The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If in this whole lecture course we are to concentrate our efforts on gaining a deeper understanding of the words “Father and Mother of Jesus,” and consequently of the essence of Christianity in general according to the Gospel of St. John, we must first acquire the material for an understanding of the concept, Mother and Father, in its spiritual sense, as it is intended in this Gospel and at the same time in its actual meaning. For it is not a question of an allegorical or a symbolic explanation.

We must first understand what it means to unite oneself with the higher spiritual worlds, to prepare oneself to receive the higher worlds. We must at the same time consider the nature of initiation, especially in regard to the Gospel of St. John. Let us ask: What is an initiate?

In all ages of the post-Atlantean human evolution, an initiate has been a person who could lift himself above the outer physical sense-world and have his own personal experiences in the spiritual worlds, a person who could experience the spiritual worlds just as the ordinary human being experiences the physical sense-world through the outer senses, eyes, ears, etc. Such an initiate becomes then a witness of those worlds and their truths. That is one aspect. But there is also something else very essential which every initiate acquires as a very special characteristic during his initiation, that is, he lifts himself above the feelings and sensations which are not only justified but also very necessary within the physical world, but which cannot, however, exist in the same way in the spiritual world.

Do not misunderstand what is said here and imagine that anyone who is able, as an initiate, to experience the spiritual world as well as the physical world must give up all other human feelings and sensations which are of value here in the physical world and exchange them for those of the higher worlds. This is not so. He does not exchange one for the other, but he acquires one in addition to the other. If, on the one hand, he has to spiritualize his feelings, he must, on the other, strengthen much more those feelings which are of use for working in the physical world. In this way we must interpret those words used in connection with an initiate, namely, that he must, in a certain sense, become a homeless person. It is not meant that in any sense he must become estranged from his home and his family as long as he lives in the physical world, but these words have at least this much significance, that by acquiring the corresponding feelings in the spiritual world, the feelings for the physical world will experience a finer, more beautiful development. What does it mean to be homeless? It means that one without this designation cannot, in the true sense of the word, attain initiation. To be a homeless man, means that he must develop no special sympathies in the spiritual world similar to those he possesses here in the physical world for special regions or relationships. The individual human being in the physical world belongs to some particular folk or to some particular family, to this or that community of the state. That is all quite proper. He does not need to lose this; he needs it here. If, however, he wished to employ these feelings in the spiritual world, he would bring a very bad dowry to that world. There, it is not a question of developing sympathy for anything, but of allowing everything to work upon him objectively, according to its inherent worth. It could also be said, were this generally understood, that an initiate must be, in the fullest sense of the word, an objective human being.

It is just through its evolution upon the earth that humanity has emerged out of a former homeless state connected with the ancient dreamy, clairvoyant consciousness. We have seen how mankind has descended out of the spiritual spheres into the physical world. In the primal spiritual spheres, patriotism and such things did not exist. When humanity descended from the spiritual spheres, one part peopled the earth in one region and another part in another region, and thus the individual groups of human beings of different regions became stereotype copies of those regions. Do not imagine that the negro became black solely from inner reasons; he became black also through adapting himself to the region of the earth in which he lived. And so it was also with the white people. Just as the great differences of colour and race came into existence because human beings have acquired something through their connection with their environment, so is it also true in respect of the smaller differences in folk individuality. But this has again to do with the specialization of love upon the earth. Because men became dissimilar, love was at first established in small communities. Only gradually will humanity be able to evolve out of the small communities into a large community of love which will develop concretely through the very implanting of the Spirit-Self. The initiate had to anticipate whither human evolution is tending in order to overcome and bridge over all barriers and bring about great peace, great harmony and brotherhood. In his homelessness, he must always, at the very beginning, receive the same rudiments of great brotherly love. This was symbolically expressed in ancient times in the descriptions of the wanderings experienced by the initiate, such as those, for example, of Pythagoras. Why was this described? In order that the initiate might become objective toward every thing in the feelings he had developed within the heart of the community. It is the task of Christianity to bring to the whole of humanity the Impulse of this Brotherhood which the initiate always possessed as an individual impulse.

Let us hold clearly in mind that most profound idea of Christianity, that the Christ is the Spirit of the earth and that the earth is His body or vesture. And let us take it literally, for we have said that we must weigh in the balance each separate word of such a document as the Gospel of St. John. What do we learn with respect to the “vesture of the earth” when we make a survey of evolution? We learn, first of all, the fact that the vesture of the earth—that is, the solid parts of it—was divided. One person took possession of this part, another of that part. This part belonged to one person, that part to another. Possession, i.e. the extension of the personality through the acquisition of property, is in a certain sense that into which the garment worn by the Christ, the Spirit of the earth, has, in the course of time, been divided. One thing alone could not be divided, but belonged to all; this was the airy envelope surrounding the earth. And from this airy covering, the breath of life was breathed into the human being, as we are shown in the myths of Paradise. Here we have the first rudiments of the ego in the physical body. The air cannot be divided. Let us try to find out whether the one who described Christianity most profoundly in the Gospel of St. John has anywhere indicated this:

And they parted His garments; but His coat they did not divide.

Here you have the words which give you an explanation of how the earth as a whole, together with its airy envelope, is the body or garment, and the coat of the Christ. The garments of the Christ were divided into continents and regions; but not the coat. The air has not been divided; it remains a common possession of all. It is the external, material symbol for the love which is hovering about the earthly globe, which will later be realized.

And in many other connections, Christianity must bring mankind to an acceptance of some of the ancient principles of initiation. If we wish to understand this, we must now characterize initiation. It will suffice, if we consider especially the three main types of initiation; the ancient Yoga, the really specific Christian initiation, and that initiation which is entirely appropriate for men of the present day, the Christian-Rosicrucian initiation. We intend now to describe what course initiation, in general, takes in all three of these forms; what it is and what it represents.

How does a human being become capable of perception in spiritual worlds? First, let me ask, how have you become capable of observing in the physical world? The physical body has sense-organs that make this possible. If you trace human evolution very far back, you will find that in primeval times, the human creature did not yet possess eyes for seeing and ears for hearing in the physical world, but that, as Goethe says, all organs were still undifferentiated. As proof of this, just recall how certain lower animals today still have these undifferentiated organs. Certain lower animals have points through which they can distinguish only light and darkness, and out of these undifferentiated organs, eyes and ears have been moulded and formed. They have been worked into the plastic substance of the physical body. Because your eye has been moulded, there exists for you a world of colour, and because your ear has been sculptured, a world of tone is audible to you. No one has the right to say that a world does not really exist; he may only say, “I do not perceive it.” For to see the world in the true sense of the word, means that I have the organs with which to perceive it. One may say: “I know only this or that world,” but one may not say: “I do not admit of the existence of a world that someone else perceives.” A person who speaks in this manner demands that others too should perceive only just what he himself perceives, but nothing else; he claims authoritatively that only what he perceives is true. When at present someone appears and says: That is all Anthroposophical imagining, what Anthroposophists declare exists, does not exist,” he only proves that he and those like him do not perceive these worlds. We take the positive standpoint. Whoever grants only the existence of what he himself perceives, demands not only that we acknowledge what he knows, but he wishes to make an authoritative decision about something of which he knows nothing. There is no greater intolerance than that shown by official science toward Spiritual Science, and it will become even worse than it has ever been before! It appears in the most varied forms. People are not at all conscious of saying something which they should not allow themselves to say. In many gatherings of very good Christians, one can hear it said: "Anthroposophists talk of some kind of an esoteric Christian teaching, but Christianity needs no esoteric teaching; for only that can be true which a simple, unpretentious mind can perceive and understand," which means, of course, only what the speaker can perceive and understand. He therefore requires that no one should perceive and understand anything different from what he himself perceives and understands. The infallibility of the Pope is quite properly not acknowledged in such Christian assemblies, but the infallibility of the individual is claimed today in the widest circles even by the Christians. Anthroposophy is attacked as a result of this papal standpoint in consequence of which each individual sets himself up as a kind of little pope.

If we consider that the physical sense-world exists for us because the individual organs have been carved into the physical body, it will no longer seem extraordinary when it is said that perception in a higher world rests upon the fact that higher organs have been formed in the higher members of the human organism, in the ether and astral bodies. The physical body is, in this way, already provided with its sense-organs, but the ether and astral bodies are not yet so provided; these have still to be carved into them. When this has been done, there exists what is called perception in the higher worlds.

We shall now speak of the way in which these organs are built into the ether and astral bodies. We have said that in anyone who aspires to initiation and has attained it, higher organs have been developed. How is this accomplished? It is a matter of understanding the human astral body in the state in which it exists in its purity. During the day this astral body is immersed in the physical body. There the forces of the physical body act upon it; it is not then free. It carries out the demands of the physical body; hence it is impossible to begin the development of these higher organs during the day. It can be begun when the astral body is out of the physical body, in sleep; only then can the astral body be moulded. The human astral body can only have its higher sense organs developed when they are carved into it during sleep, while outside the physical body. But we cannot manipulate a sleeping human being; that would not be possible for the modern man, if he wishes to perceive what is happening to him in sleep. If you have him in an unconscious condition, then he cannot observe this. Here there seems to be a contradiction, for the astral body is not conscious of its connection with the physical body during sleep. But indirectly it is possible that during the day the physical body is acted upon and the impressions which it then receives remain within the astral body when this is withdrawn at night. Just as the impressions which the astral body receives from the surrounding physical world have been impressed upon it, so in like manner we must do something quite specific with the physical body, in order that this something be imprinted upon the astral body and then be formed in it in the proper manner. This happens when the human being ceases to live in his customary way during the day, allowing random impressions to enter his consciousness, and takes his inner life in hand by means of a methodical schooling in the manner described. This is called Meditation, Concentration or Contemplation. These are exercises which are as strictly prescribed in the schools for the purpose, as microscopy is prescribed in the laboratories. If a person carries out these exercises, they act so intensely upon him that the astral body is plastically re-shaped when it withdraws during sleep. Just as this sponge adapts itself to the form of my hand as long as I hold it there, but forms itself again according to the forces inherent in it as soon as I release it, so in like manner is it with the astral body; when in sleep it withdraws from the corporality, it follows the astral forces invested in it. Thus it is during the day that we must undertake those spiritual activities by means of which the astral body, during the night, is plastically formed so that organs of higher perception are developed in it.

Meditation can be regulated in a threefold manner. 1. There can be more consideration given to the thought-matter, to the so-called elements of Wisdom, the pure element of thought. This is the Yoga training which deals especially with the element of thought, Contemplation. 2. One can work more upon the feeling through its special cultivation. This is the specifically Christian course. 3. Again one can work through a combination of feeling and will. This is the Christian-Rosicrucian method. To consider the Yoga practice would carry us too far, and it would also have no relationship to the Gospel of St. John. We shall consider the specifically Christian initiation and explain its basis. You must think of this form of initiation as one which a person belonging to the present social order could hardly undergo. It demands a temporary isolation. The Rosicrucian method, however, is the method by which we can work ourselves into the higher worlds without interfering with our duties. What, however, is applicable in principle, we can also fully explain by means of Christian initiation.

This method of initiation has to do exclusively with the feelings, and I shall now have to enumerate seven experiences of the feeling-life; seven stages of feeling, through the experiencing of which the astral body is actually so affected that it develops its organs during the night. Let us describe how the Christian neophyte must live in order that he may pass through these stages. The first stage is what is called “Washing the Feet.” Here the teacher says to the pupil: “Observe the plants. They have their roots in the ground; the mineral earth is a lower being than the plant. If the plant were able to contemplate its own nature, it would have to say to the earth; it is true I am a higher being, but if thou wert not there, I could not exist; for from thee, O earth, I draw most of my sustenance. If the plant were able to translate this into feeling, it would then bow itself down to the stone and say:—I bow myself before thee, O stone, thou humbler being, for I am indebted to thee for my very existence! Then if we ascend to the animal, it would have to behave in a similar manner toward the plant and say: Indeed it is true, I am higher than the plant, but to the lower kingdoms I owe my existence! If in this manner we mount higher and reach the human being, then each individual who stands somewhat higher in the social scale must incline himself to the lower and say: To those on the lower social level I owe my existence! This continues on up to Christ-Jesus. The Twelve who are about Him are at a level lower than Christ-Jesus; but as the plant develops out of the stone, so does the Christ grow out of the Twelve. He bows down to the Twelve and says: I owe you My existence.”

When the teacher had explained this to the pupil, he then said to him: "For weeks must thou surrender thyself to this cosmic feeling of how the superior should incline to the inferior and when thou hast thoroughly developed this feeling within thee, then wilt thou experience an inner and an outer symptom!" These are not the essential things, they only indicate that the pupil has practiced sufficiently. When the physical body was sufficiently influenced by the soul, this was indicated to him by an external symptom in which he feels as though water were lapping over his feet. That is a very real feeling! And he has another very real feeling in which the “Washing of the Feet” appears to him as in a mighty vision in the astral, the inclining of the Higher Self to the lower. Thus the occult student experiences in the astral world what is found depicted in the Gospel of St. John as an historical fact.

At the second stage, the pupil is told: "Thou must develop within thyself yet another feeling. Thou must picture how it would be were all the suffering and sorrow possible in the world to come upon thee; thou must feel how it would be wert thou exposed to the piling up of all possible hindrances, and thou must enter into the feeling that thou must stand erect even though all the adversity of the world were to bear down upon thee!" Then when the pupil has practised this exercise for a sufficient length of time, there are again two symptoms; in the first he has the feeling of being beaten from all sides, and in the second he has an astral vision of the “Scourging.” I am relating what hundreds of people have experienced whereby they have acquired the ability to mount into the higher worlds.

In the third exercise, the pupil had to imagine that the holiest thing that he possesses, which he defends with his whole ego-being, is subjected to jeers and gibes. He must say to himself:—“Come what may, I must hold myself erect and defend what is holy to me.” When he had accustomed himself to this, he felt something like pricking upon his head, and he experienced the “Crown of Thorns” as an astral vision. Again it must be said that the important thing is not the symptoms; they appear as a result of the exercises. Care was also taken that there was no question of suggestion and auto-suggestion.

In the fourth exercise, the pupil's body must become as foreign to his feelings as any external object—a stick of wood for example—and he must not say “I” to his body. This experience must become so much a part of his feelings that he says: “I carry my body about with me as I do my coat.” He connects his ego no longer with his body. Then something occurs which is called the Stigmata. What in many cases might be a condition of sickness is in this case a result of Meditation, because all sickness must be eliminated. On the feet and hands and on the right side of the breast appear the so-called Stigmata; and as an inner symptom, he beholds the “Crucifixion” in an astral vision.

The fifth, sixth and seventh grades of feeling, we can only briefly describe. The fifth grade consists of what is called “The Mystical Death.” Through feelings which the pupil is permitted to experience at this stage, he feels as though, in an instant, a black curtain were drawn before the whole physical, visible world and as though everything had disappeared. This moment is important because of something else that must be experienced, if one wishes to push on into Christian initiation, in the true sense of the word. The pupil then feels that he can plunge into the primal causes of evil, pain, affliction and sorrow. And he can suffer all the evil that exists in the depths of the human soul, when he descends into Hell. That is the “Descent into Hell.” When this has been experienced, it is as though the black curtain had been rent asunder and he looks into the spiritual world.

The sixth step is what is called the “Interment and Resurrection.” This is the stage at which the pupil feels himself one with the entire earth-body. He feels as though he were laid within and belonged to the whole earth planet. His life has been extended into a planetary existence.

The seventh experience cannot be described in words; only one could describe it who is able to think without the physical brain instrument—and for that there is no language, because our language has only designations for the physical plane. Therefore, only a reference can be made to this stage. It surpasses anything that the human being can possibly conceive. This is called the “Ascension” or the complete absorption into the spiritual world.

This completes the gamut of feelings into which the pupil, during waking day-consciousness, must place himself with complete inner equanimity. When the pupil has surrendered himself to these experiences, they act so strongly upon the astral body that, in the night, inner sense-organs are developed, are plastically formed. These seven steps of feeling are not practiced in the Rosicrucian initiation, but the result is the same as that of which we have just spoken.

Thus you see that the important thing in initiation is to influence the astral body in such a way by the indirect means of the day-experiences, that it may, when it is wholly free during the night, take on a new plastic form. When the human being in this manner, as an astral being, has given himself a plastic form, the astral body has become actually a new member of the human organism. He is then wholly permeated by Manas or Spirit-Self.

When the astral body is thus divided, that part which has in this way been plastically formed is brought over into the ether body. And just as you press the seal upon the sealing-wax, and the name on the seal appears not only on the seal, but on the wax as well, so too must the astral body dip down into the ether body and impress upon it whatever it may now possess. The inner process, the working over of the astral body, is the same in all methods of initiation. Only in the method of transmission into the ether body do the individual methods differ. We shall speak tomorrow of these differences and show how the three methods of initiation, which have proved to be the most profound evolutionary impulses in the course of the post-Atlantean age, differ from each other and what significance initiation, in general, has for human evolution. Then these parts of the Gospel of St. John upon which we have not yet been able to touch will also become clear.

Speaking about occultism and the occult development of the human being, one must first and foremost clarify how the cultivation of occult development relates to actual theosophical work in the world. The latter has, since its inception, performed its task precisely by making a certain number of occult truths accessible to mankind. These truths about the super-sensible worlds, which can be learned from the theosophical literature and lectures, are essentially ancient. However, until the last third of the 19th century, it was neither usual nor necessary to share these truths publicly with the world in the form in which they exist today as theosophical truths. The cultivation of these truths was a matter of the so-called secret schools and secret societies.

One who wanted to learn some of the ancient truths about the inner world, had to be, so to speak, an accepted student, a student of the great teachers of mankind. That someone would have travelled around, as we do nowadays, to share certain elemental truths with the world, wasn't done back then. One who was admitted had to provide certain proofs of his character, his intellectual and other abilities, and within the school, there was a very strict division by degree. It was impossible, for example, to reveal to someone who had just been accepted, secrets of higher degrees. In short, everything was strictly ordered, and the world outside did not know anything about the existence of such a secret science, although this is the only true occultism.

Who were those who found their calling there? Usually, they were not known. One was a smith, one a shoemaker, a privy councillor, a carpenter. What was known was only what he represented in the world. One did not know that these people were wise ones, able to deeply look into the spiritual and super-sensible world. This changed in the last third of the 19th century. Today it is necessary that at least the elementary parts of the secret sciences reflected in theosophical texts, lectures and other writings, be made public. That this is possible and why this is so, we will see right away.

First, we must take a look at this past age, which really basically lasted into the 14th century, and also partly into the last third of the 19th century. What is happening now, the publication of certain elemental teachings of occultism had been prepared by the occult movement. This movement was founded in the 14th and 15th centuries by a high-ranking individual who became known to the world under the name of Christian Rosenkreutz.¹ What ‘Christian Rosenkreutz’ is, or who hides behind it, only the initiates know. One thing only is certain, he belongs to the most developed individuals of the modern era, who had to shape the occult knowledge of the Middle Ages in such a way, that it would fit into modern life.

In the last third of the 19th century, some were meant to go out to announce to humanity, what it needs to know today. Theosophy is nothing else but the elementary doctrine of occultism.

If we now look back at those distant times when occultism was practised in secret, there were three avenues by which a human being could come into contact with the super-sensible worlds: First as an initiate, second as a clairvoyant, third as an adept. In the old days, these three methods were kept strictly apart, and if we really want to understand what the occult development of man is all about, then we must clearly understand these three terms.

It is actually known what is meant by a clairvoyant. I specifically note that the more important one is the clairvoyant because he, after all, possesses higher senses. It is very easy to explain what a clairvoyant is. In every human soul, hidden abilities lie dormant. These can be developed, enabling the human being to look into the world hidden from the ordinary senses. There are such secret scientific methods. If a human being practises these himself, then he will no longer be as unconscious during sleep as an ordinary human being. Practising these methods make it possible that his astral body, when it pushes itself out with the Ego, perceives the spiritual world in his surroundings. Initially perceived like flooding light, like light- and colour-phenomena, he then begins to hear during the night.

This is a real experience the human being has of himself: that he, for the time being in a transitional state, is surrounded by a spiritual world as well as by a physical one. This is the beginning of actual clairvoyance.

One who really wants to achieve the state of clairvoyance, must be able to carry across into his day-consciousness what he now sees at night, because it would only be a half-measure if one could only look at night into the astral world. Once he is able to really tune in, so that he sees not only what exists for the physical senses in humans, animals and so on, but also perceives as shining aura that which the human being and the animal feels and experiences, then the state of modern clairvoyance is reached. Therefore, a clairvoyant is someone who can really see into the spiritual world and speak about it.

Let’s assume, there was an area where people have never seen a railroad and someone from there moves to an area where there were railroads. Then he would learn about it through his own experience. He would be able to talk about it at home based on his own experience, just as the clairvoyant can testify about the spiritual world.

But someone who is such a clairvoyant, is not yet what could be called an adept, nor could he be called an initiate. If a man who, according to the example above, has become familiar with a railway by personal experience, now returns home, he would not be entrusted with the task of building a railway. The same applies to the clairvoyant. He is not able to do what someone else can do who has gained practical and scientific knowledge in the super-sensible world. This is how the clairvoyant, who has only seen what exists in the higher worlds, is in comparison to the adept.

Still different is the Initiate. Here is another comparison: Imagine a human being who can see all colours and lights, and another one who is quite short-sighted. The first one doesn’t know anything about the laws of the world of light, the other one, who can’t see far, but as a trained physicist and scientist knows all the laws well. There are people, who are initiated to a high degree, despite them not being clairvoyant; at least this is applicable to all the old schools, but not to the same degree nowadays. In the old days it was possible to work like this, because don’t forget that to teach clairvoyance or train initiates is a lengthy process. Some require many incarnations to achieve this.

Such cooperation of clairvoyants and initiates is now no longer entirely possible; for this reason the Rosicrucian School no longer keeps these things strictly separate. The selflessness, that used to operate in the secret schools, can hardly be comprehended by people today. Especially, in the Egyptian secret schools individuals worked together in this way. Today, the requisite trust no longer exists, and modern man cannot imagine this anymore. This is why initiates and clairvoyants in the Rosicrucian schools were only developed to a certain degree. In contrast, one has to deal very carefully with adeptship as one could only harm the world. Because people are very disinclined to believe that spiritual powers influence everything. A storm would be unleashed and the consequence of this would be that the preparatory understanding would be jeopardised. First, it is necessary for clairvoyants and initiates to teach the occult knowledge, and only then adepts will gradually appear.

What is an adept? They exist in all areas. Observe man himself. Man consists by his nature of a physical, an etheric, and an astral body and an ego. The various limbs of human nature develop quite differently at certain ages. This is a very important consideration. Because, for the occultist a human being is born repeatedly, first physically out of the physical mother. There the physical body is enclosed by the mother’s physical body; different blood circles and juices are moving from mother to child. Once it is physically born, the mother’s physical body is detached from the child completely. This is the first birth. At this point in time the etheric body has not been born. The second birth only happens after the second dentition begins in the seventh year of life. Until then the etheric body is enclosed by the etheric shell, which does not really belong to the specific etheric body of the child. Only in the seventh year of life will the etheric body really be born. The shell will be pushed back, and the outer expression of this process is the appearance of the adult teeth, which the human being will keep. The clairvoyant sees, how, to the extent in which the teeth appear, the etheric body is being born out of his mother’s shell. Until sexual maturity, the human being is still enclosed by its astral mother, who is there from the beginning and will remain also after the seventh year of life. Then the astral mother will be pushed aside, and only now the astral body will be born, like earlier the physical and the etheric body were born. The reaching of sexual maturity means for man, the birth of the astral body. From age twenty-one to twenty-eight only, the ego will be fully born.

Once people realise how this development proceeds, it will become clear what kind of impact this will have on education. I have given a description of this in my paper The education of the child from the perspective of the science of the spirit.² This brochure contains all the rules that need to be taken into consideration in this context. Now, you see, a teacher, who has mastered this system, would be an adept in the area of education.

