The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When these lectures were first translated into English and published in ANTHROPOSOPHY: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science in 1929, lecture 16 “Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and the Will of Man” was not published. Rene Querido translated this 16th lecture into English from the French and kindly furnished the diagram following lecture 16 which shows the interior of the Earth. Rene Querido also wrote the preface for this reprint edition.

The present cycle of lectures was given in 1906 in Paris and the report of it by Edouard Schuré now published in English in its entirety for the first time marks the beginning of a new phase in the life of Rudolf Steiner. Accompanied by Marie von Sievers (later Marie Steiner), Rudolf Steiner had been invited, by the famous French author and dramatist Edouard Schuré, to address a group consisting mainly of Russians in a small villa on the outskirts of Paris. Among them were writers of note such as Dimitri Merejkowski, his wife Zinaida Hippius, a poetess in her own right, and S. Minski. Originally it had been planned that the course be held on Russian soil but the revolution of 1905 had made that impossible.

At this time Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), a man of 65, stood at the height of his career. He had written more than a dozen major works including The Great Initiates (1889), A History of the German Lied, A Collection of Celtic Legends, two important works on Richard Wagner, and a number of dramas striving to recapture the lost ritualistic element of the ancient mysteries on the stage. He felt powerfully drawn not only to Richard Wagner the composer, but also to the man. He had met the maestro on three occasions and was present in Munich at the dramatic opening of Tristan and Isolde.

Schuré's interest in the occult was profound. He had written The Great Initiates (1889) as a result of his deep connection over a period of many years with Margherita Albana-Mignaty, who continued to inspire him even after her death. Rudolf Steiner often referred to the importance of this book and although it was written ten years before the end of Kali-Yuga (the Age of Darkness), he spoke of this work as a herald of the new Age of Light, when human beings would again seek for their spiritual connection with the great initiates of the past. For some time before their first meeting in Paris, Marie von Sievers and Schuré had corresponded. An unusual set of circumstances led to the fact that indirectly it was Schuré who had brought about the meeting between Marie von Sievers and Rudolf Steiner which was to prove so fruitful for the growth of the Anthroposophical movement. Unable to reply to a specific question related to the occult, Schuré advised the young Marie von Sievers to turn to Rudolf Steiner in Berlin. A little later Marie von Sievers wrote so enthusiastically to Schuré (in excellent French) of her meeting that he, too, wished to become acquainted with Steiner personally. This was to happen six years later in Paris on the occasion of these lectures. The recognition must have been immediate. Schuré, twenty years Steiner's senior, never tired of recounting this significant meeting: for the first time, he felt himself to be in the presence of an initiate. “Here is a genuine Master who will play a crucial part in your life.” Schuré recognized Steiner as one who stood fully in the world of today and yet could also behold in clear consciousness the boundless vistas of the super-sensible. A warm friendship quickly developed between the two men: vacations spent together in Barr (1906–1907) in Schuré's summer house in the Alsace; long walks over the Odilienberg, and an active correspondence (mostly on the part of Marie Steiner, who translated several of Schuré's dramas into German). The substance of a number of intimate conversations has been recorded by Rudolf Steiner in the “Document of Barr.”¹ In 1907 Schuré's Sacred Drama of Eleusis was produced under the direction of Rudolf Steiner at the great Munich Congress of the Theosophical Society. It was on this occasion that Rudolf Steiner said that from this time on, art and occultism should always remain connected. In 1909 the first performance of Schuré's drama, The Children of Lucifer, was given using a German translation of the French text by Marie Steiner. The deeper connection now becomes obvious: Schuré the poet, a Celtic-Greek soul, devoted to the renewal of the ancient mysteries, and one of the first Frenchmen to recognize Richard Wagner's impulse towards the “Gesamtkunstwerk” (a total ritualistic experience embracing all the art forms), now whole-heartedly supported Rudolf Steiner in the great Munich endeavors (1907–1913). This period saw the birth of the mystery dramas and the first performances of Eurythmy. It was also in Munich that plans had been made for the building of the First Goetheanum (the House of The Word) which was later erected on the Dornach hill near Basel in Switzerland.

The war years (1914–1918) brought an unfortunate clouding over of their friendship due to Schuré's stubborn chauvinism which nevertheless did not interfere with his continued championing of Richard Wagner. But with Rudolf Steiner, he broke his connection. A few years after the war the friendship was renewed and it must have been an amazing sight to have seen the old, still robust, white-haired Schuré in animated conversation with Steiner as they walked up and down on the terrace of the First Goetheanum in Dornach. Years later, Schuré would still speak of his profound indebtedness to Rudolf Steiner both for the personal help he had received from him and for his having brought the new mysteries clearly to expression in an age of materialism.

These lectures were given on the fringe of the International Theosophical Congress held in Paris and attended by delegates from many countries. Rudolf Steiner himself attached a distinct importance to this course in Paris where he formulated a basic view of Esoteric Christianity which a few years later was to separate him radically from the Theosophical Society. In the 37th chapter of Rudolf Steiner, The Story of My Life (written in 1924–25 shortly before his death) we find the following passage:²

In the Paris cycle of lectures I brought forward a perception which had required a long process of “ripening” in my mind. After I had explained how the members of the human being—physical body; etheric body, as mediator of the phenomena of life; and the “bearer of the ego”—are in general related to one another, I imparted the fact that the etheric body of a man is female, and the etheric body of a woman is male. Through this a light was cast within the Anthroposophical Society upon one of the basic questions of existence which just at that time had been much discussed. One need only remember the book of the unfortunate Weininger, “Geschlecht und Charakter,” (Sex and Character), and the contemporary poetry.

But the question was carried into the depths of the being of man. In his physical body man is bound up with the cosmos quite otherwise than in his etheric body. Through his physical body man stands within the forces of the earth; through his etheric body within the forces of the outer cosmos. The male and female elements were carried into connection with the mysteries of the cosmos.

This knowledge was something belonging to the most profoundly moving inner experiences of my soul; for I felt ever anew how one must approach a spiritual perception by patient waiting and how, when one has experienced the “ripeness of consciousness,” one must lay hold by means of ideas in order to place the perception within the sphere of human knowledge.

It is perhaps not without significance that it was in Paris, where Thomas Aquinas had elaborated some seven centuries earlier his Christ-oriented Scholasticism, that Rudolf Steiner gave his first course on an Esoteric Christian Cosmology appropriate to the dawn of the new Age of Light. Schuré's notes in French of the 18 lectures, published in French in 1928, constitute the only record of this course. They now appear for the first time in English translation in their entirety in book form, readily available to the modern student of the Science of the Spirit.

R. M. Querido

• 1. The “Document of Barr,” dated Sept. 9, 1907 and printed in English translation in the Golden Blade, 1966.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London and New York, 1928.

Maurice Maeterlinck is one of the most outstanding experiences of the modern soul. Those whose sympathies lie with the apostles of world worship, with Darwin and Haeckel, feel a deep satisfaction when the Ghent “mystic” tells them: “All our organs are the mystical accomplices of a higher being, and we have never known a human being, but always a soul.” And nothing prevents those who inwardly cheer the words of Zarathustra, the god-killer, from feeling secret pleasure when Maeterlinck speaks of the depths of the divine with religious devotion. Zarathustra says: “It was the sick and dying who despised the body and the earth and invented the heavenly and the redeeming drops of blood: but even these sweet and dark poisons they took from the body and the earth!” One can feel these words as a release from millennia of religious prejudice and yet listen with approving satisfaction when Maeterlinck says: “The gods from whom we come reveal themselves to us in a thousand ways; but this secret goodness, which has not been noticed and of which no one has spoken directly enough, is perhaps the purest sign of their eternal life. We do not know where it comes from. It is simply there, smiling on the threshold of our souls; and those in whom it smiles most deeply and most often will make us suffer day and night, if they wish, without our being able to love them any less."

Until recently, Maurice Maeterlinck seemed to be a riddle. The tone of the Christian mystics was thought to be discernible in his speeches; and the godless people of the modern scientific worldview could not resist the lure of these speeches. The power of the idea that man has developed from lower organisms according to thoroughly ungodly, purely natural laws and that only this earth, not a heavenly paradise, can be the source of our joys, did not protect them from the magical sound of Maeterlinck's words: “We may indeed already act like gods, and all our lives proceed under infinite certainties and infallibilities. But we are blind men playing with jewels along the streets; and the man who knocks at my door, the moment he greets me, gives out spiritual treasures as wonderful as those of the prince whom I have snatched from death."

Since Maeterlinck published his latest work, La sagesse et la destin&e (Paris, Librairie Charpentier) in October last year, it is no longer difficult to resolve the contradiction referred to above. In this book, we encounter a modern soul that has freed itself from the egg shells of mysticism. We believe we hear Zarathustra's wilful wisdom when Maeterlinck speaks to us: “The intellect and the will should become accustomed to living, like victorious soldiers, from what makes war on them.” And the confession of the reviled Max Stirner seems to speak anew from sentences like these: “But we are told: love your neighbour as yourself! But if you love yourself in a narrow-minded and sterile way, you will love your neighbor in the same way. Learn to love yourself in a broad-minded, healthy, wise and perfect way; that is less easy than you think. The selfishness of a strong and clear-sighted soul is of much more beneficial effect than all the devotion of a blind and weak soul. Before you can be there for others, you have to be there for yourself; and before you can give yourself away, you have to secure yourself. Be assured that the acquisition of a fraction of your self-awareness is ultimately worth more than the sacrifice of your entire unconsciousness.»

And Stirner, who sang the praises of egoism in “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” (The Ego and Its Own), would have to stand in awe of the idol of modern mystics when he says: “The soul does not grow greater through sacrifice, but in growing greater it loses sight of sacrifice, just as the wanderer, when he climbs higher, loses sight of the flowers of the valley. Sacrifice is a beautiful sign of inner compassion; but one should never cultivate compassion for its own sake.” Or: ‘The power that shines in our hearts should above all shine for itself. Only at this price will it also shine for others; and however small the lamp may be, let no one give of the oil that nourishes it, let no one give of the light that crowns it!’

Two years ago, when Maeterlinck's “Tresor des Humbles” appeared, the modern pagans had nothing to say to the mystics, who called the ecstatic Belgian one of their own. Today, after the publication of “La sagesse et la destinde”, the mystics will be less jubilant.

