The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Early in the year 1910 Rudolf Steiner is believed to have spoken for the first time on the mystery of the true nature of the Second Coming. Throughout that year he gave a number of lectures on the subject and continued his teaching during the following year. The importance of these lectures cannot be exaggerated: their study is essential to an understanding of the meaning and purpose of the Anthroposophical Movement. In the whole body of teaching that was given out, the two lectures which are now reprinted in a new translation, under the title of The True Nature of the Second Coming, form an indispensable part. Many salient points appear, and explanations are made of the connections between past, present and future.

Rudolf Steiner's interpretation of that apocalyptic event described in the New Testament as the coming of the Son of Man “in the clouds with great power and glory” demands for its apprehension knowledge of his teaching on the evolution of man's consciousness, particularly on the development of the ego-consciousness in relation to the Christ Impulse. The incarnation of the Christ took place in an epoch when the soul-faculties of men were best adapted to receive Him manifest in the flesh. But now new faculties of perception are awakening, and men will become capable of receiving Him in a different way. From the third decade of this century onwards, Rudolf Steiner said, the Christ would be visible in etheric form to those possessing these new faculties. At first He will be seen by a few, but during the next three thousand years by greater and yet greater numbers. In a lecture given at Basle on I st October, 1911, Dr. Steiner spoke of the fact that in the future the presence of Christ would be felt amongst those who were gathered together waiting in expectation to receive Him. And for those who are alone, he said, “many a one will experience, when sitting silent in his room, his heart sad and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn, that the etheric Christ will appear and will speak comforting words to him. The Christ will become a living Comforter to men!”

To attempt to master and to expound the content of this revelation given by Rudolf Steiner becomes the particular task of those who count themselves among his followers. He believed that the Christian evangel would develop further and further in time to come, bringing ever new gifts and revelations to the souls of men in their own evolutionary progress from one incarnation to another. And, speaking two years before his death, he said: “Anthroposophy would wish its destiny to be one with the destiny of Christianity.”

When he gave his lecture-cycle on the Gospel of St. Matthew he described in detail the preparation that took place for the coming of Christ in a physical body, with an account of the special mission of Jeshu ben Pandira; in 1911, in the first of two lectures entitled Jeshu ben Pandira, he gave the explicit message that it is in order to prepare humanity for the Second Coming of Christ that Spiritual Science exists. “Everyone,” he said, “who works at the task of Spiritual Science shares in making this preparation.”

MILDRED KIRKCALDY

We'll discuss something that can be of value for our whole esoteric life. The latter aims to give us something that ordinary men don't have yet. We are like children in our relation to the spiritual world. If one is a sensible teacher one doesn't just let children do what they like. One must look at what's developing in a child and arrange his education accordingly. Also one doesn't give a child a real gun to play with, because he could do a lot of damage with it. The same applies to men who are looking for super-sensible worlds. If the means to get into them were put into their hands too early they would use them injuriously, would only cause harm before they were really mature enough to enter them. One must treat children like developing beings.

This comes to expression in their games. A boy plays war, a girl plays with dolls.

An esoteric must also be treated as a developing being by spiritual leaders and teachers, and he must be given what he'll need later. Our earth evolution strides on. When we go into new incarnations we'll see how important and necessary it was to have occupied oneself with theosophy in this life. Although they don't now, men will want to remember their past spiritual experiences. One who took in no theosophy will find nothing, he'll brood about and long for something that he can't find within him. It's very important to devote oneself to esoteric life, even if one doesn't consciously enter the spiritual worlds in this life yet. We should look upon spiritual life as a necessary preparation. We should banish everything else from our thoughts and feelings. The fundamental mood of the soul in concentration and meditation is very important.

Imagine how a chick breaks its eggshell and creeps out. What's the difference between before and after? Before it was completely enclosed by the shell that was its world. Everything that the chick experienced it experienced as pictures in the eggshell. Where is it now, when it breaks through the shell? Then its experience and perception expand around it in a much larger space than before. And life in the eggshell seems very small by comparison.

A man who stands in ordinary sense life is in the same situation as the chick in its shell. Everything is projected around him as a picture and only seems as big as it is to him because he's enclosed in it and has no other yardstick.

We look up to the heavens and see the stars. Astronomers calculate their orbits and what they call their laws. But they really don't see beyond the eggshell. We all carry such an eggshell with us in our astral body—an auric eggshell or sheath. In a chick it's condensed down to the physical level, but not in us. That's why we don't notice it at all. For instance, materialistic science looks upon the sun as a hollow ball, and it lets it be permeated with substances like those in our earth, but in different states. But in reality it's the centre of our ego. Or when we look at the evening or morning star, then we theosophists know that forces are working out there that correspond to our etheric body.

During meditation or after it one could ask oneself: Where is the Christ? Where do I have to look for him?

A man's memory goes back to a time between birth and the change of teeth; that's when ego-consciousness began. The physical body's form is already finished then, it only grows some more. One could ask what things would be like if one's memory only went back to age ten. Suppose that someone who awakened to self-consciousness at 10 asked to be awakened at a certain time. Then on waking he would have the impression that he went to his door himself, knocked, and woke himself up. Or on awaking by himself he would see himself coming in as a light figure, walking towards himself, opening his eyes and awaking himself thereby. He would be able to know: In the realm from which his light form comes to him, there the Christ is also.

Many people will experience this in the near future, even though man's self-consciousness arises already during the first seven years. We're standing at an important turning point, and this must be pointed out. A man will then experience that the light form of his astral body is floating towards him, and he'll know that this light form is consuming his physical body, and that every time it leaves the latter it takes a piece of it along, as it were. And when the apparition takes possession of the physical body again in the morning, the man will see that he's living at the cost of a dying process. This knowledge can make men very sad and melancholic. They'll no longer value their physical body. And whereas men's courage will be tremendously increased by outer culture, air vehicles and other technological attainments, at the same time life will be considered to be of little value. Men will be overcome by deep sadness and melancholy, and the number of suicides will rise sharply. While outer courage is growing in sensory life, inner courage will necessarily decline and give way to a disguised cowardice. Men become ever more materialistic and don't want to know anything about the soul and spirit. Angels inspired Kant to set up his limits to knowledge, so that men could develop outer courage. But just as a compressed rubber ball springs back, so this will produce a reaction in souls, and then men's courage will want to turn to the attainment of knowledge of spiritual worlds again.