This practical work appearing from the spiritual worlds is adeptship. Until age seven a kind of hardening (solidification) of forms is happening inside the human being. All forms of the brain, and the bone structures (skeleton) will be created by the seventh year of life. They will continue to grow, but what doesn’t develop by age seven is irretrievable. So something irretrievable can be neglected by education. From then onwards the etheric body becomes free. Now it becomes obvious how the teeth that a human being gets are an expression of proper solidification and formation processes of the etheric body, which is just being born, and show whether they are in correct proportion to each other. These two things are related, the emergence of the teeth and the emergence of the etheric body. Everything that is concerned with growth and reproduction is connected with it. If one of these is not correct, then the other one will not be correct either. This illustrates how the science of the spirit explains how the teeth and the etheric body are connected. For example, women who have bad teeth, are more likely to have been affected by childbed fever.

Something of the principle of solidification and something of the principle of softening must exist—these hardening and softening principles need to exist in balance. Rickits, for example, occurs when the softening principle is stronger. Let us assume that the hardening principle is predominant, then the germs are laid for tuberculosis, for arteriosclerosis.

The moment in which the human being, by applying super-sensible principles, is able to guide the development of the etheric and physical body, he will be an adept in the area of child education, just like Paracelsus,³ who is no longer understood, was an adept, as he could perceive in any moment the invisible principles. Now you can imagine the kind of storm that would break out if you would approach a university with such teachings. Humankind must be prepared step by step, and then it will come to a point where it will demand that spiritual leaders back up their teachings with works from the spiritual world. The reason for the existence of initiates is, that the spiritual world can be researched and found according to its prevailing laws by means of clairvoyance. However, when one has found it and talks about it, then all things that a clairvoyant says can be understood by common sense, and if someone maintains that he cannot understand these, then the reason is not that he isn’t clairvoyant, but that he does not want to use his common sense enough.

Thus, one can be an initiate, without being clairvoyant, but then one has to rely on the clairvoyant. In a certain respect, the theosophical movement aims to help by requiring that all their public teachings are based on clairvoyants’ experience. What do you then want an audience for? In a way, one wants to turn them into Initiates, who comprehend without being clairvoyant themselves.

This is the mission of the theosophical movement. It is also the correct relationship between the teachings that are being given and the way these are made available to the wider audience. Now, this in-depth penetration of the super-sensible world is based on very particular methods. Here, I have already once mentioned specifically the Rosicrucian method,⁴ therefore I will only add a bit.

To raise a human being up into the higher worlds, to turn him into a clairvoyant, requires him to first develop strengths which are already in him: thinking, feeling and willpower. This already includes a lot of the difficulties experienced in the first elementary grades, which are talked about if one intends to alert of dangers. Clairvoyance is for certain people a far too beautiful thing, and those who hear something about Theosophy are keen to achieve clairvoyance. They are not very thrilled when they are told it is necessary to learn something before one gets results.

The first thing one must do is to develop one’s thinking, thoroughly develop it, and certainly prior to becoming a clairvoyant. It is extraordinarily difficult nowadays, to explain what is meant by ‘develop the thinking”. If you can see into the higher world through the opening of the higher senses, you will see that these worlds look very, very different from what you have imagined here. Normally, someone who cannot yet look into them can hardly imagine what one can experience, what kind of impressions there are, and even less so in relation to the world of clairaudience, the harmony of the spheres. One thing, however, remains constant through all worlds: logical thinking. If you have learnt this here, then it is a safe guide in the astral and spiritual worlds. The impressions are totally different, but logic remains the same. This only begins to change in the highest worlds.

What is offered in the theosophical works and books is sensory-free thinking. If one doesn’t learn to do that, then one exposes oneself to a certain danger. One can enable someone else to look into the astral world, but it should not be forgotten, that, if one is not completely standing on the solid ground of healthy thinking, it is extraordinarily difficult there to tell truth from illusion. One who can’t differentiate is simply deranged, he is not spiritually or mentally healthy and thus exposes himself to the danger of losing his balance when the astral world overwhelms him.

One learns to grasp the astral world gradually, by working on one’s feelings, and this happens through imagination. I will show you how this approaches the human being, teaches him, and introduces him to the astral world. This is facilitated by way of converting all ideas a human has, which are normally expressed as dogmas and abstract concepts, into pictures which appear visually. What we are thinking and talking and learning are abstract concepts, thus initially there is speculation. This will lead no one into the higher worlds. Only when the concepts are transformed into pictures does the human being gradually gain access to the higher worlds.

How is this transformation of thoughts into pictures achieved? In the Rosicrucian school, a teacher would say to the student: Look at this plant. With its roots it strives into the ground, its stem rises up straight, on the top is the bloom and the fruit. And now compare the plant with the human being. Superficially thinking one could be tempted to compare the bloom with the human head, and what is down below in the plant with the feet of the human being. In reality, the head of the plant is the root, and what the plant holds chastely up towards the light are its fertility organs. This is exactly the opposite of what is the case with humans.

The bloom has turned these organs towards the light. Imagine this whole thing exactly—if you wouldn’t turn the plant’s fertility organs up towards the light, but down towards the centre of the earth, then they would be penetrated by desire and passion. Thus, we find in a human being a reversed plant, at once pervaded by desires and passions. Thus, the human body is flesh whilst the plant body, the chaste one, is a body that has not yet developed into flesh.

And now look at an animal: It stands between plant and human. Plant, animal and the human being upwards form the cross that extends throughout the whole of nature. Now the student is told: Look at the plant, how it turns its calyx upwards, is kissed by the sun, by the beam of light called the holy lance of love. The human being had to exchange the plant body with the one of flesh pervaded by desire, but he has a high ideal in front of his eyes.

Here we must observe the human heart and the larynx. There are two types of organs in a human body, those, which are on the path to imperfection, and which will incrementally fall away, and others that are only in the stage of formation. All the lower organs, the sexual organs will fall away. Heart and larynx, on the other hand, are organs which will only be perfected in the future, and will only then be developed.

I am speaking to you. My thoughts are within me. I put these into words that originate from my larynx, and create sound vibrations, and in this way, my thoughts communicate with your soul. The voice box is the apparatus to produce airwaves and bring out that which is in the soul. If someone would invent a device through which these waves could be solidified, then you would be able to pick up my thoughts, and my words. In the future, the larynx will not only produce words, but one day it will become the creative, reproductive organ, and will create future beings similar to humans.

During certain times the plant-like nature of the human was not yet penetrated by the lusting passionate nature of the flesh. Those specific organs, which were the latest to develop out of the animal nature, will first disappear again. These are the reproductive organs. These remained for a long time as plant organs after the human being had already appeared in flesh. For this reason, there exist pictorial collections where pictures of hermaphrodites⁵ with plant organs are on display. When the Bible tells about Eve’s fig leaf, in reality, this is a symbol of the fact that these organs were the last to develop in the flesh. In this way, the religious texts must be interpreted. The sexual organs are declining organs, whilst the larynx is in a process of complete transformation, and once the human being has become chaste again, the larynx will turn itself again towards the spiritual sun. The calyx of the plant developed into the form of the flesh filled with passionate desires, and then the larynx will once again become a chaste, pure calyx, fertilised by Spirit, which will be raised up towards the holy lance of love. This is also the symbol of the Holy Grail, its high ideal.

Compare this, try to feel and re-experience all the shivers those images aroused; then you will have only one of those images which are given to a Rosicrucian student. And while you are wandering through these, then you will realise bit by bit that your feelings become facts for you. You will perceive that these feelings radiate light. It always radiates, but the lower human being doesn’t see it. One who experiences this mystical part of imagination learns to see his feelings. This is the beginning.

Not magic, but an intimate process of imagination happens at the beginning of the rise to clairvoyance. But here one thing needs to become clear because from that moment onwards you will see everything emanating from yourself. When one actually starts to transform the inner life into light, one has to be able to bear what is then seen. This requires a strength of character which hardly anyone can imagine. For example, if you, not being clairvoyant, tell a lie this is bad enough. But if you are clairvoyant and tell a lie, and you then see how the lie becomes visible and what it means on the astral plane, then you will understand why it is said that there a lie is murder. And this is so. Just assume you have seen an event happening, and have formed an idea about it, and then tell something that is incorrect, i.e., something that is a lie. Then from the object emanates the correct and from you the false stream and these two will collide and cause a terrible explosion; and each time you do this, you attach a hideous creature to your karma that you can't get rid of until you have made good what you have lied about.

Everyone who wants to become clairvoyant needs to develop three virtues, which are crucial for him. First, self-confidence is needed to be sure of oneself. Second, self-awareness is needed so one is never allowed to shy away from recognising one’s mistakes. And third, presence of mind is needed since one will encounter many things on the astral plane that, while present around us all the time, are something else to see. For this reason these characteristics must be developed first and foremost, and it is really nonsense that some sort of schools or societies train people to become clairvoyants without guiding them in this way.

If now in a different way, a student will be taught namely through occult texts, he will be guided upwards into the spiritual Devachan world to hearing. There one must immerse oneself into those pictures which exist for the development of the human being. I will place one such picture as an example in front of your soul.

Think of the ancient times, when the human being had just come into existence in his current form. In those days Earth was a warm, glowing fireball, and all metals and minerals were melted in the glowing Earth. The physicist would say human beings could not exist there. In those days the human being climbed down from the Godhead and formed himself in the glowing matter. This transformation was a lengthy process. If you were able to see what the clairvoyant can perceive, you would see that he had wrapped himself into a body of fire.

Where has the fire that was burning on the Earth now gone? Where is it? It is in your blood. All the warmth that has been inside the human beings and the animals was and is the fire glow of the Earth. And once you will be able to transform your blood again, so that it shines—and this will be the case when the human larynx will be transformed into the Holy Grail—then the human beings will once again send out an abundance of light. If someone now immerses himself into a picture like this one, then he can achieve clairvoyance, clairaudience. I wish to point to the introduction to the Apocalypse of John which states: “The revelation of Jesus Christ, that God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place.” These are pictures that have been used for development in Rosicrucian schools. The clairvoyant must learn to decipher such pictures. The development of the Earth will be the Word, and the Word will be with man, and man will create human beings through the Word.

• 1. Christian Rosenkreutz: Not recognised by public history as a real historic figure of the 14th/15th century, Christian Rosenkreutz became legendarily known from two anonymous Rosicrucian texts Fama Fraternitatis, ot the Discovery of the Brotherhood of the Highly Laudable Order of R.C., Kassel 1614, and Confessio Fraternitatis or Confession of the laudable Brotherhood of the highly honourable Rose Cross, Kassel 1615. According to this, he was a German of noble birth who lived from 1378 to 1484. The name appears for the first time in a text handwritten and as such distributed in 1604, and in 1616 anonymously published in the text The Chymical Wedding of Christiani Rosencreutz, Anno 1459. Rudolf Steiner presented the author of this text, Johann Valentin Andreae, as the carrier of inspiration of Christian Rosenkreutz. Refer to Rudolf Steiner, The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz in Philosophy and Anthroposophy. Collected Essays 1904-1923, GA 35. The essay is also contained in the translation of The Chymical Weddinginto New High German by Walter Weber, Basel 1978., According to Rudolf Steiner, Christian Rosenkreutz was a real historical personality. Compare also, The Esoteric Christendom and the Spiritual Leadership of Humanity, GA 130.
• 2. The Education of the Child from the perspective of Spiritual Science, first published in 1907.
• 3. Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, 1493-1541, doctor and philosopher.
• 4. Refer to note 1(Chapter 1) above. Obviously, the deliberations of Rudolf Steiner at this point have been only fragmentarily captured by the note taker. For better comprehension it is referred to the presentation in the lecture dated 15 September 1909; Lecture 1 in The Luke Gospel cycle, GA 114.
• 5. Beings who have male and female gender characteristics.

We have spoken at length about the relationship between a humanistic worldview and a social approach to life. We are discussing these matters because it is necessary today, from various points of view, to recognize how a thorough recovery of our lives and a truly fruitful development towards the future are only possible if spiritual-scientific views and ideas enter into the way people think and imagine.

Besides what I said recently about looking back on life, there is something else that applies to this life review. I have drawn your attention to the fact that when a person looks back on his life, he should actually be aware that he is only aware of discontinuous elements of his life with his ordinary consciousness, and that between these discontinuous links, which man looks back on, are the states of sleep, which actually fall away, with regard to which man, in terms of his retrospective view, even indulges in a certain delusion. He assumes that life is continuous; but it is not continuous. This life is such that it only shows us fragmented episodes. But from the spiritual-scientific background one should be clear about the fact that what is not perceived from the review of life is nevertheless an experience, just as much an experience as that which is incorporated into ordinary consciousness.

Now, the experiences that the human soul always undergoes between falling asleep and waking up are not easy to describe, because the person has to free themselves from a number of things that are part of their usual perception of consciousness if they are to have any idea at all of the experiences that take place between falling asleep and waking up.

We live for ordinary life in space and time. When we are completely asleep – from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, speaking now – then it is the case that we live neither in ordinary time nor in ordinary space. When we recall what happens to us in the time between falling asleep and waking up, the memory itself is a kind of shadow image or, as they say, a projection of the experience during sleep into the space and time of waking day life.

But if you want to take a closer look at these conditions, then you must also bear in mind that the state of sleep is not merely rest in relation to the waking state. It is precisely in this respect that one of the cases arises in which people judge more out of preconceived ideas than out of real observation. One might ask, if one calls the ordinary waking life the normal state of man: When does rest occur? Rest actually only exists in two points, at the moment of falling asleep and at the moment of waking up. In a sense, falling asleep and waking up are zero compared to the waking state during the day. But the state of sleep is not zero; the state of sleep is the opposite. We must here resort to the favorite comparison from arithmetic. You may, for instance, have some property, say fifty francs; then you have something. When have you nothing? Well, just when you have nothing. But if you owe fifty francs, then you have less than nothing, then you have the negative. Thus, in relation to waking, nothingness is falling asleep and waking up; in relation to the ordinary waking state, the state of sleep itself is the negative. For while we sleep, processes opposite to those of waking occur, processes of a completely different kind, processes that, above all, in their reality, are not subject to the laws of space and time like the processes of waking daytime life.

But, as you may have already suspected from my previous lecture, it is actually only in this state of sleep that our real self is truly in its element. The self certainly lives in our will, but even there it sleeps, as we know. The real self does not enter into our ordinary thought life. We would not even be aware of the real self if we did not perceive it as a kind of negative. And when we look back on our experiences, we do not say to ourselves: We have experienced days and nights – but we only look back on the days. And instead of saying: We look back on the nights – we say: “I” – we feel, we perceive ourselves as I.

People must gradually come to understand such truths, otherwise they will be crushed by the purely scientific world view, which has indeed taken hold of all other life, of all other views of life, in the majority of modern people. We will only be able to know ourselves completely as human beings if we say to ourselves at every moment of our lives: You are not only a human being in flesh and blood who has a consciousness, as is familiar to most people now living, but you are a human being who has only slipped out of his body from the moment he falls asleep until he wakes up. But then you live under completely different circumstances than in ordinary waking life, and only then, between falling asleep and waking up, is your ego in its actual element; there it can unfold, there it is what it can lay claim to: to be substantial. During daytime wakefulness, our ego is present only in our volition. In thinking, in imagining and even in a large part of feeling, of sensing, only images of the ego are present.

Therefore, it is a great mistake when some philosophers claim that there is a reality in what a person addresses as his or her self. Only when a person awakens in sleep in higher consciousness would he become aware of his real self. Or if he were to see through what the process of the will is, then he would experience his real self in willing.

But these things must actually pass over into the human being's intuitive perception, into his feeling, if they are to play the right role in life. Man must, so to speak, be able to say to himself: You are a being who, with his ordinary conception of the world, actually perceives only one half of it; you are embedded with the other half of this being, continually in supersensible experiences, which you cannot perceive with your ordinary consciousness alone. A certain reverence for the creative principles behind man can only be attained by man in the right way, when he can connect with the supersensible in this way. Therefore, in a materialistic age like ours, not only will the view of the supersensible fade away, but in such an age reverence for the creative principles of the world will also fade away. Respect will have vanished altogether from human hearts. There is little respect and few feelings in the present time that can truly uplift the soul to the supersensible! And much of the sentiment that people try to preserve is nothing more than a certain sentimentality, and sentimentality is at the same time also untrue, sentimentality is never completely true.

When one – and I must mention this again on this occasion – takes such things into one's consciousness, intellectually and emotionally, then the fact that human and world life has something of the character of a great mystery comes before one's soul's eye. And without this view, that life and the order of the world are a mystery, real progress in the development of humanity cannot really be imagined. Epochs such as our own, in which no one really wants to believe that life contains secrets, can basically only be episodes. They can serve to cut people off from their own origins for a while, and then, precisely through the reaction against this cutting off, they can penetrate all the more to a real feeling for the mystery of life. But this mystery of life can reveal itself to man neither out of sentimentality nor out of abstraction. It can only reveal itself when man is inclined to enter concretely into the facts of the supersensible world. And it will be something of a beginning of such an engagement with supersensible facts if one can really develop a kind of sacred feeling when entering into the state of sleep and can develop a sacred feeling with regard to looking back into this state of sleep, in which one, one may, without actually speaking figuratively, characterize it in this way: was in the dwellings of the gods.

Ultimately, we must realize how far removed our present-day view of life is from this idea, how thoughtlessly the present human race sees this other side of life. But how can we see through what lies beyond birth and death if we cannot see through what lies beyond falling asleep and waking up? For that which lies in man beyond birth and death is also there between birth and death; only between birth and death it is hidden behind the physical shell. But if there were less egotistical religiosity and more altruistic religiosity - I have already spoken of this - then in what man lives through from birth on, the continuation of prenatal life or life before conception would be seen in the spiritual world. But then the phenomena in human life would appear to us as miracles, and we would constantly have the need to unravel them. We would have the longing to see the revelation of that which is formed, embodied from supersensible worlds into the sensible world, through human evolution. And basically, it is already the case today that we can only understand the after-death life in the right way if we look at the prenatal life.

You see, there are secrets of life. A number of secrets of life must be revealed in our time because of the developmental demands of humanity. A human being cannot become aware of their full humanity if they do not broaden their view of themselves to include prenatal and post-mortem life. For we only know part of our being if we do not allow the prenatal and post-mortem to reveal themselves to us in this physical existence. Even today it is still extraordinarily difficult to speak of these things to people who have not been introduced to them through anthroposophy, because either there is the utmost interest in these things, in which case the truth is not allowed to come among people, or there is a lack of proper understanding. You only need to look around in life, then you will find that the usual world views today pay very, very little attention to prenatal life. They care about the afterlife out of selfishness, because they demand not to perish with their physical body. And the religious denominations count on this selfishness by basically only speaking of the afterlife, not of the prenatal life.

But the matter is not just that, but it is still difficult today to talk about these things because it is a dogma of the Catholic Church not to believe in prenatal life, a dogma that other Christian denominations have also adopted. So that pretty much most Christian denominations today consider it heresy to speak of prenatal life. But it is something that reaches extraordinarily deep into the spiritual development of humanity when one dogmatically forbids looking at prenatal life. It is indeed difficult to imagine — and here I am not speaking of conscious things, but rather of unconscious ones in the development of humanity — that anything could succeed more in lulling man into illusions about his actual being than withholding from him views about prenatal life. For the whole view of man is falsified by the fact that people are deceived into believing that the mere fact of being born of father and mother is the only reason man is placed on earth at all. By withholding man's insight into prenatal life, the church has created an enormous means of exerting power. Therefore the church as such will fight in the most terrible way against all those teachings that dwell on prenatal life. The church will not tolerate that. There should be no illusions about that; but nor should there be any illusion that life simply cannot be understood if no consideration is given to prenatal life.

But something will follow from this that you should really take into account deeply and thoroughly. Consider this: it was in the interest of the church creeds to withhold important information about themselves from people. The church creeds have made it their mission to withhold the most important truths about themselves from people. These church creeds have thus found their means to envelop people in dullness, in illusion. And today it is necessary not to succumb to any illusions on this point, not to compromise out of any kind of indulgence with all kinds of church dogmas. There is no compromising on this. And it should be noted that it is of no avail to assert somewhere: Anthroposophy is concerned with the Christ, it is not atheistic, it is not pantheistic either, and so on. This will never help you, for the church creeds will not be annoyed that you do not concern yourself with the Christ; they do not care much about that, but they will be annoyed precisely because you do concern yourself with the Christ. For it matters to them that they have the monopoly on saying anything about Christ. In these matters one must not practice inner indulgence, otherwise one will always be tempted to shroud the most important things in life in twilight and fog and illusion. Humanity today has a need to approach spiritual knowledge. But dogmatic church creeds are the ones that are most opposed to spiritual knowledge, especially those dogmatic church creeds that have gradually developed in the West. The Church as such cannot actually be hostile to spiritual knowledge; that is quite impossible, because the Church as such should actually only be concerned with the feelings of man, with ceremonies, with worship, but not with the life of thought. The educated Oriental does not understand the Western church creeds at all, because the educated Oriental knows exactly: he is bound to the external cult; it is his duty to devote himself to the ceremonies to which he devotes himself in his confession. He can think whatever he wants. In the Oriental confession one still knows something of freedom of thought. This freedom of thought has been completely lost to Europeans. They have been educated in the bondage of thought, especially since the 8th or 9th century AD. That is why it is so difficult for people of Western culture to understand the things I mentioned the other day: that it is easy to prove any opinion. You can prove one opinion and you can prove its opposite. Because the fact that something can be proved is no proof of the truth of what is asserted. To arrive at the truth, one must go into much deeper layers of experience than those in which our usual proofs lie. But certain church creeds have not wanted to bring experience to the surface; therefore they have separated people from such truths as these: There you stand, O human being! As your organism develops from infancy, what you have lived through in prenatal life gradually develops within you.

And what, in particular, develops mainly from prenatal life in the individual human life between birth and death?

Now, we distinguish between an individual life and a social life in a human being. If you do not keep these two poles of human experience separate, you cannot arrive at any concept of the human being at all: individual life – that which we have, so to speak, as our most personal sense of ownership every day, in every hour; social life – that which we could not have if we did not constantly exchange ideas and engage in other interactions with other people. The individual and the social play into human life. Everything that is individual in us is basically the after-effect of prenatal life. Everything we develop in our social life is the germ of our after-death life. We have even seen recently that it is the germ of karma. So we can say: there is the individual and the social in man. The individual is the after-effect of the prenatal life. The social is the germ of the after-death life.

The first part of this truth, that the individual is, so to speak, the after-effect of prenatal life, can be seen particularly clearly by studying people with special talents. Let us say, because it is good to look at the root of the matter in such cases, that we study human genius. Where does the power of genius come from? Man brings the genius into this life through his birth. It is always the result of pre-birth life. And since, understandably, pre-birth life is particularly evident in childhood — later, a person adapts to life between birth and death, but in childhood everything that a person experienced before birth comes out — that is why, in the case of genius, the childlike manifests itself throughout life. It is virtually the characteristic of genius to retain the childlike throughout life. And it is even part of genius to retain youthfulness and childlikeness until the very last days, because all genius is connected with prenatal life. But not only genius, all talents, everything that makes a person an individuality is connected with prenatal life. Therefore, if you give people the dogma that there is no prenatal life, that there is no preexistence, what are you implicitly doing with it? You are spreading the doctrine that there is no reason for special individual talents. — You know that the actual church creeds, when they are completely sincere and honest, profess that there are no reasons for personal talents. It is not right to deny personal talents themselves; but if you deny their reasons, then you can consider personal talents to be quite meaningless.

