even now strange dreams at night. This fact will reveal itself to you in strange and disconnected remarks that he makes after waking up. Supposing he has at some time or other seen snakes, then it may be that now he will see them coiling and uncoiling themselves. It is a case of a poor astral body, that has its seat mainly in the back of the head.” (Here Dr. Steiner laid his hand, with a gesture of the most intense interest, on the back of the boy's head, which was thickly covered with stubborn black hair. “This condition has to be met by introducing a counter-astrality; and that we can do by the use of algae. For algae draw in the astral forces of the surrounding air. Mushrooms do this still more; but we had better not begin with the strongest influences. All parasitic plants draw in astrality. By means of algae injections, healthy astrality will be attracted—astrality, that is, which is opposite in quality to the astrality already in the body; for there the astrality is bad.
  
  The therapy will therefore be: Algae inoculations D 5; Belladonna D 4, D 10, D 15, D 20, D 30.”
  
  Dr. Steiner was shown the record of the fits. The suggestion having been raised that their occurrence might be running parallel with the rhythms of the Moon, Dr. Steiner said that the influence of the Moon could not in this case be the direct cause of the fits; at the most, it could affect only the consciousness.
  
  Eurythmy should be done, especially with the legs.
• E3. Dr. Steiner said at Lauenstein: “She has a kink in her astral body; its form has no unity or coherence; above, it is weak, whilst below, it is stronger.”
• E4. At Lauenstein the following prescription was given: Nicotiana enema, a five per cent decoction, twice a week. If this does not help, then Nicotiana injections D 6. Curative Eurythmy: F, M, UT (oot), TU (too).
• E5When the children were brought to Rudolf Steiner at Lauenstein, he particularly enquired whether there had not been some weakness or debility in the mother. The mother declared that she had never been seriously ill, but admitted that she had suffered from chlorosis as a girl and had in general been very anaemic. Rudolf Steiner: “So the mother, you see, was evidently, earlier on, in a delicate state of health.” The father too had in his youth been weak and ailing. Their first child, at whose birth the mother was twenty years old and the father twenty-two, died young of pneumonia. The second was the elder of the girls we are considering. The third, a boy, is entirely normal. Then came, as fourth, the younger of our two albinos.
  
  Rudolf Steiner also made enquiries about the geological conditions of the district in which the children had been born. Information was given of the presence of pyrites and gypsum, to which allusion is made in the lecture. He then asked whether the people of the district were strikingly blond. This was denied; on the contrary, they are inclined to be dark. Lastly, he enquired whether the parents were relatives of one another; the answer was in the negative.
  
  Rudolf Steiner then explained to us the connection of the albinism with the sulphur. “These children”, he said, “are completely sulphurous. In them, sulphur processes are permeating the entire body.” The children are “all eye”; processes which ought to be going on in the eye alone are here taking place throughout the body. The quivering in the eyes and the furtive glancing hither and thither are due to oscillation between ether body and astral body.

Today I shall give neither a lecture nor a lecture, but rather discuss some things in the way that I believe is still missing in our branches. I will tie in with the brochure “Science and Theosophy” by F. vor Wrangell, published in Leipzig by Max Altmann in 1914. In doing so, I would like to show in particular how one can tie into such a writing can be linked to such a writing.¹

The title 'Science and Theosophy' obviously touches on an issue that it is important for us to consider, because we will very often be confronted with the objection that our movement is not scientific or that scientists do not know what to do with it. In short, it will certainly be necessary for one or other of us to deal with science in some way, because he will have to face this objection and perhaps also be pointed to some individual points in doing so. Therefore, it will be good to start by considering the views of a man who believes that he is fully immersed in the scientific spirit of the present day, and of whom, having read his booklet, one can readily can say that he deals with the relationship between science and theosophy in a very astute way, and in such a way that he creates a relationship that many will try to create who are involved in the scientific work of our time. And with such people, who want to create a relationship between science and theosophy, we, or at least a certain number of us, must be able to think along the same lines.

Furthermore, since the brochure is written favorably for Theosophy, we are not so much compelled to fall back on polemics and criticism, but can tie in with some of the author's thoughts, which arise from the specifics of our spiritual striving. Of course, if some of us were to write such a brochure, we might even avoid the title “Theosophy” after the various experiences we have had in such a debate. This is a question that may perhaps be examined in more detail in the course of reading the brochure itself.

The brochure is divided into individual, easy-to-follow chapters and bears as its motto a saying of Kant's, which reads:

“It is not correct to always speak in the lecture halls of wisdom that in the metaphysical sense no more than one single world can exist.” Kant.

Taken out of context, there is certainly not much to be gleaned from this saying of Kant's. However, the author of this paper wants to refer to Kant in the opinion that Kant wanted to say with this saying that the world view that external science creates need not be seen as the only possible one. Here, perhaps, the author of this paper has not quite accurately captured Kant's opinion, because Kant basically means something different in the context of his saying. Kant means: When man reflects, metaphysically reflects, he can think of various real worlds, and then the question is, why of these various conceivable possible worlds, the one in which we live exists for us, while for the author of the booklet the question is: Is it possible to have other world views besides the materialistic one? Of course, he is of the opinion that precisely another, a spiritual world view must also relate to this world of ours.

Then the writing begins with its first essay, which bears the title:

Introductory

A powerful spiritual movement has taken hold of European culture at the present time, in contrast to the materialistic current of thought that prevailed in the leading intellectual circles around the middle of the 19th century.

The author thus looks, as it were, at the hustle and bustle of intellectual work around him and finds that things have changed from the mid-19th century; that in the mid-19th century, scientific salvation was found in materialism, whereas now - in the time when this booklet was published, 1914 - a powerful spiritual movement has taken hold of European culture.

Now he continues:

What are the inner reasons for this counter-current? It seems to me that they lie not only in people's metaphysical need, but also, at least in part, in the widely awakened awareness of the danger to human civilization that is associated with the domination of a materialistic world view.

Thus the author of this booklet is one of those who not only believe that a metaphysical need of humanity has awakened in the 20th century, but also believe that there is a certain moral danger in the minds of people being seized by the materialistic world view.

With increasing speed, the materialistic intellectual current pours through numerous channels from the intellectual heights into the lowlands of human society, displacing the religious convictions based on reverence, which provided a firm hold for the moral life of the masses. It is becoming increasingly clear to many that the victory of a materialistic worldview inevitably leads to a materialistic outlook on life and a corresponding lifestyle, which sees the only reasonable degree of life in exploiting the short lifespan for as much enjoyment as possible.

In earlier times, too, when a solid edifice of morals based on tradition and authority succumbed to corrosive intellectual criticism, humanity was seized by a craving for raw sensual pleasure and led down disastrous paths that took it away from what we feel is its most intrinsic destiny.

This is not contradicted by the fact that among those men who, inspired by an unconditional love of truth, communicate the results of their research and thinking to their fellow men, without regard to the consequences might ensue that many, if not most, of these men stand at a high level of moral greatness and are moved by noble, unselfish motives, in the full conviction that they are thus serving humanity.

So here the author points out that certain dangers for the moral life of human beings must arise as a consequence of a materialistic world view, and he says: This danger cannot be countered solely with the objection that those people who theoretically recognize a materialistic world view as theirs and as the right one themselves stand on a high level of moral conduct.

The author touches here, from his own observations, on a point to which I have repeatedly referred in our spiritual science, I may well say, from a higher point of view. For if one says that a spirit such as Haeckel, who works in such an eminently theoretical and materialistic way, stands on the ground of high moral ideals and also shows a higher moral conception of life in his own conduct, and that therefore the materialistic world-view does not necessarily lead to a materialistic way of life, one forgets one thing – and I have pointed this out in various lectures that I have given – namely, one forgets that in the development of mankind, feelings and thoughts move at different speeds.

If you look at just a short piece of human development, you will find that thoughts move relatively quickly. From the 15th and 16th centuries onwards, materialistic thinking, the living out of human theorizing in materialistic thought, has developed rapidly and all sciences have gradually been permeated theoretically by materialistic thought forms. Moral life, which is expressed in feelings, has developed less rapidly. At least people still show in their old feelings and emotions that feeling has not progressed as quickly. Therefore, people today still live in terms of the moral feelings that arose from the previous worldview, and that is why there is a dichotomy today between materialistic thinking and a non-materialistic life and a non-materialistic way of life that is still in the old sense. But the time is approaching when the consequences will be drawn from the materialistic-theoretical world view, so that what can be called is just around the corner: the moral life will be flooded by the consequence of the materialistic world view. One can therefore deepen one's understanding of the different speeds that feelings and thoughts have when viewed from a spiritual science perspective.

Now it says further:

But if the final result of this mental work is one that seems to contradict the destiny of man, the question is justified as to whether there is not a fundamental error in the seemingly so solid structure of the critical train of thought.

The author is therefore convinced that immoral consequences must follow from theoretical materialism, and that he can only expect salvation for humanity from morality. And so he wonders whether a materialistic world view, which must necessarily lead to immorality, not only shows errors, but has errors in itself when viewed critically. And so he continues:

Is this error only felt in one's feelings, or can it also be discovered intellectually? I have also been concerned with this question, and in the following I will attempt to clarify it for myself. I hope that my train of thought will also interest some readers who, like me, are convinced that it is more effective to fight an error with its own weapons than to merely call it into question. To indicate my scientific standpoint, I would mention that I am an astronomer by training, that my independent work lies in the fields of theoretical meteorology and physical geography, and that from early youth I have moved almost exclusively in academic circles, and respect for strict science based on critical thinking has become second nature to me, so to speak.

This does, however, justify the author's claim to have something to say about the relationship between science and Theosophy, because he shows that he is familiar with science on a certain point and that his judgment must therefore be infinitely more valuable than the judgment of someone who, for example, reads Kant and says, that is all nonsense, we Theosophists do not need to read Kant, and who thus only reveals that he himself has perhaps not seriously read and thought through five lines of Kant. It continues:

I am firmly convinced that a Weltanschhauung which cannot stand up to a strict critique of reason cannot endure, however much it appeals to the emotions. These introductory words should inform the reader of the task I have set myself in this essay and the point of view from which I intended to treat it.

The next essay describes in a few sentences what a materialistic-mechanical worldview is, the worldview that developed in the second half of the 19th century in such a way that there were and still are many who consider what the author describes here in a few sentences to be the only scientifically possible worldview. Let us consider what the author writes:

The basic assumptions of the materialistic-mechanical worldview

Let us first consider the most important basic assumptions of a materialistic-mechanical worldview. They can be summarized in the following teachings:

1. All events that we observe through our senses and perceive mentally follow a law, i.e. every state of the cosmos is necessarily determined by the temporally preceding state and also necessarily results in the subsequent states. All changes, i.e. all events, are inevitable consequences of the forces present in the cosmos.

Now, what the author is trying to analyze here as the basic assumption of the materialistic-mechanical world view has often been said in the course of our lectures. But if you compare what the author says here with the way it is said in our lectures, you will notice the difference. And for those who want to familiarize themselves with our spiritual-scientific consciousness, it is good to become aware of this difference.

Anyone who reads this first point, in which the materialistic-mechanical world view is characterized in a beautiful, astute and scientifically knowledgeable way, will see: that is very good; that hits the mark of the materialistic-mechanical world view. But when we try to give such a characterization in the lectures that are held for the purpose of our movement, it is attempted in just the opposite way, and it would be good if one would reflect on how differently we proceed in such matters.

Herr von Wrangell, on the other hand, presents what might be called a materialistic-mechanical world view. He speaks a few sentences from his own perspective, summarizing the impressions he has gained from the matter. You will have noticed – if you are at all inclined to notice such things – that I usually do not proceed in this way, but quite differently. I usually start from something that is there, that is there as a result of a historical process. And so, if I wanted to characterize this point, I did not simply say such sentences about myself, but I chose one of the essential, and indeed good, authors to express in the words and manner of such an author what the matter in question is.

Thus, I have often linked to the name Du» Bors-Reymond that which could serve as a basis for my lectures. As a result, you may often have gained the impression, if you do not see the whole in context, that I wanted to criticize Du Bois-Reymond. But I never want to criticize, I just want to pick out a representative characteristic example so that it is he who speaks, not I. This is what one might call the sense for facts that is necessary for us, the sense that we do not make assertions but let the facts speak. I have often related that Du Bois-Reymond gave a speech on the recognition of nature at the Leipzig Natural Science Convention in 1872. He also spoke about the way in which he had come to his view of the world through his scientific research.

Du Bois-Reymond is a physiologist in his specific field of research. His main work is in the field of nerve physiology. He has often spoken in elegant terms about the world view of the natural scientists. At the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly in 1872, for example, he spoke about the limits of the scientific world view, about the limits of natural knowledge, and in doing so he also spoke of Laplacean minds. What is that? Du Bois-Reymond characterized it at the time. This Laplacian mind is that of someone who is well versed in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and so on in the present day and forms a world view out of these sciences. Such a Laplacian mind thus comes to form a world view that starts from so-called astronomical knowledge of reality.

What is astronomical knowledge of reality, we might ask; what is astronomical knowledge? We can explain it in a few words.

The astronomer visualizes: the sun, the planets, the moon, the earth; he visualizes the planets orbiting around the sun or moving in ellipses around it, he visualizes the force of attraction, the gravitation, acting on the planets, he visualizes an inertia, and from this inertia he visualizes that the planets orbit around the sun.

Thus, the astronomer has in mind that he can follow what is going on around him in the universe as the great events; that he can follow them from the material entities that can be seen in space and from the forces that they exert on each other in space. The fact that the entities exert material forces on one another sets things in motion; that is, things come into motion when one imagines the solar system in this way and looks at it in this way. One has a picture of the things that are spread out in space and of the events that take place over time.

Now, anyone who wants to form a world view that is in line with the times, in the sense of Du Bois-Reymonds, says the following. We have to assume that all matter consists of the smallest parts, of atoms. Just as a solar system consists of the sun, the moon and the planets, so does the smallest piece of matter consist of something similar to the sun with the planets. And just as the sun exerts forces and the planets exert forces on each other, so do the forces between the individual atoms. This sets the atoms in motion. So we have motion inside every material particle. The atoms, like the sun and the planets, are in motion. These movements are small, but they are such that we can compare them with the great movements performed by the heavenly bodies out in space, so that if we take the smallest piece of matter that we can see, something is going on inside it, like what the astronomer imagines out in space. And now natural science came to imagine everything in such a way that wherever something is really in motion, it stems from the fact that the atoms are guided by their forces.

In the second half of the 19th century, especially the science of heat, as it was founded by Julius Robert Mayer, Joule, Tyndall and Helmholtz, and further developed by C. ausius and others, contributed to the formation of this world view. So, when you touch a body and feel warmth, you say: what you feel as the sensation of warmth is only an appearance. What really exists outside is that the smallest parts, the atoms of the substance in question, are in motion; and you know a state of warmth when you know how the atoms are in motion, when you have an astronomical knowledge of it, to use the words of Du Bois-Reymond. The ideal of the Laplacian mind is to be able to say: What do I care about heat? My world view depends on my being able to find out the motion of the atoms, which through their motion cause all that we have in the way of heat, light, etc. This Laplacian mind thus forms a world view that consists of space, matter with its effective forces, and motion. In the lecture he gave at the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly on the limits of natural knowledge, Du Bois-Reymond posits this ideal of the Laplacian mind and asks: what would such a Laplacian mind be capable of?

You see, his ideal is astronomical knowledge of the world. If a mathematician takes the image of our solar system as it is at any given point in time, he only needs to insert certain numbers into his formula and he gets an image of what it was like an hour, three hours, ten years, centuries ago. How does one go about calculating whether a solar or lunar eclipse took place at a certain time in the first decade of our era? In this case, we have well-developed formulas based on the current state of science. All you need to do is insert the corresponding numbers into the formula to calculate each individual state. You can calculate when a solar eclipse will occur, let's say in 1970 or in 2728. In short, you can calculate every state that precedes or follows in time. And now Laplace's mind should have the formula that encompasses this entire solar system. So anyone with Laplace's mind, which included the atoms in space and all their states of motion, could - and Du Bois-Reymond says the same thing - calculate today, for example, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon from the world formula that he has of the atoms and their present states of motion. He would only have to insert the necessary information into the formula. It would only depend on the position of the atoms at that time, and the fact would have to follow: Caesar crosses the Rubicon. - If you insert certain values into the formula, a certain picture of the current state of the atoms should result, and then, for example, you would be able to recognize the Battle of Salamis. One would only need to proceed from differential to differential and one would be able to reconstruct the entire Battle of Salamis. That is the ideal of Laplace's mind: a knowledge of the world, which is called astronomical. Occasionally something more can be added about these things. Now I will only mention a small experience for those who are attentive to it. As a boy, I once came across a school program. Such school programs are printed, after all. They usually contain an essay written by one of the teachers. At the time, this essay was not that easy for me to understand, because it was titled “The force of attraction considered as an effect of motion”. Even then, I was dealing with an author who, so to speak, had also set himself the ideal of Laplace's mind; and he had expounded many other things in the same direction.

If you take all this together, you will see that I did not try to speak of an astronomical-materialistic world view as a mere idea, but to let the facts and the personalities speak for themselves. In a sense, then, I did strive to cultivate a style of presentation that excludes the personal. For if I were to relate what Du Bois-Reymond said on a particular occasion, I would let him speak for himself and not myself. My task is only to follow up what the personalities have said; I try to let the world speak. This is the attempt to exclude oneself, not to relate one's own views, but facts. When reading this point by Wrangell, one should be aware that our spiritual science already strives for the sense of fact in the way it presents the facts, the sense not merely to suckle at the objective, but the sense to immerse oneself in the facts, to really sink into them.

Now you will recognize what I have peeled out of the facts if you let the following lines of the booklet sink in again: “All events that we observe through our senses and perceive mentally proceed according to the laws of nature, that is, every state of the cosmos is necessarily conditioned by the temporally preceding state and just as necessarily results in the states that follow it. All changes, i.e. all events, are inevitable consequences of the forces present in the cosmos.

And now it says:

It does not affect the essence of the question whether one - for the sake of better clarity - calls the carrier of the forces “matter” or, according to the monists, imagines the concept “energy” as the only effective thing that, although it presents different forms of appearance to the human senses, basically represents an unchangeable sum of latent or current possibilities for movement.

I would only use such a sentence in the rarest of cases, and only when something else has already been summarized. Remember that I once spoke of what is expressed in this sentence. It says: “It does not affect the essence of the question whether, for the sake of better clarity, one calls the carrier of the forces ‘Stofb’ or, according to the process of the monists, conceives of the concept ‘energy’ as the only effective thing...”. I would not put it that way, but would point out that Haeckel's and Büchner's students, above all, look at the material that is spread out in space. According to the Swabian Vischer, they were the “Stoffhuber,” the “material boosters.”

Then came the man who is now the president of the Monistenbund: Ostwald. At a meeting of natural scientists, I believe it was the one in Kiel - I have spoken of it before - he gave a lecture on the overcoming of materialism through energetics, through energism. There he pointed out that it was not the matter that mattered, but the force. He thus replaced matter with force. Do you remember how I quoted his own words at the time? He said, in essence: when one person receives a slap in the face from another, it is not the matter of the substance that is dealt a blow, but the force with which the slap is dealt. Nowhere do we perceive the substance, but the force. And so, in place of substance, we find force, or, with a certain not merely descriptive but transformational meaning, energy. But this energism, which now calls itself monism, is nothing but a masked materialism. Again I have tried to show you by way of example how there really was a time when the “energy grabbers” took the place of the “substance grabbers”. I did not attempt to present a theoretical sentence, but tried to characterize from the real. And that must be our endeavor in any case. For it is only by having a sense for the real in the physical that we develop a sense for the real in the spiritual, and do not just mumble our own assertions.

So the author of the booklet says: “It does not affect the essence of the question whether one calls the carrier of the forces ‘matter’ for the sake of better clarity, or, according to the process of the monists, imagines the concept of energy as the only effective thing...

What the author means here by the expression “latent or actual possibilities of movement” can be explained as follows: Imagine some kind of counterweight here, and on top of it a tube, a glass tube, with water inside. This water presses on the floor here. In the moment when I pull away the counterweight, the water runs down. In the latter case, we are dealing with a current movement; before I pulled the support away, the same force was there, only it was not current, but at rest. Everything that then flowed down from the water and became current was previously latent, not current.

The course of all events is irrevocably predetermined, and man, in his thinking, feeling and willing, is just as unfree as, for example, a stone is in its fall.

That is the necessary consequence of the Laplacian world view. The Laplacian brain concludes that if I put my hand there, that is an image of the moving atoms, and if the Laplacian brain can still calculate the image, as I have indicated, then this excludes the freedom of man, that is, the Laplacian brain excludes the freedom of man.

This is the first point that Mr. von Wrangell makes on the basis of the materialistic-mechanical world view. The second point is as follows:

2. The inner experiences that take place in a person's consciousness (his feelings, thoughts, volitional impulses) are not essentially different from other processes in nature that a person observes through his senses. These inner experiences are only side effects of material processes within the human brain and nervous system.

This second point expresses that when I think, feel and will, it is only a concomitant of the inner processes that the Laplacian mind selects. We are therefore not dealing with independent thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will, but only with accompanying phenomena. If you follow what I said, for example, in the lecture 'The Legacy of the 19th Century' and in similar other lectures, if you study some of the material contained in 'Riddles of Philosophy', you will see how many minds in the second half of the 19th century, this view was taken for granted, that man is actually nothing more than the structure of material processes and their energies, and that thoughts, feelings and will impulses are only accompanying phenomena.

As the third point of the materialistic-mechanical world view, Mr. von Wrangell states the following:

3. After the physical death of man, the existence of the human individual finally ceases, because the so-called spiritual life of man is bound to his physicality and cannot exist without it.

This point can be understood by everyone as a consequence of the first point. The first point is the one that matters. The second and third are necessary consequences.

In the next essay, Mr. von Wrangell discusses what he calls:

examining these basic assumptions

What are the basic assumptions of the materialistic world view based on? Are they indisputably proven facts or only more or less probable hypotheses? The first of the three aforementioned assumptions, that all events are necessarily bound to follow a certain course, is the most important and has the most far-reaching consequences. It is not only regarded as beyond doubt by materialists, but also by many spiritualists, who, while accepting the independent existence of spiritual entities and believing in the continued existence of the spiritual being of man, their “soul”, after physical death, assume that there is an unalterable law within the spiritual world as well as within the sensory world. First of all, it should be noted that this idea of the absolute, unexceptional lawfulness, i.e. necessity of all events, also in the spiritual realm, excludes the concept of morality, of good and evil, because to act morally means to choose the good, when evil could be chosen.

In this chapter, Mr. von Wrangell tries to make it clear to himself that there can be no morality if the materialistic-mechanical world view is the only correct one. Because if I have to do every moment of my life what is only a by-product of atoms, then there can be no question of freedom, nor of morality, because everything is done out of necessity. Just as one cannot say that a stone that falls to the earth is good and one that does not fall to the earth is not good, so one cannot say that people's actions are good or not good. In the case of a criminal, everything happens out of necessity; in the case of a good person, everything happens out of necessity. Therefore there is something correct in the sentence: “First of all, it should be noted that this idea of the unconditional, unexceptional lawfulness, i.e. necessity of all events, also in the spiritual realm, excludes the concept of morality, of good and evil; because to act morally means to choose the good, when evil could be chosen.” But one cannot choose when everything is constrained by material necessity.

The next chapter is headed:

Freedom and Morality

As soon as there is no freedom of decision, there can be no question of morality in the sense in which this concept is understood by people and corresponds to our inner feelings. We can certainly speak of more or less useful, unfree actions and impulses, but a moral judgment of unfree actions or feelings has no justification, no sense. With the elimination of freedom, responsibility also ceases to exist. This undoubted connection between freedom and morality cannot be used as an argument against the concept of lawfulness; it is merely intended to remind us of the logical consequences associated with the assumption of absolute necessity.

So Mr. von Wrangell is trying to make it clear here that it absolutely follows from the materialistic-mechanical world view that one cannot actually speak of freedom and morality.

Now he is a scientific mind, and a scientific mind is accustomed to honestly and sincerely drawing the consequences of assumptions. Our time misses much that would immediately seem absurd to it if it had really already taken on the scientific conscience, if it did not stir and throw together all kinds of things without a scientific conscience. Mr. von Wrangell does not do that, but says: If we accept the materialistic world view, we can no longer speak of freedom and morality; because either the materialistic world view is correct, and then it is nonsense to speak of freedom and morality, or one speaks of freedom and morality, and then there is no sense in speaking of the materialistic-mechanical world view.

But since Hetr von Wrangell is a scientist who is already accustomed to drawing the consequences of his assumptions – that is an important fact – he is not accustomed to having things so sloppy in his thinking; because it is a sloppiness of thinking when someone says, “I am a materialist” and does not at the same time deny morality. He does not want to be guilty of this sloppiness of thinking. On the other hand, he also has the habit that one has when one has become a scientist, namely to say: May the world go to pieces, what I have scientifically recognized must be true! Therefore, one cannot simply discard the materialistic view, but if the materialistic world view is true, then it must be accepted and then one is faced with the sad necessity of having to throw morality overboard. So it is not just a matter of asking: where does morality take us? – he says that is not enough – but the materialistic world view must be examined, quite apart from the consequences this has for morality. So we have to tackle a different kind of materialistic world view.

The next chapter is called:

The World Enigma

Yes, one can say that the question of whether man is responsible for his actions, i.e., whether he has the possibility of regulating his volitional impulses according to motives that are unambiguously determined by his bodily organization, includes the whole world riddle for us humans, the question of freedom or unfreedom of will. For if this question is answered in the sense of the absolute necessity of all happenings in the whole universe, without exception, then materialism is the only correct view and the world, with all its agony and suffering, is a mechanism that runs to no purpose, without a recognizable beginning, but with the eternal death of the whole as its final goal.

When we started our spiritual science movement, I had occasion to read some poems by the poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, who, one might say, has come to terms with a materialistic-mechanical world view and even as a poet really draws the consequences from it. That is why she formed poems like “A dirty whirlwind is existence.” — One must come to that conclusion if one is not sloppy in one's thinking, if one lets one's thinking affect one's feelings. And only because people are so sloppy and cowardly in their thinking do they not ask themselves: What becomes of life under the influence of the materialistic-mechanical worldview? But it must be shown that it is inherently false, otherwise one would simply have accepted the consequence of delle Grazie.

Mr. von Wrangell continues:

The greatest minds and deepest thinkers have endeavored to solve this most important of all questions, and it seems presumptuous to want to say something new. However, it cannot be a matter of a generally valid answer here, but at most a reference to the train of thought that led to a subjective solution to the puzzle. Such a reference can sometimes be of help to a similarly minded soul.

Mr. von Wrangell thus points out that the greatest minds, poets and thinkers have endeavored to solve this question, and that it is unnecessary to say anything new about it. At most, it could be a hint at the train of thought that led to a subjective solution of this puzzle; that is, a hint at his own train of thought.