Men who don't find their way to the Christ see the figure of death walking beside them. But we know that Christ lives in the earth's aura and that we're always connected with him. If we know this and keep it alive in us, the picture of death takes on Christ's features and he walks beside us like a man, even if we don't see him clairvoyantly. Then we know where to look for the Christ. We can't escape the spirit of the times, it works everywhere. But the knowledge that Christ lives and that we can get to him will keep our souls from desolation, deep melancholy and disdain of life. We'll understand the word in our rosicrucian verse: In Christo morimur. If we let all of this become really alive in our souls in quiet moments it can become a big help to us.

A mind of such bold, grotesque thought as Friedrich Nietzsche's must necessarily evoke contradictory feelings in those who study it closely and lovingly. His unconditional admirers certainly understand the least of his proud ideas. But Kurt Eisner does not belong in this category. His admiration does not silence the contradiction that arises from his own significant individuality; not even the irony that Nietzsche's one-sidedness provokes. Alongside ruthlessly approving sentences such as: "Nietzsche's Zarathustra is only a work of art like Faust", or: "The songs of Zarathustra flow broadly and powerfully like Wagner's streams of music. Philosophy is here set to music, thought to sound, not evaporated, no, reheated", others say: "Nietzsche is a true reactionary, because his forward is a backward. And because he is a reactionary, the future will spurn him", or: "Nietzsche's doctrine rests on rotten ground, through his own fault". Eisner is quite sympathetic to Nietzsche's noble way of thinking, but not to its anti-democratic character. The development of the select few should not be bought at the price of the oppression and stultification of large masses. Eisner wanted to aristocratize the masses. "True aristocratism is only possible with true altruism." "Democracy must become a pan-aristocracy." In contrast to Nietzsche, Eisner wanted the community to be placed above the individual. "The herd instinct is health, the ego instinct is degeneration." Eisner counters Nietzsche's motto: "Get tough!" with "Get soft!". The former corresponds to the ruthless "through" of the individual's power content, the latter to the selfless striving of the personality, which also respects the person in the other individual as an equal.

With such a penetrating understanding of Nietzsche, with such an unbiased critique of the thinker-poet, Eisner's judgment of the "Nietzsche-affinity" can of course only be a completely devastating one. Nowhere has the herd-like nature of a following taken on such a characteristic character as in the Nietzsche herd. The contempt for the herd-like has become a wild herd roar. There has never been a more droll following than Nietzsche's. They, these howlers, do not know what the value of the master's works lies in. The secret lies in the fact that illnesses and deformities stimulate thought more than full, fresh health. The diseases of the mind make important contributions to psychology. The charm of Nietzsche's ideas lies in the abnormal guise in which they appear. Through outward appearances one becomes aware of many things that one would otherwise pass by. This is what happened to me with Nietzsche's ideas. Most of their content did not seem new to me. I had already formed it in me before I got to know Nietzsche. But as I went through Nietzsche's mind, these ideas seemed to me distorted, caricatured. A flow of thought that was healthy in itself had to force its way through a rocky cliff that did violence to its calm course. Nietzsche was never a philosophical problem for me, but always a psychological one.

Because this is my position on the strangest spirit of modern times, I must describe Kurt Eisner's writing as very sympathetic to me and recommend it to the widest circle of readers, even if I cannot agree with some of what it contains.

1.) Natural science creates the necessity for man to know himself. But it contains no means of acquiring such knowledge. Behavior of natural scientists: Nägeli, Hertwig, Ziehen.

2.) In discussions about scientific questions, e.g. about the life force, I am always on the side of the natural scientists: according to du Bois Reymond. But he too used a dictum to inhibit the transition into the spiritual realm.

3.) One cannot speak of a speculated life force, but one can speak of a perceivable body of formative forces. But in order for such perception to come about, mere imagining must be transformed into perception. The “seer” and the “non-seer”. —

4.) For a long time, only body and soul have been spoken of. This was acceptable as long as the soul was attributed spiritual properties. When this was no longer done, the natural consequence was “psychology without soul”.

5.) The spirit cannot be known through the usual soul experiences. Not even if these are “mystically” intensified.

The physiologist says: a chemical change in the blood is necessary for the feeling of hunger. The spiritual researcher says: for an idea to have a will-arousing effect, it must undergo a change in its imaginative content.

6.) One speaks of the phenomena of the soul in such a way that one regards as its laws precisely that which causes the spirit to perish: associations.

7.) Drawing from the “I”, which is “spirit” after all.

8.) In the soul, mere sensing, etc. of the truth, the soul allows a glimpse of a supernatural world, etc. The spirit allows it to be recognized: it is the eternal.

Du Bois Reymond believed that where supernaturalism begins, science ends: a future view of the world will only recognize a knowledge of nature to the extent that it is based on supernaturalism:

Where supernaturalism ends, science dies.

Because you have: atoms without content.

Laws without entities.

Apparitions of souls without ego entities, etc.

In ordinary life, the soul does not have the strength to know itself as “spirit”. It has even less strength to recognize the spirit in the outside world. In the outside world, the soul encounters the supersensible when it becomes more powerful within. When the ability to live in mere imagination is developed, when it is heightened to an imaginative cognitive faculty, then the world of life presents itself as an impression from the outside – one gets to know the different pace between one's own and the foreign course of life – for this it is necessary to go back 2-3 days in one's life – then behind it lies the true soul. This is no longer influenced by the remnants of sensation - to see it as a product of the brain would be like wanting to see the table or another person as a product of the brain, because one knows: with everything one is through the brain, one stands outside of this true soul. It includes practical realization: Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu nisi ipses intellectus. —

This “true soul” must not evoke dreams or fantasies, or even visions or hallucinations. For all these arise through the bodily organism: what is no longer bodily must be sensed like an external object -: one returns to the sensation - one senses the “spirit”.

On the body of sensation hangs the sense sensation, the power to see and to hear. Our intercourse with the environment is related to our sense sensations, how much of it we can take in, whether or not we have a well-organized ear or eye. Our perceptions are regulated by this. How much we can absorb into our inner being in a lifetime depends on this. The sentient body has significance only for one incarnation of man between birth and death; it has no more influence for the immediately next incarnation. Now the sentient soul sends its Indriyas into the perceptions. Something higher is how man processes the impressions. This is imprinted on the sentient soul; this still has meaning for the next incarnation. Something still higher is the impression that man makes on his mind soul - as memory, feeling - how one enjoys something in the mind soul, and that has significance for the third incarnation. So that man with the construction of his external senses belongs only to the present, but what he processes with them goes into other incarnations.