This is connected with the fact that an education of European humanity has emerged from the church confessions, as they have prevailed for centuries, which has ultimately led to the modern levelling of people. What are people's individual talents today? And what would individual talents be if the usual socialist doctrine were implemented? In these matters, it is less important to look at the outward name of a thing than at the inner connections. A person who is a Catholic believer in dogma on the one hand and a hater of social-democratic teachings on the other is subject to a very strange inconsistency. He is as inconsistent as someone who says: I met a little boy in 1875, I was very fond of him then, and I am still very fond of him today. But now someone says to him: But look, the little boy of 1875 has become the guy who is now standing in front of you as a Social Democrat. Yes, so the answer goes, I still like the little boy of 1875 in his life back then, but I don't like, I hate, the man he has become. But social democracy grew out of Catholicism! Catholicism is just the little boy who has grown into social democracy. The latter does not want to admit it, nor does the former want to admit it, but only because people do not want to see any liveliness in the external social sphere, but only want to see something made of papier-mâché. When you make something out of papier-mâché, it remains stiff and keeps its form as long as it lasts; but that which is in the social life grows and lives and can also be preserved. But here one must distinguish between 'deception and reality. You see, you distinguish between deception and reality when you, for example, come up with the following idea. 8th century: Catholicism; 20th century: From the real Catholicism of the 8th century, social democracy has emerged! And what is present as Catholicism alongside it is not the real Catholicism of the 8th century, but its imitation, counterfeit Catholicism; for real Catholicism has since grown into social democracy.

This is not generally recognized, not because people are unwilling to face reality, but because they create illusions and deceptions to shield themselves from reality. And it is easy for them to do so. For one simply gives the same name to what has long since ceased to be itself. But if today what is represented in Europe from Rome - I have to describe it - is given the name Catholicism in the same sense as what was represented in the 8th century from Rome, it is just the same as if I were to say of a sixty-year-old man: “He's just the eight-year-old lad!” Once upon a time he was an eight-year-old lad, but today he is no longer an eight-year-old lad.

I am drawing your attention here to something that needs to be considered because social life, too, may be seen as something alive and not as something inanimate and dead. And until such things are seen through, present-day humanity will not rise to an understanding of real social life. The social life has its roots in spheres that we today no longer grasp with our externalized names in any language, at best in the oriental languages, a little in the European languages, least of all in English or American, which is of course very far removed from reality. So our languages are obstacles to understanding the social. Therefore, humanity will only advance in its understanding of the social if it emancipates itself from mere linguistic understanding. But today, anything that goes beyond mere linguistic understanding is very much condemned. And what is most often found today is that when something is to be explained, some kind of word explanation is presented first. But it does not matter what you call a thing, what word you use for it; the important thing is to lead people to the thing and not to the word. So, above all, we must overcome the bondage of languages if we want to advance to social understanding. But the bondage of languages will only be overcome if the greatest prejudices of our time are overcome. During the years of terror that we have gone through, the cry rang out throughout the world: Freedom to the individual nations! — and the smallest nations today want to create their own social structures. A passion, a paroxysm of nationalism has come over humanity, and this is just as damaging to the social life of the earth as materialism is to the life of thought. And just as man must work his way out of materialism to freedom and spirituality, so must humanity work its way out of all nationalism, in whatever form it may appear, to universal humanity. Without this, no progress can be made.

However, we will not find the possibility in languages of completely getting out of nationalism if these languages do not draw on deeper forms of expression for the spiritual. You see, I would like to conclude these reflections more or less with an image. If you reflect on this image, which I will use, you will be able to come up with many things that may be important for your understanding of the present time. Look at any piece of writing today. These little devils standing on the white paper are called letters, which you put next to each other. They have grotesque forms and in their juxtaposition they then signify the sounds of our languages. This goes back to other more expressive forms of writing. And if we trace this back very far, we come to the forms of writing, let us say, as the Egyptians had them, or what the original Sanskrit was like, which more or less developed entirely from the snake character in its forms. The Sanskrit signs are transformed snake forms with all kinds of things attached to them. The Egyptian forms of writing were still painted, drawn forms of writing, were still pictures, and in their oldest times were even the imagination of that which was depicted. The writing was directly out of the spiritual. Then writing became more and more abstract until it became what was more or less bad enough: our ordinary writing, which is only connected to what it represents by learning its forms.

Then came something even more terrible, shorthand, which is now the deathblow to the whole system that developed out of ancient pictographic writing. This downward development must give way to an upward one; we must return to a development that leads us out of all that we have been driven into, especially with writing. And with that an attempt was made to make a beginning. Here on this hill at Dornach it stands. However much is lacking in the Dornach building, however much is imperfect, it is something in its forms that expresses in a contemporary way the supersensible essence to which the human being is meant to aspire today. I would like to say that it is also meant as a world hieroglyph. If you really study its individual forms, you will be able to read much more in them than you can absorb from descriptions of the spiritual. This is at least the intention. The intention is to realize a world scripture in it. Writing emerged from art, and writing must return to art. It must go beyond symbolism, allow the spiritual within itself to live directly, by becoming a hieroglyph again in a new way.

What is written here on this hill will only be properly understood if one says to oneself: There are many demands of humanity in the present time that should have an answer. Basically, the language of today is not sufficient to provide an answer. Such an answer is attempted with the forms of this building. Much in it is imperfect; but the attempt at such an answer has been made through this building. And if one looks at it from this point of view, then one will look at it in the right way.

This is what I wanted to add to the previous reflections.

In recent times, the question of the unconscious has come to the fore and is often spoken of in psychology. Everything in human soul life that cannot be reached, observed or explained by ordinary consciousness is relegated to the region of the unconscious. When this unconscious realm is mentioned, it is always supposed—notwithstanding the assumption that it must remain unknown—that it contains forces that do work into the conscious soul life. The emergence of this idea of the unconscious is due wholly to the fact that a certain skepticism, indeed a feeling of impotence, has arisen in recent times in regard to solving specific problems of philosophy, cosmology and religion. The insight that we have described here as imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge has the task now of probing into this undefined reservoir, which figures in so many ways in recent science as “the unconscious.” It is just by means of this supersensible knowledge—by reaching other levels of consciousness in which a different soul condition exists, hence a different perceptual capacity—that the concrete facts, which are not accessible to ordinary consciousness, must be investigated. Today I would like to give you an example of such research in an unconscious region of the soul, namely the experiences the human soul undergoes between going to sleep and waking.

Ordinary consciousness remains quite unconscious of what happens to the human soul in sleep. But we should not believe that these experiences have less meaning or are less decisive in a man's life than experiences of waking consciousness. Certainly, for external life, for our work and activities, for humanity's outer progress, the waking hours are of primary consideration. But for the configuration and the development of man's inner being, the rich experiences of the state of sleep are of the first importance. Even though man remains unconscious of them, these experiences are real, and their after-effects play into waking life. Man's general mood of soul during his waking hours is permeated by the after-effects of sleep. His physical and etheric organizations, which are worked upon by his astral organization and his actual spiritual organization, that is to say his ego organism, are permeated also. They too are influenced during waking life by the after-effects of sleep.

For ordinary consciousness the phenomena of sleep appear as follows: sense perception begins to dim down, in the end it is entirely extinguished; the same also happens in the case of thinking, feeling and willing. Except for the transitional state when we are dreaming, man sinks into an unconscious condition. But what happens to the soul then—and this must be strongly emphasized—is something absolutely real. What remains unconscious to ordinary consciousness in this respect can be illuminated by imaginative, inspired and intuitive cognition. Therefore, I will describe for you

the soul's experiences during sleep. At least sketchily, I will describe how imagination, inspiration and intuition can perceive what, for ordinary consciousness, is unconscious. I will outline the soul's experiences as if they were lived through consciously, for they are experienced consciously through higher cognition. It is not as if the soul were unconscious throughout the night, but what would otherwise have remained unconscious can be seen by means of imagination, inspiration and intuition. Light can in this way be cast upon it so that it becomes visible. The following then comes into view.

When man first enters into the state of sleep, the sense world around him ceases to exist for the soul. He goes into an inner experience that is undifferentiated, in a certain sense indefinite. The soul feels—I say feels but it does not feel; if it were conscious, it would feel—it feels enlarged as in a widespread fog. In this inward feeling and experiencing during this first stage of sleep subject and object cannot at first be distinguished. No separate phenomena and facts are distinguishable; it is a general sensing of a nebulous universality, which is sensed as one's own existence. But simultaneously there appears in the sleeping person what may be called a deep need to rest in the divine essence of the cosmos. With this outflowing of experience into an undifferentiated condition is mixed an indefinite longing—one must use such a word after all—“to rest in God. “ As I said, I describe it as if the events, experienced unconsciously, were passed through consciously. Thus, the external world of daytime, everything the soul receives through the senses, is swallowed up. All the stimuli through which the soul feels in the body are gone and, likewise, all the impulses by means of which the soul sends its will through the body are gone. The soul has at first a general, universal sensation accompanied by a longing for God.

In this condition, which arises initially after falling asleep, dreams can intervene. They are either symbolic pictures of outer experiences, memory pictures, symbolic images of inner bodily conditions, and so on, or they are dreams in which certain true facts of the spiritual world can be intermingled without the ordinary dreamer being able to acquire a definite knowledge of what the dreams really contain. Even for one who views this condition of soul with imaginative cognition—for by means of it one can do this already—dreams do not throw light upon the inner facts, rather do they veil the real truth. For this truth, in relation to what is meant here, can only be perceived by a person, if, out of his own free will, he prepares himself in an appropriate manner through soul exercises such as have been described here. Only as a result of these soul exercises can a clear view of this first stage of sleep be attained.

If you look with such cognitional faculties into this first stage of sleep, when you can divine it, it shows itself to be similar to, but not exactly the same as the unconscious experiences of earliest childhood. Indeed, if man were in a position to bring these experiences to consciousness and pour them into the concepts and ideas of ordinary consciousness, such as philosophy is occupied with, then these philosophical ideas would attain reality. The philosophy to which we should thus attain would be something real. So it can also be said that in the first stage of every sleep man becomes an unconscious philosopher. He attains to what in waking consciousness is cultivated in his soul as ideas, as dialectics and logical laws. If the flowing into the cosmic mists of the etheric world and the soul's longing to rest in God could be permeated with the experience of actuality, if man could bring these two soul experiences to consciousness and pour them into abstract philosophical ideas, then these ideas would come alive. Philosophy would then be as it was in Greece before Socrates, and in still earlier epochs of humanity. It would be an inwardly experienced reality.

We have now learned to know two stages of man's unfolding: that of his earliest childhood, which, if brought to consciousness, would represent the reality of philosophical ideas and the experience of the first stage of sleep, which, as we have noted, is quite similar to the unconscious experience of childhood, and which, when brought to consciousness, could in the same way give a living experience of reality to a philosophy worked out during waking life. That describes the first, somewhat brief stages that a human being undergoes from the time of falling asleep to waking up.

After the soul has been for a time in the state of sleep described above, another condition sets in. This second stage of sleep is such that instead of the experience of his own physical and etheric bodies, which he has when awake, man has a form of experience through which he feels inside himself the cosmos that in daytime surrounds him. While in the first stage the soul experiences no clear distinction between subject and object, this difference now becomes increasingly meaningful except that during sleep man has come into the reverse condition from that of being awake. He now feels and experiences himself in the cosmos and looks back on his physical and etheric organisms as upon an object. Just as he vaguely feels his organs—lungs, liver, heart, and so on—in day consciousness, now, in sleep, he experiences the cosmic content within himself; he himself becomes, as it were, cosmos in his soul. Not as if he extended out into the whole cosmos; rather, he experiences something like a reflection of the cosmos within him.

The first unconscious experience—which even so is wholly real—is, I might say, a fragmentation of this inner soul experience. The soul feels as if it were divided up into many separate parts of a manifoldness. It feels itself not as a unity but as a multiplicity; as if, when awake, we were to experience ourselves in the brain not as a homogeneous being but as a multiplicity of eyes, ears, lungs, liver and so on, and we were missing the sense of unity. Thus, during sleep, we experience, so to say, the cosmic ingredients without at first experiencing their unity. That brings about a condition of soul which, if we were conscious of it, we should have to describe as permeated by anxiety, even fear. The soul, however, really experiences the objective processes that cause this nightly anxiety, just as the organic processes of the physical and etheric organisms underlie what might be experienced here or there by the soul as anxiety coming from within. They are, in fact, fear-inspiring occurrences that the soul has to live through.

In this stage of sleep, occurrences of waking life now reveal their effects. For modern man living after the Mystery of Golgotha there appear the after-effects of what he experiences in waking life as inner religious devotion to Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha. The attention man gives to it, all reverence and worship that he develops for the Christ and that Mystery during his waking life, have after-effects in this second stage of sleep. It was otherwise for those who lived on earth before the Mystery of Golgotha. They received from their religious leaders appropriate measures, religious functions to carry out, whose effects they could carry over into sleep and that worked there in such a way that this anxiety could gradually be overcome. For a person living after the Mystery of Golgotha his inner bond with Christ, his feeling of belonging to Him, the religious rituals directed to Christ Jesus, his whole relation to Him and his actual conduct in reference to this relationship, all this now works into the life of sleep and helps to overcome that anxiety which oppresses the soul.

As I said, I describe things as they appear to inspired consciousness, but they certainly are experienced by the soul as reality. So, while I present concepts taken from conscious life, the actual corresponding processes are really present in the life of the soul. If, in daytime, we have developed a relation to the Christ, we actually meet His guiding power during this second stage of sleep. It is this guiding power of Christ through which we overcome the anxiety that oppresses the soul. Out of this anxiety there develops a cosmic relationship of the soul to the world. As a result of the development of this relationship, but in such a way that the soul experiences it as its inner life, the movements of the planetary system in our solar cosmos stand before the soul. It does not expand out into the planetary world during sleep, but an inner replica of it lives in the soul. It actually experiences the planetary cosmos in a replica. Even if what the soul experiences every night as a small, inner globe, a celestial globe, does not illuminate day consciousness, it does stream into the reality of daily life and continues on in the physical and etheric organizations in the systems of breathing and blood circulation, the whole rhythmic system, we find that these processes are accompanied by impulses and stimuli that live in the physical and the etheric body and work into waking life out of the inner planetary experience which the soul has in sleep. While we are awake, therefore, the planetary movements of our solar system pulse through our breathing and circulation as after-effects of sleep.

During sleep—supersensible vision shows us that astral and ego organizations are outside the physical and etheric bodies—the planetary movements do not work directly. They are experienced by the soul outside the physical and etheric organisms. But within the sleeping physical body the impulses from the previous night echo and reverberate, the same impulses that have pulsated through breathing and circulation during the day. During the following night an after-effect of these impulses is present, and they are renewed the next morning as a consequence of what the soul experienced in the night as an inner replica of the planetary cosmos.

Now in addition to this cosmic experience during the second stage of sleep something else happens. The soul receives distinct impressions of all the relationships it has ever entertained with human souls in its various lives on earth. We actually have within us, I might say, “markings” of all the relationships we have had with other human souls in successive earth lives. They now appear before the soul in a certain pictorial form. Although unconsciously, the soul really experiences everything that has been good or bad in its dealings with other people. Likewise, it experiences its developing relationships with spiritual beings who dwell in the cosmos and never live in a physical body, who always live in a super-sensible existence as opposed to the physical life of man. The human soul in sleep thus lives in a rich network of relations with those human souls with whom it has established such connections. These connections reappear, as does everything that has remained from them as after-effects of the right and wrong a person has done to others, the good and evil he may have caused. In short, the existing destiny of a person confronts his soul in this stage of sleep.

What an older philosophy has called karma appears at this stage every night before man's soul. Since the planetary experiences continue to work as stimuli in the breathing and blood circulation, and thus in man's physical and etheric organizations, it is possible for someone capable of perceiving such things through inspired cognition to observe that this experience of repeated earth lives also plays over into day consciousness, even though it is not directly present. It is clearly evident to inspired cognition, which perceives what the soul experiences, that repeated earth lives are a fact, for to the view of inspiration they present themselves directly together with the relationships established at any time with other people. Man's development through repeated earth lives presents itself because these relationships are beheld. One relationship points back to one certain earth life, another points to another life, and so on. In this way, karma appears before man's eyes as an established fact.

The experiences of the soul during sleep work in such a manner into day consciousness that man's general mood, making itself felt during the day in the form of a dull awareness of himself, depends on what we undergo in this second stage of sleep. Whether we feel happy or unhappy in our dimly perceived inner self, whether we feel lively or languid, is to a great extent the result of what is experienced in this stage of sleep. So, during this stage we find ourselves actually outside in the cosmos, even though what we experience within the soul is a copy of the cosmos; and what we experience of repeated earth lives and karma appears before the soul as images and reflections. These replicas of the cosmos and our destiny that stand before our soul contain what can be called man's inner existence in the cosmos. If you are able to formulate in concepts and ideas what has been attained through inspired cognition by letting it stream back into ordinary consciousness, you arrive at a true cosmology that encompasses the whole of man. Such a cosmology then is an experienced cosmology. We can say that when this stage of sleep is consciously reflected back, man learns to recognize himself as a member of the cosmic order—a cosmic order that is expressed in a planetary sense, as a cosmic ordering of nature.

But now, within this cosmic order, the moral world order arises. This is not as it is in earth life, where on the one side we find the order of nature with its own systems of laws but lacking morality, and on the other side a moral world order experienced as far as earthly existence is concerned only in the soul. Instead, we have a unified world before us. What we experience as a planetary cosmos is permeated and spiritually impregnated by a continuous stream of moral impulses. We live simultaneously in a natural and a moral cosmos.

You realize the full significance of these nightly events for waking life. So, we can say that what the soul experiences in the cosmos between going to sleep and waking is more real and full of meaning for man's outward configuration than what confronts him by day, for the life functions of the physical and etheric bodies, as well as our own moral condition, are results of our cosmic experience during sleep.

The third stage of sleep is characterized by a gradual transition from experiences within the planetary cosmos to an experience of the world of the fixed stars, so that this world is experienced by the soul as a kind of reflection. Yet these are not reflections of those outer sense pictures of the constellations such as we have in waking life. Instead, the soul becomes familiar with those beings of whom it was said in earlier lectures that intuition recognizes as the spiritual beings corresponding to the stars. Here in the sense world in our physical consciousness we experience the physical sense pictures of the stars. When, as I have described, we penetrate the spiritual world with intuition, we recognize that the sun and other fixed stars as perceived by ordinary sense perception are merely the reflected physical images of certain spiritual beings. The soul lives within these spiritual beings of the stars during the third stage of sleep. It feels after-images of the star constellations, that is to say, it feels the relationships that exist between the activities of the spiritual star-beings. The soul experiences such constellations.

Ancient dreamlike science specifically described how the life of the fixed star constellations and zodiac streamed into the soul. This is, after all, the main part of the soul's experience in sleep. In the sense world you arrive at a better correspondence to the single spiritual beings if you look at the constellations as a whole instead of gazing at single stars. In sleep, the soul, being free of the physical and etheric bodies, becomes so liberated that it confronts them both as objects, just as we usually have around us the objects of the external world as perceived by the senses. The soul really finds its way as a spiritual being into a cosmos consisting of other spiritual beings. What it unconsciously goes through there can be illuminated by intuitive knowledge. But the experiences there also have their after-effects in waking life; the general well-being, health and vigor of the human body—not of the soul as in the first stage of sleep—are after-effects of what the soul experiences during the night among star-beings. Especially there comes before the soul, even if unconsciously, the whole event of birth in its broadest sense; that is, the way the soul enters a physical body through conception and embryonic life. Again, there comes before the soul how the body is abandoned in death and how man's spirit being passes into the soul-spiritual world. Every night, the truth concerning the events of birth and death really confront the soul. It is also an after-effect of the night-time experiences that man has a dim feeling during the day that birth and death by no means signify for human life only what they appear to be to sense observation. It is simply not true that a man with sound common sense could believe that birth and death are nothing but the events they appear to be in outer material life. Man in fact does not believe this, but it is not true to say that the reason for his disbelief is only because in his fantasy he imagines that he is an eternal being whose existence persists beyond death. No, man cannot believe it because of the picture experienced every night by the soul of how man enters earth life from the spiritual world and withdraws again into the world of spirit. This picture streams into the soul by day and is experienced by it as a vague feeling about the world and human life.

What appears during waking life as religious longing, as religious awareness, is an after-effect of the soul's experience among the stars. What I have just described is the stage of man's deepest sleep. In actual fact, it is out of his sleep that man derives the religious feelings of his waking life.

Just as religious life can be founded today in knowledge by means of the experience resembling that of primordial humanity but permeated and formulated in intuitions by the fully developed consciousness, it can also be said that man can attain this religious knowledge if, through super-sensible intuition, he is able to perceive and illuminate the condition of deepest sleep. For what rests in the depths of sleep was also the source of what preserved man's knowledge of the divine. Our day-consciousness is only a reflection of the potentialities for consciousness open to man. Likewise, what man bears within him as a natural religious feeling appears as a reflection of the glory and sublimity experienced by his soul, even if unconsciously, in the third stage of sleep. Man sinks into the life of sleep not only to renew his tired body, or to gain the stimuli from sleep that his breathing and circulation need, or to acquire from the spiritual world the other impulses he needs. What permeates him with religious feeling penetrates to the soul's surface, to the region of day-consciousness from the profound depths through which human soul life streams during sleep.

One might say that as man lives a philosophical life during the first stage of sleep, similar to that of earliest childhood—however paradoxical that sounds to present-day consciousness—and as in the second stage he lives a cosmological life, so, in the third stage, he lives a life of being permeated with divinity. From this third stage of sleep, man must then return to daytime consciousness.

Having retraced the above-mentioned stages in backward sequence during the last stage of sleep, man returns again to waking consciousness. Since man's soul and spirit are outside his physical and etheric organizations in sleep, if this phenomenon of sleep is to be comprehended fully, intuitive knowledge must answer the question: Why is man drawn back into his physical and etheric bodies again? What impulse is at work there? If the intuitive perception of sleep is extended far enough, it is possible to recognize this impulse. As man cognizes these spiritual beings who correspond to the sun or the constellations of the other fixed stars, he then recognizes that the impulse comes from the spiritual beings whose reflection in our physical world is the moon. Indeed, the forces of the moon permeate our whole cosmos, and when, through intuition, we recognize not only the physical existence of the moon but also her spiritual correlations, we find that these spiritual beings, who correspond to the physical moon, are the entities who, in their working together, produce the impulses to bring us back into our physical and etheric bodies after we have reached the deepest stage of sleep. It is above all the moon forces that connect man's astral and ego organization with his physical and etheric organisms.

Every night, when out of the spiritual world the soul desires to re-enter its physical and etheric bodies, it must place itself within the streams of the moon forces. It is of no concern here—that will be obvious to you—whether it be new or full moon. For even when, as new moon, the moon is not visible to the senses, those forces are nevertheless active throughout the cosmos that bring the soul back into the etheric and physical bodies from the spiritual worlds. They are active even though the moon's phases appearing to the senses as half-moon, full moon, etc., are metamorphosed sense pictures that correspond to events in the soul being of the moon; these, to be sure, have something to do with man's spirit and soul in the physical and etheric bodies. Indeed, the particular configuration in which man's soul-spiritual and physical-etheric natures are linked is determined by those forces that rule and interweave in the cosmos and come to physical expression in the moon, the sense object, with her various phases that we perceive.

Thus, we can also look into the concealed aspects of man's life of waking and sleeping and inform ourselves concerning what it is that brings him back each morning into his daytime life. He returns through the same stages in reverse order, and while he passes through the last stage, which is permeated by a longing for God, the dreams mix again into his sleep life and he gradually submerges into his physical and etheric organizations.

Why is it that when man goes through the gate of death he is no longer subject to the moon forces? How does he withdraw from them when he spends a long time in the spiritual world? These questions as well as the secrets of birth, death and repeated earth lives will be considered in the next two lectures.