This peculiar development of Maeterlinck's should be pointed out here, in connection with the excellent German edition of “The Treasure of the Humble”, which has just been published (by Eugen Diederich, Leipzig and Florence) under the title: “The Treasure of the Poor. Translated into German by Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski.”

Today, modern free spirits read every sentence of this book differently than they did two years after its publication. At that time, they only had a vague feeling that this book would bring them a breath of fresh air, which, despite some adverse ingredients, would bring a fresh scent of fir trees.

And it is precisely their rare satisfaction in listening to this stammering sage that the free spirits understand today. For these free spirits are often confused with shallow rationalistic minds, to whom the voice of the heart does not speak. They only allow reason and understanding to work within them, and therefore remain unaware of the freer impulses of the human soul, the instinctive impulses.

The free spirits are accused of being dry and rational. And they themselves are constantly afraid that the sober logic could kill the most valuable forces that unconsciously rule in the human soul.

But this fear is an unjust feeling of the human soul. It is true that the language of the mind is also that of common and banal people. But this language is no less the language of the deepest secrets of the existence of the world.

And the words that now express the everyday results of stock market speculation can, in the next moment, be the interpreters of profound truths.

And there is yet another. The friends of the modern scientific creed are often called materialists and are denied a sense of the divine. It is considered appalling when they see nothing in man, who is supposed to have been given existence by a God from heaven, but that he is “three-quarters a column of water and has inorganic salts in him,” which are more capable of influencing his existence than all the spiritual powers dreamed of.

Nietzsche, the evangelist of this world, the despiser of all divine things beyond this world, says: “The inorganic conditions us completely: water, air, soil, soil structure, electricity and so on. We are plants under such conditions.”

In all of us there is still something of the belief that we are degrading the world to something base and common when we strip it of the divine and see in it nothing but what we really perceive with our senses and our minds. We imagine that we are making man into an almost disgusting being when we admit to ourselves that he is made of the materials of this world, and that these materials also obey the laws of nature of this world.

But the natural, the earthly-ungodly, is not contemptible: only the erring human spirit has made it contemptible, because it has become accustomed through a long education to always only get into a devout mood when imagining something beyond. Our best minds are sick because they can no longer believe in the divine in the hereafter and yet cannot perceive the earthly-real as a substitute for the lost divine.

Nietzsche proclaimed the sanctity and divinity of this world in his “Zarathustra”. And Maeterlinck did the same in his “Tresor des Humbles”. Basically, both spirits are saying the same thing. Only Nietzsche emphasizes: All that is worthy of worship, all that is sacred: it is not a heaven and not an afterlife; it is an earth and a here and now. And man should not long for his heavenly paradise of bliss; rather, he should be the meaning of the earth. And Maeterlinck says: The ordinary, everyday is the only reality, but this reality is divine. “Here is John, pruning his trees, there is Peter, building his house, you, talking to me about the harvest, I, shaking your hand - but we are brought to a point where we touch the gods, and we are amazed at what we do.”

In the last lecture we spoke of the experiences of the human soul in relation to the Mystery-principles of ancient times, the Eastern and Egyptian Mysteries. In a certain sense this brought us to the last step in the stages of Initiation, for in the first lecture we described as characteristic of the nature of all Mysteries these four steps: Approach to the Boundary of Death; Becoming acquainted with the Life of the Elementary World; Beholding the Sun at Midnight; Standing before the Upper and the Lower Gods.

This Standing before the Upper and the Lower Gods comes about when the aspirant has to apprehend the forces which rule everything that belongs to the physical side of man, the part which remains behind in sleep as physical and etheric body—here we have to do with the Lower Gods in the widest sense of the word. We have to speak of the Upper Gods in relation to all the forces which are concerned with the innermost being of man; with that which passes through the various incarnations, the ego and the astral body.

In the preceding lectures I was able to describe the experiences of a modern man, acquainted with the nature of the Mysteries, when he looks back in the Akashic Record at the experiences undergone by human souls within the Mysteries of ancient times. We had to point to the tragic impression made on Egyptian souls when in the course of their Initiation they came face to face with the changes that had affected the Cosmic Power known as Isis in the Egyptian Mysteries. From the Osiris legend we learn that the spouse of Isis was overcome by the enemy and torn away from her. But we have also come to know the results in the higher worlds of this changed situation in the life of Isis. The soul which in later Egyptian times had raised itself into spiritual worlds became a participant in the fate of Osiris, the God who was dying to the higher worlds and descending into the earthly region. For that is how it was experienced.

Now it is extraordinarily difficult to speak in ideas and concepts concerning the further development of this “fate of Gods”. But since we have become accustomed to bring in pictures as a help in connection with the most intimate things of the higher worlds, where our ordinary speech, which has already become so secular, fails us, let us express in a readily understandable picture something that is to form, as it were, the leit-motif of the exposition to be given today.

Let us enter into the tragic mood of one about to be initiated during the Egyptian epoch. We transpose ourselves into this mood and find. that it originated from experiences that the aspirant could express only by saying to himself: “Formerly, when I entered the spiritual worlds, I found Osiris permeating cosmic space with the Creative Word and its meaning, which represent the ground-forces of all being and development. Now the Word has become mute and silent. The God who was called Osiris has forsaken these realms. He is preparing to penetrate into other regions; he has descended into the Earth-region in order to enter into the souls of men.”

The Being who had been known spiritually to human souls in earlier days first became manifest in physical life when Moses heard in the physical world the Voice that in earlier ages had been heard only in the spiritual worlds: “Ejeh asher Ejeh!”—“I AM THE I AM, Who was, and is, and will be”. And then this Being who, as the Creative Word, had gradually become lost to the experience of the candidate for Initiation, transferred His life into the Earth-region so that He could gradually come to life again in the souls of earthly men; and in this new life, rising to ever higher and higher glory, would consist the further development of the Earth, even to the end of the Earth-evolution.

Let us try to transport ourselves as vividly as we can into the frame of mind of one of these candidates, and realise how in the spiritual regions to which he could first attain he felt the Creative Word disappearing, sinking down into the Earth-region and becoming lost to spiritual sight. Let us follow the evolution of the Earth, and we shall see that for spiritual sight this Creative Word now goes forward somewhat as a stream which has been on the surface and then disappears for a certain time below the Earth's surface, in order to reappear later at another place. And so there reappeared That which the souls who were being initiated in the later Egyptian Mysteries had seen sinking tragically out of sight. It reappeared, and could be looked upon by those in later times who were permitted to participate in the Mysteries. And they had to bring into the picture what they could see arising again, but arising now in such a way that henceforward it belonged to Earth-evolution.

How did That reappear which had become submerged in ancient Egypt? It reappeared in such a way that it became visible in the Holy Vessel which is spoken of as the “Holy Grail”, guarded by the Knights of the Holy Grail. In the rise of the Holy Grail can be found That which had sunk down in ancient Egypt, and in this arising of the Holy Grail there stands before us everything that went into the post-Christian renewal of the principle of the ancient Mysteries. Fundamentally speaking, the phrase the “Holy Grail”, with all that belongs to it, involves a reappearing of the essence of the Eastern Mysteries,

Everything that appears at a certain time in the evolution of humanity, in order to bring this evolution forward, must include a kind of repetition of what has gone before. In every later epoch the earlier experiences of humanity must appear again, but in a fresh form. We know that in the third post-Atlantean epoch the emphasis was on the Sentient Soul; in the fourth, the Graeco-Latin epoch, it was on the Intellectual Soul, and the development of the Consciousness Soul is the special task of our own epoch, the fifth. For the candidate for Initiation all these things are important, because in a given epoch the most important forces of Initiation must proceed from the soul-principle which is specially connected with that epoch. The Egyptian Initiation was connected with the Sentient Soul; the Graeco-Latin Initiation with the Intellectual Soul; and the Initiation of the fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch must be connected with the Consciousness Soul. But in the dawn of this fifth epoch there must also be a repetition of what the Initiates once went through out of the forces of the Sentient Soul; and equally a repetition of what was gone through in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Then something is added, something new which must come from the Consciousness Soul to provide supporting forces for the candidate. Hence the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, with its special emphasis on the arising of the new Initiation, must have centres where there can be recalled to human souls the secrets poured into human evolution through the Egyptian-Chaldaic soul, and the secrets poured. out in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Graeco-Latin time, during which the Mystery of Golgotha took place. And to that must be added a new element.

As in earlier ages, so also in this later age, that which was enacted in the depths of the Mysteries finds expression in the most varied legends, and these correspond more or less closely to secrets in which the human soul has participated. Hence it was necessary that the secrets of the Egyptian-Chaldaic period should appear as a kind of repetition before the souls of the fifth epoch. They were secrets related to the Cosmos, to the in-pouring of the forces of the Zodiac and of the Planets, but particularly to the secrets connected with the co-operation of the Sun and Moon, and to the shifting influences of the Sun and Moon as they pass through the signs of the Zodiac. (I am speaking of the apparent movements, because they sufficiently characterise the processes involved.) But there had to be a difference between the way in which these secrets had emerged in the third epoch and the way in which they were presented in the fifth epoch. Everything now had to work right into the Consciousness Soul, into that which makes for and constitutes human personality. This took place in a quite special way through the fact that those inspiring forces which were seen when in the third epoch souls were transported into spiritual regions of the Cosmos, and which simultaneously streamed out of cosmic space into the Earth—during the fifth epoch these forces inspired certain individuals. In the dawn of the fifth epoch, accordingly, there were persons who, not exactly through their training but through certain mysterious influences, became the instruments, the vehicles, of cosmic influences issuing from the Sun and Moon during their passage through the signs of the Zodiac. The secrets that could then be won for the human soul through these individuals were a repetition of what had once been experienced through the Sentient Soul. And the persons who expressed the transit of the cosmic forces through the signs of the Zodiac were those called “The Knights of King Arthur's Round Table”. Twelve in number, they had around them a band of other men, but they were the principal Knights. The others represented the starry host; into them flowed the inspirations which were more distantly distributed in cosmic space; and into the twelve Knights flowed the inspirations from the twelve directions of the Zodiac. The inspirations which came from the spiritual forces of the Sun and Moon were represented by King Arthur and his wife Guinevere. Thus in King Arthur's Round Table we have the humanised Cosmos. What we may call the pedagogical high school for the Sentient Soul of the West proceeded from King Arthur's Round Table. Hence we are told—and the legend here refers in pictures of external facts to inner mysteries which were taking place in the dawn of that epoch in the human soul—how the Knights of King Arthur's Round Table journeyed far and wide and slew monsters and giants. These external pictures point to the endeavours of human souls who were to make progress in refining and. purifying those forces of the astral body which expressed themselves for the seer in pictures of monsters, giants and the like. Everything that the Sentient Soul was to experience through the later Mysteries is bound up with the pictorial concepts of King Arthur's Round Table.