Those who process little will bring nothing into the next incarnation through themselves; the other adds something from within himself which has a lasting effect. Let us think of such people opposite leading individualities. Who processes little, little can be implanted in him. Through the receptive mind-soul, the achievements are taken over into the future.

What now even man works into the consciousness soul, that goes into the fourth incarnation. Concepts belong to the consciousness soul; so that concepts, which seem to be innate, are acquired before [four] incarnations. Now even the highest mental images, as we experience them about the Divine, enter into the spirit self and work into the fifth incarnation.

According to this, one can calculate how to lead humanity as an initiate. If in the fifth sub-race Theosophy should come out, in the fifth preceding race this Divine had to arise.

Those whom I can now influence through my Rishis will then be ripe to receive the same in terms - said the Manu.

What man develops in his life-mind through meditation, he takes across to his sixth incarnation. And when he has learned to act on his etheric body through meditation, he takes what he has learned as chela over into the seventh incarnation. When the spiritual man is trained, it passes over into the eighth incarnation. And the master affects the ninth incarnation.

So we see that higher beings have had influence on the etheric body for seven incarnations, and on our physical body powers from the fourth sub-race of Atlanteans through nine incarnations. Therefore, the present bodies are built up by the beings who at that time had an effect on the Atlanteans.

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Laws of evolution of the inner karma We thus see the working of the inner karma and will understand what the Manu did when he prepared in the fifth sub-race of the Atlanteans - Ur-Semites - the little cluster that became the next tribal race. Something had to be prepared that could work after the sixth - Akkadians - and the seventh sub-race of Atlanteans - Mongols - had passed, still during four incarnations. After four incarnations comes out what has been implanted in the consciousness soul: the ego.

According to this scheme, the initiates calculated the future plan of mankind.

Cypress, cedar, palm, olive tree: according to an ancient legend, the wood of these trees was used for the cross of Christ.

The rose, the chaste ego, is plant sap, but red. Bees flew to the wounds of the Savior, sucked at them and found the same in them as in the flower: blood that had become plant. To fully empathize.

The “Mysteries”. The twelve in the monastery are representatives of the twelve religions and creeds. There can be twelve. They all stand under one supreme; the spirit is the same, flowing into all.

From Brother Mark's mouth wisdom resounds as from children's lips; in the deepest simplicity, this is the divine teaching.

Those who know this and have expressed great wisdom to the highest degree in previous incarnations can, in their next life on earth, let the highest expressions of wisdom sound from their lips as naturally as a child speaks. At the highest level, there is the greatest simplification of wisdom. This is the case with Mark.

The thirteenth is about to leave this body, while fully conscious. A star at birth means that the birth of someone like this is of profound significance for the whole cosmos. He overcomes the vipers, which means that he is born at a high level. The three limbs are depicted in the form of an amphibian. Snake symbol. Fish is the sign of the Christ.

He has already overcome his lower nature. This is indicated by the killing of the viper.

After the second half of life, physical strength declines. However, spiritual strength increases. Even those at a high level must relive childhood and go through a lot before their higher personality can fully reveal itself. The spirit lies in the powers we have, not in what we learn; these are only forms.

He sees herbs and becomes a healer. The willingness to obey the will of others saves an enormous amount of strength for life.

Humanus [the thirteenth], who has all the powers of man within himself and has risen above him.

The shields [above the brothers' chairs] symbolize what each of them had to give to the world: a fire-colored dragon quenches its thirst in flames, which is the transformed astral nature, passion for religion. The arm in the bear's jaws: man's wild nature is called the bear nature. Lower animals are soundless animals. The more the animal becomes similar to man, the more 'sound' arises in him. When the 'I' has completely moved into the human being, it can fully sound into the world. This is the Rubicon that man must cross, represented in the tongue. That which is in the mouth, the tongue, is at the same time the arm in the throat (Fenriswolf).

One should use what people have already achieved, not wanting to achieve everything on one's own. That is useless effort. It draws strength from the world. There is still a lot going on here. The white lodge is among us, always.

The three youths: the three higher limbs of the human being.

It seems as if they have come from nocturnal dances,
quite refreshed and beautiful after joyful exertion.

During sleep, the astral body is in the higher world and brings back new strength. This should not be taken intellectually, but felt: from humility and simplicity comes the highest wisdom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introductory

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

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

Now he continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now it says further:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The basic assumptions of the materialistic-mechanical worldview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now it says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

examining these basic assumptions

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

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

The next chapter is headed:

Freedom and Morality

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

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

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

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

The next chapter is called:

The World Enigma

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

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

Mr. von Wrangell continues:

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

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

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

The origin of the law

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

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

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

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

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

The next chapter is called:

Freedom of the will cannot be proved by experience.

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

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

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

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

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

Epistemological Retrospection

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

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

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

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

Then Mr. von Wrangell continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is one of the aims of our spiritual-scientific endeavour to form concrete ideas of how we, as human beings upon earth, live with the spiritual worlds, even as we are connected through the physical body—its experiences and perceptions—with the physical world.

At the present stage of our studies we may well take our start from what is already known to us—what has already come before our souls during these years. Here, for instance, is the world of our sense-perceptions, the world to which we direct our will-impulses for which the physical body mediates—that is to say, our actions. Immediately behind it, as you know, there is the elemental world. That is the next world behind this one. It is not a question of the name; we might have named it differently. To gain clear and living ideas of these super-sensible worlds we must at least enter into some of their peculiarities. We must try to recognize what they are for us as human beings. For in truth our whole life between birth and death—and also our subsequent life which takes its course between death and a new birth—depends on our co-existence with the various worlds that are spread out around us. We call the ‘elemental world’ that world which can only be perceived by what we know as ‘imaginations.’ Hence we may also call it the ‘imaginative world.’ In ordinary human life, under ordinary conditions, man cannot lift into consciousness his imaginative perceptions—his perceptions of the elemental world. Not that the imaginations are not there, or that in any given moment of our sleeping or waking life we are not in relation to the elemental world, receiving imaginations from it. On the contrary, imaginations are perpetually ebbing and flowing in us. Though we are unaware of it, we constantly receive impressions from the elemental world. Just as when we open our eyes or lend our ears to the outer world we have sensations of colour and light, perceptions of sound, so do we receive continual impressions from the elemental world, giving rise to imaginations—in this case, in our etheric body. Imaginations differ from ordinary thought in this respect. In ordinary, every-day human thoughts, only the head is concerned as an instrument of conscious assimilation and experience. In our imaginations, on the other hand, we partake with almost the whole of our organism—albeit, it is our etheric organism. In our etheric organism they are constantly taking place—we may refer to them as unconscious imaginations, since it is only for an occultly trained cognition that they rise into consciousness. Moreover, though they do not enter our consciousness directly in every-day life, they are by no means without significance for us. No, for our life as a whole they are far more important than our sense-perceptions, for we are united far more intensely and intimately with our imaginations than with our sense-perceptions.