I would like to bring forward again, in a rather different form, a few remarks made in the course of our studies. You know that the fact of the intimate relation between man and the Universe was much better known to methods of perception used by the ancients than to ours of the present day. If we were to go back to the period of the Egypto-Chaldean culture, we should find that man did not look upon himself as a separate being who perambulates the Earth, but as a being belonging to the whole Universe. He knew of course to begin with that in a certain sense he was dependent upon the Earth. That can easily be observed; even our own materialistic age admits that Man, as far as his physical metabolism is concerned, depends upon the Earth's products, which he assimilates. But in those ancient times, by means of course of atavistic perception, Man knew himself to be dependent also in his soul on the one hand on the elements of fire, water and air, and on the other hand on the movements of the planets. These he related to his soul-nature in the same way as he related the products of the Earth to his physical metabolism. And the part of the Universe that is outside or beyond the planetary system, all that is in the starry heavens—this he connected with his spirit.

Thus in those past ages, when materialism was out of the question, man knew himself to be living in the bosom of the Universe. You may now ask: Yes, but how is it that the man of those times made such big mistakes in connection with the movements of the heavenly bodies, while today, in this materialistic age, he has made such magnificent progress in relation to the real truth of these movements? Well, we have spoken of these things for a considerable time and we have pointed out that the movements man believes in today are asserted by science merely on the basis of certain prejudices. Upon this subject I shall have more to say tomorrow, but for the moment we may remind ourselves that present-day man has entirely lost consciousness of the fact that that which belongs to the whole man can no more be discovered in the physical world than in the visible stellar world. For it is absolutely impossible to gain a true perception even of the visible starry heavens, unless man combines with the outer physical life the super-physical in his considerations—that super-physical part of his life through which he passes between death and re-birth. Yesterday we drew attention to the metamorphosis that takes place in man in this change from earthly to super-earthly life and showed how the organs which we consider as belonging to the lower man (and of which we said yesterday that they open inwards), transform themselves—as regards their forces, though obviously not in their substance—during the period between death and a new birth, and become what is considered to be the more noble head-organism. This latter is in reality nothing more than the metamorphosis—as regards the structure of its forces—of the so-called ‘lower’ man of the last Earth-life.

If we really think this matter over, we can see—in spirit—how between death and re-birth, man has a certain content within him of his experiences, as he has also here between birth and death. But the content is essentially different in each case. We may make this difference clear by saying: between birth and death, man has, as the circumference for his experiences, the circumference in Space, and also that which takes place in Time. He has these—Space and Time—as a circumference for his experiences.

You know in how small a degree man really experiences the processes of his inner organism. He is not conscious of them. All the organisation within the skin is known to man only indirectly and incompletely. The knowledge gained through anatomy and physiology is not real knowledge, for we do not by means of this investigation look into the actual interior of man; it is an illusion to believe that we do. Spiritual Science alone gradually reveals all that is within man. But how do we find conditions in this respect during the interval between death and a new birth? We have to put it in this way. In a certain sense we look then from the periphery upon the centre. And we know just as little of the periphery as we do here of our centre or interior. But on the other hand we have during this period a direct perception of the secrets and mysteries of Man himself. That which is hidden within us—within our skin—that we observe between death and a new birth as our experiences.

Now you will perhaps say that this world which we view during the time between death and re-birth must be a very small one indeed. But spatial dimensions do not count at all. It is the fullness or poverty of the content that matters, not the size. If we combine all we observe in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and add thereto the starry heavens, it would not compare in richness with the mysteries within Man himself. The real process is approximately as follows. We lose the structural forces of the head when we pass over in death. They have completed their office. But then the spiritual world takes up the structural forces of the remaining (lower) organism, which from being inner experience belong now to the periphery, and transforms them in such a way that when the time is ripe, from out of the spiritual world the human head is determined in the womb of the mother.

We must be absolutely clear upon this point. The very first beginning of the corporeal man within the mother, is a result of the whole process we have been describing. Conception is merely the opportunity given for a certain cosmic activity to penetrate the human body, and that which is formed first in the process of man's formation is indeed an image of the whole Cosmos. He who wishes to study the human embryo from its first stage onwards, must consider it as an image of the Cosmos.

These matters are today almost entirely overlooked. For of what do we generally think when we speak of the origin of a human being in the physical sense? Of heredity! We observe how the child-organism is formed within the parent-organism, and we are ignorant of how the cosmic forces which surround us are active within the parent-organism; we are ignorant of the fact that the whole Macrocosm projects its force into the human being in order to make possible the genesis of a new human being.

Of course, the great fault of our present-day world-philosophy is that we never take the Macrocosm into consideration, and therefore never become conscious of where lie the forces whose effect we observe. I must once again remind you of the following. The modern physicist or chemist says that there are molecules which are composed of atoms, that the atoms possess forces by means of which they act upon each other. Now this is a conception which simply does not accord with reality. The truth is, that the minutest molecule is acted upon by the whole starry heavens. Suppose here is a planet, here another, here another, and so on. Then there are the fixed stars, which transmit their forces into the molecule. All these lines of force intersect each other in various ways. The Planets also transmit their forces in the same way, and we come to realise that the molecule is nothing but a focus of macrocosmic forces. It is the ardent desire of modern science to bring microscopy far enough to enable the atoms to be seen within the molecule. This way of looking at the subject must cease. Instead of wishing to examine the structure of the molecule microscopically, we must turn our gaze outwards to the starry heavens, we must look at the constellations and see copper in one, tin in another! Out there in the Macrocosm we have to behold the structure of the molecule that is only reflected in the molecule. Instead of passing into the infinitely little, we must turn our gaze outwards to the infinitely great, for it is there we have to look for the reality of what lives in the little.

In this way does the materialistic conception of things also affect other domains of thought. Someone who considers himself capable of giving an opinion on the progress of human knowledge may say: the nineteenth century materialism is now overcome! No! It is not overcome so long as men still think atomically, so long as they fail to search in the great for the form and configuration of the small. Neither is the materialism relative to humanity overcome, so long as we continue to ignore the connection of Man the Microcosm with the Macrocosm.

And at this point we are confronted with a new—I might say a monstrous—evidence of materialism, to which I have previously drawn attention. It is in so-called Theosophy that its traces are often to be found, where a tendency is present to look at things in the following way. Here we have matter; then ether, thinner than matter but otherwise similar to physical matter; then comes the astral—again thinner or finer than the etheric; and after that quite a number of other beautiful things, all thinner and thinner and thinner. Call it Kama-manas, or what you will, it is not spiritual, but remains materialistic! The truth is that in order to arrive at a real understanding of the world, we must conceive of heavy, ponderable matter as ceasing at the ether; for we must clearly understand that this ether is essentially a very different thing from that substance of which we speak as filling space. When speaking of this latter substance, we think of space as filled with matter. But this we cannot do when we speak of ether, for then we must conceive space as being empty of matter. When ordinary matter strikes some other object, the object is repelled or pushed away. When ether approaches an object, it attracts it and draws it within itself. The activity of ether is the exact opposite to that of matter. Ether acts as an absorbent. Were this otherwise, you would present the same appearance back and front, for even in this diversity of the physical appearance of man we have the result, on the one hand of the pressure of ponderable matter, and on the other of the absorbing action of ether. Your nose is forced outwards, as it were, from your organism through the pressure of matter, while the eye sockets are drawn inward through the action of ether. It is therefore simply a pressing and absorbing substance acting within you which differentiates the exterior appearance of your front and back. These are things which are not usually taken into consideration.

Further, when we come to speak of the astral, we must not think of three-dimensional physical matter extending in a three-fold way in space, nor must we think of the absorbent ether, but of a third factor, one that forms the adjustment or connection between the other two. And should we then go on and attempt to form some approximate idea of that part of our being termed the Ego—the ‘I am’—we would have to include a fourth factor, which acts as mediator between, on the one hand, the absorbent-repelling action of ether and physical matter, and on the other hand, the astral substance. These are the things that must be taken into consideration.

You cannot logically ask: If the ether has merely a sucking, absorbing action, how then is it possible for us to perceive it? The fact is, ether stands, figuratively speaking, in the same relation in respect to ponderable matter—I am speaking now in a picture—as the relation we find in another plane if we have a bottle of soda-water. We cannot see the water in the bottle, but the pearly bubbles we can see, although these are ‘thinner’ than the water. And so it is in the case of the ether, which is a ‘hollow’ in physical matter and therefore the essential antithesis of physical matter; it also can be perceived.

From the foregoing you will now see that it is necessary, when speaking of the life between death and re-birth, to realise that this life is actually lived beyond space—beyond the space of which we are cognisant on the Earth-plane; and we shall have to endeavour to gain a conception of this ‘beyond’ of space. You can best do so by trying first to imagine ‘filled’ space. Take for instance, a table; it fills or occupies space. Then you pass from ‘filled’ space to ‘empty’ space, and perhaps you would say that you cannot go beyond this. But as I have previously pointed out to you, this would be about as sensible as to say: ‘I have a full purse out of which I continue to take money till nothing is left; this “nothing” cannot be less than it is’. But it can be less if you get into debt, when you would have less than nothing in your purse! Similarly empty space can be less than empty by being filled with ether, when it becomes a negative entity.

And that which adjusts or connects the two, that which mediates also in you between pressure and suction, is the astral. No relation would exist between the front and back of a human body did not the astral activity within form the connection between the absorbent and the pressing elements. You will say: I do not observe this connecting element. But try to follow the digestive process, and you will find the connecting link very clearly manifested. The astral is active there, and its activity is based upon the contrast between the front and back nature of the human being, even as the connection between the higher (head) man and lower (limb) man by way of the astral is based upon the Ego. We must therefore consider man, as he stands before us, in a quite concrete manner and make clear to ourselves that while he has existence upon this plane between birth and death he imprints his astral part and his Ego in the absorbent and pressure-producing elements, but his being only manifests here on Earth as the mediator between the front and the back, and between the upper and the lower parts of the body.

Now, what is this mediator or connecting link? It is that which we experience within us when we feel our equilibrium. We do not jerk the head forward and backward; we stand and walk erect. We accommodate our posture to the demands of the laws of equilibrium. We cannot see this, but we experience it inwardly. When we pass through the gate of death we consciously adjust ourselves to this condition, of which here we take no heed. If we possessed eyes only, it would then be dark around us, and if we had ears only, stillness would envelop us. But we have also the sense of equilibrium, and the sense of motion, and so we become able after all to ‘experience’ there. We take part in that which on Earth is implied in the words ‘equilibrium’ and ‘movement’. We adapt ourselves to the movements of the external world, we find our way into them.

You see, here, in the life between birth and death, the only way we experience the activity of the Earth's revolution upon its axis is in our daily metabolic process. We must take our daily meals, and this together with the succeeding digestive processes takes place within the limits of 24 hours, uniform with one revolution of the Earth. These two things belong together, the one is proof of the other. When we die, the revolution of the Earth becomes something real, as real as are the visible objects here. Then we live with this terrestrial motion; we begin to experience this motion consciously.

There are also other motions connected with the starry heavens, all of which we experience after death. Correctly considered, the description of our experiences already includes this experience, for we do not expand into the Cosmos like a jelly-fish, but we take part in the life of the Cosmos—and as beings taking part in cosmic life we experience at the same time the inner being of man. Between birth and death we say: My heart is within my breast, and in it converge the streams or motions of the blood-circulation. At a certain stage of development between death and re-birth we say: In my inner being is the Sun—and by this expression we mean the actual Sun, which the physicist claims to be a ball of gas, but which is in reality something quite different. We experience the actual Sun in the same manner as we experience here the heart. Here the Sun is visible to the eye, whereas during the time between death and re-birth the evolution of the heart on its path to the pineal gland, as it undergoes on the way a wonderful metamorphosis, is the cause of sublime experiences. The complete system of our blood-circulation we experience consciously in its transformation; we have this system within existence between death and re-birth proceeds, these forces undergo transmutation, so that, when once again we arrive at the gates of a new Earth-life, they have become the forces of us—not, of course, the substance, but the forces. As our new nervous-system. Look at the plates and illustrations scattered through modern books on anatomy or physiology and examine the circulatory system of the blood in one incarnation. This in the next incarnation becomes the life of the nerves. (We must not depict in diagrammatic form the head, breast (rhythmic) and limb systems as existing side by side, for they interpenetrate each other.) Note the wonderful structure of the human eye; there we find blood-vessels, choroid and retina (omentum). The last two are transformations of each other. What today is retina, was in the last incarnation choroid, and what is choroid today will be retina in the next incarnation. Of course this must not be taken too literally, but such is the approximate course of events. So you will understand that we cannot gain an essential conception of man if we merely study him as he appears between birth and death or even along the lines by which he develops through the forces of physical heredity. For thereby we understand man at most as far as the circulatory system; that would be the last process we would understand. The nervous system of the present life is a result of a former life, and can never be understood if studied in connection with the present life alone.

Now my dear friends, I beg of you not to object to what I have explained, by saying that animals have also a nervous system although they have no earlier lives. Such an objection would indeed be very short-sighted; for though in man the forces of his nervous system are the transformation of the blood-circulation of the former life, that does not imply that the same is valid in the case of animals. It would be just as logical to go to a barber and ask him to sell you a razor for the dinner-table—a razor being a knife, and knives forming part of the dinner service! Razors however do not! Nothing carries within itself its immediate purpose, neither does a physical organ. The human organ is entirely different from the animal organ. It depends upon the use to be made of an organ. We should not compare the human nervous system with that of an animal, but rather observe the fact that human nerves have become similar—during the course of their evolution—to animal nerves, just as the razor has become similar to the table-knife. This again demonstrates that when man follows the ordinary materialistic line of investigation, he can arrive at no true conclusion. Yet that is just the path which is being followed today.

It is this kind of investigation that prevents us from arriving at a conception of man as a product of the spiritual world. Our religious creeds, as they have gradually developed, have pandered too much to human egoism. It may almost be said that their one and only aim is to convince their followers of a continuation of life after death, because the egoism of humanity demands it. Yet it is equally important to prove to men the continuation in this life of a pre-natal life, so that they may comprehend—‘Here upon this earth I have to be a continuation of what I was between death and my present birth. I have to continue a spiritual life here on this plane.’ This indeed is not likely to please egoism so much; but it is something that must of necessity again imbue our civilisation, so that humanity can be liberated from its anti-social instincts. Try to imagine what it will mean when we can look upon a human countenance and say: ‘That is not of this world. The spiritual world has been at work upon it between the last death and this birth.’ For a time will come when we shall see within the material the imprint of the spiritual work between death and re-birth. It will indeed be a very different kind of culture which will guide humanity then; and it will bring in its train very different convictions and tendencies of thought, which will not permit the contemplation of the Cosmos as a vast machine set in motion by the mutual attraction between the stars—apart from the fact that this abstraction has already reached its zenith. Abstraction is deeply rooted in our ordinary conception of the planetary system, and it produces today some very strange results. For example, a great deal of popular literature is permeated with glorification of an idea which originates from Einstein. This idea is said to have shaken the theory of gravitation. Imagine that, far away from all celestial bodies—so that an interference by a field of gravity may be obviated—there is a box. Inside it is a man who holds a stone in one hand, and some down in the other. He lets both out of the box and see—they begin to fall—and fall until they reach the ground. Yes, says Einstein, men will no doubt say that the stone and the down both fall to the ground. But it need not be so; for up above a rope may be fastened and by some means or other the box is drawn up. The stone and the down—owing to the absence of any celestial body—do not fall, but remain where they are. When the bottom of the box reaches them, it takes them up with it.

This kind of discussion concerning an extreme abstraction, can be found today in the modern theory of relativity which Albert Einstein has propounded. Just think how far humanity has deviated from actuality! We can talk of relativity—well and good, but just imagine what would happen were this picture taken in earnest! A box, some inconceivable distance away from any celestial body that might attract (by gravitation) the stone and the down; and inside this box a man (air is only found of course in the neighbourhood of heavenly bodies, but the man is quite happy and content; as for his stone and his down, they of course need no air!), and now the box is suspended from outside and is then lifted up!

All this is a further development of the theory of Newton who postulated that ‘push’ or impetus which is imparted to a globe in the direction of a tangent, so that it is able with centrifugal force to escape the centripetal force. Such things as these actually form the contents of scientific discussions today, and are considered great achievements, whereas they are nothing more than a testimony to the fact that we have arrived at the most extreme abstraction, and that materialism has produced a state of complete ignorance in humanity as to what matter really is, and caused man to live in a series of mental pictures far removed from all reality.

But, my dear friends, these things are not in the least observed today, and we find our newspapers proclaiming that a new discovery has been made: the theory of gravitation has been replaced by the theory of inertia. The stone and down are not attracted; they remain in their original place—perhaps only because we can manage to imagine such a thing—while the box is raised! One can in truth say that so much nonsense masquerades as genius today that it becomes difficult to distinguish the one from the other. Can we wonder that in these times when in many other departments of thought too as well as that just described, men's ideas have grown quite crooked—can we wonder that we have at last been brought to the conditions of the last five or six years! These are things of which we need again and again to be reminded.

I have had to recall them to you today, and tomorrow I will add something further concerning the structure of the Universe.

As we are together for the last time during this Christmas Meeting which should be a source of strength and of vital importance for the Anthroposophical Movement, you will allow me to give this lecture as a supplement to the many vistas opened for us by the series of lectures just finished, while also giving tentative indications concerning the future of anthroposophical strivings.

When we look at the world to-day—and it has been the same for years now—destructive elements on a colossal scale are everywhere in evidence. Forces that are actively at work enable us to have forebodings of the abysses into which Western civilisation will continue to steer. When we think of those individuals who are outwardly the spiritual leaders in various domains of life, we shall perceive that these men are in the throes of an ominous, universal sleep. They think, or at least most of them were still thinking only a short time ago, that until the nineteenth century mankind was childish and primitive in respect of understanding and conceptions of the world. Then modern science appeared in its many branches and now—so it is thought—there exists something that must through all eternity be cultivated as the truth.

The people who think this are really giving way to extreme arrogance, only they are not aware of it. On the other hand there sometimes arises, even in men to-day, a premonition that things are not, after all, as I have described.

Some little time ago it was still possible for me to give lectures in Germany organised by the Wolff Bureau. They attracted extraordinarily large audiences so that the existence of a desire for Anthroposophy became obvious to many people. Among the many nonsensical utterances of opponents there was one voice which to be sure was not much cleverer than the others in respect of content but which nevertheless indicated a remarkable premonition. It consisted in a newspaper report of one of the lectures I had given in Berlin. The notice was to this effect: When one listens to something of this kind, one becomes attentive to the fact that something is going on not only on the Earth—I am quoting the notice approximately—but in the whole Cosmos something is happening which summons men to adopt a spirituality different from what existed previously. Now, the forces of the Cosmos—not only earthly impulses—demand something from men. A kind of revolution is taking place in the Cosmos, the result of which must be the striving for a new spirituality.

Such utterances were constantly to be heard and were very worthy of note. The fact of the matter is this: the impulse that must be working in what is now to go out from Dornach must—as I emphasised from every possible point of view during the Meeting itself—be an impulse originating in the spiritual world, not on the Earth. Our striving here is to develop the strength to follow impulses from the spiritual world. That is why, in the evening lectures during this Christmas Meeting, I spoke of manifold impulses at work in the course of historical evolution in order that hearts could be opened for the reception of the spiritual impulses which have yet to stream into the earthly world, which are not derived from that world itself. Everything for which the earthly world hitherto has rightly been the vehicle, proceeded from the spiritual world. And if we are to achieve anything fruitful for the earthly world, the impulses for it must be brought from the spiritual world.

This prompts the assertion that the impulses we ought rightly to take with us from the Meeting for our further activity must be connected with great responsibility.

Let us think for a short time of the responsibility laid upon us by that Meeting. Anyone with a sense of the reality of the spiritual world could encounter many personalities during recent decades, and observing them spiritually experience bitter feelings regarding the future destiny of humanity on Earth. One could encounter one's fellow men on the Earth in the way that is possible spiritually and observe these human beings during their sleep while they are in the spiritual world with Ego and astral body, having left their physical and etheric bodies. During recent decades, explorations connected with the destinies of Egos and astral bodies during the sleep of human beings have resulted in knowledge calling for great responsibility on the part of those who possess it. One often saw souls, who had left their physical and etheric bodies during sleep, approaching the Guardian of the Threshold.

In the course of evolution the Guardian of the Threshold has been brought to men's consciousness in very many different ways. Many a legend, many a saga—for it is in this form, not in the form of historical tradition that things of the greatest importance are preserved—many a legend tells of how, in earlier times, this or that personality met the Guardian of the Threshold and was instructed by him how to enter the spiritual world and return again into the physical world. Every legitimate entry into the spiritual world must include the possibility of being able at any and every minute to return into the physical world and to live there as a practical, thoughtful human being, not as a visionary or as an ecstatic mystic.

Fundamentally speaking, it was this that was demanded by the Guardian of the Threshold through all the ages of human endeavours to enter the spiritual world. But notably in the last third of the nineteenth century hardly any human beings who succeeded in approaching the Guardian of the Threshold in waking consciousness were to be seen. In our present time, when it is historically incumbent upon the whole of mankind to encounter the Guardian of the Threshold in some form, one finds how souls during sleep approach the Guardian of the Threshold as Egos and astral bodies, and the pictures that are revealed are full of significance. The stern Guardian of the Threshold has around him groups of human souls in the state of sleep, souls who in waking consciousness lack the strength to approach this Guardian of the Threshold. They approach him while they sleep.

When one watches the scene presented there, a thought connected with what I have called the seed of great and essential responsibility comes to one. The souls approaching the Guardian of the Threshold during the state of sleep plead with the consciousness then prevailing—in the waking state everything remains unconscious or subconscious—plead to be admitted into the spiritual world, to be allowed to cross the threshold. And in numberless cases one then hears the voice of the stern Guardian of the Threshold saying: For your own well-being you may not cross the threshold. You may not be allowed to enter the spiritual world. You must go back!—For if the Guardian of the Threshold were to permit such souls to enter the spiritual world, they would cross the threshold and enter that world with the concepts imparted to them by the schools, education and civilisation of to-day, with the concepts and ideas with which the human being is obliged to grow up from about the age of six to basically the end of his life on Earth.

The intrinsic character of these concepts and ideas is such that what a man has become through them in modern civilisation and education means that he enters the spiritual world paralysed in soul. Moreover, he would return to the physical world empty-headed in respect of thoughts and ideas. If the Guardian of the Threshold were not to reject many human souls of the modern age but allow them to enter the spiritual world, they would feel on awakening: I am incapable of thinking, my thoughts do not connect with my brain, I am obliged to go through the world void of thoughts. For such is the effect of the abstract ideas which man applies to everything to-day. With these ideas he can enter the spiritual world but not come forth from it again. And when one witnesses this scene which is experienced during sleep by more souls than is usually imagined, one feels: Oh! if only it were possible to protect these souls from having also to experience at death what they experience during sleep. For if the condition that is experienced in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold were to be repeated for a sufficient length of time, if civilisation were to remain long enough under the sway of what current education provides, then the souls of men would pass through the gates of death into the spiritual world but would be unable to bring any mental vigour into the next earthly life. With the thoughts prevailing to-day it is possible for a man to enter the spiritual world but he can only come out of it again paralysed in soul.

You see, modern civilisation adopts the form of spiritual life that has for so long been cultivated, but real life does not allow this. Civilisation as it now is might continue to progress for a time. During waking life souls would have no inkling of the existence of the Guardian of the Threshold and during sleep would be rejected by him in order to avoid mental paralysis; and this would finally result in a race of men being born in the future with no understanding, no possibility of applying ideas in their future earthly life; and all thinking, all ideation would vanish from the Earth. A diseased, purely instinctive human race would people the Earth. Evil feelings and unbridled emotions without the guiding power of ideas would take hold of the evolution of humanity. It is not only through observation of the souls confronting the Guardian of the Threshold—souls which can gain no entrance to the spiritual world—it is not only through observing this that a sorrowful picture is presented to the seer, but in a different connection there is another factor as well.