What the Intellectual Soul was to experience in this later time has in turn found legendary form in the saga of the Holy Grail. Everything that had to be recapitulated from the epoch in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place was concentrated in the influences that streamed forth from the secrets of the Holy Grail. And these influences could work on the Intellectual Soul in persons who had gained understanding of the Holy Grail and wished to understand their own epoch. In the present day also the human soul must be open to these influences if it is to be initiated, if it is to have understanding for the spiritual nature of our times. The Holy Grail is surrounded by many, many mysteries. Today, naturally, we can give only a sketchy outline of these mysteries; but it may provide a starting-point for more detailed studies which may one day be undertaken regarding these mysteries of the Holy Grail. In the Holy Grail, if understood in its true nature, there was embraced everything which characterised the secrets of the human soul in later times.

Let us take an Initiate of later times when, having freed his ego and astral body from his physical and etheric bodies and come forth from them, he looked down at them from outside, and let us picture what he saw in them. He saw something which could be very disturbing, if he had not learnt to understand it thoroughly. And he still sees it today. The physical and etheric bodies have woven into them something which flows through them like streams or strands running in various directions. As the nerve fibres run through the physical body, so is there woven into the physical body something finer than the nerves, of which occult sight reports: That is dead—so dead that there really is something like a piece of dead substance in the human body. It is now condemned to be dead throughout the time between birth and death, but during the Eastern period of human evolution it was still living. Yes, one has the experience that in human bodies there is something dead which once was alive. And one sets out to discover what it really is. “Dead” is to be understood here in a relative sense; the dead part is indeed stimulated by its environment, but there are tendencies and currents in the human body which, in comparison with the life that animates it, have always a disposition toward death. We investigate how this has come about, and we find that the origin of it is as follows.

Once in ancient times men's souls possessed a certain faculty of clairvoyance, and in the latter part of the Egyptian-Chaldaic civilisation this clairvoyance still existed to such a degree that a man, when gazing into the starry heavens, saw not merely the physical stars but also the spiritual beings united with them. And so, when in the intermediate state between waking and sleeping the human soul looked out into the universe and saw something spiritual, the impression received was different from the impressions made upon the human soul today, when people study science in the modern way or are living mostly in the ordinary consciousness of the times. But all the souls living and embodied today were also incarnated in the Egyptian-Chaldaic epoch. All the souls present here today once looked out from their bodies into starry space, took part in the spiritual life of the universe and received its impressions. This sank into our souls and became an intrinsic part of them. All the souls of today once looked out into the universe and received spiritual impressions in the same way as they now receive impressions of colours and sounds. It is all there still, in the depth of our souls, and the souls created their bodies in accordance with it. But our souls have lost remembrance of it! For modern consciousness it is no longer present in the souls of men. And that which corresponds to the old up-building forces which the souls used to receive, cannot now build upon the body, with the result that the corresponding part of the physical and etheric bodies remains lifeless. If nothing else were to happen, if men went on living merely with those sciences which are concerned with the outer physical world, then men would deteriorate more and more, because their souls have forgotten those former impressions of the spiritual world which go with the vivifying and building up of the physical and etheric bodies.

That is what the candidate for Initiation sees today. And he can say to himself: Souls are thirsting to vitalise something in the physical and etheric bodies which they have to abandon as lifeless because the impressions they once absorbed do not penetrate into modern consciousness. This is the disturbing impression received today by the candidate for Initiation.

Thus there is something in man that is withdrawn from the sovereignty of the soul. I beg that you will take these words with all earnestness; for a characteristic of modern man is that something in his nature is withdrawn from the rule of the soul, something that is dead in contrast with the life of the organism that surrounds it. And by working upon this dead part, the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces exercise on man a very great influence in a quite special way. While on the one hand men can acquire more and more freedom, the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces insinuate themselves precisely into that part of the organism which has been withdrawn from the sovereignty of the soul. That is why so many people in modern times feel (and quite rightly say they feel) as if there were two souls dwelling within their breast, and as if one wanted to tear itself away from the other. Much of what modern man finds so baffling in his inner experience lies in what has just been said. The Holy Grail was and is nothing else than that which can so nurture the living portion of the soul that it can become master of the dead part. Montsalvat, the sanctuary of the Holy Grail, is the school in which one has to learn, for the sake of the living part of the human soul, something that there was naturally no need to learn in the Eastern and Egyptian Mysteries. One needs to learn what has to be poured into the still living part of the soul in order to become master of the part of the physical body that has died, and the part of the soul that has become unconscious. Hence, in these secrets of the Grail, the Middle Ages saw something related to a repetition of the Graeco-Latin period in the Intellectual or Mind-soul, for in the Intellectual Soul are rooted mostly those parts of the soul which are now forgotten and dead. Thus the secrets of the Grail referred to the permeation of the Intellectual or Mind-soul with new wisdom.

When the Initiate of the Middle Ages wanted to present in picture form what he had to learn in order to permeate with the new wisdom the part of his soul that had remained living, he spoke of the Castle of the Holy Grail and of the new wisdom—which is in fact the “Grail”—that flows out from it. And when he wanted to indicate that which is hostile to this new wisdom, he pointed to another domain, the domain wherein dwelt all the beings and. forces which had made it their task to gain access to the part of the body that had become dead, and to the part of the human soul that had become unconscious. This domain, into which were justly transferred (“justly” is here used in an occult sense) all the successors of the evil spiritual beings of earlier times who had preserved the worst forces of oriental magic (not the best forces, which also had remained)—the domain which was the most vicious and hostile to the Grail was Castle Merveil, the gathering-place of all the forces which attack man in this part of his body and soul and have undergone a karmic fate such as has been indicated. Spiritual wisdom can be carried anywhere today, because we have reached a transition stage leading towards the Sixth Epoch and these things are no longer tied to particular localities, but in the Middle Ages it had to be sought in certain definite places, as I have shown in my book, The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind. Hence when in earlier times it was said that one had to travel to a particular neighbourhood in order to receive a certain teaching, this was not meant in any figurative sense. In our own time it must be said that wisdom has less of a local character; for we are living in a time of transition from life in space and time into more spiritual forms of time.

Whereas it has been said that the Castle of the Grail is situated in the West of Europe, the stronghold of hostility to the Grail must be located in another place, a place where, on account of certain spiritual forces there, a person can have just as great and powerful and good an impression as he can have also of its opposite, through other forces which have remained there to this present time like an Akashic after effect from those opponents of the Grail of whom we have been speaking. For at that place one can speak of the very worst forces, and they are still perceptible in their after-effects. At one time evil arts were practised in that place, arts which penetrated right into physical life and thence launched their assaults on the part of the human soul that had become unconscious and on the portion of the human organism that had become dead.

All this is closely connected with a figure who glimmers across from the Middle Ages as a legendary being, but is well known to anyone acquainted with the nature of the Mysteries: a personality who was quite real in the middle of the Middle Ages, Klingsor, the Duke of Terra de Labur, a district we have to look for in what is now Southern Calabria. From there were carried out the incursions of the enemy of the Grail, especially over to Sicily. Even as today, if we tread Sicilian soil and have occult sight, we are aware of the Akashic after-effects of the great Empedocles still present in the atmosphere, so we can still perceive there the evil after-effects of Klingsor, who allied himself from his Duchy of Terra de Labur, across the Straits of Messina, with those enemies of the Grail who occupied the fastness known in occultism and in legend as Calot bobot.

In the middle of the Middle Ages, Calot bobot in Sicily was the seat of the goddess called Iblis, the daughter of Eblis; and among all evil unions which have taken place within the Earth's evolution between beings in whose souls there were occult forces, the one known to occultists as the worst of all was between Klingsor and Iblis, the daughter of Eblis. Iblis, by her very name, is characterised as being related to Eblis, and in Mohammedan tradition Eblis is the figure we call Lucifer. Iblis is a kind of feminine aspect of Eblis, the Mohammedan Lucifer, and with her the evil magician Klingsor united his own evil arts, through which in the Middle Ages he worked against the Grail. These things must needs find expression in pictures, but in pictures that correspond to realities; they cannot be expressed in abstract ideas. And the whole of the hostility to the Grail was enacted in that fastness of Iblis, “Calot bobot”, whither the remarkable Queen Sibylla had fled with her son William, in 1194, under the rulership of the Emperor Henry VI.

Everything that was undertaken by a power hostile to the Grail, and whereby also Amfortas was wounded, is finally to be traced back to the alliance which Klingsor had contracted with the stronghold of Iblis, Calot bobot; and all the misery and suffering which we see embodied in the Grail legend through Amfortas is an expression of that pact. For this reason the soul must still be strongly armed even today when it comes into the neighbourhood of those places from which can emanate all hostile influences related to the Mysteries of the Grail and the advancing evolution of humanity.

Viewed thus, we have on the one hand the Kingdom of the Grail, and on the other the evil Kingdom, Chastel Merveille, with all that came from the pact between Klingsor and Iblis playing into it. And here we can see, expressed in a wonderfully dramatic form, all that the most independent and innermost of the soul-organs, the Intellectual or Mind-soul, has had to endure in face of attacks from without. In the fourth post-Atlantean period this soul-principle was not yet as inward as it had to become in the fifth. It withdrew itself more from the life in the external world that had prevailed in Greek and Roman times, back into the inner part of man, and became freer, more independent. But on that account (for reasons already given) it was much more open to attack by all the powers than it had been in the Graeco-Latin epoch. The whole of the change which had taken place in the Intellectual or Mind-soul is portrayed haltingly, in a legendary way, and yet it stands so dramatically before us in the antithesis between “Montsalvat” and “Chastel Merveille”. We feel an echo of all the sufferings and all the conquests of the Intellectual Soul in the stories connected with the Holy Grail. All that had to be changed in the human soul in more recent times is revealed to him who has come to know the nature of the Mysteries. In this connection we need only take a concrete case.