In the next chapter, he examines where the idea comes from that what precedes always follows what comes after in a lawful manner. It is called:

The origin of the law

From this point of view, it seems justified to raise the question: Where do we get the idea of the absolute lawfulness of all events? Is it perhaps an intuitive truth that underlies all thinking, or has humanity only gradually, through long and arduous mental work, come to this idea; an idea that now appears to the Europeans, who live off the cultural achievements of the past, as a self-evident truth?

So Mr. von Wrangell is asking here: Did man always believe in this unconditional law, or did people only come to it over time? Only then can one recognize the validity of this idea; for if man has always believed in it, then there must be something true about it that can be taken for granted; but if people have only just come to it, then one can examine how they have arrived at this idea. In this way one can form an opinion about its validity. He says further:

The latter is the case. This is an acquired, not an original insight. On the contrary, man's original, direct consciousness gives him the idea of inner freedom limited by external circumstances, of arbitrariness in his volitional decisions. The idea of conformity to law is only gradually being derived from experience.

Now, as you can see from my countless lectures, it is clear how slowly people have come to this idea of conformity to law, from the old clairvoyance to the time when the idea of conformity to law has come. In truth, the idea of conformity to law is only four centuries old, because it basically comes from Galileo. I have often discussed this. If you go back before Galileo, there is no idea at all that everything is permeated by such a law.

Mr. von Wrangell says: “This is an acquired, not an original insight... The idea of lawfulness has only gradually been taken from experience.” Now, I would like to know whether the child is compelled by its inner astral circumstances to reach for the sugar, that is, whether it is natural for it to do so, or whether the child thinks it already has a choice. I have told something like an anecdote before, which I would like to mention here as well. It was during my studies; I used to pace up and down in the lobby of Vienna's Südbahnhof with a fellow student. He was a hardened materialist and firmly held the view that all thinking is just a process in the brain, like the hands on a clock moving forward. And just as one cannot say that this is something special, but is connected with the mechanical substances and forces present in it, so he thought that the brain also makes these astronomical movements. That was a Laplacian head; we were eighteen to nineteen years old at the time. So I said to him once: But you never say “my brain thinks,” you say “I think.” Why do you keep lying then? Why do you always say “I think” and not “my brain thinks?” - Now, this fellow student had taken his knowledge, the ideas of volition and conformity to law, not from experience, but from complicated theories. He did not believe in inner arbitrariness, but he said “I think” and not “my brain thinks”. So he was in constant contradiction to himself.

The next chapter is called:

Freedom of the will cannot be proved by experience.

Can this contradiction be resolved rationally? It is obvious that an experience-based proof of the freedom of the will of people or other beings cannot be provided.

Mr. von Wrangell says that the truth of the freedom of the will of people cannot be proven by external experience, because one can only make one's own decision.

Mr. von Wrangell says, then, that one cannot prove the truth of the freedom of human will through external experience, because one can only make one decision. If one wanted to prove it, then one would have to be able to make two decisions. Now, I have already mentioned that one does not refer to experience at all in this question, but rather constructs an experience. For example, they once imagined a donkey with a bundle of hay on each side, the same tasty, equally sized bundle of hay. The donkey, which is getting hungrier and hungrier, is now supposed to decide whether to eat from one or the other bundle of hay, because one is as tasty as the other and as large as the other. And so he does not know whether he should turn this way or that. In short, the donkey could not come to a proper decision and had to starve between the two bundles of hay. Such things have been constructed because it was felt that one cannot get there experientially by observing freedom. Mr. von Wrangell draws attention to this and then asks the question:

But can the freedom of the will be refuted by experience? To answer this question, let us first recall some epistemological truths!

To answer this question, Mr. von Wrangell now speaks of some epistemological truths in the next chapter. This chapter is called:

Epistemological Retrospection

Man has direct awareness only of himself. He feels desires, which he seeks to satisfy and which trigger impulses of will in him; he receives impressions, of which he soon becomes convinced that they are dependent on certain sense organs of his body. When he closes his eyes, he receives no impressions of light and color; when he plugs his ears, he weakens his sound sensations or loses them altogether. Likewise, experience shows that the nose conveys the sense of smell and the mouth, in the parts covered by mucous membranes, conveys the sense of taste. Only the sense of touch seems to be tied to no particular part of the body, but can be exercised through the entire skin. The normal healthy person has five different senses in an awake state, each conveying its specific type of impression.

In this, Mr. von Wrangell is influenced by popular knowledge of the senses. Those who once listened to a small lecture cycle that I then titled “Anthroposophy” will have seen that one cannot get by with five senses, but rather has to assume twelve senses. Among these twelve senses is also the sense for the thinking of another person, for the other I. Therefore, anyone who has followed our spiritual scientific movement correctly can recognize the inadequacy of Wrangell's assertions. They are not incorrect, but they are only partially correct. We cannot say, “Man has direct consciousness only of himself.” That is incorrect. For then we could never perceive other I's.

In recent times, however, there has been a very complicated view, which is held by all sorts of people. Perhaps the philosopher and psychologist Lipps could be cited as a characteristic personality among those who hold it. They are not aware when a person confronts them that they have a direct impression of his ego, but they say: When I confront a person, he has a face; it makes certain movements, and he says certain things, and from what he says and does, one should be able to conclude that there is an ego behind it. So the ego is something inferred, not something directly perceived. A new school of philosophy, however, which has Max Scheler as its most prominent representative, takes a different view. It has already made the observation that one can have an immediate impression of the ego of another person. And what has been written about the ego, more rigorously scientifically by Husserl, the philosopher, and then somewhat more popularly, especially in his more recent essays, by Scheler, shows that more recent philosophy is on the way to recognizing that direct consciousness can also know something of another consciousness. — One can therefore say that Mr. von Wrangell has been infected by popular epistemology when he says: “Man has direct awareness only of himself.” And further: “He feels desires, which he seeks to satisfy and which trigger impulses of will in him.” And then he describes how man perceives the world through his senses.

I have already written about this sense physiology. Read in “Lucifer-Gnosis” and you will see that I tried to explain the impossibility of this sense physiology with the simple comparison of the seals. I said at the time: This sense physiology is materialistic from the very beginning. It proceeds from the assumption that nothing can enter into us from the outside, because it secretly conceives of the outside as materialistic. But it is the same as with the seal and the sealing wax: the seal always remains outside the sealing wax; nothing passes from the material of the seal into the sealing wax. But the name “Miller” engraved on it passes completely from the seal to the sealing wax. If we now place the main emphasis on what is spiritually expressed in the name Miller, and not on the material, of which nothing passes over, we can see that what is presented from the point of view of sensory physiology says nothing. But these are such horrible doctrines that have been hammered into people's brains that most people just don't follow them up, even if they want to become spiritualists. You can read more about this in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, in the chapter “The World as Illusion”.

Then Mr. von Wrangell continues:

Since man cannot imagine that an existing state can change without a cause, he assumes that the sensory impressions he feels are caused by forces that he locates outside of his own directly felt self. He calls these external causes of his internal sensory impressions “things” and, in their totality, “the world” or - epistemologically - the “not-me”, in contrast to the directly perceived “me”.

That's clear, you just have to get used to the fact that there is a bit of epistemological talk.

A thousandfold experience and the corresponding agreement with beings that he recognizes as being the same as himself - his fellow human beings - teach him that these “things,” this “not-I,” can exist independently of his consciousness.

Otherwise, man would have to believe that if he turns his eye away not only from living but also from inanimate things, things cease to exist.

If, for example, he loses consciousness during sleep, he finds upon awakening that things persist in their “reality,” that is, in their ability to evoke sensations in him. Man also recognizes his own body as belonging in some respects to the world “outside him.”

This is good to emphasize, because we not only have things that are inside, but also things that are outside.

He can receive sensory impressions from his limbs, as from other things; for example, he can see, touch, etc. his hands, and here too he distinguishes between the inner process of his sensory impressions and their outer cause, which in this case he recognizes as one of his body parts. He soon becomes convinced that it is his body, that is, that this thing has a very special connection to his “I,” to that which feels and thinks, especially through the sense of touch, which shows him that when he brings his own body parts into contact with other things, he feels the contact directly, but he does not feel it directly when other objects are brought into contact with each other.” ²

It is very good to be made aware of something like this. So this is how Mr. von Wrangell answers the question of how it comes about that a person recognizes his own body among the things that are outside in a certain thing. Those who think sloppily simply say: thinking about something like this is nonsense; these people who think about something like this want to be scientists. But Wrangell says: When these two pieces of chalk collide, it doesn't hurt, but when I bump into something with my body, it hurts. That's the difference. And because one hurts and the other doesn't, I label the one as belonging to me and the other as not belonging to me. It is good to know that we have nothing but the consequence of this consciousness.

Now, you see, my dear friends, I had intended to finish discussing this brochure today. But we have only got as far as page 10. An attempt should be made to find the connection between what is written in the world and what, in the strict sense, belongs to our spiritual science. But the next chapters are still too interesting: the formation of concepts, ideas of space and time; the principle of causality; the application of the idea of arbitrariness to the environment; observation of phenomena that occur uniformly; the essence of all science; astronomy, the oldest science; uniform motion; measurement; the principle underlying clocks. It is so interesting that perhaps we will continue the discussion tomorrow at seven o'clock.

• 1. The quotations in this and the following lectures reflect the entire text of the Wrangell brochure.
• 2. In the brochure itself, the following footnote appears: “The ‘elimination of sensitivity in sensitives’ observed by de Rochas is a particular abnormal phenomenon that deserves in-depth study.”

Jakob Hugentobler: Dear Sirs and Madams! I warmly welcome you to our lecture event. The intention of this lecture is to present you with something positive from anthroposophical spiritual science in contrast to the mostly negative criticism that is so widespread today.

Anyone who keeps their eyes open today, who opens themselves to a deeper understanding of their environment, sees newer phenomena emerging in all cultural fields - in the fields of science, religion and art. They see beginnings that look like something that wants to break through, that has not yet found the actual path for this breakthrough. In anthroposophical spiritual science, an attempt is now being made to show the roots for everything that shows itself as a healthy new thing here in its beginnings - to show how one can penetrate to a deeper spiritual realm and how something can grow out of this spiritual realm, which must again become a union of all that is making itself felt today in so many separate movements. It is because of this possibility of a deeper knowledge that anthroposophical spiritual science claims to extend to all areas of life, to penetrate all areas of life with its new knowledge. This spirit, which wants and must be active as a fertilization of today's entire cultural life, is to be spoken of here. Therefore, we must no longer speak with indignation, amazement, and astonishment about the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science is spreading to all areas of life, as was so often the case in the past. The fact is that it wants to claim to be a truly comprehensive world view. This lecture will be based on such a real world view.

You will have the opportunity to take part in specialist eurythmy courses here – eurythmy, this new art of movement that was inaugurated by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. It is based on anthroposophical spiritual science, and so this new art of eurythmy will be taught in individual courses. Likewise, there will be opportunities to delve more deeply into anthroposophical spiritual science by attending introductory courses, which will also be held here in Zurich. If you are interested, you can write down your name and address. You can see the rest from the programs that have been distributed.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! When a distorted image of anthroposophy is so often created and this distortion is then fought, so that in this fight little of what anthroposophy really represents is actually encountered, it is probably because that today many people still understand anthroposophy as something that stands, as it were, in the middle between science in the strict sense of the word on the one hand and the various religious views on the other.

In order to draw attention to the fact that the judgments that assign such a fluctuating position to anthroposophy, as it is meant here, are inaccurate, I would like to discuss the sources, the actual origins of anthroposophical research, in this introductory lecture today. And here I must first draw attention to the following. However much it is the case that what comes to light through anthroposophy touches people's religious feelings and religious sentiments, anthroposophy itself did not arise from any religious impulse, but rather it emerged from the natural science of our time, from a natural scientific world view. This may at first seem paradoxical from some points of view, but in order to characterize the scientific spirit of anthroposophy in the right way, this origin from a scientific basis must be emphasized particularly strongly.

In turning to anthroposophy, one is thoroughly imbued with the idea that the more recent development of humanity owes its greatest achievements and strongest forces to what are today called scientific insights. And I myself would like to admit that, in my opinion, no other spirit should prevail in anthroposophy than that which has been trained through the scientific research of modern times, which, above all, has come to know the conscientious, exact methods of observation, experimentation and scientific thinking of the present day. However, when we speak of a kind of scientific preparation for anthroposophy, we are less concerned with the results - I would even say triumphant results - of modern science than with the spirit of training that which a person acquires when he learns to work scientifically, that is, experimentally and observantly, to gain a scientific view of the entities and facts of the world in a serious way.

Now it has come about that in the course of the development of natural science in recent times, so to speak, more and more has been drawn into this research the sense of the exclusive significance of the world of sensual facts – of that which is based on certain facts that can be observed through the senses and whose observation can be intensified by instruments. Only what can be based on this is considered a true foundation of modern scientific research. And the more progress was made, the more this was abandoned, in thinking, in methodical reflection, to rise above this world of facts. One has more and more proceeded to regard the facts, so to speak experimentally, in such a way that they express themselves through their own mutual relations, and in this way one arrives at the laws of nature, as they are called.

Of course, not so long ago, when dealing with facts, one did not shy away from going from these facts to more or less bold hypotheses. In more recent times, these have developed into systems of concepts. And so insights have been gained, for example about the universe. We are now living in a time, however, in which some doubt has been cast on hypotheses that appear so plausible in their own way, for example, on the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of the origin of the world. It is certainly regarded as somewhat uncertain, although on the other hand it is admitted that if one wants to arrive at a satisfactory overview of the world of phenomena, such hypotheses cannot be entirely dispensed with. This characterizes one aspect of it. Well, I could only hint at what confronts someone who really goes into the field of natural science today with a sense of inquiry.

But perhaps the second aspect is even more important today. This is that today, in view of the exactitude that has been assumed in natural science, one will no longer be able to get by - not even in the descriptive natural sciences - without a certain basic mathematical education. Indeed, in the natural science of the most recent times a definition has emerged that may seem somewhat paradoxical, somewhat extreme, but which shows the spirit that actually inspires this natural science thinking. The definition has emerged: Being is that which can be measured. Such a definition indicates how much the natural scientist today feels in his element when he has mastered the art that lies in geometry and in the exact measurement that geometry produces, in arithmetic and in the other branches of mathematics. This mathematical training is, so to speak, something that must be brought along today as a basic condition for beneficial scientific research.

What I want to say about anthroposophy today is less about what can be achieved as individual results of scientific research through measurement, counting and so on, but rather about the peculiar state of mind in which the researcher finds himself when he — equipped with the transparent weave of arithmetic, geometric or algebraic concepts, concepts from the world of differential or integral calculus or even synthetic geometry and so on, when he, equipped with the whole weave of these concepts, which are, after all, concepts generated entirely in the human personality itself, approaches the external world of phenomena and then finds: With what you have gained from your own inner being, with what you have formed into formulas and images from your inner being, you can delve into what the senses present to you. And he feels: with what you have, so to speak, spun out of yourself, you can embrace and interweave all that appears to you as completely alien from the external world of facts. This confluence of the mathematical, which is obtained in full clarity, with free, all-encompassing inner volition as a structure, as formulas, this confluence of the mathematical with what confronts us externally, so to speak, from the outside, that is what constitutes the special state of mind of someone who approaches nature in the sense of today's exact natural science.

Now, I would like to draw the attention of those present to what one learns in this way when mathematizing, that is, when forming algebraic or other formulas or geometric structures. I would like to point out that it is indeed possible for a person to observe themselves, as it were, by looking backwards, to see how they behave in this mathematization, how they come to an initially formal certainty in this mathematization, an certainty of the inner truth of these formulas and structures. He can do this on the one hand, and in doing so he gains a kind of insight into the psychological process that takes place when he mathematizes. Certainly, in the emergence of natural science, one has, I would say, been satisfied with the application of the mathematical. One has paid little attention to this psychological process. But if we want to get to nature, if we want to progress from mere scientific research, then it will be necessary to take a really close look at the processes that actually take place in the soul, at what takes place when we develop the mathematical. Because why? When we consider the process that takes place in observation or in controlled experimental observation, when we penetrate the external world with mathematics by observing this process of scientific research, so to speak, observing this scientific research process in one's own personality, one comes to not only conduct scientific research, but also to be able to educate oneself in a conscious way to that kind of grasping of truth that can be grasped through such research. Now, my dear audience, you see, what can truly be called Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, has its origin in such studies - first of all in such a scientific method of research and in such a view of the researcher's activity, the inner researcher's activity. And all that presents itself as Anthroposophy should be measured against this view, this inner view. I freely admit, ladies and gentlemen, that there is an original sense of truth in man, so that numerous personalities, when they hear about the results that appear in the field of Anthroposophy, are inwardly convinced to a certain extent. But, however true it may be that this feeling of truth is based on a certain elementary sense of truth, it is equally true that only those who have undergone the training and self-observation that I have just mentioned, based on natural scientific research, are capable of forming a judgment and, if I may use the term, of “research” in the field of anthroposophy. It is so easy, because of the attractiveness of the anthroposophical results, to lapse into a kind of amateurism that in turn attracts amateurs. But this dilettantism is not at all to be found at the origin of that which, as Anthroposophy, is to present itself to the world today. On the contrary, Anthroposophy seeks to keep every trace of dilettantism out of it, and to be able to give account, so to speak, to the strictest scientific mind of the present time, of its results, and especially of the way in which it has arrived at them. That is why I do not call what occurs in anthroposophy just any kind of religious belief, but something that can stand alongside contemporary science and permeate it. The spirit that has been trained in what is demanded by science today, which underlies today's recognized science, is the same scientific spirit that underlies anthroposophy.

But precisely when one is imbued with this scientific spirit, when one looks back from the mere mathematizing indulgence in external facts to the living research, to what is becoming, when one carries this science in one's soul - leaving the outer facts - then, when one looks back, especially when one looks back on what remains for one as a human being from this science, then one is immediately confronted with a problem that stands out as a major central problem. Only someone who has been educated in the scientific way of thinking can truly grasp the full magnitude of this: this is the problem of human freedom.

Natural science and the philosophy dependent on it – today's dependent philosophy – cannot but start from what is so interwoven in things that we have to speak of necessity. It is impossible for us to start from anything other than necessity with the spirit that prevails in natural science today. And it is virtually the ideal of science to see through what confronts us in the external world as a system of internally necessary, interrelated entities and facts. When you engage in scientific research in this way, you do not come close to what confronts you in the inner fact of human freedom as an immediate experience. You do not come close to it. And so we are confronted with the significant question that leads us to a cognitive abyss: freedom as an immediate experience is given to you! Why then, by stretching out your mathematical web of knowledge over scientific facts and in this way creating a world view, cannot you approach what cannot be denied as an immediate experience: freedom!

If I may interject something personal here, I would like to point out that, as early as the 1880s, my spiritual scientific research confronted me with the scientific necessity, on the one hand, the significance of which for objective research should not be denied in the least at first, but fully recognized, and on the other hand, the problem of freedom. And in my Philosophy of Freedom, published in 1893, I tried to deal with philosophy in the way that a scientifically minded person in the present day had to do.

Now, if we already had a psychology or theory of the soul that was developed and suited to our scientific needs – we don't have it, of course – it would be easier to talk about what I have to talk about at this moment. In recent times, the doctrine of the soul has undergone a peculiar development. Whenever I want to characterize the fate of psychology, of the doctrine of the soul, I always have to refer to an outstanding thinker of recent times, who died here a year ago on the Zürichberg, Franz Brentano.

At the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, Franz Brentano was completely immersed in natural science thinking, and when he first formulated his theses for his professorship in Würzburg, he included among them the main thesis that in the science of the soul no other method may be applied than that which is applied in the external sciences. In 1874, Franz Brentano published the first volume of his “Psychology on an Empirical Basis,” and he promised that when this volume of “Psychology” appeared in the spring of that year, he would deliver the second volume in the fall and, in rapid succession, the next four volumes in the following years. Franz Brentano has since died – no continuation of the first volume has appeared!

Anyone who reads this first volume of Brentano's psychology without prejudice will understand, I would say from the way in which this psychology is presented, why such a continuation has not been published. In this first volume, Franz Brentano frankly and freely states that if one were to stop at where he stopped, one would first have to admit to oneself that one actually knows nothing. If you look at the connection of ideas and their relationship to memory, the socialization of ideas, as it is usually called, and so on, if you apply the purely scientific method to that, then that is no substitute for the kind of psychology that Plato and Aristotle had hoped for. It would not be a substitute for a psychology that can also deal with what can be described as the eternal in man, or – as Franz Brentano puts it – that can deal with the part of man that remains when the temporal life falls away from him as a body. Franz Brentano wanted to solve this problem, which in the popular sense could be called the problem of immortality, in a scientific-psychological sense. He wrestled with it. I would like to make it clear that he did not want to enter the field that I have to refer to here as anthroposophy; it did not seem scientific enough to him. But because he was an honest researcher, he simply could not continue writing. Combining honesty in the field of the doctrine of the soul with a scientific spirit of research is only possible if one is able to develop that continuation of scientific thinking along the way, which is precisely what anthroposophical spiritual science demands.

I would like to say that Franz Brentano's unfinished business with psychology is living proof that we do not have a proper psychology today. If we had a psychology, a proper psychology, then we would be able to look at certain things differently than we usually do today. And here I would like to point out one thing in particular. When we indulge in natural science, when we express natural scientific facts in laws and then incorporate these laws into our intellect, so that we carry within ourselves what has been revealed to us through external observation and experimentation, we notice that the The more we distance ourselves from external facts, the more we work inwardly with the intellect, which proves itself so excellently when guided by experiment and observation, the more we continue to work with this intellect, the more we - in other words - enter the realm of hypothesis, the realm in which we seek to formulate, with the aid of the intellect, the principles underlying these phenomena, we feel more and more distinctly that we are entering a realm in which we cannot, in the long run, satisfy ourselves. The more one, I might say, freely indulges at first in the kind of thinking that can be quite well applied in scientific research, the more one indulges in this thinking, in this forming of thought hypotheses, the more one comes to something unsatisfactory. And this unsatisfactory state is basically evident in the whole course of scientific development.

It is evident from the fact that we see how the most diverse hypotheses have been put forward - hypotheses about light, about the phenomena of electricity, about gravity, and so on. We see how these hypotheses are always replaced by others. And anyone who does not want to completely accept the point of view that we have “come so gloriously far” today must, from these feelings that he may have about this building of hypotheses, say: the hypotheses that have been developed recently will in turn be replaced by others. We are, so to speak, in the middle of replacing the old light hypothesis with another, taken from electrical phenomena. And we have to say to ourselves: we are entering an area where we form hypotheses based on the laws of nature that the mind can gain from external observation and through external experimentation in relation to the sensory world. We come into a region where this mind, so to speak, encounters a fluid, a something that cannot evoke in us the feeling that we can actually approach a being with these mental constructs that we hypothetically form and that, if they are to have a value, can only have this value if they point to something real, to something that exists.

And anyone who, in genuine inner empiricism, that is, equipped with unprejudiced observation of the inner facts of the soul, especially of the will, now considers the element in the soul that includes the fact of freedom, finds this in wonderful harmony with the impossibility of arriving at hypotheses in which there is still the same necessity that we have when we classify and systematize natural phenomena with our thinking. One then feels: if one approaches the soul life with this thinking and only wants to develop hypotheses in the soul life, one swims, as it were, in a liquid. One encounters nothing solid in the soul life. And this harmonizes wonderfully with the fact that the impulse is rooted in the soul life, which can be active without necessity prevailing in it, which can therefore move freely.

I would like to say that through external scientific research we come to a region of our soul life that shows us: if we want to extend the area of necessity into it, it also fails theoretically; it does not satisfy us theoretically either. We come across something in our soul life where freedom is rooted, where freedom can be fully experienced. And we will only be able to properly distinguish this area of freedom from the rest of the world that we can see, when we realize that, as long as we are in the necessity of the world that we can see, we cannot use this necessity to approach what is experienced inwardly when we are in the realm of freedom. I believe that a psychology that is equal to today's scientific exactitude would point to the special kind of inner satisfaction that one has in the game of hypotheses and in the harmony with what one now experiences inwardly, in one's soul, by experiencing the fact of inner freedom.

I would like to make it very clear that I am not talking here about some method or other or some theory or other about freedom, but about the fact of freedom, which we simply discover by deepening unselfconsciously into our own soul life. And then, when we are in a position to do so, when we, equipped with a genuine scientific spirit, so to speak, go against ourselves — not going outwards, but against ourselves — to the limit where we can still reach with scientific thinking and where we can move on to what can be experienced in us as freedom, then we come close to sensing the possibility, the justification of anthroposophy. For, in setting forth its scientific character, Anthroposophy must first start from this experience of the impossibility of approaching freedom through the medium of that which has led outwardly to such great theoretical and practical triumphs – namely, natural science.

Now we stand in this experience of freedom. But if we do not stand in it with abstract concepts, but rather stand inwardly before it, as before an intimately experienced inner fact, then we also know, in a sense, by inwardly experiencing the soul, by being permeated and pulsating with what is experienced as freedom: We cannot enter it with the thoughts that the external laws of nature give us, but if we as human beings really want to engage with life, if, for example, we have ideals, if we are familiar with the true demands of life, in order to take hold of it here or there - we do not enter this sphere of freedom thoughtlessly. We stand in the sphere of freedom by developing free thinking, and we can get to know thinking that moves in the element of freedom, free thinking, which is initially only an inner soul activity, which does not have external observation as a guide, does not have external experiment as a guide. As a progressive inner impulse, it is, so to speak, self-created and rooted in the soul. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I call this thinking pure thinking.

This thinking forms, as it were, the content of consciousness when we have trained this consciousness as I have just indicated. But then, when we move in this thinking, we can remember the concept of being, the concept of reality that we have appropriated from the outer world, especially from the scientifically researched outer world as presented to us by natural science. On the one hand, we take this concept of reality. It need not be particularly clear at first; it can simply be the idea that takes root in us through our direct and scientific contact with the external world. We take this concept, this idea of reality on the one hand, and on the other hand we take what we consciously experience when we engage in free thinking, then something occurs in our soul – yes, I could call it a basic law, I could call it an experience – something occurs to which one must inwardly confess to oneself by saying: I think, but I am not in thinking, that is, I am not as I have come to know existence in the outer world. And the momentous sentence appears before us: I think, therefore I am not.

That is the first thing one has to grasp for one's consciousness, my dear audience. And that is why it is so difficult to deal with the present, which is actually the starting point for the scientific nature of anthroposophy, because, as perhaps most of you know, more recent philosophy still more or less consciously or unconsciously starts from Descartes' sentence: Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. So one starts from the great error that in thinking one grasps something of a reality, of a reality such as one has initially formed it as a reality in one's mind. We must first admit to ourselves: Whatever arises as I think, I think freely. This is the experience of non-reality, which is an experience that is at the same time a thinking experience and a will experience, a pure will experience, a desire experience.