If on the journey of which I have spoken, when the souls of sleeping human beings confronting the Guardian of the Threshold can be observed, one is accompanied by a human being belonging not to Western but to Oriental civilisation, a terrible reproach of the whole of Western civilisation may be heard from him, to this effect: If things continue as they now are, when the human beings living to-day appear on Earth in new incarnations, the Earth will become barbaric. Human beings will live devoid of ideas, in instincts only. You Westerners have brought things to this pass because you have abandoned the ancient spirituality of the East.

A glimpse into the spiritual world such as I have described may well give rise to a sense of great responsibility. And here in Dornach there must be a place where for those human beings who have ears to hear, direct and significant experiences in the spiritual world can be described. Here there must be a place where sufficient strength is generated not merely to indicate in terms of the dialectic-empirical mentality of to-day that here or there little traces of spiritual reality exist. If Dornach is to fulfil its task, actual happenings in the spiritual world must be spoken of openly. Men must be able to hear of the impulses in the spiritual world which then pour into and control the natural world and Nature itself. In Dornach men must be able to hear of actual experiences, actual forces, actual Beings of the spiritual world. Here there must be the High School of true Spiritual Science. Henceforth we must not draw back when confronted by the shallowness of the scientific thoughts of to-day which, as I have described, lead in the state of sleep to the stern Guardian of the Threshold. In Dornach the strength must be acquired to confront and experience the spiritual world in its reality.

There must be no dialectical tirades from here on the subject of the inadequacy of modern scientific theory. I was obliged, however, to call attention to the position in which human beings are placed when confronting the Guardian of the Threshold on account of these scientific theories and their offshoots in the orthodox schools of to-day. If what has been said at this Christmas Meeting is sincerely applied in the life of soul, the Meeting will be a forceful impulse which the soul can then apply in the activity that is needed in this age so that in their next incarnations men may be able to confront the Guardian of the Threshold in the right way. This will ensure that civilisation in its own right can enable men to face and hold their own when confronting the Guardian of the Threshold.

Just compare the civilisation of to-day with that of earlier times during all of which men's thoughts and concepts were directed primarily to the super-sensible world, to the Gods, to the world of productive, generative, creative forces. With concepts that were concerned primarily with the Gods, men were able to contemplate the earthly world and also to understand it in the light of these concepts and ideas. If with these concepts—worthy of the Gods as they were—a man came before the Guardian of the Threshold, the Guardian would say to him: You may pass, for you bring over the threshold into the super-sensible world thoughts that were already directed to the super-sensible world during your earthly life in a physical body. Thus when you return into the physical world of the senses you will have enough strength to protect you from being paralysed by the spectacle of the super-sensible world.

To-day man develops concepts and ideas which in accordance with the genius of the age he wants to apply only to the material world. These concepts and ideas are concerned with every possible aspect of weight, measure and the like, but they have nothing to do with the Gods and are not worthy of the Gods. Hence to souls who have completely succumbed to materialistic ideas that are unworthy of the Gods, the voice of the Guardian of the Threshold thunders when they pass before him in the state of sleep: Do not cross the threshold! You have squandered your ideas on the world of the senses. Hence you must remain with them in the world of the senses. If you do not wish to be paralysed in your life of soul you may not enter the world of the Gods as long as you hold such ideas.

These things must be said, not in order to be the subject of argument but because every individual should let his mind and soul be permeated by them and thus develop the attitude of mind that should have been generated in him by this solemn Christmas Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society. For more important than anything else we take with us is the recognition of the spiritual world which gives the certainty that in Dornach there will be created a living centre of spiritual knowledge.

Hence a really splendid note was struck this morning when Dr. Zeylmans spoke in connection with the sphere of medicine, saying that it is no longer possible to-day for bridges to be built from orthodox science to what it is our aim to found in Dornach. If we were to speak of what it is hoped to develop in the sphere of medicine here by boasting that our products can stand the test of all modern clinical requirements, then we should never reach any definite goal. For then other people would simply say: That is just a new remedy; and we too have produced plenty of new remedies!

It is of essential importance that a branch of practical life such as medicine should be taken in the real sense into anthroposophical life. That is what I certainly understood to be Dr. Zeylmans' wish when he said this morning that an individual who becomes a doctor to-day really longs for something that gives impulses from a new corner of the world. In the domain of medicine this is just what will be done from here in the future, together with many another branch of genuine anthroposophical activity. It will be worked out now, with Dr. Wegman as my helper, as a system of medicine based upon Anthroposophy. It is a dire need of humanity and will soon be available. It is also my intention to establish as soon as possible a close relationship between the Goetheanum and the Clinic in Arlesheim that is proving to be so beneficial. The work there will be orientated entirely towards Anthroposophy. That is also Dr. Wegman's intention.

In speaking as he did, Dr. Zeylmans also indicated what attitude the Vorstand in Dornach will adopt in all spheres of anthroposophical activity. In future we shall know exactly how matters stand. We shall not say: let us bring Eurythmy to this or that town, for if people first see Eurythmy without hearing anything about Anthroposophy, Eurythmy will please them. Then, later on perhaps, they will come to us, and because they have liked Eurythmy and have heard that Anthroposophy is behind it, Anthroposophy too may please them! Or again, it may be said: In the practice of medicine people must be shown that ours are the right remedies and then they will buy them; later on they may discover that Anthroposophy is behind them and then they will come to Anthroposophy!

We must have the courage to realise that such procedure is dishonest and must be abandoned. Anthroposophy will then find its way in the world. Our striving for truth here in Dornach will in the future be without fanaticism, will be advocated honestly and candidly. Perhaps in this way we can make reparation for principles that have been gravely sinned against in recent years.

We must leave this Meeting, which has led to the Founding of the General Anthroposophical Society, not with trifling but with solemn thoughts. But I think that nobody need have experienced any pessimism as a result of what took place here at Christmas. We had, it is true, to pass the tragic ruins of the Goetheanum every day but I think that all those who climbed the hill and passed the ruins during the Meeting will have become aware of what our friends have understood in their hearts and that the following thought will have become a reality to them: Spiritual flames of fire will go forth from the new Goetheanum that will come into being in the future, for the blessing of mankind, will come into being through our activity and devotion. And the greater the courage with which to conduct the affairs of Anthroposophy that we take with us from this Meeting, the more effectively have we grasped the spiritual impulse of hope that has pervaded the Meeting.

The scene that I have described to you—the scene that is so often to be seen of modern man with the results of his civilisation and education facing the Guardian of the Threshold—this scene does not actually occur among perceptive Anthroposophists. But it does sometimes happen that this warning is necessary: You must develop the resolute courage to become aware of and avow your obedience to this voice from the spiritual world, for you have begun to wake. Courage will keep you wakeful; lack of courage—that and that alone could cause you to sleep.

The voice of exhortation to unfold courage and wakefulness—that is the other variant for Anthroposophists in the life of modern civilisation. Non-Anthroposophists hear the voice which says: Remain outside the spiritual world, for you have misused the ideas which are coined for purely earthly objects; you have amassed no ideas that are worthy of the Gods. Hence you would be paralysed on your return into the physical world of the senses. To the souls who are truly anthroposophical souls, however, it is said: You have now to be tested in respect only of your courage to avow adherence to the voice which because of the trend and inclination of your souls and hearts you can certainly hear and understand.

Yesterday, a year ago, we were watching the flames that were destroying the old Goetheanum, but just as we did not allow ourselves then to be interrupted in our continuation of the work, so to-day we are justified in hoping that when a physical Goetheanum will again be there, it will be merely the symbol of our spiritual Goetheanum which we will bear with us as idea when we now again go out into the world.

Over the Foundation Stone laid here will be erected the building in which the single stones will be the work achieved in every one of our Groups all over the world. We will now turn our thoughts to this work and become conscious of the responsibility of the men of to-day when they are standing before the Guardian of the Threshold who is obliged to forbid them entrance into the spiritual world.

Quite certainly it will never occur to us to feel anything except, the deepest pain and sorrow for what happened to us a year ago. But of one thing we may be sure—everything in the world that has achieved some measure of greatness is born from pain. May our own pain be applied in such a way that a vigorous, light-filled Anthroposophical Society will come into being as the result of your work, my dear friends.

To this end we will ponder deeply on the words with which I began the Christmas Meeting and with which I want to end it. May it become for us a festival of consecration not only of a year's beginning but of the beginning of a turning-point of worlds, to which we will dedicate ourselves in selfless cultivation of the spiritual life:

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the Limbs
Which bear thee through the world of Space
Into the ocean-being of the Spirit.
Practise Spirit-Recollection
In the depths of soul.
Where in the wielding
World-Creator-Life
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within the I of God.
Then in the All-World-Being of Man
Thou wilt truly live.

For the Father-Spirit of the Heights holds sway
In Depths of Worlds begetting Life.
Spirits of Strength!
Let this ring out from the Heights
And in the Depths be echoed,
Speaking:
From God, Mankind has Being.
The Spirits hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of Heart and Lung
Which leads thee through the rhythmic tides of Time
Into the feeling of thine own Soul-being.
Practise Spirit-Mindfulness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging
Deeds of the World's Becoming
Do thine own I
Unite
Unto the I of the World.
Then 'mid the weaving of the Soul of Man
Thou wilt truly feel.
For the Christ-Will in the encircling Round holds sway
the Rhythms of the Worlds, blessing the Soul.
Spirits of Light!
Let this be fired from the East
And through the West be formed,
Speaking:
In Christ, Death becomes Life.
The Spirits hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting Head
Which from the ground of the Eternal
Opens to thee the Thoughts of Worlds.
Practise Spirit-Vision
In quietness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free Willing.
Then from the ground of the Spirit in Man
Thou wilt truly think.

For the Spirit's Universal Thoughts hold sway
the Beings of all Worlds, craving for Light.
Spirits of Soul!
Let this be prayed in the Depths
And from the Heights be answered,
Speaking:
the Spirit's Universal Thoughts, the Soul awakens.
The Spirits hear it in East and West and North and South:
May human beings hear it!

At the turning-point of Time
The Spirit-Light of the World
Entered the stream of Earthly Being.
Darkness of Night
Had held its sway;
Day-radiant Light
Poured into the souls of men;
Light that gives Warmth
To simple Shepherds' Hearts,
Light that enlightens
The wise Heads of Kings.

O Light Divine,
O Sun of Christ!
Warm Thou
Our Hearts
Enlighten Thou
Our Heads,
That good may become
What from our Hearts we would found
And from our Heads direct
With single purpose.

And so, my dear friends, carry out into the world your warm hearts in which you have laid the Foundation Stone for the Anthroposophical Society, carry out into the world these warm hearts which promote strong, health-giving activity in the world. And help will be vouchsafed to you, enlightening your heads in what you would fain direct with single purpose. We will set about this with all possible strength. And if we prove to be worthy of this aim we shall see that a good star will hold sway over what is willed from here. Follow this good star, my dear friends! We shall see whither the Gods will lead us by the light of this star.

O Light Divine,
O Sun of Christ!
Warm Thou
Our Hearts
Enlighten Thou
Our Heads.

[ 1 ] A sentence in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling's Philosophy of Nature strikes us like a flash of lightning illuminating the past and future path of the evolution of philosophy. It reads, “To philosophize about nature means to create nature.” What had been a deep conviction of Goethe and Schiller, namely, that creative imagination must have a share in the creation of a world conception, is monumentally expressed in this sentence. What nature yields voluntarily when we focus our attention on it in observation and perception does not contain its deepest meaning. Man cannot conceive this meaning from without. He must produce it.

[ 2 ] Schelling was especially gifted for this kind of creation. With him, all spiritual energies tended toward the imagination. His mind was inventive without compare. His imagination did not produce pictures as the artistic imagination does, but rather concepts and ideas. Through this disposition of mind he was well-suited to continue along Fichte's path of thought. Fichte did not have this productive imagination. In his search for truth he had penetrated as far as to the center of man's soul, the “ego.” If this center is to become the nucleus for the world conception, then a thinker who holds this view must also be capable of arriving at thoughts whose content are saturated with world and life as he proceeds from the “ego” as a vantage point. This can only be done by means of the power of imagination, and this power was not at Fichte's disposal. For this reason, he was really limited in his philosophical position all his life to directing attention to the “ego” and to pointing out that it has to gain a content in thoughts. He, himself, had been unable to supply it with such a content, which can be learned clearly from the lectures he gave in 1813 at the University of Berlin on the Doctrine of Science (Posthumous Works, Vol. 1). For those who want to arrive at a world conception, he there demands “a completely new inner sense organ, which for the ordinary man does not exist at all.” But Fichte does not go beyond this postulate. He fails to develop what such an organ is to perceive. Schelling saw the result of this higher sense in the thoughts that his imagination produced in his soul, and he calls this “intellectual imagination” (intellectuelle Anschauung). For him, then, who saw a product created by the spirit in the spirit's statement about nature, the following question became urgent. How can what springs from the spirit be the pattern of the law that rules in the real world, holding sway in real nature? With sharp words Schelling turns against those who believe that we “merely project our ideas into nature,” because “they have no inkling of what nature is and must be for us. . . . For we are not satisfied to have nature accidentally (through the intermediary function of a third element, for instance) correspond to the laws of our spirit. We insist that nature itself necessarily and fundamentally should not only express, but realize, the laws of our spirit and that it should only then be, and be called, nature if it did just this. . . . Nature is to be the visible spirit: spirit the invisible nature. At this point then, at the point of the absolute identity of the spirit in us and of nature outside us, the problem must be solved as to how a nature outside ourselves should be possible.”

Nature and spirit, then, are not two different entities at all but one and the same being in two different forms. The real meaning of Schelling concerning this unity of nature and spirit has rarely been correctly grasped. It is necessary to immerse oneself completely into his mode of conception if one wants to avoid seeing in it nothing but a triviality or an absurdity. To clarify this mode of conception one can point to a sentence in Schelling's book, On the World Soul, in which he expresses himself on the nature of gravity. Many people find a difficulty in understanding this concept because it implies a so-called “action in distance.” The sun attracts the earth in spite of the fact that there is nothing between the sun and earth to act as intermediary. One is to think that the sun extends its sphere of activity through space to places where it is not present. Those who live in coarse, sensual perceptions see a difficulty in such a thought. How can a body act in a place where it is not? Schelling reverses this thought process. He says, “It is true that a body acts only where it is, but it is just as true that it is only where it acts.” If we see that the sun affects the earth through the force of attraction, then it follows from this fact that it extends its being as far as our earth and that we have no right to limit its existence exclusively to the place in which it acts through its being visible. The sun transcends the limits where it is visible with its being. Only a part of it can be seen; the other part reveals itself through the attraction. We must also think of the relation of spirit and nature in approximately this manner. The spirit is not merely where it is perceived; it is also where it perceives. Its being extends as far as to the most distant places where objects can still be observed. It embraces and permeates all nature that it knows. When the spirit thinks the law of an external process, this process does not remain outside the spirit. The latter does not merely receive a mirror picture, but extends its essence into a process. The spirit permeates the process and, in finding the law of the process, it is not the spirit in its isolated brain corner that proclaims this law; it is the law of the process that expresses itself. The spirit has moved to the place where the law is active. Without the spirit's attention the law would also have been active but it would not have been expressed. When the spirit submerges into the process, as it were, the law is then, in addition to being active in nature, expressed in conceptual form. It is only when the spirit withdraws its attention from nature and contemplates its own being that the impression arises that the spirit exists in separation from nature, in the same way that the sun's existence appears to the eye as being limited within a certain space when one disregards the fact that it also has its being where it works through attraction. Therefore, if I, within my spirit, cause ideas to arise in which laws of nature are expressed, the two statements, “I produce nature,” and “nature produces itself within me,” are equally true.

[ 3 ] Now there are two possible ways to describe the one being that is spirit and nature at the same time. First, I can point out the natural laws that are at work in reality; second, I can show how the spirit proceeds to arrive at these laws. In both cases I am directed by the same object. In the first instance, the law shows me its activity in nature; in the second, the spirit shows me the procedure used to represent the same law in the imagination. In the one case, I am engaged in natural science; in the other, in spiritual science. How these two belong together is described by Schelling in an attractive fashion:

The necessary trend of all natural science is to proceed from nature toward intelligence. This, and nothing else, is at the bottom of the tendency to bring theory into natural phenomena. The highest perfection of natural science would be the perfect transfiguration of all laws of nature into laws of imagination and thinking. The phenomena (the material element) must completely vanish and only the laws (the formal element) must remain. This is the reason for the fact that the more the law-structure in nature, itself, emerges, as if it were breaking the crust, the more the covering element vanishes. The phenomena themselves become more spiritual and finally disappear. The phenomena of optics are nothing but a geometry, the lines of which are drawn by the light, and this light, itself, is already of an ambiguous materiality. In the phenomena of magnetism, all material traces have already vanished. Of the phenomena of gravity, which, even according to natural scientists, can only be understood as a direct spiritual effect of action into distance, nothing is left but their law, the application of which is the mechanism of the celestial motions on a large scale. The completed theory of nature would be the one through which the whole of nature would dissolve into intelligence. The inanimate and consciousless products of nature are only unsuccessful attempts of nature to reflect itself, and the so-called dead nature is, in general, an immature intelligence, so that the intelligent character shines through unconsciously in its phenomena. The highest aim of nature—to become completely objective to itself—can be reached by it only through the highest and last reflection, which is man, or, more generally speaking, what we call reason, through which nature returns in its own track and whereby it becomes evident that nature originally is identical with what is known in us as the intelligent and conscious element.

[ 4 ] Schelling spun the facts of nature into an artful network of thought in such a fashion that all of its phenomena stood as in an ideal, harmonious organism before his creative imagination. He was inspired by the feeling that the ideas that appear in his imagination are also the creative forces of nature's process. Spiritual forces, then, are the basis of nature, and what appears dead and lifeless to our eyes has its origin in the spiritual. In turning our spirit to this, we discover the ideas, the spiritual, in nature. Thus, for man, according to Schelling, the things of nature are manifestations of the spirit. The spirit conceals itself behind these manifestations as behind a cover, so to speak. It shows itself in our own inner life in its right form. In this way, man knows what is spirit, and he is therefore able to find the spirit that is hidden in nature. The manner in which Schelling has nature return as spirit in himself reminds one of what Goethe believes is to be found in the perfect artist. The artist, in Goethe's opinion, proceeds in the production of a work of art as nature does in its creations. Therefore, we should observe in the artist's creation the same process through which everything has come into being that is spread out before man in nature. What nature conceals from the outer eye is presented in perceptible form to man in the process of artistic creation. Nature shows man only the finished works; man must decipher from these works how it proceeded to produce them. He is confronted with the creatures, not with the creator. In the case of the artist, creation and creator are observed at the same time. Schelling wants to penetrate through the products of nature to nature's creative process. He places himself in the position of creative nature and brings it into being within his soul as an artist produces his work of art. What are, then, according to Schelling, the thoughts that are contained in his world conception? They are the ideas of the creative spirit of nature. What preceded the things and what created them is what emerges in an individual human spirit as thought. This thought is to its original real existence as a memory picture of an experience is to the experience itself. Thereby, human science becomes for Schelling a reminiscence of the spiritual prototypes that were creatively active before the things existed. A divine spirit created the world and at the end of the process it also creates men in order to form in their souls as many tools through which the spirit can, in recollection, become aware of its creative activity. Schelling does not feel himself as an individual being at all as he surrenders himself to the contemplation of the world phenomena. He appears to himself as a part, a member of the creative world forces. Not he thinks, but the spirit of the world forces thinks in him. This spirit contemplates his own creative activity in him.

[ 5 ] Schelling sees a world creation on a small scale in the production of a work of art. In the thinking contemplation of things, he sees a reminiscence of the world creation on a large scale. In the panorama of the world conception, the very ideas, which are the basis of things and have produced them, appear in our spirit. Man disregards everything in the world that the senses perceive in it and preserves only what pure thinking provides. In the creation and enjoyment of a work of art, the idea appears intimately permeated with elements that are revealed through the senses. According to Schelling's view, then, nature, art and world conception (philosophy) stand in the following relation to one another. Nature presents the finished products; world conception, the productive ideas; art combines both elements in harmonious interaction. On the one side, artistic activity stands halfway between creative nature, which produces without being aware of the ideas on the basis of which it creates, and, on the other, the thinking spirit, which knows these ideas without being able at the same time to create things with their help. Schelling expresses this with the words:

The ideal world of art and the real world of objects are therefore products of one and the same activity. The concurrence of both (the conscious and the unconscious) without consciousness leads to the real world, with consciousness to the esthetic world. The objective world is only the more primitive, still unconscious poem of the spirit, the general organon of philosophy, and the philosophy of art is the crowning piece of its entire structure.

[ 6 ] The spiritual activities of man, his thinking contemplation and his artistic creation, appear to Schelling not merely as the separate accomplishments of the individual person, but, if they are understood in their highest significance, they are at the same time the achievement of the supreme being, the world spirit. In truly dithyrambic words, Schelling depicts the feeling that emerges in the soul when it becomes aware of the fact that its life is not merely an individual life limited to a point of the universe, but that its activity is one of general spirituality. When the soul says, “I know; I am aware,” then, in a higher sense, this means that the world spirit remembers its action before the existence of things; when the soul produces a work of art, it means that the world spirit repeats, on a small scale, what that spirit accomplished on a large scale at the creation of all nature.

The soul in man is not the principle of individuality, then, but that through which he lifts himself above all selfhood, through which he becomes capable of self-sacrifice, of selfless love, and, to crown it all, of the contemplation and knowledge of the essence of things and thereby of art. The soul is no longer occupied with matter, nor is it engaged in any direct intercourse with matter, but it is alone with spirit as the life of things. Even when appearing in the body, the soul is nevertheless free from the body, the consciousness of which—in its most perfect formation—merely hovers like a light dream by which it is not disturbed. The soul is not a quality, nor faculty, nor anything of that kind in particular. The soul does not know, but is knowledge. The soul is not good, not beautiful in the way that bodies also can be beautiful, but it is beauty itself. (On the Relation of Fine Arts to Nature.)

[ 7 ] Such a mode of conception is reminiscent of the German mysticism that had a representative in Jakob Boehme (1575–1624). In Munich, where Schelling lived with short interruptions from 1806–1842, he enjoyed the stimulating association with Franz Benedict Baader, whose philosophical ideas moved completely in the direction of this older doctrine. This association gave Schelling the occasion to penetrate deeply into the thought world that depended entirely on a point of view at which he had arrived in his own thinking. If one reads the above quoted passage from the address, On the Relation of the Fine Arts to Nature, which he gave at the Royal Academy of Science in Munich in 1807, one is reminded of Jakob Boehme's view, “As thou beholdest the depth and the stars and the earth, thou seest thy God, and in the same thou also livest and hast thy being, and the same God ruleth thee also . . . thou art created out of this God and thou livest in Him; all thy knowledge also standeth in this God and when thou diest thou wilt be buried in this God.”

[ 8 ] As Schelling's thinking developed, his contemplation of the world turned into the contemplation of God, or theosophy. In 1809, when he published his Philosophical Inquiries Concerning the Nature of Human Freedom and Topics Pertinent to This Question, he had already taken his stand on the basis of such a theosophy. All questions of world conception are now seen by him in a new light. If all things are divine, how can there be evil in the world since God can only be perfect goodness? If the soul is in God, how can it still follow its selfish interests? If God is and acts within me, how can I then still be called free, as I, in that case, do not at all act as a self-dependent being?

[ 9 ] Thus does Schelling attempt to answer these questions through contemplation of God rather than through world contemplation. It would be entirely incongruous to God if a world of beings were created that he would continually have to lead and direct as helpless creatures. God is perfect only if he can create a world that is equal to himself in perfection. A god who can produce only what is less perfect than he, himself, is imperfect himself. Therefore, God has created beings in men who do not need his guidance, but are themselves free and independent as he is. A being that has its origin in another being does not have to be dependent on its originator, for it is not a contradiction that the son of man is also a man. As the eye, which is possible only in the whole structure of the organism, has nevertheless an independent life of its own, so also the individual soul is, to be sure, comprised in God, yet not directly activated by him as a part in a machine.