We often find that persons who have not gone far enough into the matter will ask how a man such as Goethe can on the one hand bear within him certain secrets of the human soul, and on the other hand be so often torn by passion, as he is found to be by those who read his life-story in a rather superficial way. In fact, there was in Goethe something that can be called, in a crude sense, a double nature. To a superficial view the two sides can hardly be brought into harmony. On the one hand there is the great, high-minded soul who could bring forth certain portions of the second part of Faust, and gave expression to many deep secrets of human nature in the Fairy-Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; and one would like to forget everything one knows from biographies of Goethe and pay homage only to the soul who was capable of such achievements. On the other side, there appears in Goethe, tormenting him and often causing him pangs of conscience, his other nature, “human, all-too-human”, in many respects. In earlier times the two natures of man were not so widely separate in their development; they could not diverge in this way. A person with a biography comparable with Goethe's could not rise to such heights as are revealed in certain passages of the second part of Faust or in the Fairy-Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, and at the same time be so divided in his soul. That was not possible in earlier times. It has become possible only in later days, because there now exists in human nature something we have already spoken of—the part of the soul that has become unconscious, and the part of the organism that has died. The part that has remained alive can be so elevated and purified that the impulse which leads on to the Fairy-Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; can be nurtured there, while the other part may remain exposed to the attacks of the outer world. And because the forces described are able to make their abode there, circumstances may arise in which there is very little agreement with the higher ego of the person. It should be understood that the soul living in Goethe had once belonged to an Egyptian Initiate, and had then lived in Greece as a sculptor and a disciple of philosophy; then, between this Greek incarnation and the one as Goethe, there comes an incarnation (probably only one) which I have not yet been able to find. If we keep this in mind, we can see how a soul who in former incarnations could rule the entire man can be led downwards, and then has to relinquish a part of the total human nature, which then lies open to the influence of evil forces.

That is what is mysterious and so hard to understand in a nature such as Goethe's; but by the same token it brings to light many hidden aspects of the human soul in modern times. Everything brought about by the duality of human nature lays hold, in the first place, of the Intellectual Soul, and the Intellectual Soul divides into those “two souls”, whereof one can sink fairly deeply into matter and the other can rise into the spiritual.

Thus in the “Knights of King Arthur's Round Table” we are presented with a repetition of all that the candidate for Initiation had in a certain sense to experience through the Sentient Soul. In all that was grouped around the Holy Grail we are shown what can be experienced in modern times by the Intellectual Soul. Everything that a man must now go through, so that he may make one part of his double nature strong enough to penetrate into the mysteries of the spiritual worlds in modern times, must be enacted in the Consciousness Soul. This is the new thing that has to be added. And that which has to be enacted in the Consciousness Soul is crystallised in the figure of Parsifal. All the legends connected with King Arthur and the Round Table represent the repetition of the experiences of earlier ages in the Sentient Soul; all the legends and narratives which are directly connected with the Holy Grail, apart from Parsifal, represent what the Intellectual Soul had to go through; and all that finds expression in the figure of Parsifal, this ideal of the later Initiation in so far as this later Initiation is dependent on the Consciousness Soul, represents the forces which must especially be made our own through the Consciousness Soul. So the interaction of the three soul-principles in modern man is presented in a threefold legendary form. And just as we can discern deep secrets of the human soul in old legends, so can we now also sense in them deep secrets of the Mysteries of the modern age.

It is false to suggest that the nature of Initiation has not changed since olden times, as though a present-day Western man had to go through the same stages as did a person belonging either to the ancient or to the more modern East. Things are so that a characteristic belonging to an earlier epoch will persist into a later time for certain peoples. A much more important point is that the whole nature of modern Initiation has a more inward character, makes greater demands on the innermost part of the human soul; but in a certain sense it cannot directly approach the external part of human nature. Much more than in the old Initiation, therefore, the external must be cleansed and purified through the strengthening of the inner, so that this inner part becomes lord over the outer. Asceticism and external training belong more to the character of the old Initiation; a direct evolution of the soul itself, so that it develops strong forces in its inner being, belongs more to the nature of the newer Initiation. And because external circumstances are such that only in the course of time will the lifeless elements of human nature be overcome—the elements which can so greatly disturb the Initiate of today—we must say that in our time and on into the far future there will still be many natures similar to that of Goethe, persons who with one part of their being rise up into the heights, while with the other part they are connected with the “human, all-too-human”. Persons who in earlier incarnations showed no sign of these peculiarities, but on the contrary displayed a certain harmony between the outer and the inner, may enter fresh incarnations in which a deep disharmony can show itself between the external and the inner organisation. Those who know the secrets of human incarnations will not feel confused in face of this disharmony. For in proportion as these things increase, the human faculty of judgment grows also, so that the old principle of authority comes to an end. Hence there will be an ever more insistent call to test the fruits of the Mysteries. It would be more convenient to pay heed only to the external characteristics of those who have to teach, for then one would not need to ask whether the facts concerning them—what they have to say and teach and do in a spiritual sense—are in line with human understanding and impartial logic. The duality of human nature is not in the very least to he defended; on the contrary, we must insist in the strictest sense on the rule of the soul over externals, but it must still be said that the facts which have been indicated are absolutely true for modern evolution. For the after-effects of Klingsor and Iblis are still always present, even though in another form.

A special feature of our time is that these attacks from Klingsor and Iblis, as they gradually lay hold of people, are insinuating themselves into intellectual life, particularly the intellectual life that bears on education, with its popularisation of modern science. Consider what people have been learning for quite a long time now and what they think it right to instill into children; consider what is accepted as the basis of modern education—all this should not be judged in accordance with the views of someone who, believing he is very clever, says he understands these things and knows they are entirely correct. No, all this should be judged in accordance with how it influences and fructifies the soul, and in terms of the impressions it produces on the soul. And when a person becomes cleverer and cleverer, in the sense in which it is fashionable to call people clever today, he develops in his soul certain forces which in this incarnation may make him very well able to dominate the conversation in circles wedded to materialistic or monistic ideas; but then certain vital forces necessary for the human organism are worn away. And when such a person has taken into himself only these typical dregs of modern education, in his next incarnation he will lack the forces that are required for properly building up the human organism. The “cleverer” a person is by the standards of the time we are now facing and the closer his intellectual attunement to it, the more of an imbecile will he be in a later incarnation. For those categories and, concepts which relate only to the sense-perceptible outer world and to the ideas which hold it together—these concepts set up in the soul a configuration which may be ever so fine intellectually but lacks the force to work intensively on the brain and to make use of it, And to be unable while in the physical body to make use of the brain is to be an imbecile.

If it were true, as the materialists maintain, that the brain does the thinking, then one could certainly give them some comfort. But this is as false as the assertion that the “speech-centre” has formed itself. It has acquired its form through human beings having learnt to speak, and so the speech-centre is the result of speech. Similarly, all cerebral activity, even in the historical past, is the result of thinking—not the other way about. The brain is plastically modeled through thinking. If only such thoughts are developed as are customary today, if the thoughts are not permeated by the wisdom of the spirit, then the souls occupied with thinking only about material things will find in later incarnations that they are unable to use their brains properly; their brain-forces will be too weak to lay hold of things. A soul which today is occupied merely with calculating debit and credit, let us say, or with the usages of commercial and industrial life, or absorbs only the ideas of materialistic science, is filling itself with thought-pictures which in later incarnations gradually darken the consciousness, because the brain would be an unformed mass—as today in cases of softening of the brain—and so no longer capable of being taken hold of by the forces of thinking. Hence for anyone who looks into these deeper forces of human evolution, everything that can live in the soul must be permeated by a spiritual comprehension of the world.

So in this modern time the nature of man may still be twofold. The forces belonging in particular to the Consciousness Soul must be infused with inner spiritual knowledge. Man must overcome the two regions through which Parsifal went; he must overcome “apathy and doubt” in his own soul. For if he were to carry apathy and doubt with him over to a later incarnation, he would not make a success of it. Man must come to have knowledge of the spiritual worlds. Only through the fact that life widens out in the human soul, the life called Saelde by Wolfram von Eschenbach, the very life that pours out spiritual knowledge over the Consciousness Soul—only by this means can human soul-development advance fruitfully from the fifth epoch onwards into the sixth.

These are among the fruits of the newer Mysteries; they are the important and significant results which must be drawn from these Mysteries, which are an after-effect of the Grail Mystery. But, unlike all ancient Mystery-wisdom, they can be understood by the generality of people. For gradually the unconscious and dead forces of the soul and of the organism must be overcome through a strong permeation of the Consciousness Soul with spiritual knowledge; that is, with a knowledge that has been understood and grasped spiritually, not a knowledge built up on authority.

Even such things as have been said in these lectures—if a person takes into account all that modern knowledge and education are able to give—can, when they are heard, be thoroughly understood and grasped; though they can be discovered only by one who gets to know the Mysteries through occult sight. And they should be most thoroughly grasped. Now it may perhaps be true of many a modern man who is striving to attain to higher worlds that in the shape of his outer life something will still be visible of the “human, all-too-human”, or of his efforts to raise himself out of it. Yes, it may well be that the “fool's motley” is still discernible through the raiment of the spiritual, as with Parsifal. But that is not the point. What matters is that there should be present in the soul the impulse toward spiritual knowledge, spiritual understanding—that impulse which is inextinguishable in Parsifal and brings him at last, in spite of everything, to the stronghold of the Holy Grail. In the whole picture drawn of Parsifal, if rightly understood, we can find all the different methods of training the Consciousness Soul which are necessary to evoke from it the right effects, so that the person can gain control of the forces which whirl in confusion and strive against one another in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. The more present-day man looks into himself and tries to exercise honest self-knowledge, the more will he find how conflict is raging in his soul; it is a conflict within the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. For self-knowledge is a harder thing than many people suppose, and it will indeed become more and more difficult. Someone tries to acquire self-knowledge, but even if he is able to discipline himself in many respects and to build up his character, he will very often notice at critical moments how in his innermost depths the most deeply hidden passions and forces are raging, and how they tear apart the domain of the Intellectual Soul. And how is it with a modern man who devotes himself seriously to knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge? The difficulties of the inner life may perhaps never dawn on people who believe that real knowledge is to be found in external scientific work and its fruits. But anyone who takes the search for knowledge seriously and from worthy motives will be in a different situation once he looks with real insight into his inner being. He seeks in this or that field of knowledge, seeks and seeks, and seeks also in life to come to terms with the diverse aspects of human living. After searching for a while, he thinks he knows something; but then he searches further. And the more he searches with the means normally available today, the more does he feel himself torn into pieces, the more does he feel drawn into doubt. And. a person who, having acquired a present-day education, confesses to himself that in spite of all this education he really knows nothing, is often just the person who strives most earnestly and worthily for spiritual knowledge.