From the mineral kingdom, as physical human beings, we receive few imaginations. We receive more through all that we develop by living with the plant-world and with the animal. But the greater part, by far, of what lives as imaginations in our etheric body is due to our relations to our fellow human beings, and all that these relations entail for our life as a whole. In fact, our whole relation to our fellow human beings—our whole attitude towards them—is fundamentally based on imaginations. Imaginations always result from the way we meet another human being, and though, as I said, to ordinary consciousness they do not appear as imaginations, nevertheless they make themselves felt in the sympathies and antipathies which play such an overwhelming part in our life. To a greater or lesser degree, we develop sympathies and antipathies with all that approaches us as human beings in this world. We have our vague undefined feelings, slight inclinations or disinclinations. Sometimes our sympathies grow into friendship and love—love which can be so enhanced that we think we can no longer live without this or that human being. All this is due to the imaginations which are perpetually called forth, in our etheric body, by our life with our fellow human beings. In fact we always carry with us in life something that cannot quite be called memory—for it is far more real than memory. We bear within us—shall we say—these enhanced memories or imaginations which we have received from all the impressions of the human beings with who we have ever been, and which we go on receiving all the time. We bear them within us, and they constitute a goodly portion of what we call our inner life. I mean not the inner life that lives in clear, well-defined memories, but that inner life which makes itself felt in our prevailing mood and feeling and outlook—our outlook on the world itself, or on our own life in the world. We would go past the world around us coldly and we would live with our contemporary world indifferently if we did not unfold this imaginative life by living together with other beings—and notably with other human beings.

It is, as we might say, our soul's interest in the surrounding world which makes itself felt in this way. It belongs especially to the elemental world, and notably to our own etheric body. It is, above all, inherent in the forces of our etheric body, and it makes itself felt in this way. Sometimes we feel ourselves immediately ‘caught’ and interested. Such interest as is often woven from the very first moment between one human being and another is due to definite relationships which arise between the one—the one etheric human being—and the other, bringing about the play of imaginations hither and thither. We live with these imaginations and with our resulting sympathies, of whose effect and intensity we are often largely unaware, or aware only in the vaguest way. Indeed, when our everyday life is not wide-awake but runs along more or less obtusely, we often fail to observe them at all.

We belong with all this to the elemental world, for it is out of the elemental world that we have our own etheric body. Our etheric body is our instrument of communication with the elemental world. With it, however, we do not only spin out relationships to those other etheric bodies which belong to physical beings. We are also related with our etheric body to spiritual beings of an elemental character. The ‘beings of an elemental character’ are precisely those who are able to call forth in us imaginations—conscious or unconscious. We are perpetually related to a multitude of elemental beings. It is in this that one human being differs from another. They have their several relationships—one person to a given set of elemental beings, another to another set of elemental beings. Moreover, the relations of the one human being to certain elemental beings may sometimes coincide with the relations of the other to the same beings. One thing, however, must be observed in this connection. While we are always, in a manner of speaking, akin to a large number of elemental beings, we have relations of special intensity to one elemental being, who is in essence the counterpart of our own etheric body. Our own etheric body is intimately related to one particular etheric being. Just as our etheric body—what we call our etheric body from birth until death—develops its own relations to the physical world inasmuch as it is inserted in a physical body, so does this etheric entity, which is as it were the counterpart or counter-pole of our own etheric body, enable us to have relations to the whole of the elemental world—the whole of the surrounding, cosmic-elemental world.

We gaze upon an elemental world to which we ourselves belong by virtue of our etheric body, and with which we stand in manifold relations—specific relationships to such and such elemental beings. In the elemental world we make acquaintance with beings who are truly no less real than human beings or animals in the physical—beings, however, who never come to incarnation, but only to ‘etherization,’ so to speak, for their densest corporeality is ethereal. Just as we go about among physical people in this world, so do we constantly go about among such elemental beings, while other elemental beings—more remote from ourselves—are related in their turn to other people. A certain number, however, are more nearly related to ourselves, and one among them—related to us most nearly of all—acts as our organ of communication with the entire cosmic-elemental world. Now in the time immediately following our passage through the Gate of Death, when for a few days we still bear our etheric body with us, we ourselves become precisely such a being as these elemental beings are. In a manner of speaking, we ourselves become an elemental being. We have often described this process of the passage through the Gate of Death, but the more exactly we study it, the clearer the imaginations it provides. For the impressions we receive immediately after the passage of a human being through the Gate of Death always consist in imaginations—make themselves felt as imaginations.

Observing the process more exactly, we find that there is a certain mutual interplay, immediately after death, between our own etheric body and its etheric counterpart. The fact that our etheric body is taken from us a few days after death is mainly due to its being attracted—drawn in, as it were—by this etheric counterpart. Henceforth it becomes one with the etheric counterpart. A few days after death we do in fact lay aside our etheric body, we hand it over, so to speak; but it is to our own etheric counterpart that we hand it over. Our etheric body is taken from us by our own cosmic prototype or image and, as a result, special relations now emerge between what is thus taken from us and the other elemental beings with whom we have been related in any way during our life. We might describe it thus: a kind of mutual relation now arises between what our own etheric body has become—united as it now is with its counterpart or counter-image—and the other elemental beings who accompanied us from birth till death. It might be compared to the relation of a sun to its associated planetary system. Our etheric body with its cosmic counterpart is like a kind of sun, surrounded—as a kind of planetary system—by the other elemental beings. This mutual interplay gives rise to the forces which instill into the elemental world—in the right manner and in slow evolution—what our etheric body is able to take into that world. That which we commonly refer to in abstract terms—‘the dissolution of the etheric body’—is essentially a play of forces, engendered by this sun-planetary system which we have left behind. Gradually, what we acquired and assimilated to our etheric body in the course of life becomes a part of the spiritual world. It weaves itself into the forces of the spiritual world. We must be very clear on this. Every thought, every idea, every feeling we develop—however hidden it remains—is of significance for the spiritual world. For when the coherence is broken by our passage through the Gate of Death, all our thoughts and feelings pass with our etheric body into the spiritual world and become part and parcel of it. We do not live for nothing. Even as we receive them into the thoughts we make our own, into the feelings we experience, so are the fruits of our life embodied in the cosmos. This is a truth we must receive into our whole mood and outlook; otherwise we do not rightly conduct ourselves in the spiritual-scientific movement. You are not a spiritual scientist merely by knowing about certain things. You are so only if you feel yourself, by virtue of this knowledge, within the spiritual world; if you know yourself quite definitely as a member in the spiritual world. Then you will say to yourself: the thought you are now harbouring is of significance for the entire universe, for at your death it will be handed over to the universe in such or such a form.