God is not a God of the dead, but of the living. How he could find his satisfaction in the most perfect machine is quite unintelligible. No matter in what form one might think the succession of created beings out of God, it can never be a mechanical succession, not a mere causation or production so that the products would not be anything in themselves. Nor could it be an emanation such that the emanating entity would remain merely a part of the being it sprang from and therefore would have no being of its own, nothing that would be self-dependent. The sequence of things out of God is a self-revelation of God. God, however, can only become revealed to himself in an element similar to him, in beings that are free and act out of their own initiative, for whose existence there is no ground but God but who are themselves like God.

If God were a God of the dead and all world phenomena merely like a mechanism, the individual processes of which could be derived from him as their cause and mover, then it would only be necessary to describe God and everything would be comprehended thereby. Out of God one would be able to understand all things and their activity, but this is not the case. The divine world has self-dependence. God created it, but it has its own being. Thus, it is indeed divine, but the divine appears in an entity that is independent of God; it appears in a non-divine element. As light is born out of darkness, so the divine world is born out of non-divine existence, and from this non-divine element springs evil, selfishness. God thus has not all beings in his power. He can give them the light, but they, themselves, emerge from the dark night. They are the sons of this night, and God has no power over whatever is darkness in them. They must work their way through the night into the light. This is their freedom. One can also say that the world is God's creation out of the ungodly. The ungodly, therefore, is the first, and the godly the second.

[ 10 ] Schelling started out by searching for the ideas in all things, that is to say, by searching for what is divine in them. In this way, the whole world was transformed into a manifestation of God for him. He then had to proceed from God to the ungodly in order to comprehend the imperfect, the evil, the selfish. Now the whole process of world evolution became a continuous conquest of the ungodly by the godly for him. The individual man has his origin in the ungodly. He works his way out of this element into the divine. This process from the ungodly to the godly was originally the dominating element in the world. In antiquity men surrendered to their natures. They acted naively out of selfishness. The Greek civilization stands on this ground. It was the age in which man lived in harmony with nature, or, as Schiller expresses it in his essay, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, man, himself, was nature and therefore did not seek nature. With the rise of Christianity, this state of innocence of humanity vanishes. Mere nature is considered as ungodly, as evil, and is seen as the opposite of the divine, the good. Christ appears to let the light of the divine shine in the darkness of the ungodly. This is the moment when “the earth becomes waste and void for the second time,” the moment of “birth of the higher light of the spirit, which was from the beginning of the world, but was not comprehended by the darkness that operated by and for itself, and was then still in its concealed and limited manifestation. It appears in order to oppose the personal and spiritual evil, also in personal and human shape, and as mediator in order to restore again the connection of creation and God on the highest level. For only the personal can heal the personal, and God must become man to enable man to come to God.”

[ 11 ] Spinozism is a world conception that seeks the ground of all world events in God, and derives all processes according to external necessary laws from this ground, just as the mathematical truths are derived from the axioms. Schelling considers such a world conception insufficient. Like Spinoza, he also believes that all things are in God, but according to his opinion, they are not determined only by “the lifelessness of his system, the soullessness of its form, the poverty of its concepts and expressions, the inexorable harshness of its statements that tallies perfectly with its abstract mode of contemplation.” Schelling, therefore, does find Spinoza's “mechanical view of nature” perfectly consistent, but nature, itself, does not show us this consistency.

All that nature tells us is that it does not exist as a result of a geometric necessity. There is in it, not clear, pure reason, but personality and spirit; otherwise, the geometric intellect, which has ruled so long, ought to have penetrated it long ago. Intellect would necessarily have realized its idol of general and eternal laws of nature to a far greater extent, whereas it has everyday to acknowledge nature's irrational relation to itself more and more.

As man is not merely intellect and reason but unites still other faculties and forces within himself, so, according to Schelling, is this also the case with the divine supreme being. A God who is clear, pure reason seems like personified mathematics. A God, however, who cannot proceed according to pure reason with his world creation but continuously has to struggle against the ungodly, can be regarded as “a wholly personal living being.” His life has the greatest analogy with the human life. As man attempts to overcome the imperfect within himself as he strives toward his ideal of perfection, so such a God is conceived as an eternally struggling God whose activity is the progressive conquest of the ungodly. Schelling compares Spinoza's God to the “oldest pictures of divinities, who appeared the more mysterious the less individually-living features spoke out of them.” Schelling endows his God with more and more individualized traits. He depicts him as a human being when he says, “If we consider what is horrible in nature and the spirit-world, and how much more a benevolent hand seems to cover it up for us, then we cannot doubt that the deity is reigning over a world of horror, and that God could be called the horrible, the terrible God, not merely figuratively but literally.”

[ 12 ] Schelling could no longer look upon a God like this in the same way in which Spinoza had regarded his God. A God who orders everything according to the laws of reason can also be understood through reason. A personal God, as Schelling conceived him in his later life, is incalculable, for he does not act according to reason alone. In a mathematical problem we can predetermine the result through mere thinking; with an acting human being this is not possible. With him, we have to wait and see what action he will decide upon in a given moment. Experience must be added to reason. A pure rational science is, therefore, insufficient for Schelling for a conception of world and God. In the later period of his world conception, he calls all knowledge that is derived from reason a negative knowledge that has to be supplemented by a positive knowledge. Whoever wants to know the living God must not merely depend on the necessary conclusions of reason; he must plunge into the life of God with his whole personal being. He will then experience what no conclusion, no pure reason can give him. The world is not a necessary effect of the divine cause, but a free action of the personal God. What Schelling believed he had reached, not by the cognitive process of the method of reason, but by intuition as the free incalculable acts of God, he has presented in his Philosophy of Revelation and Philosophy of Mythology. He used the content of these two works as the basis of the lectures he gave at the University of Berlin after he had been called to the Prussian capital by Frederic Wilhelm IV. They were published only after Schelling's death in 1854.

[ 13 ] With views of this kind, Schelling shows himself to be the boldest and most courageous of the group of philosophers who were stimulated to develop an idealistic world conception by Kant. Under Kant's influence, the attempt to philosophize about things that transcended thinking and observation was abandoned. One tried to be satisfied with staying within the limits of observation and thinking. Where Kant, however, had concluded from the necessity of such a resignation that no knowledge of transcendent things was possible, the post-Kantians declared that as observation and thinking do not point at a transcendent divine element, they are this divine element themselves. Among those who took this position, Schelling was the most forceful. Fichte had taken everything into the ego; Schelling had spread this ego over everything. What he meant to show was not, as Fichte did, that the ego was everything, but that everything was ego. Schelling had the courage to declare not only the ego's content of ideas as divine, but the whole human spirit-personality. He not only elevated the human reason into a godly reason, but he made the human life content into the godly personal entity. A world explanation that proceeds from man and thinks of the course of the whole world as having as its ground an entity that directs its course in the same way as man directs his actions, is called anthropomorphism. Anyone who considers events as being dependent on a general world reason, explains the world anthropomorphically, for this general world reason is nothing but the human reason made into this general reason. When Goethe says, “Man never understands how anthropomorphic he is,” he has in mind the fact that our simplest statements concerning nature contain hidden anthropomorphisms. When we say a body rolls on because another body pushed it, we form such a conception from our own experience. We push a body and it rolls on. When we now see that a ball moves against another ball that thereupon rolls on, we form the conception that the first ball pushed the second, using the analogy of the effect we ourselves exert. Haeckel observes that the anthropomorphic dogma “compares God's creation and rule of the world with the artful creation of an ingenious technician or engineer, or with the government of a wise ruler. God, the Lord, as creator, preserver and ruler of the world is, in all his thinking and doing, always conceived as similar to a human being.”

Schelling had the courage of the most consistent anthropomorphism. He finally declared man, with all his life-content, as divinity, and since a part of this life-content is not only the reasonable but the unreasonable as well, he had the possibility of explaining also the unreasonable in the world. To this end, however, he had to supplement the view of reason by another view that does not have its source in thinking. This higher view, according to his opinion, he called "positive philosophy.”

It “is the free philosophy in the proper sense of the word; whoever does not want it, may leave it. I put it to the free choice of everybody. I only say that if, for instance, somebody wants to get at the real process, a free world creation, etc., he can have all this only by means of such a philosophy. If he is satisfied with a rational philosophy and has no need beyond it, he may continue holding this position, only he must give up his claim to possess with and in a rational philosophy what the latter simply cannot supply because of its very nature, namely, the real God, the real process and a free relation between God and world.”

The negative philosophy “will remain the preferred philosophy for the school, the positive philosophy, that for life. Only if both of them are united will the complete consecration be obtained that can be demanded of philosophy. As is well-known in the Eleusinian mysteries, the minor mysteries were distinguished from the major ones and the former were considered as a prerequisite stage of the latter . . . The positive philosophy is the necessary consequence of the correctly understood negative one and thus one may indeed say that in the negative philosophy are celebrated the minor mysteries of philosophy, in the positive philosophy, the major ones.”

If the inner life is declared to be the divine life, then it appears to be an inconsistency to limit this distinction to a part of this inner life. Schelling is not guilty of this inconsistency. The moment he declared that to explain nature is to create nature, he set the direction for all his life conception. If thinking contemplation of nature is a repetition of nature's creation, then the fundamental character of this creation must also correspond to that of human action; it must be an act of freedom, not one of geometric necessity. We cannot know a free creation through the laws of reason; it must reveal itself through other means.

[ 14 ] The individual human personality lives and has its being in and through the ground of the world, which is spirit. Nevertheless, man is in possession of his full freedom and self-dependence. Schelling considered this conception as one of the most important in his whole philosophy. Because of it, he thought he could consider his idealistic trend of ideas as a progress from earlier views since those earlier views thought the individual to be completely determined by the world spirit when they considered it rooted in it, and thereby robbed it of its freedom and self-dependence.

For until the discovery of idealism, the real concept of freedom was lacking in all systems, in that of Leibniz as well as in that of Spinoza. A freedom that many of us had conceived and even boasted of because of the vivid inner experience it touched on, namely, one that is to consist merely in the domination of the intelligent principle over the forces of sensuality and desire, such a freedom could be derived from Spinoza's presupposition, not merely as a last resort, but with clarity and the greatest of ease.

A man who had only this kind of freedom in mind and who, with the aid of thoughts that had been borrowed from Spinozism, attempted a reconciliation of the religious consciousness with a thoughtful world contemplation, of theology and philosophy, was Schelling's contemporary, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834). In his speeches on Religion Addressed to the Educated Among Its Scorners (1799), he exclaimed, “Sacrifice with me in reverence to the spirit of the saintly departed Spinoza! The lofty world spirit filled him; the infinite was his beginning and end; the universe his only and eternal love. He reflected himself in holy innocence and deep humility in the eternal world, and could observe how he, in turn, was the world's most graceful mirror.”

Freedom for Schleiermacher is not the ability of a being to decide itself, in complete independence, on its life's own aim and direction. It is, for him, only a “development out of oneself.” But a being can very well develop out of itself and yet be unfree in a higher sense. If the supreme being of the world has planted a definite seed into the separate individuality that is brought to maturity by him, then the course of life of the individual is precisely predetermined but nevertheless develops out of itself. A freedom of this kind, as Schleiermacher thinks of it, is readily thinkable in a necessary world order in which everything occurs according to a strict mathematical necessity. For this reason, it is possible for him to maintain that “the plant also has its freedom.” Because Schleiermacher knew of a freedom only in this sense, he could also seek the origin of religion in the most unfree feeling, in the “feeling of absolute dependence.” Man feels that he must rest his existence on a being other than himself, on God. His religious consciousness is rooted in this feeling. A feeling is always something that must be linked to something else. It has only a derived existence. The thought, the idea, have so distinctly a self-dependent existence that Schelling can say of them, “Thus thoughts, to be sure, are produced by the soul, but the produced thought is an independent power continuing its own action by itself, and indeed growing within the soul to the extent that it conquers and subdues its own mother.” Whoever, therefore, attempts to grasp the supreme being in the form of thoughts, receives this being and holds it as a self-dependent power within himself. This power can then be followed by a feeling, just as the conception of a beautiful work of art is followed by a certain feeling of satisfaction. Schleiermacher, however, does not mean to seize the object of religion, but only the religious feeling. He leaves the object, God, entirely indefinite. Man feels himself as dependent, but he does not know the being on which he depends. All concepts that we form of the deity are inadequate to the lofty character of this being. For this reason, Schleiermacher avoids going into any definite concepts concerning the deity. The most indefinite, the emptiest conception, is the one he likes best. “The ancients experienced religion when they considered every characteristic form of life throughout the world to be the work of a deity. They had absorbed the peculiar form of activity of the universe as a definite feeling and designated it as such.” This is why the subtle words that Schleiermacher uttered concerning the essence of immortality are indefinite:

The aim and character of a religious life is not an immortality that is outside of time, or behind time, or else merely after this time, but one that is still in time. It is the immortality that we can already have here in this temporal life and that is a problem, the solution of which continually engages us. To become one with the infinite in the midst of the finite, and to be eternal in every moment, is the immortality of religion.

Had Schelling said this, it would have been possible to connect it with a definite conception. It would then mean, “Man produces the thought of God. This would then be God's memory of his own being. The infinite would be brought to life in the individual person. It would be present in the finite.” But as Schleiermacher writes those sentences without Schelling's foundations, they do no more than create a nebulous atmosphere. What they express is the dim feeling that man depends on something infinite. It is the theology in Schleiermacher that prevents him from proceeding to definite conceptions concerning the ground of the world. He would like to lift religious feeling, piety, to a higher level, for he is a personality with rare depth of soul. He demands dignity for true religious devotion. Everything that he said about this feeling is of noble character. He defended the moral attitude that is taken in Schlegel's Lucinde, which springs purely out of the individual's own arbitrary free choice and goes beyond all limits of traditional social conceptions. He could do so because he was convinced that a man can be genuinely religious even if he is venturesome in the field of morality. He could say, “There is no healthy feeling that is not pious.” Schleiermacher did understand religious feeling. He was well-acquainted with the feeling that Goethe, in his later age, expressed in his poem, Trilogy of Passion:

From our heart's pureness springs a yearning tender
Unto an unknown Being, lofty, blameless,
In gratefulness unchallenged to surrender,
Unriddling for ourselves the Ever-Nameless
In pious awe –

Because he felt this religious feeling deeply, he also knew how to describe the inner religious life. He did not attempt to know the object of this devotion but left it to be done by the various kinds of theology, each in its own fashion. What he intended to delineate was the realm of religious experience that is independent of a knowledge of God. In this sense, Schleiermacher was a peacemaker between belief and knowledge.

[ 15 ] “In most recent times religion has increasingly contracted the developed extent of its content and withdrawn into the intensive life of religious fervor or feeling and often, indeed, in a fashion that manifests a thin and meager content.” Hegel wrote these words in the preface of the second edition of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1827). He continued by saying:

As long as religion still has a creed, a doctrine, a dogmatic system, it has something that philosophy can make its concern and use to join hands with religion. This fact, however, must not be approached by the inferior, dividing intellect through which modern religion is blinded. It considers the realms of philosophy and religion as being mutually exclusive and in separating them in this way assumes that they can only be linked together externally. The real relation, and this is implied also in the previous statement, is such that religion can, to be sure, be without philosophy. Philosophy, however, cannot be without religion, but comprises it within its own realm. The true religion, the religion of the spirit, must have such a credo, must have a content. The spirit is essentially consciousness of content that has become objective. As feeling, it is the nonobjective content itself and only the lowest stage of consciousness, and, indeed, of the very form of soul life that man has in common with the animals. It is thinking only that makes the spirit out of the soul, the soul with which the animal also is gifted. Philosophy is only a consciousness of this content, of the spirit and of its truth. It is consciousness of man's essential nature that distinguishes him from the animal and makes him capable of religion.

The whole spiritual physiognomy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) becomes apparent when we hear words like these from him, through which he wanted to express clearly and poignantly that he regarded thinking that is conscious of itself as the highest activity of man, as the force through which alone man can gain a position with respect to the ultimate questions. The feeling of dependence, which was considered by Schleiermacher as the originator of religious experience, was declared to be characteristically the function of the animal's life by Hegel. He stated paradoxically that if the feeling of dependence were to constitute the essence of Christianity, then the dog would be the best Christian. Hegel is a personality who lives completely in the element of thought.

Because man is a thinking being, common sense, no more than philosophy, will ever relinquish its prerogative to rise from the empirical world conception to God. This elevation has as its prerequisite the world contemplation of thinking, not merely that of the sensual, animal consciousness.

Hegel makes into the content of his world conception what can be obtained by self-conscious thinking. For what man finds in any other way can be nothing but a preparatory stage of a world conception.

The elevation of thinking above the sensual, its transcendence from the finite to the infinite, the leap into the supersensible that is taken with an abrupt termination of sensual content—all this is thinking itself; this transition itself is thinking. When such a transition is not to be made, it means that no thinking is taking place. In fact, animals do not go beyond sensual perception and immediate impression, and do not make this leap. For this reason, they have no religion.

[ 16 ] What man can extract from things through thinking is the highest element that exists in them and for him. Only this element can he recognize as their essence. Thought is, therefore, the essence of things for Hegel. All perceptual imagination, all scientific observation of the world and its events do, finally, result in man's production of thoughts concerning the connection of things. Hegel's work now proceeds from the point where perceptual imagination and scientific observation have reached their destination: With thought as it lives in self-consciousness. The scientific observer looks at nature; Hegel observes what the scientific observer states about nature. The observer attempts to reduce the variety of natural phenomena to a unity. He explains one process through the other. He strives for order, for organic systematic simplicity in the totality of the things that are presented to the senses in chaotic multiplicity. Hegel searches for systematic order and harmonious simplicity in the results of the scientific investigator. He adds to the science of nature a science of the thoughts about nature. All thoughts that can be produced about the world form, in a natural way, a uniform totality. The scientific observer gains his thoughts from being confronted with the individual things. This is why the thoughts themselves appear in his mind also, at first individually, one beside another. If we consider them now side by side, they become joined together into a totality in which every individual thought forms an organic link. Hegel means to give this totality of thoughts in his philosophy. No more than the natural scientist, who wants to determine the laws of the astronomical universe, believes that he can construct the starry heavens out of these laws, does Hegel, who seeks the law-ordered connections within the thought world, believe he can derive from these thoughts any laws of natural science that can only, be determined through empirical observation. The statement, repeated time and again, that it was Hegel's intention to exhaust the full and unlimited knowledge of the whole universe through pure thinking is based on nothing more than a naive misunderstanding of his view. He has expressed it distinctly enough: “To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy, for what is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable. . . . When philosophy paints its picture gray on gray, a figure of life has become old. . . . Minerva's owl begins its fight only as the twilight of nightfall sets in.”

From these words it should be apparent that the factual knowledge must already be there when the thinker arrives to see them in a new light from his viewpoint. One should not demand of Hegel that he derive new natural laws from pure thought, for he had not intended to do this at all. What he had set out to do was to spread philosophical light over the sum total of natural laws that existed in his time. Nobody demands of a natural scientist that he create the starry sky, although in his research he is concerned with the firmament. Hegel's views, however, are declared to be fruitless because he thought about the laws of nature and did not create these laws at the same time.

[ 17 ] What man finally arrives at as he ponders over things is their essence. It is the foundation of things. What man receives as his highest insight is at the same time the deepest nature of things. The thought that lives in man is, therefore, also the objective content of the world. One can say that the thought is at first in the world in an unconscious form. It is then received by the human spirit. It becomes apparent to itself in the human spirit. Just as man, in directing his attention into nature, finally finds the thought that makes the phenomena comprehensible, so he also finds thought within himself, as he turns his attention inward. As the essence of nature is thought, so also man's own essence is thought. In the human self-consciousness, therefore, thought contemplates itself. The essence of the world arrives at its own awareness. In the other creatures of nature thought is active, but this activity is not directed toward itself but toward something other than itself. Nature, then, does contain thought, but in thinking, man's thought is not merely contained; it is here not merely active, but is directed toward itself. In external nature, thought, to be sure, also unfolds life, but there it only flows into something else; in man, it lives in itself. In this manner the whole process of the world appears to Hegel as thought process, and all occurrences in this process are represented as preparatory phases for the highest event that there is: The thoughtful comprehension of thought itself. This event takes place in the human self-consciousness. Thought then works its way progressively through until it reaches its highest form of manifestation in which it comprehends itself.

[ 18 ] Thus, in observing any thing or process of reality, one always sees a definite phase of development of thought in this thing or process. The world process is the progressive evolution of thought. All phases except the highest contain within themselves a self-contradiction. Thought is in them, but they contain more than it reveals at such a lower stage. For this reason,, it overcomes the contradictory form of its manifestation and speeds on toward a higher one that is more appropriate. The contradiction then is the motor that drives the thought development ahead. As the natural scientist thoughtfully observes things, he forms concepts of them that have this contradiction within themselves. When the philosophical thinker thereupon takes up these thoughts that are gained from the observation of nature, he finds them to be self-contradictory forms. But it is this very contradiction that makes it possible to develop a complete thought structure out of the individual thoughts. The thinker looks for the contradictory element in a thought; this element is contradictory because it points toward a higher stage of its development. Through the contradiction contained in it, every thought points to another thought toward which it presses on in the course of its development. Thus, the philosopher can begin with the simplest thought that is bare of all content, that is, with the abstract thought of being. From this thought he is driven by the contradiction contained therein toward a second phase that is higher and less contradictory, etc., until he arrives at the highest stage, at thought living within itself, which is the highest manifestation of the spirit.

[ 19 ] Hegel lends expression to the fundamental character of the evolution of modern world conception. The Greek spirit knows thought as perception; the modern spirit knows it as the self-engendered product of the soul. In presenting his world conception, Hegel turns to the creations of self-consciousness. He starts out by dealing only with the self-consciousness and its products, but then he proceeds to follow the activity of the self-consciousness into the phase in which it is aware of being united with the world spirit. The Greek thinker contemplates the world, and his contemplation gives him an insight into the nature of the world. The modern thinker, as represented by Hegel, means to live with his inner experience in the world's creative process. He wants to insert himself into it. He is then convinced that he discovers himself in the world, and he listens to what the spirit of the world reveals as its being while this very being is present and alive in his self-consciousness. Hegel is in the modern world what Plato was in the world of the Greeks. Plato lifted his spirit-eye contemplatively to the world of ideas so as to catch the mystery of the soul in this contemplation. Hegel has the soul immerse itself in the world-spirit and unfold its inner life after this immersion. So the soul lives as its own life what has its ground in the world spirit into which it submerged.

Hegel thus seized the human spirit in its highest activity, that is, in thinking, and then attempted to show the significance of this highest activity within the entirety of the world. This activity represents the event through which the universal essence, which is poured out into the whole world, finds itself again. The highest activities through which this self-finding is accomplished are art, religion and philosophy. In the work of nature, thought is contained, but here it is estranged from itself. It appears not in its own original form. A real lion that we see is, indeed, nothing but the incarnation of the thought, “lion.” We are, however, not confronted here with the thought, lion, but with the corporeal being. This being, itself, is not concerned with the thought. Only I, when I want to comprehend it, search for the thought. A work of art that depicts a lion represents outwardly the form that, in being confronted with a real lion, I can only have as a thought-image. The corporeal element is there in the work of art for the sole purpose of allowing the thought to appear. Man creates works of art in order to make outwardly visible that element of things that he can otherwise only grasp in thoughts. In reality, thought can appear to itself in its appropriate form only in the human self-consciousness. What really appears only inwardly, man has imprinted into sense-perceived matter in the work of art to give it an external expression. When Goethe stood before the monuments of art of the Greeks, he felt impelled to confess that here is necessity, here is God. In Hegel's language, according to which God expresses himself in the thought content of the world manifested in human self-consciousness, this would mean: In the works of art man sees reflected the highest revelations of the world in which he can really participate only within his own spirit. Philosophy contains thought in its perfectly pure form, in its original nature. The highest form of manifestation of which the divine substance is capable, the world of thought, is contained in philosophy. In Hegel's sense, one can say the whole world is divine, that is to say, permeated by thought, but in philosophy the divine appears directly in its godliness while in other manifestations it takes on the form of the ungodly. Religion stands halfway between art and philosophy. In it, thought does not as yet live as pure thought but in the form of the picture, the symbol. This is also the case with art, but there the picture is such that it is borrowed from the external perception. The pictures of religion, however, are spiritualized symbols.