Dear attendees, this experience is of tremendous importance for the life of the soul. One should actually spend a long time meditating on this experience until we feel, as it were, that we have hollowed out our ego when we admit to ourselves: I think, and in this thinking my ego lives. It is as if I were looking at a colored wall with a black circle in the middle. There is darkness, there is no light. Nevertheless, I see the black circle. I see the black circle within the light. When I become self-conscious in ordinary life and confess to myself: in that I think, I do not look into a reality, I look, if I may express it this way, into the black circle; I look into the non-light, which is darkness. I believe that I actually see myself, because within the content of my consciousness, the ego is left out. It is precisely because there is a nothing within the content of my consciousness and I see this non-being in the being that I initially consider myself to be an ego in ordinary thinking. This is a fundamental fact of psychology and philosophy. However, it may take a while before philosophers are willing to engage with the analysis that is necessary to do this. I can only hint at it here, I can only point to what is there. Much can still be discussed in very long psychological-philosophical expositions before such an analysis is finally done.

You see, my dear audience, once you have realized that when you think you are actually looking into the emptiness of the inner world, once you have realized that something of a volitional nature is at work there, then you are at the right starting point for what can now occur in inner methodological anthroposophical research. And this inner, methodical, anthroposophical research consists of the following: starting from what one has inwardly experienced in the sphere of freedom in the nature of thinking, and what one has then investigated in the 'I think, therefore I am not' in the sense of the being of the beings outside, by letting it take effect on oneself, by, I would like to say, inwardly grasping this atom of will-being, one can then be in the soul mood from which that meditation starts, which one needs to come to a real inner insight.

May people condemn as heresy what appears as an anthroposophical method and thereby distort it in a certain way before humanity, by presenting it as if it were something inferior in a bad sense, as one often calls it so “inferior” in the field of experiments, pragmatism and so on - in all the fields of manifold superstition, people may, may, as I said, distort all that the spiritual researcher develops there, by starting from a fixed philosophical basis. The methods and meditative techniques developed there, ladies and gentlemen, are nothing other than a further development of those inner soul forces that we have when we do mathematics and whose application in external natural science has yielded such great and significant results. Once we have learned what is present in the soul as an activity when we mathematize, once we have familiarized ourselves with this peculiar, scientifically formed form of creation, we can develop it further by, so to speak, recreating what arises in our memory, so that we have a kind of guiding impulse for our lives from this memory. We have these impulses for our lives as guiding impulses because what occurred as external experiences at a certain point in our childhood is transformed into inner experiences. We can, so to speak, always bring up images from the unfathomable depths of the soul of what we have experienced. But we can also distinguish between the living experience of being inside the experience, as we had it ten years ago, and the act of bringing up what was experienced back then. And no matter how vivid the images may be, the essential thing in this memory life is that we make what we are experiencing temporarily into a lasting one in us through imagination, although it is a lasting one that we cannot immediately determine as to what is going on down there in the soul life - or perhaps also in the organic life. But we can determine what we have before us if we bring up from these depths what we have experienced.

If we now immerse ourselves in the way we have a memory picture, how we have a memory picture vividly within us when we remember something we have experienced over a long period of time, we learn from this 'having' of a memory picture what is necessary for meditation, for the fundamental meditation of the anthroposophical research method. It is necessary for us to place a readily comprehensible idea at the center of our consciousness, and it does not matter whether it refers to something external or whether it is formed only internally, even if it comes from the imagination. The truth of the idea is not important at first, but it is important that we can easily grasp it. I have described all this in relation to this anthroposophical research method in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in “Occult Science” and in other books; there I have described the way in which one enters into this form of meditative imagination in the soul in exactly the same way as one does in mathematizing.

You will then find it absurd if someone compares this activity of the soul, which goes beyond mathematization and is thoroughly permeated by the will, with something hallucinatory or with something subconscious. That is precisely why so much is given to a mathematical preparation for anthroposophy, because it teaches one to recognize how one has a free hand in creating and holding on to ideas in consciousness. And anyone who says that the inner will that anthroposophy aims to achieve could be hallucination, either deliberately or because they are unable to do so, does not fully appreciate the way in which this meditative life is actually pursued, how it is maintained by first placing easily comprehensible ideas into one's consciousness so as not to bring up reminiscences from the subconscious. But by doing so, one exercises an activity - through inner strength, with effort of the will - that one otherwise exercises only on the basis of external facts, because otherwise one proceeds on the basis of external facts and experiences and allows the life of ideas to develop on the basis of these external facts and experiences. But now you free yourself from those external facts and experiences - I can only hint at the principle here, you can find more details in the books mentioned - now it is a matter of holding on to the ideas through inner will and thus constantly evoking an activity of the soul, which otherwise only ignites at external facts and runs in the inner being of man, bound to external existence. But by developing such meditation further and further, by practicing for years to make ideas that are easily comprehensible permanent, by learns to know that soul activity which tears thinking, raised above ordinary existence, away from the bodily, one rises to that which I have presented in the books mentioned as imaginative knowing.

Not fanciful images, not fantastic notions! Imaginative cognition is a state of consciousness filled with images that are present in the soul in the same way as mathematical configurations and formulas. And in this free handling of supersensible reality, which one distinguishes from every [physical] reality just as one distinguishes the triangle drawn with chalk on the blackboard as a mere symbol with full inner consciousness [from the purely spiritual concept of the triangle]. By being able to remain in this imaginative life of the soul for a while, one comes to know the life of the soul as something that can be torn away from the body. We are so used to our life being bound to the nervous system and the rest of the organism that we only really recognize this when we do such exercises. We see that, independently of the organism, the soul-spiritual runs in itself, and that the soul-spiritual can be filled with images. Only through this does one get to know the meditative life. These images are quite like the memory images - not like hallucinations. It is not true that one is filled with something like hallucinations or visions when doing anthroposophical research, but one gets to know the novelty, the new kind of content, through the existence of the memory being, in which the images of imaginative cognition or imaginative consciousness appear. But one also knows that one can no longer say when these images occur: I imagine, therefore I am not – as one can say about thinking.

Now, as I ascend to imagination, I encounter in a strange way what I first encountered in the external world – I encounter necessity. I can form my images in imagination, but I cannot throw them back and forth in any old way in relation to a new world that is now emerging. I see myself gradually forced to relate these images that arise in my imaginative life to a new world that I am getting to know, to a spiritual world. I learn to recognize: I must confront this image, which I have prepared, as a question of some fact of the spiritual world, and through this image, which I have built up, I enter into a connection with this world. I gain access to the spiritual world through the consciously created images of the imagination, just as I come into contact with the sensory world through the images created by my eyes or the sound images created by my ears. These latter images, which are created in the eye and ear, are produced without my arbitrariness. What is produced in the imagination as a world of pictures is, however, attained after such thorough schooling as I have just described in the books mentioned, “How to Know Higher Worlds” and so on. But in this way one acquires the possibility of holding out something to the spiritual world in the way of inner activity, just as our senses can hold out something to the outer, natural world in the way of eye activity, ear activity, so that we receive pictures from it. What spiritual knowledge of the world is to open up for us must first be developed in us, it must first be brought up from the depths of the soul. And that happens in the first stage of supersensible knowledge, in imaginative consciousness. But it is significant that we enter into this state as if by necessity. And now we learn all the more to recognize what freedom actually is.

You see, someone who hallucinates or has visions creates images from his body. He is simply following an inner necessity, an inner compulsion. Someone who lives in fantasy creates images from his soul. He is more or less aware of how he creates these images. And if he is a healthy person and not a lunatic, then he knows that he lives in an unreal fantasy world. What one produces in the imaginative consciousness, one knows – because the ordinary, normal consciousness, the consciousness that experiences itself in freedom, remains present – that in the imaginative consciousness one forms the images oneself, just as in mathematics one forms the formula oneself, through which one comprehends reality. But one also knows that when one enters into the spiritual world, one grasps a spiritual world through these images. So one can see that as human beings with ordinary external consciousness, we can grasp this process. In our ordinary lives and in ordinary science, we have the opportunity to gain freedom – and that is because, with mere pictorial imagining, which is not in reality, one must say: I think, therefore I am not – cogito ergo non sum. If one develops one's freedom with this thinking and then looks back into the spiritual world, one looks back into a world in which the same necessity reigns that one first encountered in the external world. In the external world, one starts from the necessity of facts. One advances into a thinking in which, so to speak, freedom repels the certainty of inner thinking.

One proceeds from this free thinking to imagination, which also claims to have an existence, and thus one comes again into a world of necessity. One comes into this necessity again in an inner way. In this way one learns above all to really see through that which is spoken about so often, but which actually always confronts one in a certain nebulous, poorly mystical way. If one learns to recognize the imaginative consciousness of which I have spoken, then self-observation becomes possible for the first time. I would like to say that what used to be the starting point of the I, when one looked at the non-I, begins to brighten up a little. The will penetrates into it and begins to grasp something. And one also feels oneself again in a world of necessity. This is how one arrives at self-awareness.

If you continue your exercises, you will come to an exercise in particular where you can make the images disappear just as you feel them coming up. And this must be done, otherwise one does not remain master of it, but becomes a visionary and not a spiritual researcher. When one is able to erase the images from one's consciousness, one arrives at the complete inner exercise of will in this world of images, so that one can also erase the image whose becoming one has experienced in the soul. What I have called the second stage - the inspired consciousness - occurs. Please do not be put off by the expression. After all, we have to use expressions as technical aids. It was used in an analogous sense, in reference to old expressions, but it is definitely a new fact, a self-explored fact, that is meant by it; the new, the inspired consciousness is meant by it. And with this one now stands in the spiritual reality. And when one is so immersed in spiritual reality that one is surrounded by it, really surrounded by it, by a world of spiritual beings, then one also beholds one's own soul in its true essence. Then what anthroposophy describes as repeated earthly lives becomes an immediate fact. And one sees more and more of the soul as it passes from life to life, with the intervening life between death and a new birth — one sees this journey of the soul. One has, so to speak, expanded one's imagination so that it can, in principle, when directed inward, move in the opposite direction to which the imagination normally moves.

Let us ask ourselves: How does imagined thinking move? As I said, we first have the experience of being connected to the outside world; we live ourselves into some event in the outside world with our whole being. This speaks to our will impulses, or rather, it speaks to our feelings; it also speaks to our thoughts. We live in it with our whole being. We may even make a physical effort in having the experience. In short, we live in it with our whole being. In this way, this soul, in having our ideas, plunges down into the depths, and in the image we can bring it up again. We can say: in ordinary experience, we proceed from the external experience to ordinary memory in that the external images undergo a certain inner metamorphosis. In meditation, which is available in anthroposophical research, we go the other way. We first learn to have an image that is not allowed to link to an external experience, not to subconscious reminiscences, and learn to progress — now not to an external experience, but to a supersensible experience, also to those experiences that lie before our birth or before our conception. In this way we get to know the pre-existence of the soul, the spiritual being of the soul, in a way that we otherwise only get to know what external experiences have brought us up to a certain point in our childhood. It is the reverse experience, but one that leads us to spiritual experience, where we start from the image and ascend to the experience. And if at the same time we practise a certain self-discipline, namely a self-discipline that increasingly leads us to act out of what we know in ordinary life as the feeling of love, then we learn to recognize objectively where we can develop our activity in love from the tasks that the outer world gives us. If we get to know this life in the outer world, then after much practice, the progression from image to reality will gradually be such that we progress from the imaginative consciousness through the inspired to the intuitive consciousness. This means that we learn to stand within the inner objectivity, within the inner necessity of the spiritual world.

You see, dear attendees, in nature research we start from necessity. In a sense, we approach the human being in such a way that we can only contribute something to thinking if we can inwardly preserve and say to ourselves, in order to be a human being in the right sense, you carry within you something that is connected with the nature of the whole world. But by making the attempt to approach man with that thinking, which is extraordinarily well suited for use in the study of nature, in outer life, one comes to a point – I have characterized this, you can read about it in my Philosophy of Freedom – where one can go no further. The hypotheses become uncertain.

But if you develop what can be experienced in the realm of freedom, you will penetrate the objectivity of the mind in a reverse way. And here you can be helped if you use thinking, in the Goethean sense (as explained in his scientific writings), not to spin out hypotheses, but only to put together phenomena.

By assembling phenomena, one learns to recognize how to approach this world. One does not arrive at the realm of atoms - not at atoms, not at electrons and so on, which are justified to a certain extent, as far as external appearance is concerned. One only comes to the outer appearances in this physical-scientific way of looking at and researching. If, on the other hand, one presents these purely as phenomena, then one can penetrate to what lies behind the phenomenon - to which we ourselves belong in our eternal core - by ascending into the imaginative, inspirational, intuitive. And in this way, ladies and gentlemen, we also arrive at a certain self-knowledge, at realizing what we demand in self-observation. By developing the imaginative consciousness, we learn to look into ourselves. What is memory based on? It is based, so to speak, on the fact that we absorb what we experience in the outside world in our imagination. Not in the way it is the case, for example, in the first days of our childhood — there it is transferred down into the organization — but in such a way that it is mirrored, that it has, as it were, a mirror wall on our organization and that we absorb it by remembering, in the memory image of the experience. By developing the memory that we need for a healthy social and scientific life in this way, we overcome the bond to the physical organization through anthroposophical research. However, ordinary consciousness must always be present; it must not be as in hallucination. Rather, anyone who ascends to imaginative consciousness is always a rational human being at the same time, always has ordinary consciousness alongside. This is precisely what distinguishes imaginative envisioning, inspired envisioning, from hallucination. Hallucinations and visions live in what the body produces, so that when we develop physical images from the body, we are dealing with visions and hallucinations. When we compose images from the soul, we are dealing with imaginative creations; when we compose images from the spirit, which we grasp by learning to work freely from the body, purely in spirit and soul, we are dealing with spiritual reality. So, it is the body that produces the images by coming to hallucinations and visions. The soul composes images by coming to fantasies, not to visionary images. The spirit within us composes images by approaching spiritual realities.

But when we look back into ourselves, we see, as it were, through the looking-glass, just as we should see through an actual looking-glass if we were to pierce it or take away some of the coating. And there we do not encounter in our inner being what the nebulous mystics talk about; we encounter something quite different, because the soul has experienced many things before it believes it unites with some deity in its inner being. They speak of divine manifestations in the ego. They speak of something they dream up. But anyone who penetrates into their inner being with genuine spiritual science comes to something quite different. He comes to see materially that which is otherwise given to him spiritually. Otherwise, his thinking, feeling, willing, desiring and coveting are given to him spiritually; now, however, he sees through everything that he feels, which is more or less connected with memory, and he sees into the actual inner laws of his organism. He gets to know his organism. He will not prattle and ramble on about nebulous mysticism, but will speak of the actual nature of the liver, lungs and stomach, which he gets to know through inner vision. He can add his inner vision to what conscientious external-physical anatomy provides. There you see the possibility of ascending to a real science of pathology. There you see how spiritual science, which does not turn to nebulous, rambling mysticism but which starts from exact methods, can really enter into the whole field of science. Yes, you get to know much more. Above all, one recognizes that even with the mystics who, of course, sound so magnificent, even with St. Therese or Mechthild of Magdeburg, that basically physical abnormalities are involved. One learns to recognize how abnormal liver, spleen and so on functions can arise from an imperfect, inharmonious functioning, from which arise the images that we otherwise so admire in mysticism.

Dear attendees! Knowledge is one thing that cannot be grasped by means of life prejudices, no matter how beautiful they may be. I believe that for those who can immerse themselves in knowledge without prejudice, there is a deeper insight into the foundations of existence, because they know how the human organism “boils” such beautiful things as they encounter in the noblest forms, namely in a Saint Therese or even in a Mechthild of Magdeburg, when they mystically indulge in raptures in the mist and dream of all kinds of things that are supposed to arise from the soul and spirit within. That is the remarkable thing: that we are progressing to the materiality of the human organism through self-observation. This will increasingly distinguish exact anthroposophy from all the ramblings and ramblings of inner mysticism, namely that it does not lead into the nebulous, but into realities. It teaches that which cannot be developed through external anatomy, because what can be learned from external physiology and anatomy is only one side; in this way it shows that the soul is pre-existent. She shows how this soul works down from its more comprehensive being to shape what is formed in the mother's womb from the spiritual. Thus, the real arises out of the spiritual world. We delve into the realm of reality by meditatively penetrating forward.

In science, we approach the human being from the outside world, whereas in anthroposophy, the full knowledge of the human being extends to the realm of nature. This is how we arrive at the harmony of spirit and matter that the human being must experience if they are to be fully human in the appropriate sense. He arrives at the point where, out of an inner urge, he passes directly from inner feeling and will to direct knowledge. It follows that without this knowledge we are always compelled to appeal to an atomistic world, and that we do not really get to the heart of the material. When we learn to recognize more and more of the material, then we also learn to recognize the nature of the spiritual outwardly. We really learn to build that bridge that leads us cognitively from spirit to matter, from matter to spirit. We need not believe that it is possible to solve all the riddles of the world at once. Weak-minded natures may perhaps say: The life of today's man must be a tragic one, since he inevitably comes up against the limits of knowledge, which make the riddles of the world appear insoluble to him. But it is not so. When we ascend in this way and get to know the spiritual life as it really is, when it suddenly flashes into us and when, on the other hand, we encounter the material world again when we approach the world with real powers of perception, , we learn, in essence, by ascending to such knowledge, not to experience something that carries us into the slumber from the outset in relation to knowledge, but we learn to recognize the struggle in which we are interwoven as human beings. Man sees how he lives outside in the struggles of spiritual worlds and beings, how he participates in this struggle through the moral world, the religious world, how he brings social life out of this struggle. He gets to know something that does not, so to speak, superficialize the inner soul state in solving the riddles of the world, but on the contrary, deepens it.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophy basically wants. It is the way to meet natural science. Anyone who wants to fight anthroposophy from a scientific point of view or, following on from science, from a philosophical point of view, is tilting at windmills, because anthroposophy addresses everything that science legitimately brings up; it can only accommodate what can be achieved through such science and philosophy through full knowledge. But this full realization was not wanted. Over a long period of time, the newer spiritual life and the newer life of civilization has brought about what has become known in recent times as agnosticism. Again and again, those thinkers who did not want to come to a further development of thinking, who did not want to enter into the world of the imaginative, inspired and intuitive, spoke of an ignoramus and thus presented something to people - which is significant - that must be considered as something unrecognizable and incomprehensible. But because man always knows that he is spirit, he should actually be able to distinguish the spiritual origin from nebulous mysticism and the like. The cause of all that is literally superstition in the various areas of life does not lie in anthroposophy, which strives for clarity and exact natural science, but the origin of it lies in ignorabimus, in agnosticism. These created the “foggy” mysticism. It is precisely the ignorabimus that leads to agnosticism, because man must continually seek the spirit. All nebulous movements emanate from the ignorabimus and agnosticism.

Anthroposophy does not want to be fog, Anthroposophy wants to be light, Anthroposophy wants to be the continuation of the light that it itself recognizes in modern science as a truly spiritual light that carries humanity forward. This is how it itself sees the relationships between modern science, modern philosophy and itself as Anthroposophy.

In the last lecture we found that moral impulses are fundamental in human nature. From the facts adduced, we tried to prove that a foundation of morality and goodness lies at the bottom of the human soul, and that really it has only been in the course of evolution, in man's passage from incarnation to incarnation, that he has diverged from the original instinctive good foundation and that thereby what is evil, wrong and immoral has come into humanity. But if this is so, we must really wonder that evil is possible, or that it ever originated, and the question as to how evil became possible in the course of evolution requires an answer. We can only obtain a satisfactory reply by examining the elementary moral instruction given to man in ancient times.

The pupils of the Mysteries whose highest ideal was gradually to penetrate to full spiritual knowledge and truths were always obliged to work from a moral foundation. In those places where they worked in the right way according to the Mysteries, the peculiarity of man's moral-nature was shown in a special way to the pupils. Briefly, we may say: The pupils of the Mysteries were shown that freewill can only be developed if a person is in a position to go wrong in one of two directions; further, that life can only run its course truly and favourably when these two lines of opposition are considered as being like the two sides of a balance, of which first one side and then the other goes up and down. True balance only exists when the crossbeam is horizontal. They were shown that it is impossible to express man's right procedure by saying: this is right and that is wrong. It is only possible to gain the true idea when the human being, standing in the centre of the balance, can be swayed each moment of his life, now to one side, now to the other, but he himself holds the correct mean between the two.

Let us take the virtues of which we have spoken: first—valour, bravery. In this respect human nature may diverge on one side to foolhardiness—that is, unbridled activity in the world and the straining of the forces at one's disposal to the utmost limit. Foolhardiness is one side; the opposite is cowardice. A person may tip the scale in either of these directions. In the Mysteries the pupils were shown that when a man degenerates into foolhardiness he loses himself and lays aside his own individuality and is crushed by the wheels of life. Life tears him in pieces if he errs in this direction, but if, on the other hand, he errs on the side of cowardice, he hardens himself and tears himself away from his connection with beings and objects. He then becomes a being shut up within himself, who, as he cannot bring his deeds into harmony with the whole, loses his connection with things. This was shown to the pupils in respect to all that a man may do. He may degenerate in such a way that he is torn in pieces, and losing his own individuality is crushed by the objective world; on the other hand, he may degenerate not merely in courage, but also in every other respect in such a way that he hardens within himself. Thus at the head of the moral code in all the Mysteries there were written the significant words: “Thou must find the mean,” so that through thy deeds thou must not lose thyself in the world, and that the world also does not lose thee.

Those are the two possible extremes into which man may fall. Either he may be lost to the world, the world lays hold on him, and crushes him, as is the case in foolhardiness; or the world may be lost to him, because he hardens himself in his egoism, as is the case in cowardice. In the Mysteries, the pupils were told that goodness cannot merely be striven for as goodness obtained once for all; rather does goodness come only through man being continually able to strike out in two directions like a pendulum and by his own inner power able to find the balance, the mean between the two.

You have in this all that will enable you to understand the freedom of the will and the significance of reason and wisdom in human action. If it were fitting for man always to observe the eternal moral principles he need only acquire these moral principles and then he could go through life on a definite line of march, as it were, but life is never like this. Freedom in life consists rather in man's being always able to err in one direction or another. But in this way the possibility of evil arises. For what is evil? It is that which originates when the human being is either lost to the world, or the world is lost to him. Goodness consists in avoiding both these extremes. In the course of evolution evil became not only a possibility but an actuality; for as man journeyed from incarnation to incarnation, by his turning now to one side and now to the other, he could not always find the balance at once, and it was necessary for the compensation to be karmically made at a future time. What man cannot attain in one life, because he does not always find the mean at once, he will attain gradually in the course of evolution in as much as man diverts his course to one side, and is then obliged, perhaps in the next life, to strike out again in the opposite direction, and thus bring about the balance. What I have just told you was a golden rule in the ancient Mysteries. We often find among the ancient philosophers echoes of the principles taught in these Mysteries. Aristotle makes a statement, when, speaking of virtue, which we cannot understand unless we know that what has just been said was an old principle in the Mysteries which had been received by Aristotle as tradition and embodied in his philosophy. He says: Virtue is a human capacity or skill guided by reason and insight, which, as regards man, holds the balance between the too-much and the too-little. Aristotle here gives a definition of virtue, the like of which no subsequent philosophy has attained. But as Aristotle had the tradition from the Mysteries, it was possible for him to give the precise truth.

That is, then, the mean, which must be found and followed if a man is really to be virtuous, if moral power is to pulsate through the world. We can now answer the question as to why morals should exist at all. For what happens when there is no morality, when evil is done, and when the too-much or the too-little takes place, when man is lost to the world by being crushed, or when the world loses him? In each of these cases something is always destroyed. Every evil or immoral act is a process of destruction, and the moment man sees that when he has done wrong he cannot do otherwise than destroy something, take something from the world, in that moment a mighty influence for good has awakened within him. It is especially the task of Spiritual Science—which is really only just beginning its work in the world—to show that all evil brings about a destructive process, that it takes away from the world something which is necessary. When in accordance with our anthroposophical standpoint, we hold this principle, then what we know about the nature of man leads us to a particular interpretation of good and evil.

We know that the sentient-soul was chiefly developed in the old Chaldean or Egyptian epoch the third post-Atlantean age. The people of the present day have but little notion what this epoch of development was like prior to that time, for in external history one can reach little further back than to the Egyptian age. We know that the intellectual, or mind-soul, developed in the fourth or Graeco-Latin age, and that now in our age we are developing the consciousness-or spiritual-soul. The spirit-self will only come into prominence in the sixth age of post-Atlantean development.

Let us now ask: How can the sentient-soul turn to one side or the other, away from what is right? The sentient-soul is that quality in man which enables him to perceive the objective world, to take it into himself, to take part in it, not to pass through the world ignorant of all the diversified objects it contains, but to go through the world in such a way that he forms a relationship with them. All this is brought about by the sentient-soul. We find one side to which man can deviate with the sentient-soul when we enquire: What makes it possible for man to enter into relationship with the objective world? It is what may be called interest in the different things, and by this word “interest” something is expressed which in a moral sense is extremely important. It is much more important that one should bear in mind the moral significance of interest, than that one should devote oneself to thousands of beautiful moral axioms which may be only paltry and hypocritical. Let it be clearly understood, that our moral impulses are in fact never better guided than when we take a proper interest in objects and beings. In our last lecture we spoke in a deeper sense of love as an impulse and in such a way that we cannot now be misunderstood if we say that the usual, oft-repeated declamation, “love, love, and again love” cannot replace the moral impulse contained in what may be described by the word ‘interest.’

Let us suppose that we have a child before us. What is the condition primary to our devotion to this child? What is the first condition to our educating the child? It is that we take an interest in it. There is something unhealthy or abnormal in the human soul if a person withdraws himself from something in which he takes an interest. It will more and more be recognised that the impulse of interest is a quite specially golden impulse in the moral sense the further we advance to the actual foundations of morality and do not stop at the mere preaching of morals. Our inner powers are also called forth as regards mankind when we extend our interests, when we are able to transpose ourselves with understanding into beings and objects.

Even sympathy is awakened in the right manner if we take an interest in a being; and if, as anthroposophists, we set ourselves the task of extending our interests more and more and of widening our mental horizon, this will promote the universal brotherhood of mankind. Progress is not gained by the mere preaching of universal love, but by the extension of our interests further and further, so that we come to interest ourselves increasingly in souls with widely different characters, racial and national peculiarities, with widely different temperaments, and holding widely differing religious and philosophical views, and approach them with understanding. Right interest, right understanding, calls forth from the soul the right moral action.

Here also we must hold the balance between two extremes. One extreme is apathy which passes everything by and occasions immense moral mischief in the world. An apathetic person only lives in himself; obstinately, insisting on his own principles, and saying: This is my standpoint. In a moral sense this insistence upon a standpoint is always bad. The essential thing is for us to have an open mind and be alive to all that surrounds us. Apathy separates us from the world, while interest unites us with it. The world loses us through our apathy: in this direction we become immoral. Thus we see that apathy and lack of interest in the world are morally evil in the highest degree.