Now after a human being's death we may have to do, in one form or another, with what is thus handed over to the universe. Many of the ways in which the dead are present to those whom they have left behind are due to the fact that the etheric human being—which has, of course, been laid aside by the real individuality—sends back his imaginations to the living. And if the living person is sensitive enough, or if he is in some abnormal state or has normally prepared himself by proper spiritual training, the influences of what is thus given over to the spiritual world by the dead—the influences, that is to say, of imaginative natures—can emerge in him in a conscious form.

But there still remains a connection after death between the true human individuality and this etheric entity which has separated from him. There is a mutual interplay between them. We can observe it most clearly when by spiritual training we come into actual intercourse with this or that dead individual. A certain kind of intercourse can then take place, as follows: to begin with, the dead human being conveys to his etheric body what he himself wishes to transmit to us who are still in the physical world. For only by his transmitting it to his etheric body—as it were, making inscriptions in his etheric body—only by this means can we, who are here in the physical, have perceptions of the dead in terms of what we call ‘imaginations.’ The moment we have imaginations of him, the etheric body of the dead—if you will pardon my use of the trivial and all too realistic term—is acting as a ‘switch’ or ‘commutator.’ Do not imagine that our relations to the dead need be any the less deeply felt because such an instrument is needed. A person who meets us in the outer world also conveys his form to us by the picture which he calls forth in us through our own eyes. So it is with this transmission through the etheric body. We perceive what the dead wishes to convey to us by ‘getting’ it, so to speak, via his etheric body. This body is outside him, but he is so intimately related to it that he can inscribe in it what lives within himself, and thus enable us to read it in imaginations. There is, however, this condition. If a person who is spiritually trained wishes to come into connection with a dead human being through the etheric body in this way, he must have entered into some relation to the dead—either in his last life between birth and death, or out of former incarnations. Moreover, these relationships must have affected his soul—the soul of the one who is still living here—deeply enough for the imaginations to make an impression on him. For this can only be if in his heart and mind he had a definite and living interest in the dead person. Interests of heart and feeling must always be the mediator between the living and the dead, if any intercourse at all is to take place—conscious or unconscious. (Of the latter we shall speak presently.) Some interest of heart and feeling must be there, so that we really carry something of the dead within us. In a certain respect at any rate the dead person must have constituted a portion of our own soul's experience. Only one who is spiritually trained can make himself a certain substitute. For instance—(it may seem external at first sight, but spiritual training turns it into something far more inward)—one can give oneself up to the impression of the handwriting, or of something else in which the individuality of the dead is living. However, one can only do so if one has acquired a certain practice in making contact with an individuality through the fact that he lives in the writing. Or again, one may establish this possibility by entering with sympathy into the feelings of the physical survivors, partaking in their grief and in all the emotional interest they have in the dead person. By entering with sympathy into these real and living feelings, which flow from the dead into the dear ones whom he has left on Earth—or which remain in their inner life—a person of spiritual training can prepare his soul to read in the aforesaid imaginations.

But we must also realize the following. Though to perceive the imaginations which play over from the etheric body depends on spiritual training or other special conditions, yet at the same time what passes unperceived by people is there none the less. And we may truly say, those who are living in the physical world are not only woven around by the elemental forces, as imaginations, which proceed from other human beings living with them in the physical body. Whether we know it or not, our etheric body is constantly played-through by all the imaginations which we absorb from those who stood in any kind of relation to us and who passed before us through the Gate of Death. As in our physical life, in the physical body, we are related to the air around us, so are we related to the whole of the elemental world—including all that is there of the dead.

We shall never learn to know our human life unless we gain knowledge of these relationships, albeit they are so intimate and fine that they remain unnoticed by most people. After all, who can deny that we do not always remain the same between birth and death. Let us look back upon our lives. However consistent we may think the course of life has been, we will soon notice that we have often gone hither and thither in life, or that this or that has occurred. Even if this does not immediately change the direction of our lives, which it can of course do, it nonetheless has the effect of enriching our lives in one way or another—in a happy direction or in a painful one. It brings us into different conditions—just as when you go into another district your general feeling of health may be changed by the different composition of the air.

These moods of soul, into which we enter in our life's course, are due to the influences of the elemental world, and in no small measure to the influences that come from the dead who were formerly related to us. Many a human being in earthly life meets with a friend or with some person with whom he becomes connected in one way or another—to whom, perhaps, he finds himself obliged to do this or that by way of kindness or of criticism or rebuke. The fact that they were brought together required the influence of certain forces. He who recognizes the occult connections in the world knows that when two human beings are brought together to this end or that, sometimes one and sometimes several of those who have gone before them through the Gate of Death are instrumental. Our life does not become any the less free thereby. We do not lose our freedom because we starve if we do not eat. No one who is not deliberately foolish will say: how can a person be free, seeing that he is obliged to eat? It would be just as invalid to say that we become unfree because our soul constantly receives influences from the elemental world as here described. Indeed, just as we are connected with warmth and cold, with all the things that become our food and with the air around us, so are we connected with that which comes to us from those who have died before us. We are equally connected with the rest of the elemental world, but above all with that which comes to us from them, and we can truly say: man's working for his fellow human beings does not cease with his passage through the Gate of Death. Through his etheric body, with which he himself remains connected, he sends his imaginations into those with whom he was connected in his life. Indeed, the world to which we are here referring is far more real than that we commonly call real—even if, in our every-day life, for very good reasons, it remains unperceived. So much, for today, about the elemental world.