In truth there can be no one with any depth of soul today who does not experience this gnawing doubt. And it is something he ought to be familiar with. For only then will he immerse himself in that spiritual knowledge which is right for the Consciousness Soul and must pour itself out into the Intellectual Soul in order to be master there. Hence we must try to penetrate with rational understanding into what is brought to the Consciousness Soul from out of occult knowledge. By that means we shall draw into our inner being such a self as will be a real lord and master there; and then, when we come to know the nature of the modern Mysteries, we shall stand confronting ourselves.

Anyone who approaches the Mysteries today must. feel that he is confronting himself in such a way that he will strive after the virtues of Parsifal, while knowing that—because of the modern conditions already described and because he is a man of modern times—he is in fact someone else also, the wounded Amfortas. A man of our time carries within him this double nature—aspiring Parsifal, wounded Amfortas. That is what his self-knowledge must lead him to feel. Then from this recognition will flow the forces which out of duality must make a unity, and so should bring man a little further on in the course of world-evolution. In our Intellectual Soul, in the depths of our inner life, there must be a meeting between Amfortas, wounded in body and soul, and Parsifal, whose task is to cultivate the Consciousness Soul. And it is entirely true to say that in order to gain freedom for himself, a man must go through the “wounding” of Amfortas and become acquainted with the Amfortas within himself, so that he may also come to know Parsifal. Just as it was right for Egyptian times that one should rise up into the spiritual worlds in order to know Isis, so is it right for our times to start with the spirituality, the spiritual nature, of this world, and through it to rise into the higher spiritual worlds. A wish to deny the Amfortas-nature is not a true characteristic of our time. It is because modern man is so fond of surrounding himself with Maya that he wants to deny Amfortas. For how delightful it sounds when we hear it said: “Humanity is always advancing!” Yes, but this “advance” follows a very tortuous path. And in order to develop the forces of Parsifal in human nature, the Amfortas-nature in man must be recognised.

So in this cycle of lectures, using legends from which I have tried to call forth pictures of deep soul-processes, I have sought above all to lead your deeper premonitions, at least in some degree, towards the nature of the modern Mysteries. Perhaps one day we shall have opportunity to speak in still clearer words, if that can be, of what the nature of the modern Mysteries discloses concerning the dual nature which man bears within himself: concerning Amfortas and Parsifal.

You will have understood from the former lectures, that when we gaze at the planetary system, at the starry heavens, our physical vision only perceives “ maya,” the great illusion. We only reach the reality, the actual facts, when we gradually attain knowledge of the spiritual beings at work in the various heavenly bodies. We were obliged, first of all, to make the attempt in these studies to learn about the individual spiritual beings at work in cosmic space, in the stellar system; to know these spiritual beings as such; in other words, we had to become acquainted with the various beings of the three hierarchies standing above man. You will have noticed that we have approached the beings of these Hierarchies by pointing out the ways in which occult consciousness actually penetrates to a sort of perception of those beings who, in the super-sensible world, are directly or even indirectly, exalted above man. We tried, as it were, to follow an inner, a mystic-esoteric way, in order to gain some idea, a purely spiritual-psychic idea, of the character of the beings of the higher hierarchies. Only in the last lecture did we try to turn a little from the inner to the outer, so to speak, and to show how through a cooperation of a duality in the hierarchies—in the really normal beings and the Luciferic beings of the hierarchies—the actual external form of the stars visible to the senses have come into being. I should now like, before proceeding further with the occult, esoteric, mystical consideration, to seek a way from another side, namely, that which is connected with the ordinary consciousness, and which again brings us to the paths we followed in the former lectures. In any case we shall have to refer to much in the earlier lectures in considering this more external way, which starts from the facts known to normal consciousness.

When with our ordinary normal consciousness we look out into cosmic space, we discover, first of all, heavenly bodies of various kinds. These have indeed been differentiated and described by external materialistic astronomy. Today we will devote our attention to that which is, to a certain extent, visible to the external consciousness in a planetary system. There we have the planets themselves, with the fixed star, the Sun, as their ruler; and circling the planets we have their moons (speaking of our earth we have our own moon)—and within the planetary system we also have those remarkable stars, which are so difficult for the external consciousness to place in the collective picture of the system—the meteoric and cometary bodies. We will, to begin with, look away from everything else in the stellar systems, and fix our attention upon the following quaternary in a planetary system: the planets, the fixed stars, the moons, and the comets. Let us be quite clear concerning the obvious fact, that to the ordinary normal consciousness, only the planet itself and, indeed, only the particular planet on which the normal consciousness functions, is perceptible. Thus to the earth-dweller the Earth is the planet. To the normal consciousness all the rest is at first only observable in its most external nature. With the hypotheses given us by the occult-esoteric methods we will now pass on to this external classification which the normal consciousness provides. We have already classified man himself, in the ranks of the beings who stand, as it were, above him, as on the lowest step of the ladder of the hierarchies. We then ascended to the three categories of the Third Hierarchy, and described the beings known to western esotericism as Angels or Angeloi, Archangels, and Archai. Standing above these as the Second Hierarchy, we have those beings we have described as Spirits of Form, Spirits of Motion, Spirits of Wisdom; and above these again the Spirits of Will or Thrones, the Cherubim, and the Seraphim. Only when we thus fix our attention upon the ranks of the spiritual beings—the steps, as it were, of the ladder of the different beings of the Hierarchies, do we bring the earth relations to our esoteric consciousness. Indeed, if as we have seen, we wish fully to consider man and everything which appertains to him on this planet, we must think of him in relation to all these beings. We saw, in the last lecture, that the phenomena of man and his planet are not to be spiritually explained, unless we fix our attention on these beings. We have seen from man to the Spirits of the Age, we are concerned with beings who, in the first place, play their part in the human, historical process of civilisation; so that we must regard the beings of the Third Hierarchy as bringing man himself forward, step by step, in his earth-development, and as leading the progress of civilisation. Further, we have seen that while these beings of the Third Hierarchy remain above, certain of their offspring, which we have called the nature-spirits, descend into the world of nature, and work there. We have also seen that when we turn our attention to the planets themselves they cannot be explained unless we think of their forms as determined by the Spirits of Form; their inner mobility and activity by the Spirits of Motion, and their consciousness by the Spirits of Wisdom. This only refers to the inner part of the planet, the inner part of the earth, that part of it which belongs to man. We have further seen that if only beings up to the rank of the Spirits of Wisdom were active, the planet would be still. The fact that it moves, and has an impulse to movement, we must ascribe to the Spirits of Will; and the regulation of the movement in the whole planetary system, we must ascribe to the Cherubim. We have thus put together the whole planetary system; for while the movements of the individual planets are so ordered that together they comprise the system, it must be presumed that the whole is directed from the fixed stars. And in the Seraphim, we have that which speaks from the

Seraphim
Cherubim

Thrones
Spirits of Wisdom

Spirits of Motion
Spirits of Form

Spirits of the Age
Archangels

Angels
Man

planetary system to cosmic space, to the neighboring planetary system. We could compare this with the fact that men do not live for themselves alone, or simply in a social connection—which could be compared with the directing of the Spirits of Will—but that men understand one another by their speech. So, in a similar way there is mutual understanding between one planetary system and another by means of the Seraphim. They are, as it were, to the whole system, that which corresponds to the speech which draws men together, holds them together, and leads them to agreement. The Seraphim carry messages from one planetary system to another, and give information of what takes place in one planetary system to the other system. Through this means the world of planetary systems is integrated and forms a whole.

We were obliged to instance these successive grades the Beings of the Hierarchies, for all the forces and activities proceeding from these Hierarchies are perceptible in the collective phenomena of man on his planet. Occult vision teaches us that, just as this whole system of beings has to do with the Earth-planet, so in like manner a similar system belongs to other planets. When man, with all the means at his disposal, directs his occult vision to the other planets of our own planetary system he finds that the same experiences that we make when as human beings, we approach the Cherubim, Seraphim, or Thrones, we make also with regard to other planets. In other words, everything which I have described as necessary in order that we may raise ourselves to a being of the rank of Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, in so far as they cooperate in the occurrences of the earth-planet—all this we find when we direct our spiritual vision to Saturn, or to other planets our system. Exactly in the same way must we proceed as far down as the Spirits of Motion. Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Spirits of Wisdom;—thus far the results for occult vision are the same for all the individual planets of our Planetary System, whether we direct our observation to Mars, Jupiter, Mercury, or Venus, we find the same results if we fix our attention on the activities of these particular beings. On the other hand, we no longer find the same results for the other planets of our system, as regards the activity of the Spirits of Motion and the Spirits of Form. In other words, if we try to direct our occult vision to another planet—to Mars, for instance—and ask ourselves: How do the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, and Spirits of Wisdom work upon Mars? The answer is: They work there just as upon our earth. But if we ask the same question with regard to the Spirits of Motion and Form, this is no longer the case. The activities of these two categories of higher hierarchies differ from one another as regards the individual planets, We must make this distinction: Every planet of our Planetary System has its own Spirit of Form, its own Spirit of Motion.

Now we can also direct our occultly developed vision to the Sun itself, the fixed star. If we wish to know the fixed star in its own being, we must be careful that in our observation of it we do not confuse it with what, in the main, has significance, not for the fixed star, but for its surrounding planets. Let us understand correctly. In a previous lecture I stated that all these beings of the higher Hierarchies down to the Spirits of Form, actually work together in the cosmic system as a sort of Council having its residence in the Sun; that the Sun is actually the center of activity of all these spirits. Now when it is stated that Mars, for instance, has its own Spirit of Form, likewise has Jupiter, and also the earth, we must if we wish to speak in picture (and in relation to these exalted conditions everything is more or less a picture) we must imagine that although actually the seat, the center, of the activities of the Spirits of Form of Mars and Jupiter and so on, is always the Sun; that they work from there, from the fixed star; yet their sphere of action on Mars is, so to speak, allotted to the Spirits of Form from the Sun. They work upon Mars from the Sun; other Spirits of Form work upon the Earth, others upon Jupiter. That which they perform is an activity for the benefit of the whole system. Now we will not ask what is accomplished from the Sun, from the fixed star, for the benefit of the planets; but rather what takes place in the realm of the fixed star itself for its own beings, for the actual evolution of the beings belonging to the fixed star.