Anthroposophy is something which makes the mind ever more active, helps us to think with greater readiness of what is spiritual and to take it into ourselves. Just as it is true that warmth comes from the fire when we light a stove so it is true that interest in humanity and the world comes when we study spiritual science. Wisdom is the fuel for interest and we may say, although this may perhaps not be evident without further explanation, that Anthroposophy arouses this interest in us when we study those more remote subjects, the teachings concerning the evolutionary stages through Saturn, Sun and Moon, and the meaning of Karma and so on. It really comes about that interest is produced as the result of anthroposophical knowledge while from materialistic knowledge comes something which in a radical manner must be described as apathy and which, if it alone were to hold sway in the world, would, of necessity, do untold harm.

See how many people go through the world and meet this or that person, but really do not get to know him, for they are quite shut up in themselves. How often do we find that two people have been friends for a long time and then suddenly there comes a rupture. This is because the friendship had a materialistic foundation and only after the lapse of time did they discover that they were mutually unsympathetic. At the present time very few people have the “hearing” ear for that which speaks from man to man; but Anthroposophy should bring about an expansion of our perceptions, so that we shall gain a “seeing” eye and an open mind for all that is human around us and so we shall not go through the world. apathetically, but with true interest.

We also avoid the other extreme by distinguishing between true and false interests, and thus observe the happy mean. Immediately to throw oneself, as it were, into the arms of each person we meet is to lose oneself passionately in the person; that is not true interest. If we do this, we lose ourselves to the world. Through apathy the world loses us; through uncontrolled passion we lose ourselves to the world. But through healthy, devoted interest we stand morally firm in the centre, in the state of balance.

In the third post-Atlantean age of civilisation, that is, in the Chaldaic-Egyptian age, there still existed in a large part of humanity on earth a certain power to hold the balance between apathy and the passionate intoxicating devotion to the world; and it is this, which in ancient times, and also by Plato and Aristotle, was called wisdom. But people looked upon this wisdom as the gift of superhuman beings, for up to that time the ancient impulses of wisdom were active. Therefore, from this point of view, especially relating to moral impulses, we may call the third post-Atlantean age, the age of instinctive wisdom. You will perceive the truth of what was said last year, though with a different intention, in the Copenhagen lectures on The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind. In those lectures we showed how, in the third post-Atlantean age, mankind still stood nearer to the divine spiritual powers. And that which drew mankind closer to the divine spiritual powers, was instinctive wisdom.

Thus, it was a gift of the gods to find at that time the happy mean in action, between apathy and sensuous passionate devotion. This balance, this equilibrium was at that time still maintained through external institutions. The complete intermingling of humanity which came about in the fourth age of post-Atlantean development through the migrations of various peoples, did not yet exist. Mankind was still divided into smaller peoples and tribes. Their interests were wisely regulated by nature, and were so far active that the right moral impulses could penetrate; and on the other hand, through the existence of blood kinsmanship in the tribe, an obstacle was placed in the way of sensual passion. Even to-day one cannot fail to observe that it is easiest to show interest within blood-relationship and common descent, but in this there is not what is called sensuous passion. As people were gathered together in relatively small tracts of country in the Egypto-Chaldaic age, the wise and happy mean was easily found.

But the idea of the progressive development of humanity is that, which originally was instinctive, which was only spiritual, shall gradually disappear and that man shall become independent of the divine spiritual powers. Hence we see that even in the fourth post-Atlantean age, the Graeco-Latin age, not only the philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, but also public opinion in Greece, considered wisdom as something which must be gained as something which is no longer the gift of the gods, but after which man must strive. According to Plato, the first virtue is wisdom, and according to him, he who does not strive after wisdom is immoral.

We are now in the fifth post-Atlantean age. We are still far from the time when the wisdom instinctively implanted in humanity as a divine impulse, will be raised into consciousness. Hence in our age people are specially liable to err in both the directions we have mentioned, and it is therefore particularly necessary that the great dangers to be found at this point should be counteracted by a spiritual conception of the World, so that what man once possessed as instinctive wisdom may now become conscious wisdom. The Anthroposophical Movement is to contribute to this end.

The gods once gave wisdom to the unconscious human soul, so that it possessed this wisdom instinctively, whereas now we have first to learn the truths about the cosmos and about human evolution. The ancient customs were also fashioned after the thoughts of the gods.

We have the right view of Anthroposophy when we look upon it as the investigations of the thoughts of the gods. In former times these flowed instinctively into man, but now we have to investigate them, to make the knowledge of them our own. In this sense Anthroposophy must be sacred to us; we must be able to consider reverently that the ideas imparted to us are really something divine, and something which we human beings are allowed to think and reflect upon as the divine thoughts according to which the world has been ordered. When Anthroposophy stands in this aspect to us, we can then consider the knowledge it imparts in such a way that we understand that it has been given us so as to enable us to fulfil our mission. Mighty truths are made known to us, when we study what has been imparted concerning the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, concerning reincarnation, and the development of the various races, etc. But we only assume the right attitude towards it when we say: The thoughts we seek are the thoughts wherewith the gods have guided evolution. We think the evolution of the gods. If we understand this correctly we are overwhelmed by something that is deeply moral. This is inevitable. Then we say: In ancient times man had instinctive wisdom from the gods, who gave him the wisdom according to which they fashioned the world, and morality thus became possible. But through Anthroposophy we now acquire this wisdom consciously. Therefore we may also trust that in us it shall be transformed into moral impulses, so that we do not merely receive anthroposophical wisdom, but a moral stimulus as well.

Now into what sort of moral impulses will the wisdom acquired through Anthroposophy be transformed? We must here touch upon a point whose development the anthroposophist can foresee, the profound moral significance and moral weight of which he even ought to foresee, a point of development which is far removed from what is customary at the present time, which is what Plato called the “ideal of wisdom.” He named it with a word which was in common use when man still possessed the ancient wisdom, and it would be well to replace this by the word truth, for as we have now become more individual, we have withdrawn ourselves from the divine, and must therefore strive back to it. We must learn to feel the full weight and meaning of the word ‘truth,’ and this in a moral sense will be a result of an anthroposophical world conception and conviction. Anthroposophists must understand how important it is to be filled with the moral element of truth in an age when materialism has advanced so far that one may indeed still speak of truth, but when the general life and understanding is far removed from perceiving what is right in this direction. Nor can this be otherwise at the present time; as owing to a certain quality acquired by modern life, truth is something which must, to a great extent, be lacking in the understanding of the day, I ask what does a man feel to-day when in the newspapers or some other printed matter he finds

certain information, and afterwards it transpires that it is simply untrue? I seriously ask you to ponder over this. One cannot say that it happens in every case, but one must assert that it probably happens in every fourth case. Untruthfulness has everywhere become a quality of the age; it is impossible to describe truth as a characteristic of our times.

For instance, take a man whom you know to have written or said something false, and place the facts before him. As a rule, you will find that he does not fear such a thing to be wrong. He will immediately make the excuse: “But I said it in good faith.” Anthroposophists must not consider it moral when a person says it is merely incorrect what he has said in good faith. People will learn to understand more and more, that they must first ascertain that what they assert really happened. No man should make a statement, or impart anything to another until he has exhausted every means to ascertain the truth of his assertions; and it is only when he recognises this obligation that he can perceive truth as moral impulse. And then when someone has either written or said something that is incorrect, he will no longer say: “I thought it was so, said it in good faith,” for he will learn that it is his duty to express not merely what he thinks is right, but it is also his duty to say only what is true, and correct. To this end, a radical change must gradually come about in our cultural life. The speed of travel, the lust of sensation on the part of man, everything that comes with a materialistic age, is opposed to truth. In the sphere of morality, Anthroposophy will be an educator of humanity to the duty of truth.

My business today is not to say how far truth has been already realised in the Anthroposophical Society, but to show that what I have said must be a principle, a lofty anthroposophical ideal. The moral evolution within the movement will have enough to do if the moral ideal of truth is thought, felt and perceived in all directions, for this ideal must be what produces the virtue of the sentient-soul of man in the right way.

The second part of the soul of which we have to speak in Anthroposophy is what we usually call the mind-soul, or intellectual-soul Gemütsseele. You know that it developed especially in the fourth post-Atlantean, or Graeco-Latin age. The virtue which is the particular emblem for this part of the soul is bravery, valour and courage; we have already dwelt on this many times, and also on the fact that foolhardiness and cowardice are its extremes. Courage, bravery, valour is the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice. The German word gemüt expresses in the sound of the word that it is related to this. The word gemüt indicates the mid-part of the human soul, the part that is mutvoll, full of mut, courage, strength and force.

This was the second, the middle virtue of Plato and Aristotle. It is that virtue which in the fourth post-Atlantean age still existed in man as a divine gift, while wisdom was really only instinctive in the third. Instinctive valour and bravery existed as a gift of the gods (you may gather this from the first lecture) among the people who, in the fourth age, met the expansion of Christianity to the north. They showed that among them valour was still a gift of the gods. Among the Chaldeans wisdom, the wise penetration into the secrets of the starry world, existed as a divine gift, as something inspired. Among the people of the fourth post-Atlantean age, there existed valour and bravery, especially among the Greeks and Romans, but it existed also among the peoples whose work it became to spread Christianity. This instinctive valour was lost later than instinctive wisdom.

If we look round us now in the fifth post-Atlantean age, we see that, as regards valour and bravery, we are in the same position in respect of the Greeks as the Greeks were to the Chaldeans and Egyptians in regard to wisdom. We look back to what was a divine gift in the age immediately preceding ours, and in a certain way we can strive for it again. However, the two previous lectures have shown us, that in connection with this effort a certain transformation must take place. We have seen the transformation in Francis of Assisi of that divine gift which manifested itself as bravery and valour. We saw that the transformation came about as the result of an inner moral force which in our last lecture we found to be the force of the Christ-impulse; the transformation of valour and bravery into true love. But this true love must be guided by another virtue, by the interest in the being to whom we turn our love. In his Timon of Athens Shakespeare shows how love, or warmth of heart, causes harm, when it is passionately manifested; when it appears merely as a quality of human nature without being guided by wisdom and truth. A man is described who gave freely of his possessions, who squandered his living in all directions. Liberality is a virtue, but Shakespeare also shows us that nothing but parasites are produced by what is squandered.

Just as ancient valour and bravery were guided from the Mysteries by the European Brahmins—those wise leaders who kept themselves hidden in the background—so also in human nature this virtue must accord with and be guided by interest. Interest, which connects us with the external world in the right way, must lead and guide us when, with our love, we turn to the world. Fundamentally this may be seen from the characteristic and striking example of Francis of Assisi. The sympathy he expressed was not obtrusive or offensive. Those who overwhelm others with their sympathy are by no means always actuated by the right moral impulses. And how many there are who will not receive anything that is given out of pity. But to approach another with, understanding is not offensive. Under some circumstances a person must needs refuse to be sympathised with; but the attempt to understand his nature is something to which no reasonable person can object. Hence also the attitude of another person cannot be blamed or condemned if his actions are determined by this principle.

It is understanding which can guide us with respect to this second virtue: Love. It is that which, through the Christ-impulse, has become the special virtue of the mind-soul or intellectual-soul; it is the virtue which may be described as human love accompanied by human understanding. Sympathy in grief and joy is the virtue which in the future must produce the most beautiful and glorious fruits in human social life, and, in one who rightly understands the Christ-impulse, this sympathy and this love will originate quite naturally, it will develop into feeling. It is precisely through the anthroposophical understanding of the Christ-impulse that it will become feeling.

Through the Mystery of Golgotha Christ descended into earthly evolution; His impulses, His activities are here now, they are everywhere. Why did He descend to this earth? In order that through what He has to give to the world, evolution may go forward in the right way. Now that the Christ-impulse is in the world, if through what is immoral, if through lack of interest in our fellow-men, we destroy something, then we take away a portion of the world into which the Christ-impulse has flowed. Thus because the Christ-impulse is now here, we directly destroy something of it. But if we give to the world what can be given to it through virtue, which is creative, we build. We build through self-surrender. It is not without reason that it has often been said, that Christ was first crucified on Golgotha, but that He is crucified again and again through the deeds, of man. Since Christ has entered into the Earth development through the deed upon Golgotha, we, by our immoral deeds, by our unkindness and lack of interest, add to the sorrow and pain inflicted upon Him. Therefore it has been said, again and again: Christ is crucified anew as long as immorality, unkindness and lack of interest exist. Since the Christ-impulse has permeated the world, it is this which is made to suffer.

Just as it is true that through evil, which is destructive, we withdraw something from the Christ-impulse and continue the crucifixion upon Golgotha, it is also true that when we act out of love, in all cases where we use love, we add to the Christ-impulse, we help to bring it to life. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me” (Matthew 25, 40), this is the most significant statement of love and this statement must become the most profound moral impulse if it is once anthroposophically understood. We do this when with understanding we confront our fellow-men and offer them something in our actions, our virtue, our conduct towards them which is conditioned by our understanding of their nature. Our attitude towards our fellow-men is our attitude towards the Christ-impulse itself.

It is a powerful moral impulse, something which is a real foundation for morals, when we feel: ‘The Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished for all men, and an impulse has thence spread abroad throughout the whole world. When you are dealing with your fellow-men, try to understand them in their special, characteristics of race, colour, nationality, religious faith, philosophy, etc. If you meet them and do this or that to them, you do it to Christ. Whatever you do to men, in the present condition of the earth's evolution, you do to Christ.’ This statement: “What ye have done to one of My brothers, ye have done unto Me,” will at the same time become a mighty moral impulse to the man who understands the fundamental significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. So that we may say: Whereas the gods of pre-Christian times gave instinctive wisdom to man, instinctive valour and bravery, so now love streams down from the symbol of the cross, the love which is based upon the mutual interest of man in man.

Thereby the Christ-impulse will work powerfully in the world. On the day when it comes about that the Brahmin not only loves and understands the Brahmin, the Pariah the Pariah, the Jew the Jew, and the Christian the Christian; but when the Jew is able to understand the Christian, the Pariah the Brahmin, the American the Asiatic, as man, and put himself in his place, then one will know how deeply it is felt in a Christian way when we say: “All men must feel themselves to be brothers, no matter what their religious creed may be.” We ought to consider what otherwise binds us as being of little value. Father, mother, brother, sister, even one's own life one ought to value less than that which speaks from one human soul to the other. He who, in this sense does not regard as base all that impairs the connection with the Christ-impulse cannot be Christ's disciple. The Christ-impulse balances and compensates human differences. Christ's disciple is one who regards mere human distinctions as being of little account, and clings to the impulse of love streaming forth from the Mystery of Golgotha, which in this respect we perceive as a renewal of what was given to mankind as original virtue.

We have now but to consider what may be spoken of as the virtue of the Consciousness- or Spiritual- Soul. When we consider the fourth post-Atlantean age, we find that Temperance or Moderation was still instinctive. Plato and Aristotle called it the chief virtue of the Spiritual-Soul. Again they comprehended it as a state of balance, as the mean of what exists in the Spiritual-soul. The Spiritual-Soul consists in man's becoming conscious of the external world through his bodily nature. The sense body is primarily the instrument of the Spiritual-Soul, and it is also the sense body through which man arrives at self-consciousness.

Therefore the sense-body of man must be preserved. If it were not preserved for the mission of the earth, then that mission could not be fulfilled. But here also there is a limit. If a man only used all the forces he possessed in order to enjoy himself, he would shut himself up in himself, and the world would lose him. The man who merely enjoys himself, who uses all his forces merely to give himself pleasure, cuts himself off from the world—so thought Plato and Aristotle—the world loses him. And he, who denies himself everything renders himself weaker and weaker, and is finally laid hold of by the external world-process, and is crushed by the outer world. For he who goes beyond the forces appropriate to him as man, he who goes to excess is laid hold of by the world-process and is lost in it.

Thus what man has developed, for the building up of the Spiritual-soul can be dissolved, so that he comes into the position of losing the world. Temperance, or Moderation, is the virtue which enables man to avoid these extremes. Temperance implies neither asceticism nor gluttony, but the happy mean between these two; and this is the virtue of the Spiritual-Soul. Regarding this virtue we have not yet progressed beyond the instinctive standpoint. A little reflection will teach you that, on the whole, people are very much given to sampling the two extremes. They swing to and fro between them. Leaving out of account the few who at the present day endeavour to gain clear views on this subject, you will find that the majority of people live very much after a particular pattern. In Central Europe this is often described by saying: There are people in Berlin who eat and drink to excess the entire winter, and then in summer they go to Carlsbad in order to remove the ill-effects produced by months of intemperance, thus going from one extreme to the other. Here you have the tipping of the scale, first to one side and then to the other. This is only a radical case. It is very evident that though the foregoing is extreme, and not universal to any great extent, still the oscillation between enjoyment and deprivation exists everywhere. People themselves ensure that there is excess on one side, and then they get the physicians to prescribe a so-called lowering system of cure, that is, the other extreme, in order that the ill effects may be repaired.

From this, it will be seen that in this respect people are still in an instinctive condition, that there is still an instinctive feeling, which is a kind of divine gift, not to go too far in one direction or another. But just as the other instinctive qualities of man were lost, these, too, will be lost with the transition from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean age. This quality which is still possessed as a natural tendency will be lost; and now you will be able to judge how much the anthroposophical world conception and conviction will have to contribute in order gradually to develop consciousness in this field.

At the present time there are very few, even developed anthroposophists, who see clearly that Anthroposophy provides the means to gain the right consciousness in this field also. When Anthroposophy is able to bring more weight to bear in this direction, then will appear what I can only describe in the following way: people will gradually long more and more for great spiritual truths. Although Anthroposophy is still scorned to-day, it will not always be so. It will spread, and overcome all its external opponents, and everything else still opposing it, and anthroposophists will not be satisfied by merely preaching universal love. It will be understood that one cannot acquire Anthroposophy in one day, any more than a person can take sufficient nourishment in one day to last the whole of his life. Anthroposophy has to be acquired to an ever increasing extent. It will come to pass that in the Anthroposophical Movement it will not be so often stated that these are our principles, and if we have these principles then we are anthroposophists; for the feeling and experience of standing in a community of the living element in anthroposophy will extend more and more.

Moreover, let us consider what happens by people mentally working upon the particular thoughts, the particular feelings and impulses which come from anthroposophical wisdom. We all know that anthroposophists can never have a materialistic view of the world, they have exactly the opposite, But he who says the following is a materialistic thinker: “When one thinks, a movement of the molecules or atoms of the brain takes place, and it is because of this movement that one has thought. Thought proceeds from the brain somewhat like a thin smoke, or it is something like the flame from a candle.” Such, is the materialistic view. The anthroposophical view is the opposite. In the latter it is the thought, the experience in the soul which sets the brain and nervous system in motion. The way in which our brain moves depends upon what thoughts we think. This is exactly the opposite of what is said by the materialist. If you wish to know how the brain of a person is constituted, you must inquire into what thoughts he has, for just as the printed characters of a book are nothing else than the consequence of thoughts, so the movements of the brain are nothing else than the consequence of thoughts.

Must we not then say that the brain will be differently affected when it is filled with anthroposophical thoughts than it will be in a society which plays cards? Different processes are at work in your minds when you follow anthroposophical thoughts from when you are in a company of card players, or see the pictures in a movie theatre. In the human organism nothing is isolated or stands alone. Everything is connected; one part acts and reacts on another. Thoughts act upon the brain and nervous system, and the latter is connected with the whole organism, and although many people may not yet be aware of it, when the hereditary characteristics still hidden in the body are conquered, the following will come about. The thoughts will be communicated from the brain to the stomach, and the result will be that things that are pleasant to people's taste to-day will no longer taste good to those who have received anthroposophica1 thoughts. The thoughts which anthroposophists have received are divine thoughts. They act upon the whole organism in such a manner that it will prefer to taste what is good for it. Man will smell and perceive as unsympathetic what does not suit him—a pecu1iar perspective, one which may perhaps be called materialistic, but is exactly the reverse.

This kind of appetite will come as a consequence of anthroposophical work; you will like one thing and prefer it at meals, dislike another and not wish to eat it. You may judge for yourselves when you notice that perhaps you now have an aversion to things, which before your anthroposophical days you did not possess. This will become more and more general when man works selflessly at his higher development, so that the world may receive what is right from him. One must not, however, play fast-and-lose with the words “selflessness” and “egoism.” These words may very easily be misused. It is not altogether selfless when someone says: “I shall only be active in the world and for the world; what does it matter about my own spiritual development? I shall only work, not strive egoistically!” It is not egoism when a person undergoes a higher development, because he thus fits himself more fully to bear an active part in the furtherance of the world development. If a person neglects his own further deve1opment, he renders himself useless to the world, he withdraws his force from it. We must do the right thing in this respect as well, in order to develop in ourselves what the Deity had in view for us.

Thus, through Anthroposophy a human race, or rather, a nucleus of humanity will be developed, which perceives temperance as a guiding ideal not merely instinctively, but which has a conscious sympathy for what makes man in_a worthy way into a useful part of the divine world-order, and a conscious disinclination for all that mars man as a part in the universal order.

Thus we see that also in that which is produced in man himself, there are moral impulses, and we find what we may call life-wisdom or practica1 wisdom as transformed temperance. The ideal of practical wisdom which is to be taken into consideration for the next, the sixth post-Atlantean age, will be the ideal virtue which Plato calls “justice.” That is: the harmonious accord of these virtues. As in humanity the virtues have altered to some extent, so what was looked upon as justice in pre-Christian times has also changed. A single virtue such as this, which harmonises the others did not exist at that time. The harmony of the virtues stood before the mental vision of humanity as an ideal of the most distant future. We have seen that the moral impulse of bravery has been changed to love. We have also seen that wisdom has become truth. To begin with, truth is a virtue which places man in a just and worthy manner in external life. But if we wish to arrive at truthfulness regarding spiritual things, how then can we arrange it in relation to those things? We acquire truthfulness, we gain the virtue of the Sentient-Soul through a right and appropriate interest, through right understanding. Now what is this interest with regard to the spiritual world? If we wish to bring the physical world and especially man before us, we must open ourselves towards him, we must have a seeing eye for his nature. How do we obtain this seeing-eye with reference to the spiritual world? We gain it by developing a particular kind of feeling, that which appeared at a time when the old instinctive wisdom had sunk into the depths of the soul's life. This type of feeling was often described by the Greeks in the words: “All philosophical thought begins with wonder.” Something essentially moral is said when we say that our relationship to the supersensible world begins with wonder. The savage, uncultivated human being, is but little affected by the great phenomena of the world. It is through mental development that man comes to find riddles in the phenomena of everyday life, and to perceive that there is something spiritual at the back of them. It is wonder that directs our souls up to the spiritual sphere in order that we may penetrate to the knowledge of that world; and we can only arrive at this knowledge when our soul is attracted by the phenomena which it is possible to investigate. It is this attraction which give rise to wonder, astonishment and faith. It is always wonder and amazement which direct us to what is supersensible, and at the same time, it is what one usually describes as faith. Faith, wonder and amazement are the three forces of the soul which lead us beyond the ordinary world.

When we contemplate man with wonder and amazement, we try to understand him; by understanding his nature we attain to the virtue of brotherhood, and we shall best realise this by approaching the human being with reverence. We shall then see that reverence is something with which we must approach every human being and if we have this attitude, we shall become more and more truthful. Truth will become something by which we shall be bound by duty. Once we have an inkling of it, the supersensible world becomes something towards which we incline, and through knowledge we shall attain to the supersensible wisdom which has already sunk into the subconscious depths of the soul. Only after supersensible wisdom had disappeared do we find the statement that “philosophy begins with wonder and amazement.” This statement will make it clear that wonder only appeared in evolution in the age when the Christ-impulse had come into the world.

It has already been stated that the second virtue is love. Let us now consider what we have described as instinctive temperance for the present time, and as practical wisdom of life for the future. Man confronts himself in these virtues. Through the deeds he performs in the world, he acts in such a way that he guards himself, as it were; it is therefore necessary for him to gain an objective standard of value.

We now see something appear which develops more and more, and which I have often spoken of in other connections, something which first appeared in the fourth post-Atlantean age, namely the Greek. It can be shown that in the old Greek dramas, for instance in Aeschylus, the Furies play a role which in Euripides is transformed into conscience. From this we see that in ancient times what we call conscience did not exist at all. Conscience is something that exists as a standard for our own actions when we go too far in our demands, when we seek our own advantage too much. It acts as a standard placed between our sympathies and antipathies.

With this we attain to something which is more objective, which, compared with the virtues of truth, love and practical wisdom, acts in a much more objective, or outward manner. Love here stands in the middle, and acts as something which has to fill and regulate all life, also all social life. In the same way it acts as the regulator of all that man has developed as inner impulse. But that which he has developed as truth will manifest itself as the belief in supersensible knowledge. Life-wisdom, that which originates in ourselves, we must feel as a divine spiritual regulator which, like conscience, leads securely along the true middle course. If we had time it would be very easy to answer the various objections which might be raised at this point. But we shall only consider one, for example, the objection to the assertion that conscience and wonder are qualities which have only gradually developed in humanity, whereas they are really eternal. But this they are not. He who says that they are eternal qualities in human nature only shows that he does not know the conditions attached to them.

As time goes on it will be found more and more that in ancient times man had not as yet descended so far to the physical plane, but was still more closely connected with divine impulses, and that he was in a condition which he will again consciously strive to reach when
he is ruled more by truth, love and the art of life in regard to the physical plane, and when in regard to spiritual knowledge he is actuated by faith in the supersensible world. It is not necessarily the case that faith will directly lead into that world, but it will at length be transformed into supersensible knowledge. Conscience is that which will enter as a regulator in the Consciousness- or Spiritual-Soul. Faith, love, conscience; these three forces will become the three stars of the moral forces which shall enter into human souls particularly through Anthroposophy. The moral perspective of the future can only be disclosed to those who think of these three virtues being ever more increased Anthroposophy will place moral life in the light of these virtues, and they will be the constructive forces of the future.

Before closing our observations, there is one point which must be considered. I shall only touch upon the subject, for it would be impossible to analyse without giving many lectures. The Christ-impulse entered human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha. We know that at that time a human organism consisting of physical, etheric, and astral bodies received the Ego-impulse or “I” from above, as the Christ-impulse. It was this Christ-impulse which was received by the earth and which flowed into earthly evolution. It was now in it as the ego of Christ. We know further that the physical body, etheric body and astral body remained with Jesus of Nazareth; the Christ-impulse was within as the ego. At Golgotha, Jesus of Nazareth separated from the Christ-impulse, which then flowed into the earth development. The evolution of this impulse signifies the evolution of the earth itself.