[ 20 ] Compared to these highest manifestations of thought, all other human life expressions are merely imperfect preparatory stages. The entire historical life of mankind is composed of such stages. In following the external course of the events of history one will, therefore, find much that does not correspond to pure thought, the object of reason. In looking deeper, however, we see that in historical evolution the thought of reason is nevertheless in the process of being realized. This realization just proceeds in a manner that appears as ungodly on the surface. On the whole, one can maintain the statement, “Everything real is reasonable.” This is exactly the decisive point, that thought, the historical world spirit, realizes itself in the entirety of history. The individual person is merely a tool for the realization of the purpose of this world spirit. Because Hegel recognizes the highest essence of the world in thought, he also demands of the individual that he subordinate himself to the general thoughts that rule the world evolution.

The great men in history are those whose special personal purposes contain the substantial element that is the will of the world spirit. This content is their true power. It is also contained in the general unconscious instincts of the people. They are inwardly driven to it and have nothing further to fall back upon that would enable them to resist the individual who has made the execution of such a purpose his own interest. The people gather around his colors. He shows them and brings into reality their own immanent purposes. If we appraise the fate of these world-historical individuals, we must say that they have had the good fortune to be the executive agent of a purpose that represented a step in the progress of the general spirit. We can call a ‘stratagem or reason,’ the way in which reason employs individuals as its tools, for it has them execute their own purposes with all fury of passion, and in so doing, it not only remains unharmed, but actually realizes itself. The particular is mostly negligible in comparison with the general; the individuals are sacrificed and abandoned. World history thus presents the spectacle of struggling individuals and, in the field of the particular, everything happens in an entirely natural fashion. Just as in the animal nature the preservation of life is purpose and instinct of the individual specimen, and just as general reason holds sway while the individual drops out, in the same way things also happen in the spiritual world. The passions work mutual destruction on each other. Reason alone wakes, follows its purpose and prevails.

Man as an individual can seize the comprehensive spirit only in his thinking. Only in the contemplation of the world is God entirely present. When man acts, when he enters the active life, he becomes a link and therefore can also participate only as a link in the complete chain of reason.

Hegel's doctrine of state is also derived from thoughts of this kind. Man is alone with his thinking; with his actions he is a link of the community. The reasonable order of community, the thought by which it is permeated, is the state. The individual person, according to Hegel, is valuable only insofar as the general reason, thought, appears within such a person, for thought is the essence of things. A product of nature does not possess the power to bring thought in its highest form into appearance; man has this power. He will, therefore, fulfill his destination only if he makes himself a carrier of thought. As the state is realized thought, and as the individual man is only a member within its structure, it follows that man has to serve the state and not the state, man.

If the state is confused with society, and if its end is then defined as the security and protection of property and individual freedom, then it follows that the interest of the individual as such is the last purpose for which the two are associated, and from this again it would follow that it is merely a matter of an arbitrary choice of the individual to become a member of the state or not. The state has, however, an entirely different relation toward the individual. As it is objective spirit, the individual man himself has objectivity, truth and morality only insofar as he is a member of it. The union as such is the true content and purpose, and it is the destination of the individuals to lead a generally valid life. Their subsequent satisfaction, activity and behavior has this substantial element of general validity as its basis and as its result.

What place is there for freedom in such a life-conception? The concept of freedom through which the individual human being is granted an absolute to determine aim and purpose of his own activity is not admitted as valid by Hegel. For what could be the advantage if the individual did not derive his aim from the reasonable world of thoughts but made his decision in a completely arbitrary fashion? This, according to Hegel, would really be absence of freedom. An individual of this kind would not be in agreement with his own essence; he would be imperfect. A perfect individual can only want to realize his essential nature, and the ability to do this is his freedom. This essential nature now is embodied in the state. Therefore, if man acts according to the state, he acts in freedom.

The state, in and by itself, is the moral universe, the realization of freedom, and it is reason's absolute purpose that freedom be real. The state is the spirit that has a foothold in the world, whereas in nature it realizes itself only in a self-estranged form as dormant spirit. . . . The fact that the state exists testifies to God's walk through the world. It has its ground in the power of reason that causes its self-realization through the force of will.

Hegel is never concerned with things as such, but always with their reasonable, thoughtful content. As he always searched for thoughts in the field of world contemplation, so he also wanted to see life directed from the viewpoint of thought. It is for this reason that he fought against indefinite ideals of state and society and made himself the champion of the order existing in reality. Whoever dreams of an indefinite ideal for the future believes, in Hegel's opinion, that the general reason has been waiting for him to make his appearance. To such a person it is necessary to explain particularly that reason is already contained in everything that is real. He called Professor Fries, whose colleague he was in Jena and whose successor he became later in Heidelberg, the “General Field Marshal of all shallowness” because he had intended to form such an ideal for the future “out of the mush of his heart.”

The comprehensive defense of the real and existing order has earned Hegel strong reproaches even from those who were favorably inclined toward the general trend of his ideas. One of Hegel's followers, Johann Eduard Erdmann, writes in regard to this point:

The decided preponderance that Hegel's philosophy is granted in the middle of the 1820's over all other contemporary systems has its cause in the fact that the momentary calm that it established in the wake of the wild struggles in the field of politics, religion and church policy, correspond appropriately to a philosophy that has been called—in reprehension by its antagonists, and in praise by its friends—the ‘philosophy of the restoration.’

This name is justified to a much greater extent than its coiners had realized.

[ 22 ] One should not overlook the fact also that Hegel created, through his sense of reality, a view that is in a high degree close and favorable to life. Schelling had meant to provide a view of life in his “Philosophy of Revelation,” but how foreign are the conceptions of his contemplation of God to the immediately experienced real life! A view of this kind can have its value, at most, in festive moments of solitary contemplation when man withdraws from the bustle' of everyday life to surrender to the mood of profound meditation; when he is engaged, so to speak, not in the service of the world, but of God. Hegel, however, had meant to impart to man the all-pervading feeling that he serves the general divine principle also in his everyday activities. For him, this principle extends, as it were, down to the last detail of reality, while with Schelling it withdraws to the highest regions of existence. Because Hegel loved reality and life, he attempted to conceive it in its most reasonable form. He wanted man to be guided by reason every step of his life. In the last analysis he did not have a low estimation of the individual's value. This can be seen from utterances like the following.

The richest and most concrete is the most subjective, and the element that withdraws the most into profundity is the most powerful and all-comprehensive. The highest and most pointed peak is the pure personality, which alone through the absolute dialectic, which is nature, encompasses everything within itself and at the same time, because it develops to the highest stage of freedom and insists on simplicity, which is the first immediacy and generality.

But in order to become “pure personality” the individual has to permeate himself with the whole element of reason and to absorb it into his self, for the “pure personality,” to be sure, is the highest point that man can reach in his development, but man cannot claim this stage as a mere gift of nature. If he has lifted himself to this point, however, the following words of Hegel become true:

That man knows of God is a communal knowledge in the meaning of the ideal community, for man knows of God only insofar as God knows of himself in man. This knowledge is self-consciousness of God, but also a knowledge that God has of man; this knowledge that God has of man is the knowledge that man has of God. The spirit of man, to know of God, is only the spirit of God himself.

According to Hegel, only a man in whom this is realized deserves the name of “personality,” for with him reason and individuality coincide. He realizes God within himself for whom he supplies in his consciousness the organ to contemplate himself. All thoughts would remain abstract, unconscious, ideal forms if they did not obtain living reality in man. Without man, God would not be there in his highest perfection. He would be the incomplete basic substance of the world. He would not know of himself. Hegel has presented this God before his realization in life. The content of the presentation is Hegel's Logic. It is a structure of lifeless, rigid, mute thoughts. Hegel, himself, calls it the “realm of shadows.” It is, as it were, to show God in his innermost, eternal essence before the creation of nature and of the finite spirit. But as self-contemplation necessarily belongs to the nature of God, the content of the “Logic” is only the dead God who demands existence. In reality, this realm of the pure abstract truth does not occur anywhere. It is only our intellect that is capable of separating it from living reality. According to Hegel, there is nowhere in existence a completed first being, but there is only one in eternal motion, in the process of continual becoming. This eternal being is the “eternally real truth in which the eternally active reason is free for itself, and for which necessity, nature and history only serve as forms of manifestation and as vessels of its glory.”

Hegel wanted to show how, in man, the world of thoughts comprehends itself. He expressed in another form Goethe's conception:

When a man's healthy nature acts in its entirety, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful. worthy and cherished whole, when inner harmony fills him with pure and free delight, then the universe, if it could become aware of itself, would rejoice as having reached its destination and would admire the peak of its own becoming and being.

Translated into Hegel's language, this means that when man experiences his own being in his thinking, then this act has not merely an individual personal significance, but a universal one. The nature of the universe reaches its peak in man's self-knowledge; it arrives at its completion without which it would remain a fragment.

[ 22 ] In Hegel's conception of knowledge this is not understood as the seizing of a content that, without the cognitive process, exists somewhere ready-made in the world; it is not an activity that produces copies of the real events. What is created in the act of thinking cognition exists, according to Hegel, nowhere else in the world but only in the act of cognition. As the plant produces a blossom at a certain stage of development, so the universe produces the content of human knowledge. Just as the blossom is not there before its development, so the thought content of the world does not exist before it appears in the human spirit. A world conception in which the opinion is held that in the process of knowledge only copies of an already existing content come into being, makes man into a lazy spectator of the world, which would also be completely there without him. Hegel, however, makes man into the active co-agent of the world process, which would be lacking its peak without him.

[ 23 ] Grillparzer, in his way, characterized Hegel's opinion concerning the relation of thinking and world in a significant epigram:

It may be that you teach us prophetically God's form of thinking. But it's human form, friend, you have decidedly spoiled.

What the poet has in mind here in regard to human thinking is just the thinking that presupposes that its content exists ready-made in the world and means to do nothing more than to supply a copy of it. For Hegel, this epigram contains no rebuke, for this thinking about something else is, according to his view, not the highest, most perfect thinking. In thinking about a thing of nature one searches for a concept that agrees with an external object. One then comprehends through the thought that is thus formed what the external object is. One is then confronted with two different elements, that is, with the thought and with the object. But if one intends to ascend to the highest viewpoint, one must not hesitate to ask the question: What is thought itself? For the solution of this problem, however, there is again nothing but thought at our disposal. In the highest form of cognition, then, thought comprehends itself. No longer does the question of an agreement with something outside arise. Thought deals exclusively with itself. This form of thinking that has no support in any external object appears to Grillparzer as destructive for the mode of thinking that supplies information concerning the variety of things spread out in time and space, and belonging to both the sensual and spiritual world of reality. But no more than the painter destroys nature in reproducing its lines and color on canvas, does the thinker destroy the ideas of nature as he expresses them in their spiritually pure form. It is strange that one is inclined to see in thinking an element that would be hostile to reality because it abstracts from the profusion of the sensually presented content. Does not the painter, in presenting in color, shade and line, abstract from all other qualities of an object? Hegel suitably characterized all such objections with his nice sense of humor. If the primal substance whose activity pervades the world “slips, and from the ground on which it walks, falls into the water, it becomes a fish, an organic entity, a living being. If it now slips and falls into the element of pure thinking—for even pure thinking they will not allow as its proper element—then it suddenly becomes something bad and finite; of this one really ought to be ashamed to speak, and would be if it were not officially necessary and because there is simply no use denying that there is some such thing as logic. Water is such a cold and miserable element; yet life nevertheless feels comfortably at home in it. Should thinking be so much worse an element? Should the absolute feel so uncomfortable and behave so badly in it?”

[ 24 ] It is entirely in Hegel's sense if one maintains that the first being created the lower strata of nature and the human being as well. Having arrived at this point, it has resigned and left to man the task to create, as an addition to the external world and to himself, the thoughts about the things. Thus, the original being, together with the human being as a co-agent, create the entire content of the world. Man is a fellow-creator of the world, not merely a lazy spectator or cognitive ruminator of what would have its being just as well without him.

[ 25 ] What man is in regard to his innermost existence he is through nothing else but himself. For this reason, Hegel considers freedom, not as a divine gift that is laid into man's cradle to be held by him forever after, but as a result toward which he progresses gradually in the course of his development. From life in the external world, from the stage in which he is satisfied in a purely sensual existence, he rises to the comprehension of his spiritual nature, of his own inner world. He thereby makes himself independent of the external world; he follows his inner being. The spirit of a people contains natural necessity and feels entirely dependent on what is moral public opinion in regard to custom and tradition, quite apart from the individual human being. But gradually the individual wrests himself loose from this world of moral convictions that is thus laid down in the external world and penetrates into his own inner life, recognizing that he can develop moral convictions and standards out of his own spirit. Man lifts himself up to the vantage point of the supreme being that rules within him and is the source of his morality. For his moral commandment, he no longer looks to the external world but within his own soul. He makes himself dependent only on himself (paragraph 552 of Hegel's Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences). This independence, this freedom then is nothing that man possesses from the outset, but it is acquired in the course of historical evolution. World history is the progress of humanity in the consciousness of freedom.

[ 26 ] Since Hegel regards the highest manifestations of the human spirit as processes in which the primal being of the world finds the completion of its development, of its becoming, all other phenomena appear to him as the preparatory stages of this highest peak; the final stage appears as the aim and purpose toward which everything tends. This conception of a purposiveness in the universe is different from the one in which world creation and world government are thought to be like the work of an ingenious technician or constructor of machines, who has arranged all things according to useful purposes. A utility doctrine of this kind was rigorously rejected by Goethe. On February 20th, 1831, he said to Eckermann (compare Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann, Part II):

Man is inclined to carry his usual views from life also into science and, in observing the various parts of an organic being, to inquire after their purpose and use. This may go on for awhile and he may also make progress in science for the time being, but he will come across phenomena soon enough where such a narrow view will prove insufficient and he will be entangled in nothing but contradictions if he does not acquire a higher orientation. Such utilitarian teachers will say that the bull has horns to defend itself with, but there I ask why the sheep have none. Even when they have horns, why are they twisted around the sheep's ears so that they cannot be of any use at all. It is a different thing to say that the bull defends himself with his horns because they are there. The question why is not scientific at all. We fare a little better with the question how, for if I ask the question, ‘How does the bull have horns?’ I am immediately led to the observation of his organization, and this shows me at the same time why the lion has no horns and cannot have any.

Nevertheless, Goethe recognizes, in another sense, a purposeful arrangement in all nature that finally reaches its aim in man and has all its works so ordered, as it were, that he will fulfill his destination in the end. In his essay on Winckelmann, he writes, “For to what avail is all expenditure and labor of suns and planets and moons, of stars and galaxies, of comets and of nebulae, and of completed and still growing worlds, if not at last a happy man rejoices in his existence?” Goethe is also convinced that the nature of all world phenomena is brought to light as truth in and through man (compare what is said in Part 1 Chapter VI). To comprehend how everything in the world is so laid out that man has a worthy task and is capable of carrying it out is the aim of this world conception. What Hegel expresses at the end of his Philosophy of Nature sounds like a philosophical justification of Goethe's words:

In the element of life nature has completed her course and has made her peace as she turns into a higher phase of being. The spirit has thus emerged from nature. The aim of nature is her own death, to break through the crust of immediate sensual existence, to burn as a phoenix in order to emerge from this external garment, rejuvenated as spirit. Nature thus becomes estranged from herself in order that she may recognize her own being, thereby bringing about a reconciliation with herself. . . . The spirit therefore exists before nature as its real purpose; nature originates from the spirit.

This world conception succeeded in placing man so high because it saw realized in man what is the basis of the whole world, as the fundamental force, the primal being. It prepares its realization through the whole gradual progression of all other phenomena but is fulfilled only in man. Goethe and Hegel agree perfectly in this conception. [ 27 ] What Goethe had derived from his contemplative observation of nature and spirit, Hegel expresses through his lucid pure thinking unfolding its life in self-consciousness. The method by which Goethe explained certain natural processes through the stages of their growth and development is applied by Hegel to the whole cosmos. For an understanding of the plant organism Goethe demanded:

Watch how the plant in its growth changes step by step and, gradually led on, transforms from blossoms to fruits.

Hegel wants to comprehend all world phenomena in the gradual progress of their development from the simplest dull activity of inert matter to the height of the self-conscious spirit. In the self-conscious spirit he sees the revelation of the primal substance of the world.

[ 1 ] As the new Age of Consciousness proceeds, it grows less and less possible for Michael to connect himself with the existence of mankind in general. Intellectuality has become human and is now entering humanity. From it the Imaginative conceptions, which could reveal to man the Divine Being and Intelligence in the Cosmos, are vanishing. The possibility for Michael himself to approach man begins only with the last third of the nineteenth century. Before that time it was only possible by those paths which were sought for in the true Rosicrucian sense.

[ 2 ] With his own budding intellectuality, man looks out into Nature. He sees there a physical and etheric world, in which he himself is not contained. Through the great ideas of men such as Copernicus and Galileo, he attains a picture of the world external to man. But he loses the picture of himself. When he gazes on himself he has no possibility of reaching any insight as to what he truly is.

[ 3 ] In the depths of his being, that which is destined to bear and sustain his intelligence is being awakened in him. With this, his Ego becomes united. Thus man now bears a threefold nature within him: first, in his spirit-and-soul being, manifesting as physical-etheric, that which originated once upon a time, in the old Saturn and Sun epochs, and then ever and again placed him within the kingdom of the Divine-Spiritual. It is here that the Human Being and the Michael Being go together. Secondly, man bears within him his later physical and etheric nature, that which evolved in him during the Moon and Earth epochs. All this is the work and active working of the Divine-Spiritual. But the Divine-Spiritual itself is no longer living and present within it. [ 4 ] It only becomes fully living and present once more when Christ passes through the Mystery of Golgotha. In that which is at work spiritually in the physical and etheric body of man, Christ can indeed be found.

Thirdly, man has within him that part of his soul and spirit which received new being in the Moon and Earth epochs. Here Michael has remained active (whereas in the part of man that is inclined towards the Moon and Earth, he has become more and more inactive.) In the former Michael has preserved, for man, his picture of Man and the Gods together.

[ 5 ] He was able to do this until the dawn of the new age of Consciousness—the age of the Spiritual Soul. Then the spirit and soul of man sank down, as it were, entirely in the physical-etheric nature, in order to draw forth from there the Spiritual Soul.

[ 6 ] Radiantly there arose in the consciousness of man what his physical and his etheric body could tell him about the physical and etheric in the world of Nature. And what his astral body and Ego had been able to tell him about himself vanished away from his vision.

[ 7 ] In the age which now began, there arose in man the feeling that with his own insight he could no longer reach himself. Thus there began a search for knowledge of the human being. Man could no longer find satisfaction for this quest in what the present was able to provide. He went back to earlier ages of history. Humanism arose in the evolution of the spiritual life. Humanism became the object of men's striving, not because they had grasped Man in his essential nature, but because they had lost him. As long as they possessed this knowledge, Erasmus of Rotterdam and others would have worked from a trend of soul quite different from anything that Humanism could give them.

[ 8 ] In Faust, Goethe discovered at a later time a figure representative of the man who had completely lost hold of his essential being.

[ 9 ] This quest of the human being grows more and more intense as time goes on. For man has now no other alternative: he must either make himself blunt and insensitive as regards his own being, or else the longing for it must come forth as an essential element in his soul's life.

[ 10 ] Right into the nineteenth century, the best minds in the spiritual life of Europe evolve ideas in the most varied fields and in the most different ways—ideas historical, scientific, philosophical, mystical, all of which represent the striving to find, in what has now become an intellectualistic world-conception, the human being himself.

[ 11 ] Renaissance, spiritual re-birth, humanism, are striving restlessly—even tempestuously—for a spiritual element in a direction in which it is not to be found. And, in the direction in which it should be sought, there is impotence, illusion, bewilderment of consciousness. And yet everywhere—in Art, in Knowledge—the Michael-forces are breaking through into the human being, though not as yet into the newly-growing forces of the Spiritual Soul. It is a critical time for the spiritual life. Michael turns all his forces towards the past in cosmic evolution so that he may gain the power to hold the ‘Dragon’ balanced and constrained beneath his feet. It is under these mighty exertions of Michael that the great creations of the Renaissance are born. Yet they still only represent a renewal by Michael of Intellectual or Mind-Soul forces. They are not yet a working of the new soul-forces.

[ 12 ] We can behold Michael filled with anxiety. Will he really be able to master the ‘Dragon’ in the long run? He perceives human beings in one region trying to gain a picture of Man out of the newly-acquired picture of Nature. He sees how they observe Nature and then seek to form a picture of Man from what they call the ‘Laws of Nature.’ He sees them forming their conceptions:—‘This animal quality becomes more perfect, that system of organs more harmonious, and man “arises”!’ But before the spirit-gaze of Michael man does not arise. For in effect, what is thus thought of as being harmonised, perfected, is there only in thought. No one can see it evolving in reality, for nowhere does this happen in actual fact.

[ 13 ] And so, with these their conceptions about Man, men live in empty pictures, in illusions. They are forever running after a picture of Man which they only imagine that they have, while in real truth there is nothing in their field of vision. ‘The power of the spiritual Sun shines upon their souls. Christ Himself is working; but they are not yet able to perceive His presence. The power of the Spiritual Soul holds sway in the body; but it still will not enter into their souls.’ That is approximately the inspiration one can hear of what Michael says in great anxiety. Is it possible that the forces of illusion in man will give the ‘Dragon’ so much power that it will be impossible for Michael to maintain the balance?

[ 14 ] Other persons try with more inward artistic power to feel Nature at one with man. Mighty are the words in which Goethe described Winkelmann's work in a beautiful book: ‘When the healthy nature of man acts as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, majestic and worthy whole, when harmonious case gives him pure, free delight; then would the Universe, if it were conscious of itself, shout aloud for joy, as having reached its goal, and marvel at the climax of its own development and being.’ That which stimulated Lessing with fiery spirit and ensouled Herder's wide outlook on the world, rings out in these words of Goethe. And the whole of Goethe's own work is like a many-sided revelation of these his own words. In his ‘Aesthetic Letters’, Schiller has described an ideal human being who, in the sense described in the above words, bears the Universe within himself and realises it in social intercourse with other human beings. But whence comes this picture of Man? It shines like the morning sun over the Earth in spring. But it has entered into human feeling from study of the ancient Greeks. It arose in men with a strong inward Michael-impulse; but they could give form to this impulse only by turning the mind's eye to days of yore. When Goethe wished to experience ‘Man,’ he felt himself in the greatest conflict with the Spiritual Soul. He sought for Man in Spinoza's philosophy; but only during his tour in Italy, when he studied the nature of Greek art, did he feel that he had a glimpse of him. He went away finally from the Spiritual Soul, which is striving upwards in Spinoza, to the Intellectual Soul or Mind-Soul which was gradually dying out. However, with his far-reaching conception of Nature he was able to carry over an infinite amount from the Intellectual Soul into the Spiritual Soul.

[ 15 ] Michael also looks with earnestness upon this search for Man. What is in accordance with his idea is indeed entering here into the spiritual evolution of man:—it is that human being who once beheld the Divine Being and Intelligence when Michael still ruled it from the Cosmos. But if this were not laid hold of by the spiritualised force of the Spiritual Soul it would in the end inevitably slip away from Michael's control and come under the sway of Lucifer. The other great anxiety in Michael's life is, lest in the oscillation of the cosmic spiritual state of balance Lucifer might gain the upper hand.