Thus, if we direct our gaze to the fixed star, we must say: Life upon the fixed star is so exalted, so grand and mighty, that the beings developing there can only associate with beings of the sublimity of the Seraphim, Cherubim. Thrones, and Spirits of Wisdom; while the Spirits of Motion and Form who are going through their evolution upon the fixed star itself, are powerless to do anything for its evolution. They are not of sufficiently exalted rank; they, who are of such immense importance for the humanity of the planets, are of no importance to the fixed star; they are powerless to work upon its development. Thus if we fix our attention on the being of the planet, and look away from the humanity dwelling upon it—on our earth—we can say: In so far as the planet has its place in the solar system, all ranks of beings down to the Spirits of Form have an influence on its development. Down to the Spirits of Wisdom we have to reckon the sphere of influence upon the fixed stars; down to the Spirits of Form the sphere of influence upon the planets.

Now within the planetary system there still remain two cosmic bodies, the moon and the comets and the question now is: How do these cosmic bodies present themselves to occult vision? If directed to the moon, which revolves round our earth, what forms of activity does occult vision find there?

Occult vision finds upon the moon nothing of that which is developed as human life upon the earth. An evolution resembling the human is not to be found upon the moon. Nor is there anything to be found upon it, as regards its evolution, which can be compared to our animal kingdom. Neither of these is to be found by occult vision upon our moon. It would, of course, be trivial and superfluous to say that no human beings incorporated in flesh perambulate the moon, or such animals as are to be met with upon the earth; when an occultist uses such expressions he means something essentially different. It certainly might be possible for something resembling the higher principles of human nature (the human ego, or astral body) to be in existence under other conditions on a cosmic body, and there go through a development without being incarnated in a human fleshly or etheric body. That is conceivable—and such conditions really do exist. It is conceivable that an evolution in a spiritual sense might take place upon the moon without the external embodiment, the external stamp of the beings resembling those of man; but it does not happen to be the case. Nothing like human history, like a development of beings who might even psychically resemble man or our animals, exists upon the moon. Even if we ascend from man to the beings we have called the first spiritual leaders of mankind, whom we have described as Angels in the ranks of the hierarchies, we do not find their evolution upon the moon. We find there no form of activity, no forces, such as those which proceed from the intervention upon earth of the Angels, or the Angeloi. We have described somewhat exactly what these beings have to do for mankind upon the earth. No such intervention takes place on the moon. Nowhere do we find traces of any human or animal activity, or any such as we could attribute to the Angels. But if we go further and fix our attention on the forces by means of which the Archangels forward human evolution and if we then turn our occult sight to the moon, strange to say we find these forces existing there. Occult vision finds there as active forces in existence on the moon the same forces which it encounters when, in contemplating the earth evolution, it looks upon the development of a people through its Folk-soul, through its Archangel. The Archangel who spiritually guides the lives of nations is present in his special characteristic as forces and speaks to us when we focus our spiritual sight upon the moon. When we fix our attention upon the nature of those spiritual beings whom we designate as the Archai or Spirits of the Age, the beings who take charge of and lead earthly evolution from one epoch to another—for instance, from the Egyptian civilisation to the Greek, or from the Greek to our own—if we acquire an occult vision of the forces which rule in the guidance of evolution by the Spirit of the Age, we find again these same distinctive forces when we look upon that which meets our gaze from the moon. So, just as we could, for the planet, designate for its sphere the beings of the higher hierarchies as far as the Spirits of Form, so can we also set limits to the sphere of the Moon and say: The sphere of the Moon extends as far as the Archangels.

Now, before we continue to study the results of occult investigation as we have done before, it will be useful for our further consideration if, from the point of view of occultism, we further compare the moon and planets and the fixed star. In undertaking such a comparison, it is necessary, in the first place, to acquire the right ideas of what exists in man himself and especially in his physical body, in a way not taken into account by the ordinary materialistic anatomy and physiology. What does the ordinary anatomist of today do when he investigates a physical body? Well, he takes a piece of the liver, let us say, then a piece of nerve or brain substance as contiguous substances; these he investigates side by side, comparing the one with the other in a purely external way. The ordinary materialistic anatomist or physiologist does not take into consideration the fact that when we have before us a piece of brain-substance and a piece of liver-substance, we have absolutely different things. In one part of the human body we have something upon which the higher bodies, the super-sensible principles, work in quite a different way from how they do on another part. Thus, for instance, a portion of brain substance is so constituted that the whole structure, the whole formation could not arise if this substance had not been worked upon, not only by the etheric body, but also by an astral body. The astral body permeates and works upon the brain-substance, and there is nothing in the brain-substance or the nerve-substance upon which the astral body, in cooperation with the etheric body, does not work. Take on the other hand a portion of the liver, you must imagine that the liver is also permeated by the astral body, but that it does nothing for the liver, takes no part in the inner organisation of the liver. On the other hand, the etheric body takes a very essential part in the organisation and structure of the liver. The different organs in man are in reality very different from each other. We can only study the liver when we know that in it the etheric body with its forces plays the chief part, and that the astral body, though it certainly permeates the liver as water does a sponge, has no special share in its formation or inner configuration. We can only picture the brain-substance as something in which the astral body has essentially the largest share, and the etheric body only a lesser one. Again, in the whole structure of the blood-system, even to the framework of the heart, the ego has its essential part, whilst in the organisation of nerve-substance as such, for instance, the ego takes no part at all—not to mention the other organs. Thus, when we consider the physical body of man in the occult sense, not in the sense of mere formulae, we have in its various organs, things, beings of quite different value, of quite different essence, altogether of quite different nature. We may say that what in man is his liver or his spleen depends upon higher principles at work within it. Liver and spleen are very different organs; the astral body has, in a very special manner, a strong share in the spleen, whilst it has hardly any share in the liver. All these things will at some time have to he studied; and indeed at no very distant date, by the physiologists and anatomists, because gradually facts will come to light in the materialistic descriptions of the organs of men, animals and plants, which would have no sense at all if only compared as though they were peas and beans, as external anatomy and physical science does to-day. How something in the world and in man stands to the spirit, represents its true nature. And as in man, so it is in the heavenly system. A moon is quite different from a planet or fixed star. We have already seen that the relation of the beings of the higher hierarchies are different as regards the Sun from what they are in regard to the moon or the planets; consequently we must fix our attention on the following in order to describe these differences. Suppose we could take out of a planetary system—as if we peeled them off—all the moons of the individual planets: that is to say thought away for a moment the fixed star itself and the planets, till we have only the moons remaining in the planetary system. If occult vision were so directed that it only observed the moons—everything which is moon within the planetary system, everything in which the forces, as far down as the Archangels, are the same as upon our earth in the successive evolution of humanity—we should then gain a very definite impression; we should have a very definite occult experience.

We might repeat this occult experience a second time. Anyone with trained occult vision can, if he has sufficient will-power, think away the fixed star and the planets from the planetary system so that only the moons remain (that is to say, he must fix his attention only upon that for which he has prepared himself). He must then seek for something else from which he has the same impression as that connected with all the moons of a planetary system. Precisely the same impression as is made upon one by visualizing all the moons, is also made on one who looks at a human corpse, a physical body, the bearer of which has recently passed through the gate of death. Although these things appear externally as absolutely different, what appears to natural science as an external difference is Maya. The impression made upon our occult vision when we, as human beings, stand thus with regard to all the moons of a planetary system on the one hand, and on the other stand before a physical body left behind, deserted by the astral and etheric bodies is one and the same. From this arises the occult knowledge that in the moons that are continually coming into existence the planetary system is gradually forming its own corpse within itself. All the moons of a system which are continually being formed will constitute the corpse of a planetary system. The difference with regard to man is, that at the moment when he, with his being, passes into the condition in which the planetary system is when it forms its moons, he then rejects his corpse; while the planetary system keeps the corpse within itself, binds it together, and condenses the dying matter into moons. Thus it is as though man, when he goes through the gates of death, were not to lay aside his physical body, but were to form it into some sort of organ, and by a certain power within him, drag it about with him. A planetary system actually drags about its own corpse, and indeed a continually changing corpse, in its moons; a corpse which is in the process of becoming, which is in the course of evolution.

Now let us direct our occult vision to the fixed star, thus in our case, to the Sun, and try to gain an impression of the fixed star in the way described for the totality of the moons and planets. If we notice the impression made by the forces active in the fixed star, we can find something in the earth conditions themselves which can call up a similar impression. This again is somewhat difficult, because this time we have to do with the plants, and we cannot reach the whole plant-world of our earth. But comparatively speaking it will suffice if we fix our occult gaze upon a certain number of forms, of plant-forms, and gain the occult impression of that which works and lives in the plants; if we allow that to work upon our vision, it recalls the impression we received from the inner development of the fixed star.

The differences certainly become ever greater and greater. The resemblance of a human corpse after death with the totality of the moons, is really very striking as regards the occult impression. This resemblance is also pronounced in the impressions made by the planetary world and the fixed star upon man. The resemblance is clearly present, but it is no longer so great as that between the discarded physical human body and the totality of the moons. But the resemblance becomes infinitely greater if we now demand from occult vision something special; namely, when we have gained an impression of a number of plant-forms, we must look away from these plants which we have observed with occult vision look away from the physical plant-bodies and make use of those means which the practical occultist uses when he observes the etheric bodies of the plants. We thus make an additional observation. We have noted the impression we gained from the fixed star; we then seek the similar though not yet satisfactory impression which we gain from a number of plants. We go further; we abstract the external form of the plant and allow the etheric body which is within the plant to work upon us. The resemblance then increases and becomes almost as complete as that between the physical corpse of a man and the totality of the moons. Occult perception then realizes that when we look up to the fixed star, what we perceive as working in the fixed star is the etheric body of the planetary system; for we actually gain the impression of an etheric body. We understand the impression which the fixed star makes upon us when we observe the etheric body of the plants, where it works as yet unmixed with an astral body, where only the etheric body works, in cooperation with the physical body. We then gain the knowledge that when we look at the fixed star, we actually see the etheric body of the planetary system raying down from it. We can now say: In the moons we have the corpse of the planetary system, in the totality of the planets we have its body, its physical body; and in the fixed star itself, raying out from it, we have the etheric body of the planetary system. In fact, the possibility of occult vision clinging to the dead paper-mache ideas upon which all physical astronomy is based, soon ceases; for this vision everywhere recognizes that the whole planetary system is permeated by life, and is a living organism. Indeed a continual stream of etheric life flows from the fixed star to the outermost boundary of the system, and back again. We have continually to do with life-forces (as in living animal and plant bodies) which appear centered—I say that now by way of comparison—centered in the fixed star—as the life of the animal is centered—let us say—in the heart; or as plant-life is centered in the various organs which regulate the rising and failing of the sap. In short, we have to do with a center of the planetary system, which we must seek in the fixed star.