Earnestly consider certain things which are very often repeated in order that they may be more easily understood. As we have often heard, the world is maya or illusion, but man must gradually penetrate to the truth, the reality of this external world. The earth evolution fundamentally consists in the fact that all the external things which have been formed in the first half of the earth's development are dissolved in the second half, in which we now are, so that all that we see externally, physically, shall separate from human development just as the physical body of a human being falls away. One might ask: What will then be left? And the answer is: The forces which are embodied in man as real forces through the process of the development of humanity on the earth. And the most real impulse in this development is that which has come into earth evolution through the Christ-impulse. But this Christ-impulse at first finds nothing with which it can clothe itself. Therefore it has to obtain a covering through the further development of the earth; and when this is concluded, the fully developed Christ shall be the final man—as Adam was the first—around whom humanity in its multiplicity has grouped itself.

In the words: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me,” is contained a significant hint for us. What has been done for Christ? The actions performed in accordance with the Christ-impulse under the influence of conscience, under the influence of faith and according to knowledge, are developed out on the earth-life up to the present time, and as, through his actions and his moral attitude a person gives something to his brethren, he gives at the same time to Christ. This should be taken as a precept: All the forces we develop, all acts of faith and trust, all acts performed as the result of wonder, are—because we give it at the same time to the Christ-Ego—something which closes like a covering round the Christ and may be compared with the astral body of man.

We form the astral body for the Christ-Ego-impulse by all the moral activities of wonder, trust, reverence and faith, in short, all that paves the way to supersensible knowledge. Through all these activities we foster love. This is quite in accordance with the statement we quoted: “What ye have done to one, of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.”

We form the etheric body for Christ through our deeds of love, and through our actions in the world which we do through the impulses of conscience we form for the Christ-impulse that which corresponds to the physical body of man. When the earth has one day reached its goal, when man understands the right moral impulses through which all that is good is done, then shall be perfected that which came as an Ego or “I” into human development through the Mystery of Golgotha as the Christ-impulse. It shall then be enveloped by an astral body which is formed through faith, through all the deeds of wonder and amazement on the part of man. It shall be enveloped by something which is like an etheric body which is formed through deeds of love; and by something which envelops it like a physical body, formed through the deeds of conscience.

Thus the future evolution of humanity shall be accomplished through the co-operation of the moral impulses of man with the Christ-impulse. We see humanity in perspective before us, like a great organic structure. When people understand how to member their actions into this great organism, and through their own deeds form their impulses around it like a covering, they shall then lay the foundations, in the course of earthly evolution, for a great community, which can be permeated and pervaded through and through by the Christ-impulse.

Thus we see that morals need not be preached, but they can indeed be founded by showing facts that have really happened and do still happen, confirming what is felt by persons with special mental endowments. It should make a noteworthy impression upon us if we bear in mind how, at the time when Goethe lost his friend, Duke Charles Augustus, he wrote many things in a long letter at Weimar, and then on the same day—it was in the year 1828, just three-and-a-half years before his own death, and almost at the end of his life—he wrote a very remarkable sentence in his diary: “The whole reasonable world may be considered as a great immortal individual which uninterruptedly brings about what is necessary and thereby makes itself master even over chance.” How could such a thought become more concrete than by our imagining this individual active among us, and by thinking of ourselves as, being united with him in his work? Through the Mystery of Golgotha the greatest Individual entered into human development, and, when people intentionally direct their lives in the way we have just described, they shall build up a covering round the Christ-impulse, so that around this Being there shall be formed something which is like a covering around a kernel.

Much more could be said about virtue from the standpoint of Anthroposophy. In particular long and important considerations could be entered into concerning truth and its connection with karma, for through Anthroposophy the idea of karma will have to enter into human evolution more and more. Man will also have to learn gradually so to consider and order his life that his virtues correspond with karma. Through the idea of karma man must also learn to recognise that he may not disown his former deeds by his later ones. A certain feeling of responsibility in life, a readiness to take upon ourselves the results of what we have done, has yet to show itself as a result of human evolution. How far removed man still is from this ideal we see when we consider him more c1osely. That man develops by the acts he has committed is a well-known fact. When the consequences of an action seem to have come to an end, then what could only be done if the first act had not taken place, can still be done. The fact that a person feels responsible for what he has done, the fact that he consciously accepts the idea of karma, is something which might also be a subject for study. But you will still find much for yourselves by following the lines suggested in these three lectures; you will find how fruitful these ideas can be if you work them out further. As man will live for the remainder of the earth development in repeated incarnations, it is his task to rectify all the mistakes made respecting the virtues described, by inclining to one side or the other, to change them by shaping them of his own free will, so that the balance, the mean, may come and thus the goal be gradually attained which has been described as the formation of the coverings for the Christ-impulse.

Thus we see before us not merely an abstract ideal of universal brotherhood, which indeed may also receive a strong impulse if we lay Anthroposophy at the foundation, but we see that there is something real in our earthly evolution, we see that there is in it an Impulse which came into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. And we also feel ourselves under the necessity so to work upon the Sentient-Soul, the Intellectual-Soul and the Spiritual-Soul, that this ideal Being shall be actualised, and that we shall be united with Him as with a great immortal Individual. The thought that the only possibility of further evolution, the power to fulfil the earth mission, lies in man's forming one whole with this great Individual, is realised in the second moral principle: What you do as if it were born from you alone, pushes you away and separates you from the great Individual, you thereby destroy something; but what you do to build up this great immortal Individual in the way above described, that you do towards the further development, the progressive life of the whole organism of the world.

We only require to place these two thoughts before us in order to see that their effect is not only to preach morals, but to give them a basis. For the thought: “Through your actions you are destroying what you ought to build up,” is terrible and fearful, keeping down all opposing desires. But the thought: “You are building up this immortal Individual; you are making yourself into a member of this immortal Individual,” fires one to good deeds, to strong moral impulses. In this way morals are not only preached, but we are led to thoughts which themselves may be moral impulses, to thoughts which are able to found morals.

The more the truth is cultivated, the more rapidly will the anthroposophical world conception and feeling develop ethics such as these. And it has been my task to express this in these lectures. Naturally, many things have only been lightly touched upon, but you will develop further in your own minds many ideas which have been broached. In this way we shall be drawn more closely together all over the earth. When we meet together—as we have done on this occasion as anthroposophists of Northern and Central Europe—to consider these subjects, and when we allow the thoughts roused in us at gatherings such as this to echo and re-echo through us, we shall in this way best make it true that Anthroposophy is to provide the foundation—even at the present time—for real spiritual life. And when we have to part again we know that it is in our anthroposophical thoughts that we are most at one, and this knowledge is at the same time a moral stimulus. To know that we are united by the same ideals with people who, as a rule, are widely separated from one another in space, but with whom we may meet on special occasions, is a stronger moral stimulus than being always together.

That we should think in this way of our gathering, that we should thus understand our studies together, fills my soul, especially at the close of these lectures, as something by which I should like to express my farewell greeting to you, and concerning which I am convinced that, when it is understood in the true light, the anthroposophical life which is developing will also be spiritually well founded. With this thought and these feelings let us close our studies today.

In the last lecture we found that moral impulses are fundamental in human nature. From the facts adduced, we tried to prove that a foundation of morality and goodness lies at the bottom of the human soul, and that really it has only been in the course of evolution, in man's passage from incarnation to incarnation, that he has diverged from the original instinctive good foundation and that thereby what is evil, wrong and unmoral has come into humanity. But if this is so, we must really wonder that evil is possible, or that it ever originated, and the question as to how evil became possible in the course of evolution requires an answer. We can only obtain a satisfactory reply by examining the elementary moral instruction given to man in ancient times.

The pupils of the Mysteries whose highest ideal was gradually to penetrate to full spiritual knowledge and truths were always obliged to work from a moral foundation. In those places where they worked in the right way according to the Mysteries, the peculiarity of man's moral-nature was shown in a special way to the pupils. Briefly, we may say: The pupils of the Mysteries were shown that freewill can only be developed if a person is in a position to go wrong in one of two directions; further, that life can only run its course truly and favourably when these two lines of opposition are considered as being like the two sides of a balance, of which first one side and then the other goes up and down. True balance only exists when the crossbeam is horizontal. They were shown that it is impossible to express man's right procedure by saying: this is right and that is wrong. It is only possible to gain the true idea when the human being, standing in the centre of the balance, can be swayed each moment of his life, now to one side, now to the other, but he himself holds the correct mean between the two.

Let us take the virtues of which we have spoken: first—valour, bravery. In this respect human nature may diverge on one side to foolhardiness—that is, unbridled activity in the world and the straining of the forces at one's disposal to the utmost limit. Foolhardiness is one side; the opposite is cowardice. A person may turn the scale in either of these directions. In the Mysteries the pupils were shown that when a man degenerates into foolhardiness he loses himself and lays aside his own individuality and is crushed by the wheels of life. Life tears him in pieces if he errs in this direction, but if, on the other hand, he errs on the side of cowardice, he hardens himself and tears himself away from his connection with beings and objects. He then becomes a being shut up within himself, who, as he cannot bring his deeds into harmony with the whole, loses his connection with things. This was shown to the pupils in respect to all that a man may do. He may degenerate in such a way that he is torn in pieces, and losing his own individuality is crushed by the objective world; on the other hand, he may degenerate not merely in courage, but also in every other respect in such a way that he hardens within himself. Thus at the head of the moral code in all the Mysteries there were written the significant words: “Thou must find the mean,” so that through thy deeds thou must not lose thyself in the world, and that the world also does not lose thee.

Those are the two possible extremes into which man may fall. Either he may be lost to the world, the world lays hold on him, and crushes him, as is the case in foolhardiness; or the world may be lost to him, because he hardens himself in his egoism, as is the case in cowardice. In the Mysteries, the pupils were told that goodness cannot merely be striven for as goodness obtained once for all; rather does goodness come only through man being continually able to strike out in two directions like a pendulum and by his own inner power able to find the balance, the mean between the two.

You have in this all that will enable you to understand the freedom of the will and the significance of reason and wisdom in human action. If it were fitting for man to observe eternal moral principles he need only acquire these moral principles and then he could go through life on a definite line of march, as it were, but life is never like this. Freedom in life consists rather in man's being always able to err in one direction or another. But in this way the possibility of evil arises. For what is evil? It is that which originates when the human being is either lost to the world, or the world is lost to him. Goodness consists in avoiding both these extremes.. In the course of evolution evil became not only a possibility but an actuality; for as man journeyed from incarnation to incarnation, by his turning now to one side and now to the other, he could not always find the balance at once, and it was necessary for the compensation to be karmically made at a future time. What man cannot attain in one life, because he does not always find the mean at once, he will attain gradually in the course of evolution in as much as man diverts his course to one side, and is then obliged, perhaps in the next life, to strike out again in the opposite direction, and thus bring about the balance.

What I have just told you was a golden rule in the ancient Mysteries. We often find among the ancient philosophers echoes of the principles taught in these Mysteries. Aristotle makes a statement, when, speaking of virtue, which we cannot understand unless we know that what has just been said was an old principle in the Mysteries which had been received by Aristotle as tradition and embodied in his philosophy. He says: Virtue is a human capacity or skill guided by reason and insight, which, as regards man, holds the balance between the too much and the too-little. Aristotle here gives a definition of virtue, such as no subsequent philosophy has attained. But as Aristotle had little tradition from the Mysteries, it was possible for him to give the precise truth.

That is, then, the mean, which must be found and followed if a man is really to be virtuous, if moral power is to pulsate through the world. We can now answer the question as to why morals should exist at all. For what happens when there is no morality, when evil is done, and when the too-much or the too-little takes place, when man is lost to the world by being crushed, or when the world loses him? In each of these cases something is always destroyed. Every evil or unmoral act is a process of destruction, and the moment man sees that when he has done wrong he cannot do otherwise than destroy something, take something from the world, in that moment a mighty influence for good has awakened within him. It is especially the task of Spiritual Science—which is really only just beginning its work in the world—to show that all evil brings about a destructive process, that it takes away from the world something which is necessary. When in accordance with our anthroposophical standpoint, we hold this principle, then what we know about the nature of man leads us to a particular interpretation of good and evil.

We know that the sentient-soul was chiefly developed in the old Chaldean or Egyptian epoch the third post-Atlantean age. The people of the present day have but little notion what this epoch of development was like at that time, for in external history one can reach little further back than to the Egyptian age. We know that the intellectual, or mind-soul, developed in the fourth or Graeco-Latin age, and that now in our age we are developing the consciousness-or spiritual-soul. The spirit-self will only come into prominence in the sixth age of post-Atlantean development.

Let us now ask: How can the sentient-soul turn to one side or the other, away from what is right? The sentient-soul is that quality in man which enables him to perceive the objective world, to take it into himself, to take part in it, not to pass through the world ignorant of all the diversified objects it contains, but to go through the world in such a way that he forms a relationship with them. All this is brought about by the sentient-soul. We find one side to which man can deviate with the sentient-soul when we enquire: What makes it possible for man to enter into relationship with the objective world? It is what may be called interest in the different things, and by this word “interest” something is expressed which in a moral sense is extremely important. It is much more important that one should bear in mind the moral significance of interest, than that one should devote oneself to thousands of beautiful moral axioms which may be only paltry and hypocritical. Let it be clearly understood, that our moral impulses are in fact never better guided than when we take a proper interest in objects and beings. In our last lecture we spoke in a deeper sense of love as an impulse and in such a way that we cannot now be misunderstood if we say that the usual, oft-repeated declamation, “love, love, and again love” cannot replace the moral impulse contained in what may be described by the word interest.

Let us suppose that we have a child before us. What is the condition primary to our devotion to this child? What is the first condition to our educating the child? It is that we take an interest in it. There is something unhealthy or abnormal in the human soul if a person withdraws himself from something in which he takes an interest. It will more and more be recognised that the impulse of interest is a quite specially golden impulse in the moral sense the further we advance to the actual foundations of morality and do not stop at the mere preaching of morals. Our inner powers are also called forth as regards mankind when we extend our interests, when we are able to transpose ourselves with understanding into beings and objects.

Even sympathy is awakened in the right manner if we take an interest in a being; and if, as anthroposophists, we set ourselves the task of extending our interests more and more and of widening our mental horizon, this will promote the universal brotherhood of mankind. Progress is not gained by the mere preaching of universal love, but by the extension of our interests further and further, so that we come to interest ourselves increasingly in souls with widely different characters, racial and national peculiarities, with widely different temperaments, and holding widely differing religious and philosophical views, and approach them with understanding. Right interest, right understanding, calls forth from the soul the right moral action.

Here also we must hold the balance between two extremes. One extreme is apathy which passes everything by and occasions immense moral mischief in the world. An apathetic person only lives in himself; obstinately, insisting on his own principles, and saying: This is my standpoint. In a moral sense this insistence upon a standpoint is always bad. The essential thing is for us to have an open mind for all that surrounds us. Apathy separates us from the world, while interest unites us with it. The world loses us through our apathy: in this direction we become unmoral. Thus we see that apathy and lack of interest in the world are morally evil in the highest degree.

Anthroposophy is something which makes the mind ever more active, helps us to think with greater readiness of what is spiritual and to take it into ourselves. Just as it is true that warmth comes from the fire when we light a stove so it is true that interest in humanity and the world comes when we study spiritual science. Wisdom is the fuel for interest and we may say, although this may perhaps not be evident without further explanation, that Anthroposophy arouses this interest in us when we study those more remote subjects, the teachings concerning the evolutionary stages through Saturn, Sun and Moon, and the meaning of Karma and so on. It really comes about that interest is produced as the result of anthroposophical knowledge while from materialistic knowledge comes something which in a radical manner must be described as apathy and which, if it alone were to hold sway in the world, would, of necessity, do untold harm.

See how many people go through the world and meet this or that person, but really do not get to know him, for they are quite shut up in themselves. How often do we find that two people have been friends for a long time and then suddenly there comes a rupture. This is because the friendship had a materialistic foundation and only after the lapse of time did they discover that they were mutually unsympathetic. At the present time very few people have the “hearing” ear for that which speaks from man to man; but Anthroposophy should bring about an expansion of our perceptions, so that we shall gain a “seeing” eye and an open mind for all that is human around us and so we shall not go through the world. apathetically, but with true interest.

We also avoid the other extreme by distinguishing between true and false interests, and thus observe the happy mean. Immediately to throw oneself, as it were, into the arms of each person we meet is to lose oneself passionately in the person; that is not true interest. If we do this, we lose ourselves to the world. Through apathy the world loses us; through uncontrolled passion we lose ourselves to the world. But through healthy, devoted interest we stand morally firm in the centre, in the state of balance.

In the third post-Atlantean age of civilisation, that is, in the Chaldaic-Egyptian age, there still existed in a large part of humanity on earth a certain power to hold the balance between apathy and the passionate intoxicating devotion to the world; and it is this, which in ancient times, and also by Plato and Aristotle, was called wisdom. But people looked upon this wisdom as the gift of superhuman beings, for up to that time the ancient impulses of wisdom were active. Therefore, from this point of view, especially relating to moral impulses, we may call the third post-Atlantean age, the age of instinctive wisdom. You will perceive the truth of what was said last year, though with a different intention, in the Copenhagen lectures on The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind. In those lectures we showed how, in the third post-Atlantean age, mankind still stood nearer to the divine spiritual powers. And that which drew mankind closer to the divine spiritual powers, was instinctive wisdom.

Thus, it was a gift of the gods to find at that time the happy mean in action, between apathy and sensuous passionate devotion. This balance, this equilibrium was at that time still maintained through external institutions. The complete intermingling of humanity which came about in the fourth age of post-Atlantean development through the migrations of various peoples, did not yet exist. Mankind was still divided into smaller peoples and tribes. Their interests were wisely regulated by nature, and were so far active that the right moral impulses could penetrate; and on the other hand, through the existence of blood kinsmanship in the tribe, an obstacle was placed in the way of passion. Even to-day one cannot fail to observe that it is easiest to show interest within blood-relationship and common descent, but in this there is not what is called sensuous passion. As people were gathered together in relatively small tracts of country in the Egypto-Chaldaic age, the wise and happy mean was easily found.

But the idea of the progressive development of humanity is that that, which originally was instinctive, which was only spiritual, shall gradually disappear and that man shall become independent of the divine spiritual powers. Hence we see that even in the fourth post-Atlantean age, the Graeco-Latin age, not only the philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, but also public opinion in Greece, considered wisdom as something which must be gained as something which is no longer the gift of the gods, but after which man must strive. According to Plato, the first virtue is wisdom, and according to him, he who does not strive after wisdom is unmoral.

We are now in the fifth post-Atlantean age. We are still far from the time when the wisdom instinctively implanted in humanity as a divine impulse, will be raised into consciousness. Hence in our age people are specially liable to err in both the directions we have mentioned, and it is therefore particularly necessary that the great dangers to be found at this point should be counteracted by a spiritual conception of the World, so that what man once possessed as instinctive wisdom may now become conscious wisdom. The Anthroposophical Movement is to contribute to this end.

The gods once gave wisdom to the unconscious human soul, so that it possessed this wisdom instinctively, whereas now we have first to learn the truths about the cosmos and about human evolution. The ancient customs were also fashioned after the thoughts of the gods.

We have the right view of Anthroposophy when we look upon it as the investigations of the thoughts of the gods. In former times these flowed instinctively into man, but now we have to investigate them, to make the knowledge of them our own. In this sense Anthroposophy must be sacred to us; we must be able to consider reverently that the ideas imparted to us are really something divine, and something which we human beings are allowed to think and reflect upon as the divine thoughts according to which the world has been ordered. When Anthroposophy stands in this aspect to us, we can then consider the knowledge it imparts in such a way that we understand that it has been given us so as to enable us to fulfil our mission. Mighty truths are made known to us, when we study what has been imparted concerning the evolutions of Saturn, Sun and Moon, concerning reincarnation, and the development of the various races, etc. But we only assume the right attitude towards it when we say: The thoughts we seek are the thoughts wherewith the gods have guided evolution. We think the evolution of the gods. If we understand this correctly we are overwhelmed by something that is deeply moral. This is inevitable. Then we say: In ancient times man had instinctive wisdom from the gods, who gave him the wisdom according to which they fashioned the world, and morality thus became possible. But through Anthroposophy we now acquire this wisdom consciously. Therefore we may also trust that in us it shall be transformed into moral impulses, so that we do not merely receive anthroposophical wisdom, but a moral stimulus as well.

Now into what sort of moral impulses will the wisdom acquired through Anthroposophy be transformed? We must here touch upon a point whose development the anthroposophist can foresee, the profound moral significance and moral weight of which he even ought to foresee, a point of development which is far removed from what is customary at the present time, which is what Plato called the “ideal of wisdom.” He named it with a word which was in common use when man still possessed the ancient wisdom, and it would be well to replace this by the word veracity, for as we have now become more individual, we have withdrawn ourselves from the divine, and must therefore strive back to it. We must learn to feel the full weight and meaning of the word ‘veracity’, and this in a moral sense will be a result of an anthroposophical world conception and conviction. Anthroposophists must understand how important it is to be filled with the moral element of truth in an age when materialism has advanced so far that one may indeed still speak of truth, but when the general life and understanding is far removed from perceiving what is right in this direction. Nor can this be otherwise at the present time; as owing to a certain quality acquired by modern life, truth is something which must, to a great extent, be lacking in the understanding of the day, I ask what does a man feel to-day when in the newspapers or some other printed matter he finds certain information, and afterwards it transpires that it is simply untrue? I seriously ask you to ponder over this. One cannot say that it happens in every case, but one must assert that it probably happens in every fourth case. Untruthfulness has everywhere become a quality of the age; it is impossible to describe truth as a characteristic of our times.

For instance, take a man whom you know to have written or said something false, and place the facts before him. As a rule, you will find that he does not fear such a thing to be wrong. He will immediately make the excuse: “But I said it in good faith.” Anthroposophists must not consider it moral when a person says it is merely incorrect what he has said in good faith. People will learn to understand more and more, that they must first ascertain that what they assert really happened. No man should make a statement, or impart anything to another until he has exhausted every means to ascertain the truth of his assertions; and it is only when he recognises this obligation that he can perceive veracity as moral impulse. And then when someone has either written or said something that is incorrect, he will no longer say: “I thought it was so, said it in good faith,” for he will learn that it is his duty to express not merely what he thinks is right, but it is also his duty to say only what is true, and correct. To this end, a radical change must gradually come about in our cultural life. The speed of travel, the lust of sensation on the part of man, everything that comes with a materialistic age, is opposed to truth. In the sphere of morality, Anthroposophy will be an educator of humanity to the duty of truth.

My business today is not to say how far truth has been already realised in the Anthroposophical Society, but to show that what I have said must be a principle, a lofty anthroposophical ideal. The moral evolution within the movement will have enough to do if the moral ideal of truth is thought, felt and perceived in all directions, for this ideal must be what produces the virtue of the sentient-soul of man in the right way.

The second part of the soul of which we have to speak in Anthroposophy is what we usually call the mind-soul, or intellectual-soul (German—Gemütsseele). You know that it developed especially in the fourth post-Atlantean, or Graeco-Latin age. The virtue which is the particular emblem for this part of the soul is bravery, valour and courage; we have already dwelt on this many times, and also on the fact that foolhardiness and cowardice are its extremes. Courage, bravery, valour is the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice. The German word “gemüt” expresses in the sound of the word that it is related to this. The word “gemüt” indicates the mid-part of the human soul, the part that is “mutvoll,” full of “mut,” courage, strength and force.

This was the second, the middle virtue of Plato and Aristotle. It is that virtue which in the fourth post-Atlantean age still existed in man as a divine gift, while wisdom was really only instinctive in the third. Instinctive valour and bravery existed as a gift of the gods (you may gather this from the first lecture) among the people who, in the fourth age, met the expansion of Christianity to the north. They showed that among them valour was still a gift of the gods. Among the Chaldeans wisdom, the wise penetration into the secrets of the starry world, existed as a divine gift, as something inspired. Among the people of the fourth post-Atlantean age, there existed valour and bravery, especially among the Greeks and Romans, but it existed also among the peoples whose work it became to spread Christianity. This instinctive valour was lost later than instinctive wisdom.

If we look round us now in the fifth post-Atlantean age, we see that, as regards valour and bravery, we are in the same position in respect of the Greeks as the Greeks were to the Chaldeans and Egyptians in regard to wisdom. We look back to what was a divine gift in the age immediately preceding ours, and in a certain way we can strive for it again. However, the two previous lectures have shown us, that in connection with this effort a certain transformation must take place. We have seen the transformation in Francis of Assisi of that divine gift which manifested itself as bravery and valour. We saw that the transformation came about as the result of an inner moral force which in our last lecture we found to be the force of the Christ-impulse; the transformation of valour and bravery into true love. But this true love must be guided by another virtue, by the interest in the being to whom we turn our love. In his Timon of Athens Shakespeare shows how love, or warmth of heart, causes harm, when it is passionately manifested; when it appears merely as a quality of human nature without being guided by wisdom and truth. A man is described who gave freely of his possessions, who squandered his living in all directions. Liberality is a virtue, but Shakespeare also shows us that nothing but parasites are produced by what is squandered.

Just as ancient valour and bravery were guided from the Mysteries by the European Brahmins—those wise leaders who kept themselves hidden in the background—so also in human nature this virtue must accord with and be guided by interest. Interest, which connects us with the external world in the right way, must lead and guide us when, with our love, we turn to the world. Fundamentally this may be seen from the characteristic and striking example of Francis of Assisi. The sympathy he expressed was not obtrusive or offensive. Those who overwhelm others with their sympathy are by no means always actuated by the right moral impulses. And how many there are who will not receive anything that is given out of pity. But to approach another with, understanding is not offensive. Under some circumstances a person must needs refuse to be sympathised with; but the attempt to understand his nature is something to which no reasonable person can object. Hence also the attitude of another person cannot be blamed or condemned if his actions are determined by this principle.

It is understanding which can guide us with respect to this second virtue: Love. It is that which, through the Christ-impulse, has become the special virtue of the mind-soul or intellectual-soul; it is the virtue which may be described as human love accompanied by human understanding. Sympathy in grief and joy is the virtue which in the future must produce the most beautiful and glorious fruits in human social life, and, in one who rightly understands the Christ-impulse, this sympathy and this love will originate quite naturally, it will develop into feeling. It is precisely through the anthroposophical understanding of the Christ-impulse that it will become feeling.

Through the Mystery of Golgotha Christ descended into earthly evolution; His impulses, His activities are here now, they are everywhere. Why did He descend to this earth? In order that through what He has to give to the world, evolution may go forward in the right way. Now that the Christ-impulse is in the world, if through what is unmoral, if through lack of interest in our fellow-men, we destroy something, then we take away a portion of the world into which the Christ-impulse has flowed. Thus because the Christ-impulse is now here, we directly destroy something of it. But if we give to the world what can be given to it through virtue, which is creative, we build. We build through self-surrender. It is not without reason that it has often been said, that Christ was first crucified on Golgotha, but that He is crucified again and again through the deeds, of man. Since Christ has entered into the Earth development through the deed upon Golgotha, we, by our unmoral deeds, by our unkindness and lack of interest, add to the sorrow and pain inflicted upon Him. Therefore it has been said, again and again: Christ is crucified anew as long as unmorality, unkindness and lack of interest exist. Since the Christ-impulse has permeated the world, it is this which is made to suffer.