[ 16 ] Michael's preparation of his Mission for the end of the nineteenth century flows on in cosmic tragedy. Below, on the Earth, there is often the greatest satisfaction in the working out of the new picture of Nature; whereas in the region where Michael works there is a tragic feeling regarding the hindrances to the coming of the picture of Man.

[ 17 ] Formerly Michael's austere, spiritualised love lived in the sun's rays, in the shimmering dawn, in the sparkling of the stars; this love had now acquired most strongly the note of looking down at humanity with awakening sorrow.

[ 18 ] Michael's situation in the Cosmos became tragically difficult, but it also pressed for a solution just at the period of time which preceded his earthly mission. Men were able to keep intellectuality only in the sphere of the body and there only in the sphere of the senses. On one hand, therefore, they received into their views nothing that the senses did not tell them; Nature became the field of the revelations of the senses, considered quite materially. The forms of Nature were no longer perceived as the work of the Divine-Spiritual but as something devoid of spirit, and yet something of which it is affirmed that it brings forth that spiritual element in which man lives. On the other hand, as regards a Spirit-world, men would now accept only what the historical accounts narrated. Direct vision of the Spirit working in the past was discredited, as was the vision of the Spirit in the present.

[ 19 ] In the soul of man there now lived only that which came from the sphere of the present, which Michael does not enter. Man was glad to stand on ‘sure’ ground. He believed he possessed this because in ‘Nature’ he sought no thoughts, in which he might have had to fear the presence of arbitrary fancies. But Michael was not glad. In his own sphere, beyond man, he had to wage war with Lucifer and Ahriman. This resulted in tragic difficulty, because Lucifer is able to approach man the more easily, the more Michael—who indeed also preserves the past—is obliged to keep himself away from man. And thus a severe battle for man took place between Michael and Ahriman and Lucifer in the spiritual world immediately bordering upon the Earth, while on the Earth itself man kept his soul in action against what was beneficial to his evolution.

[ 20 ] All this applies of course to the spiritual life of Europe and America. We should have to speak differently with respect to that of Asia.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the above Third Study: Michael's suffering over Human Evolution before the Time of his earthly Activity)

[ 21 ] 134. In the very earliest time of the evolution of the Spiritual Soul, man began to feel that he had lost the picture of Humanity—the picture of his own Being—which had formerly been given to him in Imagination. Powerless as yet to find it in the Spiritual Soul, he sought for it by way of Natural Science or of History. He wanted the ancient picture of Humanity to arise in him again.

[ 22 ] 135. Man reaches no fulfilment in this way. Far from becoming filled with the true being of Humanity, he is only led into illusions. But he is unaware that they are so; he thinks they have real power to sustain Humanity.

[ 23 ] 136. Thus, in the time that went before his working upon Earth, Michael had to witness with anxiety and suffering the evolution of mankind. For in this time men eschewed any real contemplation of the Spirit, and thus they severed all the links that connected them with Michael.

The name Lucifer inspires a slight sense of dread in some, and is usually associated with notions of antipathy. Is this justified? The name Lucifer means: light bearer, light bringer. Medieval beliefs were different, but for those who have studied the deep knowledge of the world, Lucifer actually denotes something quite different.

Spiritual beings play a role in human life. The religions of the East speak of deva and dhyani chohan, the more Western religions, such as Christianity, speak of angels and archangels. To those who are familiar with the spiritual worlds, they represent something true and real. Higher beings play a role in human life. Lucifer is also understood to be among the guiding personalities, the leading or seducing ones.

Here we must be clear about dualism – duality – which plays a role in all areas of life. The ancients, including Pythagoras, speak of this duality: light and darkness, male and female, positive and negative magnetism, and we could cite many more such dualities. – When we make a glass rod electrically positive by rubbing it, we simultaneously make the rubbing material electrically negative. The electricity of glass and that of the rubbed material are related to each other as light is to darkness. In the Persian creation myth, we find Ormuzd and Ahriman: good deity, evil deity. Everything that drives the world forward is done by the good god, while everything that hinders it is withdrawn by the evil god. They place man in the middle.

Remember that everything in the world has a good and an evil side. What do human beings, with their culture, not owe to fire. And on the other hand, how destructive the power of fire can be in volcanic phenomena. Germany's great poet Schiller sang gloriously about this in “The Bell”: “Beneficial is the power of fire...” and so on.

This duality also works in man himself. For centuries, the one principle was seen as evil. A distinction was made between divine - good, and luciferic - evil. In the story of creation, the luciferic principle was represented as a snake. Man had to grow out of a dull nature, so the snake came and opened his eyes to good and evil, and thus another principle was opposed to the divine one. The ancient Indians called the Rishis a snake.

We have to go much deeper into the development of the human soul to see what reality underlies the Lucifer principle. In more recent times, views on this have undergone changes. These were already evident in the old Faust saga. Goethe reshaped it to meet human needs. Faust not only wanted to immerse himself in divine science, he also wanted to make a covenant with evil powers. Then he no longer wanted to approach theology, he wanted to remain a medical doctor. He put the Bible behind the bench and that was considered a reason to fall into the hands of evil forces. In Goethe's work, the crux of the matter is in the second part of Faust: “Whoever strives, we can redeem.” So it is not something destructive, but rather a power is evoked that is not opposed to the deity.

If we want to understand this power, we must realize how man fits into the world around him. Man forms one of the kingdoms; alongside him we have the mineral kingdom, the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom. Man perceives himself as a self-aware being and carries within himself all these kingdoms; he is the bearer of all these natures. He has a physical body in common with the mineral, and he also shares the etheric or life body with the plant. Through his world of feelings, which, as the astral body, is the carrier of passions, instincts, desires, he has something in common with the animal. Thus, man is in an interdependent relationship with the three realms.

Man can only sustain his life by breathing. He draws in the air of life – oxygen – into himself, combines the latter with carbon in his body and exhales this poison – carbonic acid. But man and animal could not live if the plant did not continually renew this air of life. Man and animal owe the possibility of life to the plant. The plant owes it to the mineral. It is only logical to extend this chain of development beyond man, not only to lower beings but also to higher ones. Just as man belongs to lower beings, so he also belongs to higher ones. The fact that man does not see higher beings is no reason why they should not exist. Higher senses can bring man this perception.

Man is first of all a tetrad: physical body, etheric body, astral body and the I. He is a developing being. How does his development take place? A savage still follows his animal instincts, he follows every urge; the one who is higher up only follows certain urges, and those who are very high up, let us say, for example, Schiller or Francis of Assisi, follow even fewer of the lower urges, but transform them into ideals. This results in an upward development of the astral body. The inferior man also has an astral body, but he has done little work in it. A superior man raises his astral body from the animal stage to a higher, nobler and more perfect form. The astral body consists of two parts: what other entities have given him, and what he himself has worked into it. That which he has worked into it himself, we call “Manas”, spirit self, and we thus designate the fifth limb of man. Manas is nothing other than the transformed astral body. But man can do much more than transform his astral body. An undeveloped person knows nothing of morality, law, logic; he has developed little Manas.

But there are even deeper changes. In the ninth and tenth centuries, people did not all have such perfect ideas, but much of what they had learned was incorporated into their astral bodies, because it is the carrier of everything we can learn in the world. What we learn changes quickly, but habits and temperaments change more slowly. We could compare what changes quickly with the minute hand of a clock and what changes more slowly with the hour hand. But there is also the opportunity to change what we are used to, and in doing so we change the etheric or life body: because it is denser, it makes it more difficult for the ego to change. As much as the human being changes his etheric body, so much 'budi' arises in him. Religions are instructions on how to work “Budhi” into the etheric body, while morality only changes the astral body. In the highest sense, art does the same as religions.

Thus you can now find the human being with six limbs, even if manas and budhi are only present in him in a germinal state. But there is already secret training that develops the etheric body. What is taught to the individual is doctrine; what transforms humanity is an influence on the budhi, is secret training. A chela, an occult disciple, works in his etheric body.

But what is hardly present in the seed is the Atman. It is such a strong power that a person can work with it right into his physical body. What can a person do in his physical body today? A person who can develop as an artistic human being, as a chela, can become master of his habits. But the person who has worked this seventh link, this Atman, into himself, also learns to control his pulse. And with this, he becomes partaker of the eternal. This is an achievement of mastery.

Now we see the human being with manas, budhi and atman. We now know that man, we said the I, stands in relation to the three lower realms, and now we see that he stands in relation to a realm above him, the divine realm, through what he has worked into himself as Manas. In this divine realm we have to seek the Elohim, divine spirits, of whom the Bible, as Jehovah, names one.

Through his Manas, his spiritual self, man is linked to the higher worlds. Therefore, we speak of man as one who is becoming, an evolving God. Christ Jesus says, “You are gods.” (John 10:34) Man will one day look back on his present spiritual level and he will feel like a human being who has grown out of it completely.

If we believe in evolution, we must also consider this for other beings, and looking back, we see that our older brothers, the Elohim, with them Jehovah, on an earlier planet or on the earlier embodiment of the earth, occupied the same stage that man now occupies on the present embodiment of the earth. The law of embodiment is not only the basis of man, but of all beings. Goethe speaks of the Earth Spirit: “In the flood of life, in the storm of action, I surge up and down,” and so on. The Earth was seen by individuals as a spiritual being and man as its members. The Earth was often embodied and in its previous embodiment it brought the present gods to the level of man. And in a later incarnation, the present-day human being will take on the level of his older brothers, the Elohim or gods. God, the Nameless, the Unfathomable, is not spoken of here. Elohim or Deva, better translated into German as: spirits.

To illustrate this “progressive” view, I will give an albeit trivial example: just as a student passes through different classes, the class that present humanity is going through is what the gods went through in their previous incarnation on Earth. Students also remain in classes, and so there were beings that did not go through this class completely.

Where do they stand today between humans and gods? They are higher beings than humans, but lower than the gods. In a sense, they are familiar with humans. The following law exists: Each of the basic parts of the human being is developed in an incarnation on earth. In the present incarnation on earth, the manas is developing; in the earlier incarnation, the astral body. The essential thing in this development on earth was that man has changed his entire astral body, that he no longer has anything of the animal in him. Through the development of the manas, he can enter into contact with manasic beings. Only when the atman is developed can he develop independently. Today, older brothers work, later still older ones in budhi and still older ones in atman. The higher spirits that have remained are related to the human astral body. They have already tasted of the Divine. Just as in Manas, demigods also help us to assert ourselves and to glow with the Divine. We would remain trapped in lower instincts if it were not for this stimulation. Thus the passions are transformed into higher instincts. There would only be a barren realm of moral principles, but they would not pulsate in man.

The Old Testament has wonderfully developed this law. The entities that evoke enthusiasm, the glow of love for the manasic, are called Luciferic entities. Thus, Lucifer is the one who evokes the astral passion for the divine in man. He thus arouses in him the desire to learn to love the divine, not as a duty, but as an inclination. He adds independence to submission. He is the instigator of human freedom.

Man becomes free only by following the divine out of his own urge. This is reflected in the biblical story of creation. God guided man, he could not choose. Then the serpent came, and the thought came into man, not only to live in God is desirable, but to become God himself, to carry the image of the deity in [himself] as a personality. Through Lucifer — biblically expressed through the serpent — the human body became the light bearer, as Lucifer himself was the light bearer, until Christ entered the world as “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12) and realized the principle of love for the divine. External knowledge, knowing what the laws of the world are, now seems dull to man. This external knowledge should grasp our inner being, should intervene directly as theosophy, as an independent inner experience. This is how Lucifer anchors himself in man. This research is called the school of Luciferian striving. These people are called: children of Lucifer.

If the gods gave science, Lucifer gave enthusiasm.

God: Revelation.

Lucifer: freedom.

We have a filial relationship with God; Lucifer awakened the feeling of being an independent being, of freedom. Devotion was a voluntary sacrifice. As everywhere, there must be a duality: God and Lucifer.

Thus, the Luciferic entities have not been left behind for no reason. They are those who strive to lead us to the divine by our own free choice. To do so, man must also have the opportunity to be evil. He can certainly become divine without it, but only through free choice.

If the Supreme is to be free, then it must be anchored in the other nature. In this way, God and luciferic entities work towards perfection and freedom.

Question & Answer: Question: [What does the] sphinx mean?

Rudolf Steiner: What the mind is trying to grasp today is nothing new as a concept. The pyramids represent the ancient views of our ancestors: there are four lines on which they stand = the fourfold nature of the human being, physical body, etheric body, astral body with the I. That is the foundation. Above it rises the triangle, representing the three basic parts that the ego works out of the four: Atman, Budhi, Manas. The trinity is not yet complete. If you want to feel this, then you must look at the sphinx. She represents the lower nature and from the eye the riddle of future development radiates towards you. In it, man prophetically seeks his future.

Question: [Not handed down.]

Rudolf Steiner: There are two writings – they are not actually writings in the strict sense – one is kept by a religious community, a church in secret, the other is kept by a master, a great leader of humanity.

Among the literary works of the present day that seek to point the way to a deepening of our spiritual culture, Bruno Wille's book “Revelations of the Juniper Tree: A Novel of an All-Seeing Eye” (published by Eugen Diederichs in Leipzig in 1901, 2 volumes) is arguably one of the most significant. The book has something “representative” for our time: the word “representative” used in the way the great American Emerson speaks of “representative” personalities in world history, meaning those who, as it were, harbor typical feelings and thoughts in their person. Those, incidentally, that are distributed among many, but still constitute a certain coherent aspect of human endeavor, a necessary tone, as it were, in the great symphony of human activity. In this sense, Wilee's “Novel of an All-Seeing Eye” is representative of our time. It expresses, in compressed form, the feelings and thoughts of all those of deeper nature in the present day, who are filled with a striving for spiritualization in our culture, which is absorbed in purely external life. — And he expresses these feelings and thoughts in a genuinely artistic form. This is particularly appealing because the pursuit of knowledge and of a new kind of religious devotion is interwoven with a personal life story, so that in the “hero” of the novel we are presented with a human being in all aspects of his existence. From the immediate events of the emotional and passionate life, which plays out in everyday life, to the highest spheres of all-pervasive knowledge and free, dignified devotion and piety, we are presented with the full gamut of the personal life of a person thirsting for wholeness and harmony. And no less appealing is the introduction of nature into the novel. The beings of nature, especially the juniper tree, reveal the depths of their essence themselves, and reveal their soul, which the science of the present, directed at the merely factual and sensual, wants to deny them. Since Wille is a true poet, he is able to depict the dialogue and the whole interaction and empathy between man and nature in a way that is poetically effective in the most beautiful sense and that gives the novel greatness and artistic perfection.

One sentence from the book is enough to show how the basic feelings of deeper natures in the present are captured here. “What is truth? Must not the truth be united? But what do all these wise men do, each of whom boasts that he possesses the truth? The researcher shrugs contemptuously at the priest. The priest fights back like a snake and hisses: “Your knowledge is sacrilegious; it is cursed!” The scientist now leans towards the poem, smiling: “Nice – but unfortunately a lie!” The poet replies: “And your science? It may be correct, but I find it distasteful!” – So what is truth? Where does that unified vision flourish, which is at once science, devotion and beauty?” (Volume 1, page 6). Wille points to a unity in the human soul that finds truth in a sublime and beautiful guise, so that it - at the same time spiritualizes the poet's art, and is so lofty, so divine that it urges the heart to pious devotion, to a religious mood. How, on the other hand, modern science relates to poetry is vividly expressed in the world view that a professor of anatomy develops. The natural scientist, who is at the “height of scientific knowledge,” says to his students: “So, gentlemen, as a result of our science, we get a view of the world whose basic features would be bleak if they did not have the one consolation of being true. We may regard the sentence: “The world is a theater!” as a gain and a mentor worth heeding. ... We who know stand behind the scenes; through peep holes we look at the audience and wonder whether to laugh or cry. ... Yes, the world is a theater, and here, gentlemen, in this corpse... yes, here we see a prima donna of the conjuring trick of life. ... This body, which seems to be all beauty and poetry, presents itself to the unmasking science as a mere bandage of bones and ligaments, muscles, nerves, blood and skin. And like this woman, so the whole world. Let us go behind the scenes of the great game of deception, hand in hand with science. We see the sun shining brightly and benignantly. But behind the scenes, the loving mother is a soulless fireball. The happiness of childhood, innocence, hope tremble in the spring buds; presentiments and wondrous dreams shiver through the forest. So say the poets; they imagine they are eavesdropping on nature and, in doing so, have grasped some great truth. Theater-making is all that! Subjective mood transferred to soulless objects. One deceives oneself, there is present what only exists here in the mind... Gentlemen! From this corpse, I have removed the skull and show you a gray mass, rich in convolutions and tangled fibers, which consists mostly of protein. That spiritual world is nothing but a process in this substance. Mind and emotion are functions of the brain. Without nerve mass, there is no feeling, no imagining and thinking, no feeling and willing. ... Gentlemen! This world view may seem dull to some of you. Indeed, it destroys the naive belief in beauty, in the reality of beauty. But before all poetry, it has the advantage of being scientific. Science is ruthless, it must be, it has the duty to destroy even the most charming illusions in order to erect the sober structure of truth on the ruins of fantasy.” ... In the novel, this speech is followed by: ‘The professor bowed, the students trampled and applauded...’ (Volume 1, pages 43 ff.).— And so do many of our contemporaries. They applaud “sober science,” the destroyer of illusions, and build an opinion of the world on this soberness, which is their only truth, their only religion. And the more profound natures, who cannot believe that the Supreme is so soulless, so sober, so arid of intellect in the face of the “illusions” that appear on its surface, who ascribe beauty, sublimity, and : these deeper natures feel doubt sinking into their souls and say to themselves what the hero of our novel says to the “scientist,” his friend: “Oh, of course, it is good manners to tolerate poetry. But who believes in it? Who believes the poet when he says that the sun smiles – that it really smiles, not just as it were? But your science objects that the sun has no smile muscles. And in front of Böcklin's mermaids, it argues that a human body with a fish's tail is anatomically absurd. ... This kind of science is a tyrant! It looks bleak and dull under her sceptre. I want to turn my back on her – my heart is with the Cinderella of poetry – I long for my childlike faith, the lost paradise.” And what ‘Friend Oswald’ would probably do today is the same as any ‘true’ scientist when confronted with such deeper natures. “Oswald shrugged his shoulders impatiently and walked around, repeatedly clearing his throat. With him, this was a sign of nervousness."

Out of such doubts, the following idea can arise in the one who is pondering: is the poetic sense really obscuring your perception of reality? Could it not also be the case that, on the contrary, your intellect is obliterating the higher reality that lies in things, making you a bungler at perceiving them; and that the poetic sense is the only one that opens up these higher realities to you? Could not realities quite different from those admitted by your intellect lie behind the realities that your intellect admits, realities that do not condemn this world to “scientific” desolation, but that. wring pious devotion from your soul and give it a true religion? These are the representations that take place below the threshold of our all-seeing creator's consciousness and that finally lead him to no longer seek the secret of the world exclusively in the dry words of the anatomist, but to let it be revealed to him by the rustling of the trees in the forest, by the beings of nature itself. For he comes to the conclusion that there could be just as much soul in the movements and rustling of the trees as there is in man, whose inner life, after all, also becomes clear to him not directly but in gestures and sounds. He says to himself: I hear the sounding words and see the movements of my fellow man, and say to myself: he sends me sounds as I myself give them; he makes gestures as I myself make them: so he will have an inner life as I experience it myself within me. And only in me can I perceive such an inner life. All other inner life is only revealed to me through external signs. If I now interpret the external signs on other people's inner life, why should I not be able to relate the creeping movements of the hop plant, the crackling sounds of the trees, to an inner life? — Inspired by such ideas, our all-seeing person learns to understand the language of the juniper tree; it reveals an inner life to him, just as human language reveals an inner life to him. And so, for him, the whole of nature becomes the outer expression of its inner soul. What is given to man as perception is in itself an experience, a soul, even if it is of a different kind from that of man. And just as plants and seemingly inanimate beings are ensouled, so are entire world bodies. Man's organism is composed of innumerable cells. And each of these cells has its soul. The harmony of all these cell-souls is built into the common soul, as which man experiences himself. But he is only one link in a comprehensive organism. Am I not, the All-Seer reflects, a soul-link in the earth organism, just as the soul-cell of my blood corpuscle is a link in my organism? And must not the earth organism, like mine, be an experience and a soul in itself? Thus Goethe's Earth Spirit becomes a reality before the meditating soul. The way in which poetry can give rise to convincing truth in this way, and how the perception of this high truth in the heart of the All-Seer becomes religious devotion to the world soul: that is the content of Will's novel, which seeks to unite in unity: art, science and religion. Science is raised from the realm of the intellect to that of the imagination, an imagination that seeks to be not an organ of illusion but of higher knowledge. And life, which in the light of rational science appears to be a purposeless game of deception, acquires meaning and order in the context of the soul of the universe. A tragic experience of the hero is clarified when he views its causes and consequences from the point of view of his thus formed belief. He himself feels meaningfully integrated into a meaningful world. And he devoutly submits to the all-pervasiveness of the world spirit, recognizing his will in this pervasion as a member. “Foolish human brothers and sisters! From your fearful narrowness, turn soon to the boundless expanse! Stop confusing a part with the whole, mistaking your petty, fickle, cowardly, mercantile ego for your deepest, cosmic self! If you feel only as fragments of nature... Redeemed are those who, having penetrated the narrow barriers of the ego, feel their community with the whole and enter into the great order with devotion! They have accomplished the highest human art, have shaped their lives into devout music – have become a blissful voice in the symphony of the world (Volume 2, page 391).

This “novel of the All-Seer” may be called a book of longing. On the last pages, there is the sentence: “Every ideal means burgeoning high-altitude life, the early spring of a world Pentecost, prophetic reaching into the better world, awakening, inspiring dawn that precedes the new sun, reflection of the Heavenly Kingdom that cannot fail to appear.” The “all-seeing” person clearly ascends to this ideal. He looks into the past of man. He has developed from lower conditions. “That the future extends into the present is the nature of all development – just as the past extends into the present. The individual human being passes through the stages of development that his species had to go through before it reached the threshold of humanity. In my mother's womb I was a worm — and a fish — a newt and a lizard — a platypus, a marsupial and a monkey. My germ history is a brief repetition of the tribal history. This fundamental law can be extended beyond the present so that it also applies to the forthcoming stages of human development. Just as man in one respect still is what he once was, so in another respect he already is what he will later be. If, therefore, a higher development is to come out of him, then the germ of the higher must already be found in humanity (Vol. II, p. 396f.). Here stands Wille before the gates of the temple in which the creed matures, the cultivation of which the theosophical spiritual currents of all times have made their task. And he remains standing at the entrance. For anyone who feels the full significance of his above sentences will see that the next step is necessary: he must put them into living action. If the “germ of the higher” lies in man, then this germ must be developed. One cannot be satisfied with the mere fact that man's soul is his inner experience, but one should go further and see what can be experienced inwardly. Then one enters completely new realms of a higher reality. Our “all-seeing” friend repeatedly points out that the external facts that unfold before our senses point to inner experiences, and he repeatedly emphasizes that this inner life is the soul. Soul, soul, and again soul: we hear him say this in countless repetitions on his fascinating paths of knowledge and life. But is it not as if someone were to lead us through the entire animal kingdom, repeating over and over again, 'animal, animal, animal,' instead of explaining the special forms: worm, fish, newt, duck-billed platypus, and monkey? No, the soul is just as structured, rich, and diverse, and has just as many powers and laws as the physical. And into these realms of the soul lead the higher cognitions, which are called the theosophical views. Before the entrance gate to them, the will stops. Therefore, there are beautiful vantage points: the eyes, to see from these points, are given by theosophy. This can be seen everywhere in the book. This will be shown for the interesting sections: the “deed body” and “the all-phonograph” in the next issue, where, in reference to Leadbeater's “astral plane,” reference will be made to the realms to which Wille points without opening the eye for them.