A further realm which is ever present in our environment, and to which we ourselves belong no less than to the elemental world, is the soul world—for so we may call it. (It is not the name that matters.) With the elemental world we are always connected in our waking life, and in sleep, too, indirectly, when with our ego and astral body we are outside the physical and the etheric; when our body that lies there in the bed, and our etheric body, are still connected with the elemental world. But with the higher world to which I now refer, we are connected most directly—only that this too cannot rise into our consciousness in ordinary life. We are connected with it in sleep when we have our astral body freely around us, and also in waking life—albeit then the connection, mediated as it is by forces which the physical body has drawn into itself, is no longer so direct.

Now in this world-of-soul (let us call it the soul world for the present; medieval philosophers referred to it as the heavenly world or the celestial) in this world, once more, we find beings who are just as real as we are during our life between birth and death, nay, more so. They are, however, beings who do not need to come to embodiment in a physical, or even in an etheric, body. They live—as in their lowest corporeality—in that which we are wont to call the astral body. Constantly, during our life and after our death, we are connected intimately with a large number of these purely astral beings. Here, too, human beings differ from one another inasmuch as they are related to different astral beings—albeit, here again, two people may have their relationships to one or more astral beings in common, while at the same time each of them has his several relations to other astral beings.

It is to this world, in which these astral beings are, that we ourselves belong from the time when, after passing through the Gate of Death, we have laid aside our etheric body. We with our own individuality are then among the beings of the soul world. We are such beings at that time, and beings of the soul world are our immediate environment. True, we are also related to the content of the elemental world, inasmuch as we can kindle in it that which calls forth imaginations as aforesaid. We have, however, the elemental world in a certain sense outside us—or, as one might also say, beneath us. It is a portion of which we rather make use for purposes of communication with the remainder of the world, while we ourselves belong directly to what I have now called the world-of-soul. It is with the beings of the soul world that we have our intercourse, including other human beings who have also passed through the Gate of Death and, after a few days, laid aside their etheric bodies.

Now just as we constantly get influences from the elemental world, although we do not notice it, so too we constantly receive influences—straight into our astral body—out of this world-of-soul which I am now describing. It is only the immediate, straightforward influences which we thus receive that can appear as inspirations. (Of the indirect influences via the etheric body we have already spoken.) You will understand the character of such an influence from the soul world if I describe once more in a few words how it appears to one who is spiritually trained—one who is able to receive conscious inspirations out of the spiritual world. It appears to him as follows. He can only bring these inspirations to his consciousness if he is able, so to speak, to take into himself some portion of the being who wants to inspire him—some portion of the qualities, of the inherent tendency in life, of such a being.

One who is spiritually trained to develop conscious relations with a dead person, not only via the etheric body but in this direct way through inspiration, must bear in his soul even more than mere interest or sympathy is able to call forth. For a short while, at least, he must be so able to transform himself as to receive into his own being something of the habits, the character, the very human nature of the one with whom he wishes to communicate. He must be able to enter into him till he can truly say to himself, ‘I am taking on his habits to such an extent that I could do what he could, and in his way; that I could feel as he could, and will as he could, also.’ It is the ‘could’ that matters—the possibility. We must, therefore, be able to live together with the dead even more intimately. For a person of spiritual training there are many ways of coming thus near to the dead, provided the dead person himself allows it. We should, however, realize that the beings who belong to what we are now calling the world-of-soul are quite differently related to the world than we are in our physical body. Hence there are certain conditions, quite definite conditions, of intercourse with such beings—and, among others, with the dead, so long as they are living still as astral beings in their astral bodies. We may draw attention especially to certain points.

You see, all that we develop for our life in the physical body—our many and varied relationships to other people (I mean precisely those relationships which arise through earthly life)—all this acquires quite another kind of interest for the dead. Here on the earth we develop sympathies and antipathies. Let us be fully clear on this. Such sympathies and antipathies as we develop while we are living in the physical body are subject to the influences of this our present form of life, which we owe to the physical body and to its conditions. They are subject to the influences of our own vanity and of our egoism. Let us not fail to realize how many relationships we develop to this or that human being as a result of vanity or egoism—or other things that depend on our physical and earthly life in this world. We love other people or we hate them. Verily, as a rule, we take little notice of the true grounds of our loving and our hating—our sympathies and antipathies. Nay, often enough we flee from taking conscious notice of our sympathies and antipathies, for the simple reason that, if we did so, highly unpleasant truths would as a rule emerge. If, for instance, we followed up the real facts which find expression in our not loving this or that human being, we should often have to ascribe to ourselves so much of prejudice or vanity or other qualities that we are afraid to do so. Therefore we do not bring to full clarity in consciousness why it is that we hate this person or that. And with love, too, the case is often similar. Interests, sympathies and antipathies evolve in this way, which only have significance for our everyday life. Yet it is out of all this that we act. We arrange our life according to these interests and sympathies and antipathies.

Now it would be quite wrong to imagine that the dead can possibly have the same interest as we earthly people have in all the ephemeral sympathies and antipathies which thus arise under the influence of our physical and earthly life. That would be utterly wrong. Truly, the dead are obliged to look at these things from quite another point of view. Moreover, we may ask ourselves, are we not largely influenced in our estimate of our fellow human beings by these subjective feelings—by all that lies inherent in our subjective interest, our vanity and egoism and the like? Let us not think for a moment that a dead person can have any interest in such relationships between ourselves and other human beings, or in our actions which proceed out of such interests. But we must also not imagine that the dead person does not see what is living in our souls. For it is really living there, and the dead one sees it well enough. He shares in it, too, but he sees something else as well. One who is dead has quite another way of judging people. He sees them quite differently. As to the way in which the dead person sees the human beings who are here on earth, there is one thing of outstanding importance. Let us not imagine that the dead has not a keen and living interest in the world of human beings. He has, indeed, for the world of human beings belongs to the whole cosmos. Our own life belongs to the cosmos. And just as we, even in the physical world, interest ourselves in the subordinate kingdoms, so do the dead interest themselves intensely in the human world, and send their active impulses into the human world. For the dead work through the living into this world. We have only just given an example of the way in which they go on working soon after their passage through the Gate of Death.