Just as it is true that through evil, which is destructive, we withdraw something from the Christ-impulse and continue the crucifixion upon Golgotha, it is also true that when we act out of love, in all cases where we use love, we add to the Christ-impulse, we help to bring it to life. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me” (Matthew 25, 40), this is the most significant statement of love and this statement must become the most profound moral impulse if it is once anthroposophically understood. We do this when with understanding we confront our fellow-men and offer them something in our actions, our virtue, our conduct towards them which is conditioned by our understanding of their nature. Our attitude towards our fellow-men is our attitude towards the Christ-impulse itself.

It is a powerful moral impulse, something which is a real foundation for morals, when we feel: “The Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished for all men, and an impulse has thence spread abroad throughout the whole world. When you are dealing with your fellow-men, try to understand them in their special, characteristics of race, colour, nationality, religious faith, philosophy, etc. If you meet them and do this or that to them, you do it to Christ. Whatever you do to men, in the present condition of the earth's evolution, you do to Christ.” This statement: “What ye have done to one of My brothers, ye have done unto Me,” will at the same time become a mighty moral impulse to the man who understands the fundamental significance of the Mystery of Golgotha. So that we may say: Whereas the gods of pre-Christian times gave instinctive wisdom to man, instinctive valour and bravery, so love streams down from the symbol of the cross, the love which is based upon the mutual interest of man in man.

Thereby the Christ-impulse will work powerfully in the world. On the day when it comes about that the Brahmin not only loves and understands the Brahmin, the Pariah the Pariah, the Jew the Jew, and the Christian the Christian; but when the Jew is able to understand the Christian, the Pariah the Brahmin, the American the Asiatic, as man, and put himself in his place, then one will know how deeply it is felt in a Christian way when we say: “All men must feel themselves to be brothers, no matter what their religious creed may be.” We ought to consider what otherwise binds us as being of little value. Father, mother, brother, sister, even one's own life one ought to esteem less than that which speaks from one human soul to the other. He who, in this sense does not regard as base all that impairs the connection with the Christ-impulse cannot be Christ's disciple. The Christ-impulse balances and compensates human differences. Christ's disciple is one who regards mere human distinctions as being of little account, and clings to the impulse of love streaming forth from the Mystery of Golgotha, which in this respect we perceive as a renewal of what was given to mankind as original virtue.

We have now but to consider what may be spoken of as the virtue of the Consciousness- or Spiritual- Soul. When we consider the fourth post-Atlantean age, we find that Temperance or Moderation was still instinctive. Plato and Aristotle called it the chief virtue of the Spiritual-Soul. Again they comprehended it as a state of balance, as the mean of what exists in the Spiritual-soul. The Spiritual-Soul consists in man's becoming conscious of the external world through his bodily nature. The sense body is primarily the instrument of the Spiritual-Soul, and it is also the sense body through which man arrives at self-consciousness.

Therefore the sense-body of man must be preserved. If it were not preserved for the mission of the earth, then that mission could not be fulfilled. But here also there is a limit. If a man only used all the forces he possessed in order to enjoy himself, he would shut himself up in himself, and the world would lose him. The man who merely enjoys himself, who uses all his forces merely to give himself pleasure, cuts himself off from the world—so thought Plato and Aristotle—the world loses him. And he, who denies himself everything renders himself weaker and weaker, and is finally laid hold of by the external world-process, and is crushed by the outer world. For he who goes beyond the forces appropriate to him as man, he who goes to excess is laid hold of by the world-process and is lost in it.

Thus what man has developed for the building up of the Spiritual-soul can be dissolved, so that he comes into the position of losing the world. Temperance or Moderation is the virtue which enables man to avoid these extremes. Temperance implies neither asceticism nor gluttony, but the happy mean between these two; and this is the virtue of the Spiritual-Soul. Regarding this virtue we have not yet progressed beyond the instinctive standpoint. A little reflection will teach you that, on the whole, people are very much given to sampling the two extremes. They swing to and fro between them. Leaving out of account the few who at the present day endeavour to gain clear views on this subject, you will find that the majority of people live very much after a particular pattern. In Central Europe this is often described by saying: There are people in Berlin who eat and drink to excess the entire winter, and then in summer they go to Carlsbad in order to remove the ill-effects produced by months of intemperance, thus going from one extreme to the other. Here you have the weighing of the scale, first to one side and then to the other. This is only a radical case. It is very evident that though the foregoing is extreme, and not universal to any great extent, still the oscillation between enjoyment and deprivation exists everywhere. People themselves ensure that there is excess on one side, and then they get the physicians to prescribe a so-called lowering system of cure, that is, the other extreme, in order that the ill effects may be repaired.

From this, it will be seen that in this respect people are still in an instinctive condition, that there is still an instinctive feeling, which is a kind of divine gift, not to go too far in one direction or another. But just as the other instinctive qualities of man were lost, these, too, will be lost with the transition from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean age. This quality which is still possessed as a natural tendency will be lost; and now you will be able to judge how much the anthroposophical world conception and conviction will have to contribute in order gradually to develop consciousness in this field.

At the present time there are very few, even developed anthroposophists, who see clearly that Anthroposophy provides the means to gain the right consciousness in this field also. When Anthroposophy is able to bring more weight to bear in this direction, then will appear what I can only describe in the following way; people will gradually long more and more for great spiritual truths. Although Anthroposophy is still scorned to-day, it will not always be so. It will spread, and overcome all its external opponents, and everything else still opposing it, and anthroposophists will not be satisfied by merely preaching universal love. It will be understood that one cannot acquire Anthroposophy in one day, any more than a person can take sufficient nourishment in one day to last the whole of his life. Anthroposophy has to be acquired to an ever increasing extent. It will come to pass that in the Anthroposophical Movement it will not be so often stated that these are our principles, and if we have these principles then we are anthroposophists; for the feeling and experience of standing in a community of the living element in anthroposophy will extend more and more.

Moreover, let us consider what happens by people mentally working upon the particular thoughts, the particular feelings and impulses which come from anthroposophical wisdom. We all know that anthroposophists can never have a materialistic view of the world, they have exactly the opposite, But he who says the following is a materialistic thinker: “When one thinks, a movement of the molecules or atoms of the brain takes place, and it is because of this movement that one has thought. Thought proceeds from the brain somewhat like a thin smoke, or it is something like the flame from a candle.” Such, is the materialistic view. The anthroposophical view is the opposite. In the latter it is the thought, the experience in the soul which sets the brain and nervous system in motion. The way in which our brain moves depends upon what thoughts we think. This is exactly the opposite of what is said by the materialist. If you wish to know how the brain of a person is constituted, you must inquire into what thoughts he has, for just as the printed characters of a book are nothing else than the consequence of thoughts, so the movements of the brain are nothing else than the consequence of thoughts.

Must we not then say that the brain will be differently affected when it is filled with anthroposophical thoughts than it will be in a society which plays cards? Different processes are at work in your minds when you follow anthroposophical thoughts from when you are in a company of card players, or see the pictures in a movie theatre. In the human organism nothing is isolated or stands alone. Everything is connected; one part acts and reacts on another. Thoughts act upon the brain and nervous system, and the latter is connected with the whole organism, and although many people may not yet be aware of it, when the hereditary characteristics still hidden in the body are conquered, the following will come about. The thoughts will be communicated from the brain to the stomach, and the result will be that things that are pleasant to people's taste to-day will no longer taste good to those who have received anthroposophical thoughts. The thoughts which anthroposophists have received are divine thoughts. They act upon the whole organism in such a manner that it will prefer to taste what is good for it. Man will smell and perceive as unsympathetic what does not suit him—a peculiar perspective, one which may perhaps be called materialistic, but is exactly the reverse.

This kind of appetite will come as a consequence of anthroposophical work; you will like one thing and prefer it at meals, dislike another and not wish to eat it. You may judge for yourselves when you notice that perhaps you now have an aversion to things, which before your anthroposophical days you did not possess. This will become more and more general when man works selflessly at his higher development, so that the world may receive what is right from him. One must not, however, play fast-and-lose with the words “selflessness” and “egoism.” These words may very easily be misused. It is not altogether selfless when someone says: “I shall only be active in the world and for the world; what does it matter about my own spiritual development? I shall only work, not strive egoistically!” It is not egoism when a person undergoes a higher development, because he thus fits himself more fully to bear an active part in the furtherance of the world development. If a person neglects his own further development, he renders himself useless to the world, he withdraws his force from it. We must do the right thing in this respect as well, in order to develop in ourselves what the Deity had in view for us.

Thus, through Anthroposophy a human race, or rather, a nucleus of humanity will be developed, which perceives temperance as a guiding ideal not merely instinctively, but which has a conscious sympathy for what makes man in a worthy way into a useful part of the divine world-order, and a conscious disinclination for all that mars man as a part in the universal order.

Thus we see that also in that which is produced in man himself, there are moral impulses, and we find what we may call life-wisdom or practical wisdom as transformed temperance. The ideal of practical wisdom which is to be taken into consideration for the next, the sixth post-Atlantean age, will be the ideal virtue which Plato calls “justice.” That is: the harmonious accord of these virtues. As in humanity the virtues have altered to some extent, so what was looked upon as justice in pre-Christian times has also changed. A single virtue such as this, which harmonises the others did not exist at that time. The harmony of the virtues stood before the mental vision of humanity as an ideal of the most distant future. We have seen that the moral impulse of bravery has been changed to love. We have also seen that wisdom has become truth. To begin with, truth is a virtue which places man in a just and worthy manner in external life. But if we wish to arrive at truthfulness regarding spiritual things, how then can we arrange it in relation to those things? We acquire truthfulness, we gain the virtue of the Sentient-Soul through a right and appropriate interest, through right understanding. Now what is this interest with regard to the spiritual world? If we wish to bring the physical world and especially man before us, we must open ourselves towards him, we must have a seeing eye for his nature. How do we obtain this seeing-eye with reference to the spiritual world? We gain it by developing a particular kind of feeling, that which appeared at a time when the old instinctive wisdom had sunk into the depths of the soul's life. This type of feeling was often described by the Greeks in the words: “All philosophical thought begins with wonder.” Something essentially moral is said when we say that our relationship to the super-sensible world begins with wonder. The savage, uncultivated human being, is but little affected by the great phenomena of the world. It is through mental development that man comes to find riddles in the phenomena of everyday life, and to perceive that there is something spiritual at the back of them. It is wonder that directs our souls up to the spiritual sphere in order that we may penetrate to the knowledge of that world; and we can only arrive at this knowledge when our soul is attracted by the phenomena which it is possible to investigate. It is this attraction which give rise to wonder, astonishment and faith. It is always wonder and amazement which direct us to what is super-sensible, and at the same time, it is what one usually describes as faith. Faith, wonder and amazement are the three forces of the soul which lead us beyond the ordinary world.

When we contemplate man with wonder and amazement, we try to understand him; by understanding his nature we attain to the virtue of brotherhood, and we shall best realise this by approaching the human being with reverence. We shall then see that reverence becomes something with which we must approach every human being and if we have this attitude, we shall become more and more truthful. Truth will become something by which we shall be bound by duty. Once we have an inkling of it, the super-sensible world becomes something towards which we incline, and through knowledge we shall attain to the super-sensible wisdom which has already sunk into the subconscious depths of the soul. Only after super-sensible wisdom had disappeared do we find the statement that “philosophy begins with wonder and amazement.” This statement will make it clear that wonder only appeared in evolution in the age when the Christ-impulse had come into the world.

It has already been stated that the second virtue is love. Let us now consider what we have described as instinctive temperance for the present time, and as practical wisdom of life for the future. Man confronts himself in these virtues. Through the deeds he performs in the world, he acts in such a way that he guards himself, as it were; it is therefore necessary for him to gain an objective standard of value.

We now see something appear which develops more and more, and which I have often spoken of in other connections, something which first appeared in the fourth post-Atlantean age, namely the Greek. It can be shown that in the old Greek dramas, for instance in Aeschylus, the Furies play a role which in Euripides is transformed into conscience. From this we see that in earlier times what we call conscience did not exist at all. Conscience is something that exists as a standard for our own actions when we go too far in our demands, when we seek our own advantage too-much. It acts as a standard placed between our sympathies and antipathies.

With this we attain to something which is more objective, which, compared with the virtues of truth, love and practical wisdom, acts in a much more objective, or outward manner. Love here stands in the middle, and acts as something which has to fill and regulate all life, also all social life. In the same way it acts as the regulator of all that man has developed as inner impulse. But that which he has developed as truth will manifest itself as the belief in super-sensible knowledge. Life-wisdom, that which originates in ourselves, we must feel as a divine spiritual regulator which, like conscience, leads securely along the true middle course. If we had time it would be very easy to answer the various objections which might be raised at this point. But we shall only consider one, for example, the objection to the assertion that conscience and wonder are qualities which have only gradually developed in humanity, whereas they are really eternal. But this they are not. He who says that they are eternal qualities in human nature only shows that he does not know the conditions attached to them.

As time goes on it will be found more and more that in ancient times man had not as yet descended so far to the physical plane, but was still more closely connected with divine impulses, and that he was in a condition which he will again consciously strive to reach when he is ruled more by truth, love and the art of life in regard to the physical plane, and when in regard to spiritual knowledge he is actuated by faith in the super-sensible world. It is not necessarily the case that faith will directly lead into that world, but it will at length be transformed into super-sensible knowledge. Conscience is that which will enter as a regulator in the Consciousness- or Spiritual-Soul. Faith, love, conscience; these three forces will become the three stars of the moral forces which shall enter into human souls particularly through Anthroposophy. The moral perspective of the future can only be disclosed to those who think of these three virtues being ever more increased Anthroposophy will place moral life in the light of these virtues, and they will be the constructive forces of the future.

Before closing our observations, there is one point which must be considered. I shall only touch upon the subject, for it would be impossible to analyse without giving many lectures. The Christ-impulse entered human evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha. We know that at that time a human organism consisting of physical, etheric, and astral bodies received the Ego-impulse or “I” from above, as the Christ-impulse. It was this Christ-impulse which was received by the earth and which flowed into earthly evolution. It was now in it as the ego of Christ. We know further that the physical body, etheric body and astral body remained with Jesus of Nazareth; the Christ-impulse was within as the ego. At Golgotha, Jesus of Nazareth separated from the Christ-impulse, which then flowed into the earth development. The evolution of this impulse signifies the evolution of the earth itself.

Earnestly consider certain things which are very often repeated in order that they may be more easily understood. As we have often heard, the world is maya or illusion, but man must gradually penetrate to the truth, the reality of this external world. The earth evolution fundamentally consists in the fact that all the external things which have been formed in the first half of the earth's development are dissolved in the second half, in which we now are, so that all that we see externally, physically, shall separate from human development just as the physical body of a human being falls away. One might ask: What will then be left? And the answer is: The forces which are embodied in man as real forces through the process of the development of humanity on the earth. And the most real impulse in this development is that which has come into earth evolution through the Christ-impulse. But this Christ-impulse at first finds nothing with which it can clothe itself. Therefore it has to obtain a covering through the further development of the earth; and when this is concluded, the fully developed Christ shall be the final man—as Adam was the first—around whom humanity in its multiplicity has grouped itself.

In the words: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me,” is contained a significant hint for us. What has been done for Christ? The actions performed in accordance with the Christ-impulse under the influence of conscience, under the influence of faith and according to knowledge, are developed out on the earth-life up to the present time, and as, through his actions and his moral attitude a person gives something to his brethren, he gives at the same time to Christ. This should be taken as a precept: All the forces we develop, all acts of faith and trust, all acts performed as the result of wonder, are—because we give it at the same time to the Christ-Ego—something which closes like a covering round the Christ and may be compared with the astral body of man.

We form the astral body for the Christ-Ego-impulse by all the moral activities of wonder, trust, reverence and faith, in short, all that paves the way to super-sensible knowledge. Through all these activities we foster love. This is quite in accordance with the statement we quoted: “What ye have done to one, of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me.”

We form the etheric body for Christ through our deeds of love, and through our actions in the world which we do through the impulses of conscience we form for the Christ-impulse that which corresponds to the physical body of man. When the earth has one day reached its goal, when man understands the right moral impulses through which all that is good is done, then shall be present that which came as an Ego or “I” into human development through the Mystery of Golgotha as the Christ-impulse shall then be enveloped by an astral body which is formed through faith, through all the deeds of wonder and amazement on the part of man. It shall be enveloped by something which is like an etheric body which is formed through deeds of love; and by something which envelops it like a physical body, formed through the deeds of conscience.

Thus the future evolution of humanity shall be accomplished through the co-operation of the moral impulses of man with the Christ-impulse. We see humanity in perspective before us, like a great organic structure. When people understand how to member their actions into this great organism, and through their own deeds form their impulses around it like a covering, they shall then lay the foundations, in the course of earthly evolution, for a great community, which can be permeated and made Christian through and through by the Christ-impulse.

Thus we see that morals need not be preached, but they can indeed be founded by showing facts that have really happened and do still happen, confirming what is felt by persons with special mental endowments. It should make a noteworthy impression upon us if we bear in mind how, at the time when he lost his friend, Duke Charles Augustus, Goethe wrote many things in a long letter at Weimar, and then on the same day—it was in the year 1828, three-and-a-half years before his own death, and almost at the end of his life—he wrote a very remarkable sentence in his diary: “The whole reasonable world may be considered as a great immortal individual which uninterruptedly brings about what is necessary and thereby makes itself master even over chance.” How could such a thought become more concrete than by our imagining this Individual active among us, and by thinking of ourselves as, being united with him in his work? Through the Mystery of Golgotha the greatest Individual entered into human development, and, when people intentionally direct their lives in the way we have just described, they will range themselves round the Christ-impulse, so that around this Being there shall be formed something which is like a covering around a kernel.

Much more could be said about virtue from the standpoint of Anthroposophy. In particular long and important considerations could be entered into concerning truth and its connection with karma, for through Anthroposophy the idea of karma will have to enter into human evolution more and more. Man will also have to learn gradually so to consider and order his life that his virtues correspond with karma. Through the idea of karma man must also learn to recognise that he may not disown his former deeds by his later ones. A certain feeling of responsibility in life, a readiness to take upon ourselves the results of what we have done, has yet to show itself as a result of human evolution. How far removed man still is from this ideal we see when we consider him more closely. That man develops by the acts he has committed is a well-known fact. When the consequences of an action seem to have come to an end, then what could only be done if the first act had not taken place, can still be done. The fact that a person feels responsible for what he has done, the fact that he consciously accepts the idea of karma, is something which might also be a subject for study. But you will still find much for yourselves by following the lines suggested in these three lectures; you will find how fruitful these ideas can be if you work them out further. As man will live for the remainder of the earth development in repeated incarnations, it is his task to rectify all the mistakes made respecting the virtues described, by inclining to one side or the other, to change them by shaping them of his own free will, so that the balance, the mean, may come and thus the goal be gradually attained which has been described as the formation of the coverings for the Christ-impulse.

Thus we see before us not merely an abstract ideal of universal brotherhood, which indeed may also receive a strong impulse if we lay Anthroposophy at the foundation, but we see that there is something real in our earthly evolution, we see that there is in it an Impulse which came into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. And we also feel ourselves under the necessity so to work upon the Sentient-Soul, the Intellectual-Soul and the Spiritual-Soul, that this ideal Being shall be actualised, and that we shall be united with Him as with a great immortal Individual. The thought that the only possibility of further evolution, the power to fulfil the earth mission, lies in man's forming one whole with this great Individual, is realised in the second moral principle: What you do as if it were born from you alone, pushes you away and separates you from the great Individual, you thereby destroy something; but what you do to build up this great immortal Individual in the way above described, that you do towards the further development, the progressive life of the whole organism of the world.

We only require to place these two thoughts before us in order to see that their effect is not only to preach morals, but to give them a basis. For the thought: “Through your actions you are destroying what you ought to build up,” is terrible and fearful, keeping down all opposing desires. But the thought: “You are building up this immortal Individual; you are making yourself into a member of this immortal Individual,” fires one to good deeds, to strong moral impulses. In this way morals are not only preached, but we are led to thoughts which themselves may be moral impulses, to thoughts which are able to found morals.

The more the truth is cultivated, the more rapidly will the anthroposophical world conception and feeling develop ethics such as these. And it has been my task to express this in these lectures. Naturally, many things have only been lightly touched upon, but you will develop further in your own minds many ideas which have been broached. In this way we shall be drawn more closely together all over the earth. When we meet together—as we have done on this occasion as anthroposophists of Northern and Central Europe—to consider these subjects, and when we allow the thoughts roused in us at gatherings such as this to echo and re-echo through us, we shall in this way best make it true that Anthroposophy is to provide the foundation—even at the present time—for real spiritual life. And when we have to part again we know that it is in our anthroposophical thoughts that we are most at one, and this knowledge is at the same time a moral stimulus. To know that we are united by the same ideals with people who, as a rule, are widely separated from one another in space, but with whom we may meet on special occasions, is a stronger moral stimulus than being always together.

That we should think in this way of our gathering, that we should thus understand our studies together, fills my soul, especially at the close of these lectures, as something by which I should like to express my farewell greeting to you, and concerning which I am convinced that, when it is understood in the true light, the anthroposophical life which is developing will also be spiritually well founded. With this thought and these feelings let us close our studies today.

In ancient mystery schools, candidates resolved to devote their incarnation entirely to initiation, for it was a do or die procedure. They had to undergo trials that required great courage. Terrifying things were shown that killed some of them. But if they survived, they had come to the other shore and were reborn. They had descended to the God within them, had encountered drives, desires and passions in their bodies and had passed the test. Then they would say of themselves: Ex Deo nascimur. Well, one could ask: Does this evil that one encounters on the way to the inner God also come from the Gods? Here we must tell ourselves that it was originally something divine which we made into something evil.

Men trod the path of ecstasy in the Druidic mysteries. The candidate united himself with the spirit that worked everywhere in nature: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

These two paths are united in the Rosicrucian path, that is, what's good for us is taken from both. One can no longer initiate a modern unconsciously. Since the breaking in of the Christ-principle, a man must be there with his waking consciousness.

The meditations that the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings have given us are all directed towards the Christ, even if his name doesn't occur in them. The words: In the pure rays of light are arranged in such a way that if one makes oneself deaf and blind for one's immediate environment, one slowly lifts one's etheric body out of the physical one, and thereby one unites oneself with the Christ-etheric aura, which is now our earth's aura. If we would lift ourselves out of the body without our meditation's content, then our soul would be alone with itself. But now it's permeated by Christ and it experiences what Paul called “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me.”

In the pure love for all beings. These words remind us that all soul things are woven out of love. This meditation is a slow dying of the lower ego. And we have the connection between the two paths in this dying into Christ and coming to life in him in: In Christo morimur. It's a conscious coming to life in the Christ spirit. That's why we've added the word Sanctum to the words Per Spiritum.

[ 1 ] Man bears within him a soul-centre belonging to a spiritual world. This is the permanent human entity, which passes through repeated earthly lives in such a way that in one earthly life it is trained in normal consciousness as a being independent of that consciousness, then experiences itself in a purely spiritual world, after human physical death, and in due time realises in a new earthly life the results of the preceding one. This permanent entity acts as the inspirer of man's destiny in such a way that one earthly life follows another as a consequence which is based on the order of the cosmos.

[ 2 ] Man is this permanent entity itself; he lives in it as though in his other self. Inasmuch as he, as a being, is that other self, so he lives in an astral body, in the same way as he is living in a physical and etheric body. Just as the environment of the physical body is the physical world and that of the etheric body the elemental world, so the environment of the astral body is the world of the spirit. [ 3 ] Beings of the same nature and origin as man's other self are working in the physical and elemental worlds as Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. The way in which they work makes the relation of the astral body to the etheric and physical bodies intelligible.

[ 4 ] The original source of the etheric body is to be found in a long-past period of the earth, its so-called Sun condition.

[ 5 ] In accordance with the foregoing, the following survey of man may be made:

[ 6 ] I. The physical body in the environment of the physical world. By means of this body man recognises himself as an independent individual (ego).

[ 7 ] II. The subtle (etheric or vital) body in the elemental environment. By means of this body man recognises himself as a member of the earth's vital body, and hence indirectly as a member of three successive planetary states.

[ 8 ] III. The astral body in a purely spiritual environment. Through this body man is a member of a spiritual world of which the elemental and physical worlds are reflections. In the astral body lives man's other self, and this comes to expression in repeated earthly lives.

The prophet Elijah shines forth as one of the most resplendent stars in the firmament of man’s spiritual evolution, and that great illumination which he brought to humanity in olden times has endured even to the present day. The deeds, the characteristics, the greatness of this outstanding personality as portrayed in the ancient Biblical records, make the profoundest impression upon the hearts and feelings of mankind; but, nevertheless, this significant figure appears difficult of comprehension to external history. We are about to consider Elijah from the stand-point of Spiritual Science. Viewed in its light, we find in the very nature of his being an indication that the most important causes and motives underlying the circumstances connected with earthly existence during man’s evolution are not merely dependent upon those ideas that may be consciously apprehended, and the results of which can be recognized externally as forming a part of life’s history; for we learn that those very impulses which move us to actions of greatest import are born within the confines of the soul.

In order that this truth which sheds so great a light upon the world’s history may become clearly apparent to our spiritual vision, we need only recall the fact that Christianity owes its foundation, for the most part, to that profound psychic incident experienced by St. Paul [Saul], which found outward expression in ‘The Vision near Damascus’ (‘Ereignis von Damaskus’), Acts. ix, 3. No matter how much we may argue concerning the reality and nature of this external happening, it cannot be denied that the true origin of Christianity is intimately connected with what then took place in the soul and spirit of that great Apostle and righteous founder of the Christian Faith; and the knowledge and enlightenment which came to him was passed on to mankind through the medium of his flaming words and self-sacrificing deeds. In many other cases it can be proved that primary causes and impulses underlying events which happen during the historical enfoldment of human existence, cannot be identified with normal external occurrences, for their inception may oft-times be traced to the hearts and souls of mankind.

We are now about to consider an example of this very nature in connection with the personality of Elijah and the period in which he lived. Since, however, my lecture must of necessity be both brief and sketchy in character, although treating of a subject covering so wide a field, the question as to how far the matter presented will elucidate and provide new evidence concerning the progress of man’s historical evolution in this special instance must be left for your further consideration, but your thoughts should at all times be guided by the deep promptings of the soul. The object of my discourse is not merely to supply information concerning the personality and significance of the prophet Elijah, its true purport is at the same time to present an example of the manner in which Spiritual Science weighs and regards such matters and, in virtue of the means at its disposal, is enabled to shed fresh light upon facts connected with the growth and development of mankind, which have come to our knowledge through other sources.