It must not for a moment be supposed that in the whole planetary system there is nothing besides that which we have now called corpse, physical body, and etheric body; for of course every part is permeated by the beings of the various Hierarchies. Naturally there are spiritual-psychic forces everywhere and we need only grasp the fact that within the system are the Spirits of the Age, the Archangels and the Luciferic Beings; they all belong to it. We have now discovered in the planetary system the corpse, the physical body and the etheric body. From what we have now heard we can, of course, say that everywhere within the system there is also astral substance, which is organized into beings; for there is astral substance, even in the beings of the higher hierarchies.

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If I draw a planetary system with its Sun, we can so indicate a comet passing through it, that its track crosses the system. Physical astronomy says that the comet comes from very, very far away. When the beginning of a thing cannot be traced, it is easy to say that it comes from very, very far away. So physical astronomy also says—the comet comes from very far away and it also returns to a very great distance. Now because certain comets return periodically, physical astronomy cannot think otherwise than that these comets come from far away, pass through our system and again disappear; follow a very long path in cosmic space, and then come back again. Materialistic astronomy cannot imagine anything else. Occult vision shows us, that, however, as a matter of fact, just about when the comet disappears from physical sight, it dissolves, and continues its way through a world not limited to the ordinary three dimensions of space; it no longer exists in the ordinary world. It actually disappears on the one side and appears again on the other. This is a conception of which, naturally, the materialistic astronomy can make no use; it cannot conceive that a comet, when it again reappears, has not been in existence in the meantime. The Anthroposophist should be able to understand something of such things; for he knows, for example, that the succession of physical bodies of the human incarnations, form a complete whole in certain respects, from the force-aspect; and yet they are not connected physically. Thus, in short, with the exception of a few comets which really have long-drawn elliptical orbits, the comets for the most part are so formed that they come in at the one side and disappear at the other, and when they reappear they have formed themselves anew. Why? Because as a comet approaches, it exercises a power of attraction—it is, at first, merely a sort of spiritual force center; this center attracts all the harmful astral streams, develops them round itself and thus takes on form. We shall hear in the next lecture why it has a tail and a nucleus under the influence of this drawing-up of harmful astral matter. It attracts more and more of this around it, as it passes through the planetary system. In its journey towards the other side it draws this along with it, until it gets beyond the region of the planetary system, when it casts it out into cosmic space. Then the center of force builds itself again at the other pole without needing three-dimensional space, once more takes up the harmful matter and throws it out on the other side. Thus we must regard cometary life as something which continually works as a thunder storm in the planetary system, cleansing it. By the passage of a comet through the planetary system an effort is made to discharge from it the injurious matters which have been called forth in the system by the harmful astral radiations of the beings. Thus we have something in the cometary life of which we cannot, as in the physical and etheric bodies, find an analogy in man himself. The physical body of the planetary system is the totality of the planets. The etheric body is that which, raying out from the fixed star, streams through the system; but in physical man it is not the case that he carries his corpse about with him, as the planetary system does. On the other hand, it has an arrangement for getting rid of the evil astral matter by means of its comets.

Now if we study what exists in the comet only as maya, yet which is active within it as force, it is extremely difficult to connect with it what we have learnt in the course of these lectures. I have described to you, for example, how one may ascend to the Thrones, and how this can only be done by studying the human will. If this study is undertaken with occult means, one can raise oneself up to the Thrones. But in the comets there is nothing at all to be found, either of the Spirits of Wisdom or the Thrones. We find in the comets nothing which would be attainable by any other than those occult methods which I mentioned in former lectures. These are such methods as proceed from the fact that we study a man who is not merely a thinking, feeling and willing human being, but one who can give us a special impression. We described how this impression can be obtained by allowing ourselves to be influenced by a man who has behind him decades of rich experience of life; whose wisdom, as an extract of all this experience, makes an impression upon us and does more than can be done by arguments of a logical or more rational sort. The actual power of conviction of the wisdom derived from human experience, is so impressive that, developed by occult vision, the spiritual can actually be seen through it; that first gives our occult vision an idea of the Cherubim. If we further school this occult vision on the direct convincing effect of the unspoken wisdom and strength of such a man, whereby what he has gained through his experience of life is displayed in his eyes, we then gain an understanding of the impression we need for the sphere of the Seraphim. But the impression which we can thus obtain does not yet lead us to the observation of the spiritual behind the comets. All this is of no avail for an occult study of the comets. Only the two methods leading to the Cherubim and Seraphim can give us an elucidation of the comets. The sphere of the comets extends to the sphere of the Cherubim. We must therefore first know what is the nature of the Cherubim and Seraphim, in order to understand the substance and movement of the comets. The evolution of the comets is therefore dependent upon the beings of the higher hierarchies down to the Cherubim; the evolution of the fixed star is dependent on the beings of the higher hierarchies down to the Spirits of Wisdom; the evolution of the planet itself, apart from the human being who dwells upon it, is dependent upon the forces proceeding from the higher hierarchies down to the Spirits of Form; and that which works on the moon is dependent on the forces which proceed from the higher hierarchies down to the Archangels. Thus we have described the life of a planetary system from various sides, and can build further upon this foundation in the subsequent lectures. To be sure, we must specially note that we can never grasp these matters by means of merely mechanical definitions. How often has it been said that every microcosm corresponds to a macrocosm! We may call man a microcosm, a solar system in miniature; but if we wish to point out the correspondence, we must not stop at these abstract assertions, but must proceed so far with the concrete connection that one realizes that such mechanical descriptions have but an approximate value in the world. If we begin by describing the microcosmic man from the physical body upwards, as the being standing immediately before us, we must in the planetary system begin by describing the corpse, and must also find in the physical system the substances of the cometary bodies, which are the external expression for the purifying astral thunder-storms in the planetary system.

[ 1 ] If we turn our attention to what was said to the Greeks by the teachers and leaders of ancient Egypt about the direction and guidance of the spiritual life of their country, we may trace a remarkable parallel between that which is manifested in the individual life of man, and that which governs human evolution as a whole. It is related that when a Greek once asked an Egyptian, who had guided and led his nation from ancient times onwards, he answered, ‘In the times of yore, the gods ruled and taught us, and only afterwards men came to be our leaders.’ The Egyptians named Menes to the Greeks as their first leader on the physical plane to be recognized as a human leader. That is to say, the directors of the Egyptian people alleged that in earlier times the gods themselves—as Greek records confirm—guided and led the Egyptian nation. Such an assertion, coming down to us from ancient times, must, however, be rightly understood. What did the Egyptians mean when they said, ‘Our kings and great teachers were gods?’

The man who thus answered the question of the Greek meant that if any one had gone back into the ancient times of the Egyptian nation, and had asked those people who felt something within them like a higher consciousness, or wisdom from higher worlds: ‘Who are really your teachers?’ they would have answered: ‘If I wanted to tell you about my real teacher, I should not point to such and such a person and say, ‘That is my teacher,’ but I should first have to put myself into a clairvoyant state (it is known from spiritual science that this was comparatively easier in ancient times than it is now), and then I would find my real inspirer and teacher, who comes to me only when the eyes of my spirit are opened.’ For in ancient Egypt beings who were not incarnated in a physical human body came down amongst men. In those remote ages, it was the gods who still ruled and taught the Egyptians, and by “gods” they understood beings who had preceded man in evolution.

[ 2 ] According to spiritual science, the earth passed through an earlier planetary condition, called the Moon-state, before it became Earth. During this condition man was not yet human in the present sense of the word. On the old Moon were present beings not possessed of the present human forms and differently constituted, who nevertheless were then at the evolutionary stage which man has now attained on earth. We may therefore say, that on the ancient Moon-planet which has perished, and out of which the Earth afterwards originated, there lived beings who were man's predecessors. In Christian esoteric language they are called Angel-beings (Angeloi). The beings immediately above them, Archangels (Archangeloi), were human at a still earlier period. The angels, or angeloi in Christian esotericism, Dhyanic beings in eastern mysticism, were ‘men’ during the Moon-period. Now these beings, during the present Earth-period, are a stage farther advanced than man—those of them, that is to say, who completed their evolution on the Moon. Only at the end of the Earth's evolution will man have arrived at the stage which those beings had reached at the end of the Moon-period.

When the Earth-state of our planet began and man appeared on earth, these beings were not able to appear in an external human form, for the human body of flesh and blood is essentially a product of earth, and is only adapted to the beings who are now human. The beings who are a stage farther advanced than man could not be incarnated in human bodies. They were only able to take part in the government of the earth by illuminating and inspiring those people in primeval times who had attained the stage of clairvoyance. Indirectly, then, through such clairvoyant persons the angels intervened to guide the destinies of earth.

[ 3 ] Thus the ancient Egyptians still remembered a time when the leading personalities of the nation were clearly conscious of their connection with what are called gods, angels, or dhyanic beings. Now what sort of beings were these, who were not incarnated in a human form of flesh and blood, but who influenced mankind in the way we have described? They were man's predecessors, advanced beyond the human stage.

[ 4 ] There is in these days much misuse of a word which may in this connection be applied in its true meaning, the word “Superman.” If we really wish to speak of “Supermen,” it is these beings who may rightly be so called. Human during the Moon-period, the planetary stage preceding our Earth, they had now outgrown humanity. They were only able to appear in an etheric body to clairvoyants. It was thus that they came down to earth from spiritual worlds and ruled here even as late as post-Atlantean times.

[ 5] These beings had, and still have, the remarkable quality of not being obliged to think; in fact, we might even say that they cannot think at all as man does. How then does man think? More or less in this way. He starts from a certain point and says, “I understand this or that,” and from that point he then tries to understand various other things. If this were not the method of human thought, school-life would not be such a difficult period for many. We cannot learn mathematics in a day, because we have to begin at a certain point and go slowly forwards. This takes a long time. We cannot survey a whole world of thought at a glance, for human thought runs its course in time. A system of thought does not enter the mind in a flash. We have to make an effort and have to exert ourselves, in order to find the sequence of thought. The beings described above are without this human peculiarity. A far-reaching train of thought comes into their minds with the same rapidity with which an animal makes up its mind that it will snatch at something which its instinct tells it is eatable. Instinct and reflective consciousness are in no wise distinct in these beings; they are one and the same. Just as animals have instinct at their stage of evolution, in their kingdom, so these dhyanic beings or angels have direct spiritual thought and conceptions. By virtue of this instinctive inner life of conception they are of an essentially different nature from human beings.