But the dead sees one thing above all, and that most clearly. Suppose, for example, that he sees a human being here following impulses of hatred—hating this person or that, and with a merely personal intensity or purpose. This the dead sees. At the same time, however, according to the whole manner of his vision and all that he is then able to know, he will observe quite clearly, in such a case, the part which Ahriman is playing. He sees how Ahriman impels the person to hatred. The dead actually sees Ahriman working upon the human being. On the other hand, if a person on earth is vain, he sees Lucifer working at him. That is the essential point. It is in connection with the world of Ahriman and Lucifer that the dead human being sees the human beings who are here on earth. Consequently, what generally colours our judgement of people is quite eliminated for the dead. We see this or that human being, whom in one sense or another we must condemn. Whatever we find blameworthy in him, we put it down to him. The dead does not put it down directly to the human being. He sees how the person is misled by Lucifer or Ahriman. This brings about a toning-down, so to speak, of the sharply differentiated feelings which in our physical and earthly life we generally have towards this or that human being. To a far greater extent, a kind of universal human love arises in the dead. This does not mean that he cannot criticize—that is to say, cannot rightly see what is evil in evil. He sees it well enough, but he is able to refer it to its origin—to its real inner connections.

What I have here described is not without its results, for it means that an occultly-trained person cannot consciously come near to one who is dead unless he truly frees himself from feelings of personal sympathy or antipathy to individuals. He must not allow himself to be dependent, in his soul, on personal feelings of sympathy or antipathy. You need only imagine it for a moment. Suppose that an occultly-trained, clairvoyant person were about to approach a dead human being—whoever he might be—so that the inspirations which the dead was sending in towards him might find their way into his consciousness. Suppose, moreover, that the one here living were pursuing another human being with a quite special hatred—hatred having its origin only in personal relationships. Then, of a truth, as fire is avoided by our hand, so would the dead avoid such a person who was capable of hatred for personal reasons. He cannot approach him, for hatred works on the dead like fire. To come into conscious relation with the dead we must be able to make ourselves like them—independent, in a sense, of personal sympathies and antipathies.

Hence you will understand what I now have to say. Bear in mind this whole relation of the dead to the living, in so far as it rests on Inspirations. Remember that the inspirations are always there, even if they pass unnoticed. They are perpetually living in the human astral body, so that the human being upon earth has his relations to the dead in this direct way, too. Now, after all that we have said, you will well understand that these relationships depend on our whole mood and spirit here in our life on earth. If our attitude to other people is hostile, if we are without interest or sympathy for our contemporaries above all, if we have not an unprejudiced interest in our fellow human beings—then are the dead unable to approach us in the way they long to do. They cannot properly transplant themselves into our souls, or, if they must do so, in one way or another it is made difficult for them and they can only do it with great suffering and pain. All in all, the living-together of the dead with the living is complicated.

Thus man goes on working beyond the time when he passes through the Gate of Death, even directly, inasmuch as after death he inspires those who are living on the physical plane. And this is absolutely true. Notably as to their inner habits and qualities—the way they think and feel and develop inclinations—those who are living at any given time on earth are largely dependent on those who died and passed from the earth before them, who were related to them during their life, or to whom they themselves established a relation even after death—which may sometimes happen, though it is not so easy.

A certain portion of the world-ordering and of the whole progress of mankind is altogether dependent on this working of the dead into the life of earthly human beings, inspiring them. Nay, more, in their instinctive life people are not without an inkling that it is so and that it must be so. We can observe it if we consider ways of life, formerly very wide-spread, which are now dying out because humanity in the course of evolution goes ever onward to new forms of life. In bygone times when, generally speaking, they divined far more of the reality of spiritual worlds, people were more deeply aware of what is necessary for life as a whole. They knew that the living need the dead—need to receive into their habits and customs the impulses from the dead. What, then, did they do? You need only think of former times, when in wide circles it was customary for a father to take care that his son should inherit and carry on his business, so that the son went on working on the same lines. Then when the father was long dead, inasmuch as the son remained in the same channels of life, a bond of communication was created through the physical world itself. The son's activity and life-work being akin to his father's, the father was able to work on in him. Many things in life were based on this principle. And if whole classes of society attached great value to the inheritance of this or that property within the class or within its several families, it was due to their divining this necessity. Into the life-habits of those who live later, the life-habits of those who lived earlier must enter, but only when these life-habits are so far ripened that they come from them after they have passed through the Gate of Death—for it is only then that they become mature.

These things are ceasing, as you know—for such is the progress of the human race. We can already see a time approaching when these inheritances, these conservative conditions, will no longer play a part. The physical bonds will no longer be there in the same way. But all the more, to compensate for this, people must receive such detailed spiritual-scientific knowledge as will lift the whole matter into their consciousness. For then they will be able consciously to connect their life with the life-habits of former times—with which we have to reckon in order that life may go forward with continuity. Since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period we are living in a transition time. During this time a more or less chaotic state has intervened. But the conditions will arise again when in a far more conscious way—by recognition of the spiritual-scientific truths—people will connect their life and work with that which has gone before them. Unconsciously, merely instinctively, they used to do so—of that there can be no doubt. But even that which is still instinctive to this day must be transmuted into consciousness. Instinctively, for instance, people still teach in this way—only we do not observe it. One who studies history on spiritual lines will soon observe it, if only he pays attention to the facts and not to the dreadful abstractions which prevail nowadays in the so-called humanistic branches of scholarship. If we look at the facts we can well observe it: what is taught in a given epoch bears a certain character only because people attach themselves unconsciously, instinctively, to what the dead are pouring down into the present. If once you learn to study in a real way the educational ideas which are propounded in any given age by the leading spirits in education—I mean not the charlatans but the true educationists—you will soon see how these ideas have their origins in the habitual natures of those who have recently died.

This is a far more intimate living-together; for that which plays into the human being's astral body enters far more into his inner life than that which plays into his etheric body. The communion which the dead themselves, as individualities, can have with people on earth, is far more intimate than that which the etheric bodies have—or, for that matter, any other elemental beings. Hence you will see how the succeeding epoch in the life of humanity is always conditioned by the preceding one. The preceding time always goes on living in the time that follows. For in reality, strange though it may sound, it is only after our death that we become truly ripe to influence other people—I mean to influence them directly, working right into their inner being. To impress our own habits on any man who is ‘of age’ (I mean now, spiritually speaking, not in the legal sense) is the very thing we should not do. Yet it is right and according to the conditions of the progressive evolution of mankind for us to do so after we ourselves have passed through the Gate of Death. Beside all the things that are contained in the progress of karma and in the general laws of incarnation, these things take place. If you ask for the occult reasons why, let us say, the people of this year are doing this or that, then—not for all things but certainly for many—you will find that they are doing it because certain impulses are flowing down to them from those who died twenty or thirty years ago, or even longer. These are the hidden connections—the real concrete connections—between the physical and the spiritual world. It is not only for ourselves that something ripens and matures in what we carry with us through the Gate of Death. It is not only for ourselves, but for the world at large. And it is only from a given moment that it becomes truly ripe to work upon others. Then, however, it does become ever riper and riper.