With this end in view, we shall employ a special method in dealing with our subject. In the first place, statements that are the result of the investigations of Spiritual Science, and have reference to the personality and significance of Elijah, will be as independent as possible of all connection with the Bible as a source, and such references will only occur when they seem essential in connection with names and descriptions. We shall therefore endeavour to portray all pertinent events first as they actually happened and later draw attention to the manner in which they are depicted in the ancient Biblical records. The occurrences will be set forth just as they are revealed by the researches of Spiritual Science, which researches have formed the basis of the various portrayals presented both in the lectures of this series and in others of previous years. A large number of my audience who, through long years of experience with the methods of Spiritual Science have gained confidence in its power and proved substantiality, will accept from the very first all that I propose to bring forward, and regard it as entirely trustworthy and as the result of conscientious investigation; and this will be the case, even though my subject must of necessity be treated in a somewhat sketchy manner, because an exposition involving detailed proofs would require many hours for its complete presentation. To those of my audience who have had no such experience as I have mentioned, I would suggest that they look upon all that is said concerning the authentic historical narrative that I am about to unfold, as if it were in the nature of an hypothesis, underlying which is a substratum of positive evidence; and I am certain that if they will but do this, and make a reasonable and understanding attempt, in moderation and without prejudice to obtain the required evidence, that all my statements will ultimately receive entire confirmation.

What now has Spiritual Science to say concerning the personality and significance of the prophet Elijah and his period? To understand this we must go back in thought to those ancient Hebrew times when the brilliant epoch that marked the reign of Solomon was passed, and the kingdom of Palestine was enduring many and varied forms of privation. We must recall the troubles of the Philistines and other similar incidents, and transport ourselves in mind to those days when all that formerly constituted a united and centralized monarchy was already divided into the separate kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and King Ahab, who was the son of Omri, reigned in Samaria. Here we have found an opportunity of introducing Biblical names, but we have done so merely for the sake of clarity and corroboration as will often be the case as we proceed.

Between King Ahab, or rather between his father and the King of Tyre and Sidon, there was a close friendship and a sort of alliance had been formed; this compact was further strengthened by the marriage of Ahab with Jezebel, a daughter of the Royal House. I am making use of these names as they are familiar to us from the Bible, and in order that my subject may be more easily understood. We are looking back into an age when that ancient clairvoyant gift which was in general a spiritual attribute of man in primeval times had by no means entirely disappeared among those people who had still retained the necessary and fitting disposition. Now, Queen Jezebel was not only endowed with this gift, but her clairvoyant powers were of a very special order; these however, she did not always employ in ways which were destined to promote that which was good and noble. While we look upon Jezebel as a kind of clairvoyante, we must regard King Ahab as a man who only under exceptional circumstances evinced a faculty in virtue of which the hidden forces of his soul could break in upon his conscious state. In olden times such manifestations were much more in evidence and more widely spread than is the case in these days. There were occasions when Ahab himself experienced visions and presentiments, but never to any marked extent, and they occurred only when he was confronted with some special matter connected with human destiny.

At the time to which I refer, a rumour had spread throughout the land that a remarkable spirit was abroad. In reality, this was none other than he who, in the Bible records, bears the name of Elijah. Few there were among those living, as one might say, in the outer world, who knew precisely in what place the personality that bore this name might be found—nor did they know in what way, or by what means, he exerted so powerful an influence upon contemporaneous people and events. We can perhaps best describe the situation by saying that throughout the widest circles any reference to this mysterious being, or even the mention of his name was accompanied by a thrill of awe, and because of this it was generally felt that this spirit must possess some singular and hidden attribute of greatest import. But no man knew rightly, or had indeed any idea, in what way this unusual quality might manifest, or where it might be sought. Only certain isolated persons, whom we might term initiates, had true knowledge of what was really taking place, and they alone knew where, in the physical world, they might find the outer reality of the actual individual who was the bearer of this mysterious spirit.

King Ahab was also ignorant concerning these matters, but nevertheless he experienced a peculiar feeling of apprehension, and a kind of dread overcame him whenever mention was made of that incomprehensible being, regarding whom the most extravagant notions prevailed, as was only natural under the circumstances. Now, Ahab was that King of Samaria who through his alliance with Tyre and Sidon, had introduced into the ancient kingdom of Palestine a certain religious order which held to outer forms and ceremonies, and found expression through external symbolism—in other words a species of heathenism. Such information concerning the individuality of Elijah as came to the followers of this pagan form of worship must have created in them a strange and peculiar feeling of fear and dismay. For it was evident from what they heard that the Jahveh-religion, as it may be termed, had now indeed come down to them from the by-gone days of the ancient Hebrew people, and was once more active. There was still a belief in One God—in One Great Spiritual Being in the cosmos, Who rules over the superperceptual realm, and Who by means of its forces makes His influence felt, and affects both the evolution and the history of mankind.

It was further realized that the time was approaching when there would be an ever greater and more significant understanding of the Jahveh-Being, among those who were the most advanced and perfect of the descendants of the old Hebrew race. It was well known that in truth the religion of Moses contained the germ of all that one might term the Jehovah-Religion, but this fact had been grasped by the nation in a manner more or less after the fashion of a people yet in a stage of childhood or early youth.

The old faith with its upturned vision toward a supersensible God may only be described by saying:—‘It can be likened to nought else than to an awareness of contact with that which is invisible and superperceptual, which comes to man when he indeed apprehends and realizes his own true Ego’—and it was this consciousness of the supersensible which had descended upon the people. But the concept which they had formed, as far as they could form any concept at all, was as we might put it, based upon an attempt to picture to themselves the workings of the God Jehovah, as conceived from their experiences of the external phenomena of life. In those days it was the custom to say that Jehovah acted with regard to humanity, in such a manner that when all nature was luxuriant and fruitful, it was a sign that He was rewarding mankind and showering benefits upon the nation. On the other hand, when the people suffered from want and distress brought about by war, scarcity of food, and other causes, they cried out that Jehovah had turned his face away and was consumed with anger.

At that time about which we are speaking the nation was enduring the miseries caused by a period of dearth and starvation, and many turned aside from the God Jehovah, because they could no longer believe in His works when they saw how He treated mankind, for there was a terrible famine in the land. If, indeed, we can speak of progress in connection with the Jahveh-conception, then the progress destined to be made by these ancient Hebrew people can be characterized in the following manner:—The nation must henceforth form a new Jehovah-concept embodying the old thoughts and ideas, through which must flow a fuller and a higher order of human understanding, so that all might say:—‘No matter what shall take place in the outer world, whether we live in happiness or are beset with sorrows and privations, we must ever realize that such external events are in no way an evidence of either the wrath or the benevolence of Jehovah. True devotion to God and a proper comprehension of the Jahveh-concept implies that mankind shall at all times gaze upward unswervingly toward the invisible Deity, uninfluenced by the contemplation of outer happenings and things, or the apparent reality of material impressions. And even though we meet with the direst want and affliction, nevertheless, through those inner forces alone which dominate the soul, man shall come to the sure conviction that—HE IS.’

This great revolution in religious outlook was destined to be consummated and wrought through the power of the prophet Elijah [and, as will be seen later, his spiritual force operated at times through the medium of a chosen human personality]. When it is ordained that some great momentous change shall be brought about in the concepts of mankind, as was the case in Elijah’s day, it is necessary in the beginning that there be certain fitting personalities at hand in whose souls can be implanted the germ, so to speak, of those things which it is ordained shall later enter into the history of mankind. The manner in which the seed thus laid finds befitting expression, is ever that of a new impulse and a new force.

If you will not misunderstand my meaning, I would say that it was decreed in accordance with the preordained fate of the nation, that the individuality known as the prophet Elijah should be the chosen one whose soul should first grasp the Jehovah-concept in the form which I have described. To this end it was essential that certain singular and very special forces be called up from the hidden depths of his soul – deep-seated powers as yet unknown to mankind, and unguessed at even by the teachers of that time. Something in the nature of an holy mystical initiation of the highest order, through which might come the revelation of such a God, must first take place in the innermost being of Elijah. It is therefore of the utmost importance, in order to describe in characteristic manner the way in which the Jahveh-concept was instilled into the minds of the people, that we should presently gaze into the soul of that particular human personality in whom the Spirit that was to impart the primary impulse was incarnated, or embodied—that man, who through the nature of his Divine initiation became imbued with all the latent forces of his soul. Forces so vital to one who would strike that first deep fundamental note, which would call forth and make possible the coming Jehovah-conception.

Such [great spiritual] personalities [as Elijah] who are chosen to experience within the soul the first stimulating impress of some momentous forward impulse, stand for the most part, isolated and alone. In olden days, however, there gathered around them certain followers who came from the great Religious Schools, or Schools of the Prophets as they were called in Palestine, and which by other nations have been termed Initiation or Mystery Sanctuaries. Thus we find the prophet Elijah, if we would use this name, also surrounded by a few earnest disciples, who looked up to him in reverence as one exalted far above them. These disciples realized to some extent the true nature and significance of Elijah’s mission, even though, because of their limited spiritual vision, they were unable to penetrate deeply into the soul of their great master. [Now at that time strange events had begun to take place in the land] the people, however, had no idea where the mysterious personality might be found who had brought them about. They could only say:—‘He must be here, or there,—for something unusual is happening.’

Hence it was that there spread abroad what we might term a sort of rumour (if the word is not misused) to the effect that HE, a prophet, was actually at work, but no man knew rightly where. This uncertainty was due to the exercise of a definite and peculiar influence, which could be exerted by all such advanced spiritual beings as are found among outstanding seers. Viewed in the light of our modern times it is probable that such a statement may appear somewhat grotesque, but those who are acquainted with the singular characteristics of that by-gone age will find it in no way fanciful or extravagant.

All truly exalted spiritual personalities, such as Elijah, were endowed with this specific and highly penetrative quality which made itself felt now here, now there. Not only was the activity of this potent influence manifested in feelings of awe and dread, but there was also a direct positive action, through which it entered little by little into the souls of the people. It there operated in such manner as to cause them to be unable to tell, at times, just where the external form of some great spiritual personality might be found. But the true followers and disciples of Elijah knew well where to seek him, and were further quite aware that his outer individuality might perchance assume a wholly unpretentious character, and come to light in connection with some quite lowly station in earthly life.

It is remarkable that at the time about which I am speaking, the actual bearer of the spirit of Elijah was a close neighbour of Ahab’s, King of Samaria, and the possessor of a small property in his immediate vicinity; but Ahab had no suspicion that such was the case. He sought everywhere for this singular being whose presence was felt so mysteriously throughout the community, and whom he regarded with feelings of awe and wonder, even as did his people. He entirely failed, however, to take into consideration the simple and unassuming land-owner who lived so near him, and gave no thought as to why he should, at times, absent himself, nor where he went on these occasions. But Jezebel [being clairvoyant] had discovered that this unobtrusive personality had actually become the external physical embodiment of the spirit of Elijah; now the knowledge she had thus acquired she did not impart to Ahab, she kept it to herself regarding it as a secret, for reasons which will become apparent later. In the Bible this particular character [upon whose innermost being Elijah’s spirit worked] is known by the name of Naboth. We thus see that according to the investigations of Spiritual Science we must recognize in the Naboth of the Bible, the physical bearer of the spiritual individuality of Elijah.

It was in those days that a great famine came upon the land, and there were many who hungered. Naboth, in certain ways, also experienced want and distress. At times such as these, when not only does hunger prevail, as was assuredly the case in Palestine, but when on every side there is a feeling of infinite pity for those who suffer, the conditions are especially favourable for the entry of the latent soul-forces into one already prepared through destiny or karma. It is alone through these hidden powers of the soul that man may raise himself to the level of such a mission as we have outlined.

Let us clearly picture what takes place deep within the being under such circumstances, and thus gain an understanding of the manner in which Naboth’s soul was affected. In the initial stage there is an inner progressive change or enfoldment, marked by an important period of self-education and self-development. It is most extremely difficult to describe those inner experiences of the soul which tend to raise it to greater spiritual heights, while the personality is becoming imbued with the forces by means of which it shall be enabled to look upon the world of spirit. The power of Divine spiritual vision must next be called into being, in order that there may come therefrom the wisdom necessary to the inception of all vital impulses destined to be implanted in the stream of human evolution. A verbal description is here the more difficult because never once have those who have undergone an experience of this nature, especially in olden times, come to such a state of apperception that they could outline their impressions in a precise and lucid manner. What actually happens may be stated to be somewhat as follows:—The clairvoyant development of the soul is accomplished through different stages. In the case of a being such as Naboth, it would naturally occur that his first inner experience would be the clear apprehension of the following definite concept:—‘That spiritual power which it is ordained shall descend upon humanity, will now shine forth in me, and I am its appointed receptacle.’ Next would come this further thought:—‘I must henceforth do all that in me lies, in order that the force within my being may find true and proper expression; and that I may acquire those qualities that shall fit me to cope with every form of trial and experience that may come upon me. Thus shall I know how to impart the power of Divine-Impulse to my fellow men, in proper fashion.’

It is in this way that the spiritual and clairvoyant development of a personality such as I have described must go forward—step by step. When a suitable predetermined stage has been reached, then follow certain definite signs which are noticeable and manifest within the soul. These are also of the nature of inner experiences; they are neither dreams nor visions, for they owe their origin to, and are dependent upon, the soul’s actual growth and unfoldment. Pictorial images appear; these indicate that inner progress has now so far advanced, that the particular personality in question may reasonably believe that his soul has indeed acquired new powers. These images, taken alone, have not necessarily much connection with the reality of those experiences through which the soul is passing. They are merely symbols, such as may come during the sleep state, but in a certain way they are typical symbols, similar to those which occur, under certain conditions, when we have very distinct and positive dreams. For instance, a person suffering from palpitation of the heart, may, during sleep, be under an illusion that heat is emanating from some glowing source, as, for instance, a hot stove. In like manner when the soul has gained this or that special clairvoyant power, then will come corresponding definite experiences in the form of visionary manifestations.

Now, in the case of Naboth, the first event of the above nature brought with it a full realization of all that is implied in the following words:—‘Thou art the chosen one, through whom it shall be proclaimed that man may still believe in the ancient Jahveh-God; and that he must hold fast to this faith, even though it outwardly seemeth that because of the sore tribulation which has come upon the land, the current of life’s happenings be set against such trust. Mankind must now rest in peace till times may mend—for albeit it is the will of Jahveh the God of old to come with affliction, nevertheless shall man again rejoice—but he must be ever steadfast of faith in the Lord God.’

It was evident to Naboth that this proclamation which should come through him, was undoubtedly the expression of a true and unswerving force, carrying a conviction which lay deep within his soul; and this experience stood out vividly, as something more than a mere vision. Then it was that before his soul there arose an image of God Himself, in that form and manner in which it was within his power to picture Him, and the Presence said:—‘Go thou to King Ahab, and say unto him; In the God Jahveh must ye have faith, until such time as He may again bring rain upon the earth.’ In other words, until the conditions should improve. Naboth realized the nature of his mission; he knew also that henceforth he must devote himself to the further unfoldment of that power of soul, through which he might apprehend and interpret all that was yet to be presented to his spiritual vision. He then resolved that he would eschew no sacrifice, but as far as in him lay, share in the sufferings of those who were exposed to the greatest measure of want and starvation, during that period. Thus it came about that Naboth also hungered; but he did not seek thereby to rise to a higher spiritual state. Such a procedure, I would mention, is most certainly not to be recommended as a step toward higher spiritual knowledge and understanding. He hungered because of an impulse that made him desire to suffer even as others. Not only did he thus want to share in the common fate, but it was his earnest wish to take upon himself a measure of adversity, greater than that endured by those around him.

The soul of Naboth was given over to unceasing inner contemplation of that God who had revealed Himself to him in the manner described, and his thoughts were ever concentrated upon this Deity. The Spiritual Science of our time would say that throughout his meditations he devoted himself entirely, and of his own free will, to holding this divine concept in the very centre of his soul. That he acted rightly in so doing was made clear to him by a sign which came during an inner vision. This vision was again more positive than any of merely dreamlike character; for an image of that God who dwelt within his soul appeared before him, and it was full of life, and a voice said:—‘Abide in patience—endure all things—for He who feedeth mankind and thee also will of a surety provide that which thou needest; but thou must ever hold to a true faith in the soul’s eternal life.’ In this vision, which was of greater pictorial reality than any before, it appeared to him [whom we may now, under the singular conditions which prevailed, term Elijah-Naboth] that he was led by a hermit to the brook which is called Cherith, where he concealed himself and drank of the waters of the brook so long as any remained; and that he was nourished, so far as the conditions prevailing at the time permitted, by food which the Lord provided. It further seemed to him during the vision, that through the special mercy of God this nutriment was brought by ravens. Thus did [Elijah-Naboth] receive confirmation of the verity of the most important among those inner experiences which he was destined to encounter. It was next ordained that [Naboth] should pass through a more advanced stage of development in relation to the activities of the hidden soul-forces—and we know that he endeavoured to immerse himself yet more deeply (as we would now explain it) in that condition of intensive contemplation which lay at the foundation of his spiritual progress, the character of which we have already described.

This state of profound meditation fraught with inner-life experiences, assumed the following form—Naboth pondered thus:—’If thou wouldest indeed become worthy of that mission which shall shine in upon mankind because of this wholly new concept of God’s image, then must thou change utterly the nature of thine inner being, even to the most profound of its forces, so that thou art no more as thou hast been. Thou shalt subdue that soul which dwells in thee, and through those deeper powers which abide therein bring to thine inner Ego a new life, for it may no longer remain as it now is. [Thou must uplift its quality.]’ Under the influence of thoughts such as these [Naboth] worked intensively upon his soul—ever striving within—that he might bring about this essential transformation of his Ego, and thus become worthy to stand in the presence of that God who had revealed Himself before him.

Then came to [Elijah-Naboth] yet another experience which was, however, only in part a vision. But because it was not entirely of the nature of an inner soul-happening, there being other content, it must be regarded as of less spiritual significance. It is ever the pure inner workings of the soul that are of truest and greatest import. In the vision, it appeared to him that his God, who had again manifested, set him upon a journey to Zarepath (I Kings, xvii, 9), and in that place he met a widow who had a son and he there saw represented, or personified, as it were, in the fate of this widow and her son, the manner and way in which he was now to live. It seemed to his spiritual sight that their food was well-nigh spent, and even that which they had was about to be consumed, after which they would die. Then it was that he spoke to the widow as in a dream, as in a vision, using in effect those same words which, day by day, and week by week, throughout his solitary meditations, he had repeated over and over again to his own soul:—‘Fear not,—from that meal which remaineth, prepare the repast which must be made ready for you and your son, and for me also. In all that may yet come to pass trust alone in that God Who doth create both joy and sorrow, and in Whom we must ever abide in faith.’

In this dreamlike vision it was clearly impressed upon [Elijah-Naboth] that the barrel of meal would not become empty nor would the cruse of oil fail; for the oil and the meal would ever be renewed. It is worthy of note that at this point his whole soul-state which had become, so to speak, fully developed and perfected with regard to his individual character, expressed itself in the vision in such manner, that it seemed to him as if his personality went to live in the upper part of the house which belonged to the widow. But in reality the inner truth was that his own soul had, as one might say, risen to a higher level and achieved a more advanced stage of development.

It next appeared to [Elijah-Naboth], again as in a vision, that the son of the widow lay dead. This we must regard as merely a symbolical representation of the fact that [Naboth] had overcome, and slain, as it were, the Ego which had been his up to that time. Then it was the subconscious forces in his soul cried out:—‘What wilt thou do now?’ For a while [Elijah-Naboth] stood helpless and perplexed; but he was able to regain his self-control through the medium of that power which had always lived and flowed within his innermost being, and to plunge even yet more profoundly into the consideration of those conditions which now called for such deep and earnest contemplation. It then happened that after the widow’s son was dead, she reproached him. This signifies that his subconscious spirit reproached him, in other words, aroused in him a misgiving of this nature:—‘My old Ego-consciousness has now left me—what am I to do?’ In the description given of these events it is stated that he took the child unto himself and plunged unhesitatingly still further into the depths of his soul, and we are told that power was vouchsafed to him through which he brought the dead son once more to life. Then did he gain more courage to stimulate and quicken the new Ego, which was now his, by virtue of those qualities which were in the Ego that he had lost.

From that time on [Elijah-Naboth] continued to develop and mature the hidden forces of his soul, so that it might acquire that inner strength necessary to come before the outer world and utter those words which all must hear. But in the first place and above everything, to stand before King Ahab and bring to a crisis the matter which must now be decided, namely, the victory of the new Jehovah-concept as opposed to those beliefs that the King himself accepted, and which, owing to the weakness of the times had become generally acknowledged among the people.

Now, it came about, that while Ahab was making a round of his empire, anxiously observing the signs of want and distress that the personality [whom we have called Elijah-Naboth] approached him; and no man knew from whence he came, certainly the King had no idea. And there was a strangeness in the manner of his speech which affected the soul of Ahab, who was not, however, aware that this man was his neighbour. More strongly than ever did the King experience that feeling of awe and dread which had always come upon him when reference was made to that great spirit known in the Bible as Elijah the prophet. Then it was that the King spoke and said:—‘Art thou he that troubleth Israel?’ And Elijah-Naboth replied:—‘No, not I, but thou thyself it is who bringeth misfortune and evil upon the people, and it must now be determined to which God they shall turn.’

So it came to pass that a great multitude of the tribe of Israel assembled upon Mount Carmel in order that final judgment should be made between the god of Ahab and the God of Elijah. The decision was to be brought about by means of an external sign; but such a sign as all might plainly discern and clearly understand. To enter into details concerning these matters at the present time would, however, take us too far. It was arranged that the priests and prophets of Baal, the name by which the god of King Ahab was known, should be the first to offer a sacrifice. The people would then wait and see if the performance of certain sacrificial rites (religious exercises in which the ecstatic priests, through the medium of music and dancing, worked themselves up into a state of singular ecstasy) would lead to any communication or influence being imparted to the multitude. In other words, the people were to judge whether or not, in virtue of inherent divine powers possessed by the priests any sign was vouchsafed of the might and potency of their god.

The sacrificial beast is brought to the altar. It is to be decided if in truth the priests of Baal are endowed with an inner force, such as would stir the multitude. Then Elijah-Naboth raised up his voice and said:—‘This thing must now be determined—I stand alone while opposed to me are the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal. We shall see how strong is their hold upon the people, and how great is that power which is in me.’ The sacrifice is performed, and everything possible done in order to transmit to the multitude a potent influence from the priests—that all should believe in the god Baal. The ecstatic exercises are carried to such lengths that the hands and other parts of the body are cut with knives until the blood flows, so as to increase still further the awesome character of the spectacle evoked by these followers of Baal, under the frenzied stimulus of the dancing and the music. But behold! there is no sign—for Elijah-Naboth is there, and the spirit within him is at work.

In words all insufficient of expression, one might say, that while Elijah-Naboth stood thus near at hand, he caused a great spiritual power to flow forth from his being, so that he overcame and swept away all things which were opposed to him. In this case, you must not, however, imagine to yourselves the exercise of any kind of magic.

Elijah-Naboth then prepares his sacrifice. He makes an offering to his God, using the full force of his soul, that soul which had passed through all those trials which we have already described. The sacrifice is consummated, and achieves the fullness of its purpose, for the souls and the hearts of the people are stirred. The priests of Baal, the four hundred and fifty opponents of Elijah are driven to admit defeat. They are destroyed in their very souls by that which they had desired, killed, as it were, by Elijah-Naboth—for Elijah-Naboth had won the day!

The above events were in some ways similar to those that I have endeavoured to portray in my book entitled Mysticism and Modern Thought. While speaking of Johannes Tauler, it is there related that for a considerable period during his life he was known as a remarkable and trenchant preacher, and that at one time he gave himself up to a particular form of training; after which, upon his return to the pulpit, he exercised upon one occasion such an extraordinary influence upon his congregation, that we are told some forty persons collapsed and were as if dead. This signifies that their innermost beings were touched, and that they were overcome by the sympathetic action of a special power emanating from that great divine. With such an example before us, we need no longer imagine that the Bible account concerning Ahab and Elijah is a mere exaggeration, for it is at all events entirely confirmed by the researches of Spiritual Science.

What follows as the natural outcome of all these events? I have already described the character and peculiar nature of Jezebel. She was quite aware of the fact that the man who had done all these things was their neighbour, and that he was to be found living close at hand, that is, when he was not mysteriously absent. Now, what did Elijah-Naboth know and realize from that moment? He knew that Jezebel was powerful, and that she had discovered his secret. In other words, he felt that henceforth his outer physical life was no longer safe. He must therefore prepare for death in the near future; for Jezebel would certainly compass his destruction.

Now, King Ahab went home, and as related in the Bible, told Jezebel about those events which had taken place upon Mount Carmel;¹ and [Spiritual Science tells us, that] Jezebel said:—‘I will do unto Elijah that which he did unto thy four hundred and fifty prophets.’ Who could understand these words spoken by Jezebel [and reflected in the second verse of the nineteenth chapter of the First Book of Kings]² were it not for the investigations made by Spiritual Science, in whose light their meaning seems almost self-evident. [As a result of these researches it is quite clear, and this point has always been obscure, why it was that Jezebel brought about the death of Naboth, when in reality she sought to destroy Elijah. From Spiritual Science, however, we realize that she sent her threatening message to Elijah-Naboth, because in virtue of her clairvoyant powers, she knew full well that the physical body of Naboth was in truth the bearer of Elijah’s spirit. (Ed.)]

It now became necessary for Elijah to form some definite plans whereby he could avoid being immediately done to death as a result of Jezebel’s revenge. He must at once arrange, that in case of this event happening, his spirit could still continue to carry on his teachings, and exert its influence upon mankind. Thus it came about when next he held commune with his soul, and while in a state of intense inner contemplation, that he questioned himself thus:—‘What shall I do that I may find a successor to fulfil my mission in this physical world, should my death indeed be brought about through the vengeance of Jezebel?’ Then behold! a new revelation came to him, in which his inner vision was directed toward a certain quite definite personality, to whom Elijah-Naboth³ might pass on all that he had to bestow upon mankind—this personality was Elisha. You may think it possible that Elijah had previously known Elisha, whether such was the case or not is a matter of little importance. What is of moment is the fact that it was the Spirit that pointed to the way, and that he heard through an inner illumination these words:—‘Initiate thou this man into thy secrets.’

We are further told, with that clarity which it marks the statements of Spiritual Science concerning ancient religious records, that Elijah-Naboth had a very special mission to fulfil; and that the Divine element which was about to descend upon Elisha, would be of the self-same Spirit as had heretofore been predominant in Elijah. Now it was in Damascus that Elisha was to be sought, and in that place he would receive this great spiritual illumination, which would come to him in the same way as that glorious Divine Light which flowed in upon St. Paul at a later period. But soon after Elijah had chosen his successor the vengeance of Jezebel fell upon him. For Jezebel turned the thoughts of her lord toward Naboth, their neighbour, and spoke to Ahab somewhat after this fashion:—‘Listen thou unto me, this neighbour is a pious man, whose mind is filled with ideas concerning Elijah. It would perhaps be well to remove him from this vicinity, for he is one of the most important of his followers, and upon him much depends.’