I beg you here to observe that I am not speaking of externals, but of inner, spiritual workings. A person may remember the habits of his dead father or grandfather and repeat them out of memory on the physical plane. That is not what I mean; that is a different matter. I really mean the inspired influences—imperceptible, therefore, to ordinary consciousness—the influences which make themselves felt in our habits in our most intimate character. Much in our life depends on our finding ourselves obliged, here or there, to free ourselves from the influences—even the well-meant influences—coming to us from the dead. Indeed, we gain much of our inner freedom by having to free ourselves in this way, in one direction or another. Inner conflicts of soul, which a person often does not know, will grow intelligible to him when he views them in this light or that, taking his light from spiritual knowledge of this kind. To use a trite expression, we may say: the past is rumbling on—the souls of the past go rumbling on—in our own inner life.

These things are facts—truths into which we look by spiritual vision. But alas, especially in the life of today, men have a peculiar relation to these truths. It was not always so. Anyone who can study history in a spiritual way will know this. Today people are afraid of these truths—they are afraid of facing them. They have a nameless fear—not indeed conscious, but unconscious. Unconsciously they are afraid of recognizing the mysterious connections between soul and soul, not only in this world, but between here and the other world. It is this unconscious fear which holds back the people in the outer world. This is a part of that which holds them back, instinctively, from spiritual science. They are afraid of knowing the reality. They are all unaware of how they are disturbing—by their unwillingness to know reality—disturbing and confusing the whole course of world-evolution, and with it, needless to say, the life that will have to be lived through between death and a new birth, when these conditions must be seen.

Still more mature—for everything that evolves, becomes ever riper and more mature—still more mature becomes that which lives in us when it no longer has to stop short at Inspiration but can become Intuition (in the true sense in which I used the word in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. Now Intuition can only be a being that has none other than a Spirit-body (to use this paradoxical expression). To work intuitively upon other beings—and, among others, upon those who are still incarnated here in the physical life—a human being must first have laid aside his astral body; that is to say, he must first belong entirely to the spiritual world. That will be decades after his death, as we know. Then he can also work down on other people through intuition—no longer merely through Inspiration as I described it just now. Not until then does he as ego—now in the spiritual world—work in a purely spiritual way into other egos. Formerly he worked by Inspiration into the astral body—or, via his etheric body, into the etheric body of man. But one who has been dead for decades past can also work directly as an ego—albeit at the same time he can still work through the other vehicles, as described above. It is at this stage that the human individuality grows ripe to enter no longer merely into the habits of people but even into their views and ideas of life. To modern feeling, full of prejudice as it is, this may be an unpleasant truth—very unpleasant, I doubt not. None the less it is true. Our views and ideas, originating as they do in our ego, are under constant influences from those long dead. In our views and conceptions of life, those who are long dead are living. By this very means, the continuity of evolution is preserved—out of the spiritual world. It is a necessity, for otherwise the thread of people's ideas would constantly be broken.

Forgive me if I insert a personal matter at this point. I do so, if I may say so, for thoroughly objective reasons. For such a truth as this can only be made intelligible by concrete examples.

No one ought really to bring forward, as views or ideas, his own personal opinions—however sincerely gained. Therefore, no one who stands with full sincerity on the true ground of occultism—no one who is experienced in the conditions of spiritual science—will impose his own opinions on the world. On the contrary, he will do all he can to avoid imposing his own opinions directly. For the opinions, the outlook he acquires under the influence of his own personal tendency of feeling, should not begin to work until thirty or forty years after his death. Then it will work in this way: it will come into the souls of people along the same paths as the impulses of the Time-Spirits or Archai. Only then has it become so mature that its working is in harmony with the objective course of things. Hence it is necessary for everyone who stands on the true ground of occultism to avoid making personal proselytes—setting out to gain followers for his own personal views. That is the general custom nowadays. No sooner has anyone got an opinion of his own, he cannot hasten enough to make propaganda for it. That is what a real and practising spiritual scientist cannot possibly desire to do. Now I may bring in the personal matter to which I referred just now. It is no chance, but something essential to my life, that I began by writing—communicating to the world—not my own views, but Goethe's world-conception. That was the first thing I wrote. I wrote entirely in the spirit and in the sense of Goethe's world-conception, thus taking my start not from any living person. For even if that living person were oneself, it could not possibly justify one in teaching spiritual science in the comprehensive way I try to do. It was a necessary link in the chain, when I thus placed my work into the objective course of world-evolution. Therefore I did not write my theory of knowledge, but Goethe's—A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception—and in this way I continued.

Thus you will see how the development of man goes on. What he attained on earth ripens not only for the sake of his own life as he advances on the paths of karma. It ripens also for the world. So we continue to work for the world. After a certain time we become ripe to send imaginations; then—after a further time—inspirations into the habits of human beings. And only after a longer time has elapsed do we grow ready and mature enough to send intuitions into the most intimate part of man's life—into the views and conceptions of people.

Let us not imagine that our views and conceptions of life grow out of nothing—or that they arise anew in every age. They grow from the soil in which our own soul is rooted, which soil is in truth identical with the sphere of activity of human beings who died long ago.

By knowledge of such facts, I do believe human life must receive that enrichment which it needs, according to the character and sense of our age and of the immediate future. Many an old custom has grown rotten to the core. The new must be developed, as I have often said; but man cannot enter the new life without those impulses which grow in him through spiritual science. It is the feelings that matter—the feelings towards the world in its entirety, and all the other beings of the world, which we acquire through spiritual science. Our mood of life grows different through spiritual science. The super-sensible, in which we always are, becomes alive for us through spiritual science. We are and always have been living in it; but human beings will be called to know it, more and more consciously, the farther they evolve through the fifth, sixth and seventh post-Atlantean epochs and for the rest of earthly time.

These things I wanted to communicate to you today. They are indeed essential to the enrichment, the quickening of man's whole feeling for the world, and to the deepening of all his life. These things I wanted to kindle in your hearts, now that we have been able to be together once more after a lapse of time. May we be able to be together often again to speak of similar matters, so that our souls may partake in achieving that evolution of mankind which is the aim and endeavour of spiritual science.