Now the King knew nothing whatever about the secret which surrounded Naboth, but he was quite aware by this time that he was indeed a faithful adherent of Elijah’s, and gave heed to his words. Jezebel next urged Ahab to try and induce Naboth to come over to his side, either by methods of persuasion or, if necessary, by exercising his power of kingly authority. She said:—‘It would be a great blow to the schemes and projects of this man, Elijah, if by any means it were possible to draw him away from his intents.’ Jezebel knew quite well, however, that all her talk was the merest fiction; what she really desired was to induce her lord to take some kind of definite and effective action. For it was not this particular move in which she was interested; her mind was bent upon a plot which was to follow: hence the advice which she tendered was of the nature of a subterfuge. After Jezebel had spoken in this manner to Ahab, the King went to Naboth and held converse with him; but behold, Naboth would not regard what he said, and replied:—‘Never shall those things come to pass which thou desirest.’

In the Bible the position is so represented that this neighbour of Ahab’s is described as possessing a vineyard which the King coveted, and sought to acquire. According to this account (I Kings, xxi, 3), Naboth said to Ahab:—‘The Lord forbid it me that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.’ In reality, however, the actual inheritance to which reference is here made was of quite another kind to that which Naboth declined to surrender; nevertheless, Jezebel used this incident as the foundation of her revenge. She deliberately proffered false counsel, in order that the King might be discountenanced and then angered by Naboth’s refusal. That such was the case becomes evident when we read that passage in the Bible (I Kings, xxi, 4), where it is written: ‘And Ahab came into his house heavy and displeased because of the word which Naboth the Jezreelite had spoken to him: for he had said, I will not give thee the inheritance of my fathers. And he laid him down upon his bed, and turned away his face, and would eat no bread.’ Think of that! Merely because the King could not obtain a certain vineyard in his neighbourhood, he refused to eat! We can only begin to understand such statements, when we are in a position to investigate the facts which underlie them.

It was at this point that Jezebel took definite steps to bring about her revenge. She started by arranging that a feast be given to which Naboth should be invited, and at which he was to be an especially honoured guest (I Kings, xxi, 12). Naboth could not refuse to be present; and at this feast it was planned that he be afforded an opportunity of expressing himself freely. Now, Jezebel was truly gifted with clairvoyant insight; with the others Naboth could easily cope, with them he could measure forces; but Jezebel had the power to bring ruin upon him. She introduced false witnesses, who declared that Naboth did deny [blaspheme] God and the King’. It was in this manner that she contrived to compass his murder; as is related in the Bible (I Kings, xxi, 13). Henceforth the outer physical personality of Elijah was dead, and no more seen upon the face of the external world.

Now, because of all that had happened the deep forces in Ahab’s soul were stirred, and he was, as one might say, confronted with the grave question of his destiny, while at the same time he experienced a strange and unusual foreboding. Then Elijah, whom he had ever regarded with feelings of awe, appeared as in a vision and revealed to him plainly how the matter stood. Here we have an actual spiritual experience, in which Ahab was accused by the spirit-form of Elijah (subsequent to his death) of having virtually himself murdered Naboth—this Naboth-Elijah. The connection with the latter personality he could but dimly realize; nevertheless, Ahab was definitely termed his murderer. In the Bible we can read the dreadful words which fell upon his soul during that awe-inspiring prophecy, when the spirit-form said:—‘In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine’ (I Kings, xxi, 19); and then came yet another dire prophetic utterance:—‘The dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel’ (I Kings, xxi. 23).

We now know that these predictions belonged to a class which finds ultimate fulfilment. For subsequently when King Ahab went forth to battle against the Syrians, he was wounded and his blood ran out of the wound into the chariot, and so he died; and when the chariot was being washed dogs came and licked up his blood (I Kings, xxii, 35, 38). Later on, after a further course of events had made Jehu ruler of Jezreel, Jezebel was seen as she stood at a window, and she was seized and thrown down, and dogs tore her in pieces, and actually devoured her before the walls of the city (II Kings, ix, 30 to 37). I have only touched lightly upon these matters, because our time is short and they are of no special importance to us just now. You will find that the subject I am about to consider is of much greater moment.

He whom Elijah-Naboth had elected to be his successor must henceforth develop and perfect his inner being, even as he himself had done; but this spiritual unfoldment was brought about in other fashion. For the pupil it was in some ways less difficult than it had been for his teacher; since all that power which Elijah-Naboth had acquired through constant upward striving was now at his disciple’s disposal, and he had ever the help and support of his great master. Elijah-Naboth influenced Elisha in the same way as the individualities of those who have passed through the portals of death may at times act upon humanity, namely, by means of a special form of spiritual activity emanating directly from the spirit-world. The divine force which thus descended upon Elisha was like in nature to that glorious inspiration which Christ Jesus Himself gave to His disciples after His resurrection. Elisha’s subsequent experiences were directly related to this divine power which continued to flow forth from Elijah, even after his death, and to affect all who might give themselves up to its potent influence. With Elisha, his experience was such that the living form of his great master appeared before his soul, and said:—‘I will go forth with thee out of Gilgal.’

At this point I shall quote the Bible literally, where it says (II Kings, ii, 1):—‘And it came to pass, when the Lord would take up Elijah into heaven by a whirlwind, that Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal.’ Now, Gilgal is not a place or locality, and it is not intended in the Bible that it should be taken as such. The word Gilgal merely signifies—The act of moving in a circuitous path while revolving, as in waltzing [Herum-walzung]. This technical expression refers to the roundabout course of the soul’s life during those periods in which it is incarnated in the flesh, and passes from one physical body to another; that is the true significance of ‘Gilgal’.

It need cause you no surprise that the results obtained through Spiritual Science show that Elisha, in virtue of soul experiences gained through inner contemplation and absolute devotion, was enabled to be in the actual presence of Elijah in a higher state or world. This was made possible, not because of the forces latent in his physical nature, but through those more exalted powers which he possessed. While Elisha was thus uplifted the steps which he must take toward his soul’s development were pointed out to him by the spirit of Elijah, who constantly drew his attention to the difficulties which he would encounter in the path which he must follow. The way led upward and onward, step by step, to a stage where he would first feel himself unified with that divine spirit, ever flowing forth from his great teacher—Elijah.

The names, apparently referring to places which have been chosen [in the Bible at this point such as Beth-el and Jericho (II Kings, ii, 2, 4 )], are not to be taken as designating localities, but in their literal sense, signifying conditions of the soul. For instance, Elijah says:—‘I will now take me to Beth-el.’⁴ This statement was made to Elisha in a vision, but to him it was more than a mere vision. Then, again, as if counselling him, the spirit of Elijah spoke and said It were better to remain here’;4 the true significance of which is as follows:—‘Consider whether thou possessest the strength to go with me further’; [referring to the spiritual path]. The vision then continues with an incident in which we again find something in the nature of an exhortation and warning. All the sons of the prophets who were his colleagues in the spirit stood about Elisha and cautioned him, and those who were initiated into the mystery and knew that at times he could indeed ascend to the higher regions where the spirit of Elijah held converse with him, admonished him, and said:—‘This time thou wilt not be able to follow Elijah’—‘Knowest thou that the Lord will take away thy master from thy head to-day?’ (II Kings, ii, 3). And his answer to those about him was:—‘Hold ye your peace.’ But to the spirit of Elijah he said:—‘As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee.’ Then Elijah spoke again and said:—‘I must now go upon my way to Jericho’ [(II Kings, ii, 4.) ‘Tarry here I pray thee; for the Lord hath sent me to Jericho.’]. Once again this dialogue is repeated [and the word Jordan is introduced. (II Kings, ii, 6)], after which Elijah asks:—‘What dost thou truly desire?’ The reply which Elisha gave is recorded in the Bible, but in such a manner that we have to drag out its proper meaning, for it is rendered incorrectly. The words are these:—‘I pray thee let a double portion of thy spirit be upon me’ (II Kings, ii, 9); the actual answer, however, was:—‘I desire that thy spirit shall enter and dwell, as a second spirit within my soul.’

Now, the essence of Elisha’s request as understood by Elijah was somewhat as follows—Elisha had asked that his soul be stirred to its very depths and quickened, so that he might awaken to a full consciousness of its true relation to the spirit of his master. It could then of its own powers bring about enlightenment concerning spiritual revelation, even as had been the case during the physical life of his great teacher. Elijah spoke again and said:—‘I must now ascend into the higher realms; if thou art able to perceive my spirit as it rises upward, then hast thou attained thy desire and my power will enter in unto thee.’ And behold it came to pass that Elisha saw the spirit of Elijah as he ‘went up by a whirlwind into heaven’ (II Kings, ii, 11), and the mantle of Elijah fell down [upon him]; which was a symbol denoting the spiritual force in which he must now enwrap himself. Here, then, we have a spiritual vision which indicated, and at the same time caused Elisha to realize that he might now indeed become the true successor of Elijah. In the Bible (I Kings, ii, 15) we read:—- ‘And when the sons of the prophets which were to view at Jericho saw him, they said, The Spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha. And they came to meet him, and bowed themselves to the ground before him.’ This passage points to the fact that the Word of the Lord had become so mighty in Elisha that it was filled with the same force which the sons of the prophets had experienced with Elijah; and they realized that the spirit of Elijah-Naboth did in truth live on in the being of Elisha.

In previous lectures I have described the methods employed by Spiritual Science, and as we proceed they will be yet further elucidated. The foregoing account gives expression to its testimony regarding the actual events which took place in Elijah’s time, and also concerning the impulse to humanity which flowed forth from that great prophet and his successor Elisha. An impulse which ever tended toward the renewing and uplifting of the ancient Jahveh Faith.

It is characteristic of that ancient period, that incidents such as we have portrayed and which could only be understood by the initiated, were represented to the mass of the people (who were quite incapable of comprehending them in their true form) in such a manner as to render them not only intelligible, but at the same time to cause them to work upon, and to influence, the soul. The method to which I refer is that of parables or miracle stories. But what seems to us so truly amazing, in the highest spiritual sense is, that out of such allegorical narratives there should have been evolved an account like that relating to Elijah, Elisha, and Naboth, as told in the Bible.

Now, in those days it was the custom to use the parable form, when speaking to all who could not understand or realize the supreme glory of the impulse which had come from the souls of these Great Ones; spiritual beings who of themselves must first undergo many inner experiences deep hidden from man’s external vision and apprehension. Thus it came about that the people were told, as may be gathered from the Bible, that Elijah lived in the time of King Ahab, and that during a period of famine the God-Jahveh appeared before him and [as Spiritual Science tells us] commanded him to go to the King Ahab and say to him:—‘As the Lord God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew or rain these years, but according to my word’ (I Kings, xvii, 1). The account in the Bible continues as follows:—‘And the word of the Lord came unto him saying:—Get thee hence, and turn thee eastward, and hide thyself by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan. And it shall be that thou shalt drink of the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there.’ (I Kings, xvii, 2, 3, 4.) These things came to pass; and when the brook was dried up, God sent Elijah to Zarephath (I Kings, xvii, 9); and ‘in the third year’ he was commanded to set out and appear before King Ahab (I Kings, xviii, 1) and to cause the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal to be called to a final decision (I Kings, xviii, 19). I have previously referred to all this, when presenting the facts as obtained through Spiritual Science.

Next comes a wonderful picture of the events that actually took place on Mount Carmel (I Kings, xviii, 20 to 39), and which happenings I have described. Then follows the story of how Naboth (who was in reality the bearer of the spirit of Elijah) was to be robbed of his vineyard by Ahab; and of how Jezebel brought ruin upon him (I Kings, xxi, 1 to 14). From the Bible account alone, we cannot understand how Jezebel could have possibly accomplished the destruction of Elijah in accordance with her threatening utterance to King Ahab (see this passage), namely:—‘I will do unto Elijah that which he did unto thy four hundred and fifty prophets’; for the story tells us that she merely compassed the death of Naboth. As a matter of fact, however, she actually brought destruction to the being in whom dwelt at that time the spirit of Elijah; a point which would undoubtedly escape the notice of any ordinary Biblical student—for in the Bible it merely states that Elijah ascended into heaven (II Kings, ii, 11). Now, if, as is intimated in the Bible, Jezebel’s desire was—to do unto Elijah as he had done unto the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal—she certainly accomplished her end and brought about his ruin in a most remarkable manner!⁵ I would here state that there are some graphic portrayals relative to the dim past which can only be rightly understood when illumined by that bright radiance which flows from the deep sources of spiritual research.

It is not possible in a single lecture to bring forward further evidence and proofs concerning these matters. If, however, those among my audience who may still feel that they cannot look upon the pronouncements of Spiritual Science as other than sheer hypotheses, would but criticize without prejudice, and set about comparing the various statements made with facts obtained through the medium of external science, I should feel entirely satisfied. Although it is true that if spiritual methods of research are not employed, we cannot hope to reach final and positive conclusions, nevertheless, it will be found that the verity of Spiritual Science is confirmed by the results of orthodox scientific investigations, and the proper exercise of the individual intelligence.

When we study the personality and period of the prophet Elijah, it becomes clear that the impulses and primal causes which underlie and bring about human events, are in no way limited to those occurrences which are outwardly apparent, and therefore find a place in the records of external history. By far the most important and significant happenings connected with man’s existence have their actual origin, and are matured as regards a primary stage, within the confines of the soul. The outcome of this fundamental process next finds expression in the outer world, ever spreading its influence further and further among the people. Although in these days it is inconceivable that a mysterious personality such as we have portrayed, and known only through rumour, could dwell in our midst in the guise of a simple and homely neighbour without all the facts becoming known, in olden times such a circumstance was undoubtedly possible. We have learned that throughout all human evolution it is precisely those forces which are of greatest power and intensity that operate in obscure and secret fashion.

From what has been said it is clear that through the influence of the prophet Elijah, man was raised to a higher spiritual level and became more and more imbued with Jahveh thoughts and concepts. We also realize that the life and deeds of that great patriarch, when viewed in the proper manner, must be regarded as forming an epoch of supreme import to humanity. Further investigation and research will assuredly prove that [by means of the methods of Spiritual Science] a new light has been thrown upon the momentous happenings of a bygone age, and on the events which ultimately led to the founding of Christianity. We know that through realities of this nature, born of the Spirit-World, we can draw nearer to an understanding of those fundamental forces and impulses which have been ever active during the evolution of mankind, and therefore appear to us of such great significance and moment. Then with enhanced knowledge we shall realize that, even as these basal factors have operated in remote antiquity, so must they continue to work on in our present period. Never can we read the deep secrets of the life which is around us, if we have no clear concept of the inner nature and purport of those singular events which have taken place in the dim and distant past.

External history, which is garnered solely from the outer world, does not enlighten us concerning things of greatest and most vital import. It is here the words of Goethe so fittingly apply—words which, if but read with a touch of deeper meaning, become as a call to humanity urging mankind to profound inner spiritual contemplation. For it is thus that man may enter upon that quest which alone can spring from the soul’s most hidden depths, and learn to apprehend the Divine Spirit which is, and abides, in all nature.

The wonderful example of the prophet Elijah and his period, as it shines forth in our spiritual firmament, stands as an evidence of the truth of Goethe’s words, which in slightly modified form, are as follows:—

History will not permit that veil to be withdrawn,
Which hides her secrets from the light of our new day.
That which she chooses from thy spirit to conceal,
Canst thou ne’er wrest from parchment script, nor canst thou say,
What message lies secreted ‘neath those mystic signs,
Inscribed on bronze, or fashioned deep in stone or clay.⁶

ADDENDUM

In the above lecture, which was delivered in Berlin in 1911, it will be noticed that in some cases the name Elijah-Naboth is found in places where Elijah only is mentioned in the Bible. The reason for this apparent inconsistency becomes at once evident, when we take a general view of the circumstances and singular relation which existed between Elijah, Naboth, and what we might term a duality of being as expressed in Elijah-Naboth. Let us therefore briefly consider the events portrayed in the order in which they took place.

At the time of Ahab, the Hebrew people were for the most part, so far sunk in materialism that there was danger, not only that disaster would overtake them, but that the actual course of the spiritual evolution of mankind might be hindered; and the matter had gone to such a length as to call for Divine intervention. Hence it was ordained that Elijah, whom we must regard as a truly exalted spirit, should descend upon the earth, and that his mission would be to turn the hearts of the people once more to Jehovah, and to determine upon his (Elijah’s) successor. This mission we may look upon as being accomplished in four stages.

At first the spirit of Elijah worked in mysterious ways, for he appeared among the people now here, now there; and no man knew from whence he came. In those olden days the masses were oft-times moved in matters concerning religious thought by engendering feelings of awe and wonder, and by so doing Elijah established a definite and powerful influence among the minds of the Community. He thus prepared the people to witness that sign of the spirit which it was decreed should be vouchsafed. Only through some great manifestation of Divine force could the nation, in that material state into which it had fallen, be brought back to Jahveh, the ancient God of the Hebrews.

In the second stage of Elijah’s mission we come upon the simple land-owner, Naboth. In order to create the utmost possible impression at the time when the supreme revelation of spiritual power should take place, it was essential that a multitude be present, but for this thing to happen it was necessary to gain the consent of the King. Now Naboth lived near to Ahab, and might on occasion obtain audience with him, and in this manner could aid Elijah in the maturing of his plans. Elijah therefore so worked upon the innermost soul of Naboth, that he became ‘the bearer of his spirit’ and did according to his word. Thus did Elijah’s spirit find expression through the outer form of Naboth and bring influence to bear upon the King, that all should be made ready for the people to be gathered together when the moment was at hand for the sign to be given. It is the dual state of Naboth’s being while the spirit of Elijah was dominant and worked within him that has been termed, Elijah-Naboth.

Now, Ahab was not truly clairvoyant and had no suspicion of all that had occurred. On that occasion when he met Elijah-Naboth and said to him: ‘Art thou he that troubleth Israel?’ (I Kings, xviii, 17), he thought it was only Naboth who was speaking, and that it was he who would turn the people against the gods of Baal; for Ahab at that time merely knew of Elijah through indefinite rumour. But it was the voice of Elijah the prophet speaking through Naboth that answered the King—it was Elijah-Naboth that spoke. It is because the ancient writer who portrayed this incident did not realize the singular spiritual and clairvoyant conditions, and therefore did not fully understand the circumstances, that the name of Elijah alone appears in this, as in other Bible accounts connected with the events which took place in those days.

We find a similar difference in the names occurring in the description of the happening on Mount Carmel, when the people were assembled in order to judge between Jehovah and the gods of Baal. It was then that the third stage of Elijah’s mission was fulfilled. In the lecture it states that it was Elijah-Naboth who was present on the Mount, and that it was he who ‘won the day’, but the Bible narrative tells us that it was Elijah himself who overcame the prophets of Baal. The reason for this apparent inconsistency can be seen from the following considerations.

It was Elijah-Naboth, who when all had come, stood forth and said: ‘This thing must now be determined—I stand alone while opposed to me are the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal.’ But Elijah, who was granted special spiritual powers at that moment, so ordered the matter that while the King saw before him merely the outer form of the man Naboth, the people were impressed with the spiritual being and personality of Elijah. In the Bible, the narrator realized the circumstances as the multitude had apprehended them, and therefore spoke only of Elijah, being unaware that at that time, Naboth was ‘the bearer of his spirit’.

Jezebel was not present at Mount Carmel, because she was conscious that she could not cope directly with Elijah. Already through her clairvoyant powers she was cognizant of all that had come to pass, and she knew full well that the spirit of the great prophet would be all-powerful in that place. In other words, she clearly understood that if she went to the Mount she would there have to do with Elijah-Naboth, and not merely with the simple land-owner. She thought, however, that if she could but compass the physical death of Naboth, she might put an end to Elijah’s influence.

Next came the fourth stage of Elijah’s mission. He must seek a successor, and that before Jezebel brought about the death of Naboth, for when the outer form of Naboth should be destroyed, Elijah must return to the Divine Spirit-realms. At that point in the lecture (see this passage) where it states that Elijah communed with his soul and asked this question: ‘What shall I do that I may find a successor to fulfil my mission in this physical world, should my death indeed be brought about through the vengeance of Jezebel?’ he is referring to the material death of Naboth and to the possible premature ending of the impulse he had wrought.

Further, we are told that Spiritual Science states: ‘That Elijah-Naboth had a very special mission to fulfil; and that the Divine element which was about to descend upon Elisha, would be of the self-same spirit as had heretofore been predominant in Elijah.’ And, ‘it was in Damascus that Elisha was to be sought ...’ In the Bible (I Kings, xix, 15, 16) we find these words: ‘And the Lord said unto him [Elijah], Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus ... and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel-Meholah shalt thou anoint to be a prophet in thy room.’ The actual command to seek out Elisha was given in a vision to Elijah, as is indicated both in the lecture and in I Kings xix, 12, 13. Spiritual Science, however, tells us that it was Elijah-Naboth who made the journey. And this is quite comprehensible when we realize that in Elijah-Naboth, Elisha in virtue of his advanced spirituality would know and commune with the spirit being of Elijah. Here again it is for reasons similar to those already advanced, that in the Bible the name of Elijah, only, occurs, while in the lecture Elijah-Naboth is mentioned.

In all such cases it will be found, if we but look deeply into the matter, that the statements of Spiritual Science are, in truth, not in any way at variance with those things which are written in the Bible. [Ed.]

Notes for this lecture:

1 ‘And Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and withal how he had slain all the prophets with the sword.’ (I Kings, xix, I.)

2 This verse is as follows:—‘Then Jezebel sent a messenger unto Elijah, saying, So let the Gods do unto me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time.’

3. See Addendum to this lecture.

4. Tarry here, I pray thee; for the Lord hath sent me to Beth-el. (II Kings, ii, 2.)

5. In this lecture it has been previously stated (see this passage) that, through Elijah–Naboth, the prophets of Baal were ‘destroyed in their very souls by that which they had most desired’. Now Elijah longed that his spirit might continue active in the being of Naboth, and it was this very wish that caused Jezebel to set about his ruin, and thus, as it were, to ‘destroy’ Elijah ‘in his very soul’. It was not merely physical death, to which Jezebel referred when she sent her message to Elijah, as mentioned in the Bible, saying: ‘So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time,’ (I Kings, xix, 2), but to a kind of spiritual death, which would break for ever that mysterious and sacred union between Elijah and Naboth, which it was her aim to sever. She knew quite well in virtue of her clairvoyant powers, that she could only hope to accomplish this end, and—‘destroy Elijah in his very soul’—by bringing about the material dissolution of Naboth, the bearer of Elijah’s spirit. Thus we find, that if we read Jezebel’s message anew, in the light thrown upon it by Spiritual Science, its purport becomes at once intelligible. [Ed.]

6. ‘Geheimnisvoll am Iichten Tag der Gegenwart,
Lässt Geschichte sich des Schleiers nicht berauben.
Was sie deinem Geist nicht offenbaren mag,
Das zwingst du ihr nicht aus Pergamenten
Und nicht aus Zeichen, die eingeschrieben rind
In Erz und Ton und Stein.’

Folksstück in three acts and a prelude by C. Karlweis
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

During the terrible boredom that this "folk play" causes for three hours, the thought arises again and again: Someone wanted to be a Raimund and didn't even make it as far as Birch-Pfeiffer and O.F.Berg. Something that is equally obtrusive and equally meaningless in its sentimentality and clumsy buffoonery will not be easy to find within the dramatic genre to which this play wants to belong. An obnoxious fellow with all the instincts of meanness and baseness torments his whole environment because he is only capable of loving his own self. He maltreats his wife, he condemns his son to idleness, even though he would like to work as an independent employee in his father's factory. The old egotist does not want to give up the "whip" as long as he can still take a breath. He refuses to give his consent when his daughter wants to give her hand to the man she loves, because it is better for his mean nature to set her up with someone else; and when a good friend comes into need and misery, the ego-lover can't get a penny out of him. This is the first act. It is preceded by a prelude depicting a quarrel between the fairy Humanitas and the Viennese fairy. It symbolizes how the "good Viennese heart" can be abandoned by all humanity and led down the path of self-interest and unkindness. But the Viennese must rediscover his golden heart. For this journey of discovery, "God Morpheus" joins forces with Humanitas and the Viennese fairy and - in the second act - lets the evil egoist fall into a bad dream that shows the dreamer where his hard mind will lead him when God wants to punish him and make him a poor man. And when the curtain rises again for the third act, the egotist is cured: with farcical agility, the "poet" has made the sinner the best father, a philanthropist and an exemplary husband.

All this takes place with unspeakable clumsiness. Karlweis wants to be naive like Raimund, but he is only childish. There is not even a hint of the spirit in the play that immediately wins us over when Raimund raises the curtain and his fairy tales play out before our eyes.

The role of the old egotist, Florian Heindl, was played by Mr. Bonn. He did everything he could to make the character even more repulsive than the poet had made him. Fräulein Groß, who has to play the Viennese fairy in the prelude and the young Heindl's fiancée in the drama, was only a "smart Viennese" in both roles, without being able to arouse any further interest. Carl Waldow alone gave a noteworthy performance as Heindl's house servant.

Today desire goes out of the astral body, interest lies in the I, and pleasure is in the etheric body. Previously interest was in the astral body, desire was in the etheric body and pleasure was in the physical body; this was in the Lemurian epoch when there was no disease, food flowed in and out, and egoless people without interest in outer things changed bodies like clothes. Pictures arose in the astral body that told a man what was good or harmful for him. He was interested in the pictures that arose within him and this interest remained when he changed bodies. This was a permanent astral consciousness. This changed when the I that had been in the spiritual world sank into man and permeated him more and more. Interest moved into the I. The I drew interest up to itself, it drew everything up to its own realm. Thereby it tied itself off from the Gods, and the result was death. Everything that doesn't happen for the whole but for a single something that's separated from the whole, and therefore is egoism, finally leads to the destruction of this single thing, to death.

Rosicrucianism calls this interest that goes out from the ego estimatio. We must raise our interest to the astral plane again; whereby we gain imaginatio. When desire is brought back into the etheric body we attain incantatio or inspiratio. And by putting pleasure back into the physical body we get intuitio.

When we no longer follow personal interests in our actions, when we do what we have to do in such a way that we follow the inner necessities that a rightly understood law of karma places on us, when we give our deeds to the outer world with inner equanimity and in accordance with this law, then we overcome estimatio through our own higher I who is then the doer. And when bound by the strength of this I we no longer let ourselves be driven by the streams and influences that storm in on us from the outer world we can then make right judgments about the outer world and we gather wisdom from it. It reveals its inner nature to us when we stand before it with equanimity, and when we think and act in such a way that we know: All of my thoughts, feelings and deeds influence the whole, nothing exists for itself; I want to give everything to humanity, let everything be dedicated to the service of mankind. When this lives in a pupil as the basic feeling, he then develops Buddhi, the Christ principle. Thus he lets the higher triad arise from the given figure: Manas, Buddhi, Atman.