[ 6 ] Now we can easily understand why it is impossible for these beings to use a brain or physical body like ours. They have to use an etheric body, because the human body and brain only allow of thoughts in time, whereas these beings do not develop their thoughts in time, but feel the wisdom that is approaching them blaze forth, as it were, spontaneously within them. It is impossible for them to think erroneously in the sense in which man does. The process of their thought is a direct inspiration. Hence the personalities who were able to come into contact with these super-human or angelic beings were conscious that they were in the presence of unerring wisdom, Therefore, even as late as ancient Egyptian times, when the man who was the human teacher or king was in the presence of his spiritual guide, he felt thus the command which he is giving, the truth which he is enunciating, is literally right and cannot be wrong. This was also felt by those to whom the truths were passed on.

[ 7 ] The clairvoyant guides of the human race were able to speak in such a manner that in their words people believed they were receiving exactly what came down from the spiritual world. In short, there was a direct current down from the higher spirit-hierarchies which were directing humanity. [ 8 ] Thus what works on the individual in early childhood may be seen working on humanity at large in the form of the next world of spirit-hierarchies which hovers over human evolution as a whole. This is the next kingdom of the angels or super-human beings, standing a step higher than man, and extending directly into spiritual spheres. They bring down to earth from those spheres what is worked into human civilization. In the child, it is on the formation of the body that the higher wisdom leaves its impress; in human evolution of past ages, it was civilization that was so matured.

[ 9 ] Thus the Egyptians, who described themselves as being in connection with divinity, felt that the soul of humanity was open to the action of spirit hierarchies. Just as the soul of a child opens its aura to the hierarchies up to the time mentioned in the preceding pages, so, through its work, did the whole of humanity open its world to the hierarchies with which it was connected.

[ 10 ] This connection was most important in those teachers whom we call the holy teachers of India, the great teachers of the first post-Atlantean or Indian civilization, which unfolded itself in southern Asia. When the Atlantean catastrophe was over, and the physiognomy of the earth had changed, so that the new conformation of Asia, Europe, and Africa had evolved in the Eastern hemisphere, the civilization led by the ancient great teachers of India began. This was before the time we have mentioned as reported in ancient records. The man of today is apt to get quite a wrong idea about these teachers. If, for example, one of the great Indian teachers were to be confronted with an educated man of the present day, the latter would gaze upon him with astonishment, and perhaps say, “Is that a great teacher? I should never have thought it.” The words “clever” or “learned” in the sense of modern culture could not be applied to the holy teachers of ancient India. They had nothing clever to say. They were simple, homely people, who would have answered even questions of everyday life in the simplest fashion possible. And there were many periods during which scarcely anything could be elicited from them but what would seem, to an educated man of today, insignificant. On the other hand, there were certain times when these holy teachers were revealed as something more than simple, homely men. At these times they were obliged to be together to the number of seven, because what each individual was able to feel had to combine harmoniously with the feelings of the other six teachers, as though in a consonance of seven sounds. For it was then possible for each one to see something according to his particular gift and degree of development. Assuming that we know how to decipher the real occult records, we find that from the harmony of the separate parts which each individual was able to see, there arose the primeval wisdom which comes down to us from ancient times. These records are not the revelations of the Vedas, however much we may admire them. What the Indian holy teachers taught is of much earlier date than the composition of the Vedas, and it is only a feeble echo of their wisdom which lies before us in those mighty works. But when each of these men was in the presence of a super-human predecessor of humanity, was gazing clairvoyantly into higher worlds, and listening clairaudiently to what was being taught through that predecessor, it was as though the sun shone from their eyes. What they were then able to say worked with overpowering force on their environment, so that all who heard them knew that it was not human life or wisdom that was speaking, but that gods, super-human beings, were influencing human civilization.

[ 11 ] The ancient civilizations had their rise in this sounding to mankind of the knowledge of the gods. Only by degrees in post-Atlantean times was the door closed into the divine spiritual world which in the Atlantean period had still been wide open for the human soul. And in the various countries and nations it was felt that man was thrown ever more and more on his own resources. What is revealed in the case of a child appears in humanity in a different way. The divine spiritual world is first diffused into the unconscious soul of a child, and the soul works upon the formation of the body. Then comes the moment at which the child learns to feel itself an ‘ego’ and this is the moment to which its memory goes back in later life. This is what makes it possible to say that the wisest of men may still learn something from the soul of a child. From this point, however, the individual is left to himself. The ego-consciousness comes into being, and everything combines to make it possible for him to remember his experiences.

So, too, in the life of nations there came a time when they began to feel themselves shut off from the divine inspiration of their early forefathers. Just as the child becomes gradually shut off from the aura that floats about its head in its earliest years, so in the life of nations did the divine ancestors withdraw themselves more and more, and mankind was left to its own research and to its own knowledge. When history speaks in this manner, the fact of the guidance of humanity is realized Menes was the Egyptian name of him who inaugurated the first human civilization, and it is at the same time hinted that man thereby became liable to error, for thenceforward he was left to look for guidance to the instrument of his brain. That man was liable to fall into error is symbolically indicated by the fixing of the date of the construction of the labyrinth at the time when humanity was abandoned by the gods; for the labyrinth is an image of the convolutions of the brain as the instrument of man's own thoughts—windings in which the thinker is able to lose himself. The Orientals called man, as a thinking being, Manas, and Manu stands for the first great thinker. The Greeks called the first organizer of the human principle of thought Minos, and with him is associated the myth of the labyrinth, because it was felt that, since his time, mankind had gradually passed from the direct guidance of the gods to a guidance in which the “ego” feels the influence of the higher spirit-world in a different way.

[ 12 ] Besides those predecessors of man, the true supermen, who had completed their humanity on the Moon and had become angels, there are, however, other beings who did not perfect their evolution on the Moon .The beings called dhyanic in Oriental mysticism and angelic in Christian esotericism, consummated their evolution on the ancient Moon, and when man began his earthly career were already a stage higher than he was. But there were other beings who had not finished their evolution on the ancient Moon, any more than the higher categories of Luciferic beings had finished theirs. When the Earth-state of our planet began, man as we have described him was not the only being there. He felt also the inspiration of divinely-spiritual beings; otherwise, like a child, he would have been unable to progress. Accordingly, besides these childlike human beings, and acting through them, there must have been also present on the earth beings who had completed their evolution on the Moon. But between these and man there were yet other beings who had not finished their evolution on the Moon—beings of a higher order than man, because, even as early as the ancient Moon-period, they might have become angels or dhyanic beings. At that time, however, they had not come to full maturity. They were angels in a backward state, yet they far outdistanced man as regards everything which man called his own. Generally speaking, they are beings occupying the lowest grade in the ranks of Luciferic spirits. They hold a middle position between men and angels, and with them begins the kingdom of Luciferic spirits.

[ 13 ] Now it is extremely easy to get an erroneous idea of these spirits. We might ask why did the divine spirits, the regents of good, allow them to fall short, and thereby admit the Luciferic principle into humanity? And it might further be objected on this ground, that surely the good gods turned everything to good. This question is obvious. And another misunderstanding which might arise, is expressed in the idea that these are “evil” spirits. Both ideas are merely misunderstandings; for these spirits are by no means purely “evil,” although the origin of evil in human nature is due to them. Since they stand midway between man and superman, they are, in a sense, more perfect than men. In all the qualities which human beings have to acquire for themselves, these spirits have attained a high standard, and they only differ from man's predecessors described above in being able to incarnate in human bodies whilst man is being evolved on Earth. This is because they did not consummate their humanity on the Moon.

The dhyanic or angelic beings proper, who are the great inspirers of humanity, and to whom the Egyptian referred as being still their teachers, did not appear in human bodies. They could only manifest themselves through human beings. On the other hand, the beings in a mid-position between men and angels were still able, in very early times to incarnate in human bodies. Hence amongst the human race inhabiting the earth in the Lemurian and Atlantean periods, we find people whose innermost soul-nature was that of an angel in a backward state. Not only ordinary people were going about the earth, who through their successive incarnations were to arrive at the ideal of humanity, but beings who only outwardly appeared like them. These had to bear a human body, for the outward form of a human being in the flesh is dependent on earthly conditions. Especially in more ancient times did it happen that beings belonging to the lowest category of Luciferic individualities were present amongst men. And so at the same time that the angel-beings were working on human civilization through man, Lucifer-beings were also incarnated and founding human civilizations in various places. And when in the old folk legends it is related that in some place there lived a great man who was the founder of a civilization we are not to understand that such a Lucifer-being was necessarily the vehicle of evil but rather that human civilization was to receive countless blessings from him.

[ 14 ] Now it is known through occult science that in ancient times, particularly in the Atlantean period, there existed a kind of primitive human language, a manner of speech, which was the same all over the earth, because “speech” in those days came much more out of the depths of the soul than it does now. This may be gathered from the following: In Atlantean times, people felt all outward impressions in such a way that if the soul wished to express anything outward by a sound, it was constrained to use a consonant. What existed in space pressed for imitation in a consonant. The blowing of the wind, the murmur of the waves, the shelter given by a house were felt and imitated by man in consonants. On the other hand, the sorrow or joy which was felt inwardly, or was observed as feeling in another being, was imitated in a vowel. From this we can see that the soul became one, in speech, with outer events or beings. [ 15 ] The following instance is taken from the Akashic Records: A man drew near a hut, which was arched in the ancient fashion and gave shelter and protection to a family. He noticed this, and expressed the protective arch by a consonant; and by a vowel he expressed the fact, which he was able to feel, that within the hut the embodied souls were comfortable. Thence arose the thought “shelter”; “there is a shelter for me—shelter for human bodies.” The thought was then poured forth in consonants and vowels, which could not be otherwise than they were, because they were a direct impression of experience and had but one meaning. [ 16 ] This was the same all over the earth. It is no dream that there was once an original human root-language. And, in a certain sense, the initiates of all nations are still able to feel that language. Indeed there are in all languages certain similar sounds which are the remains of that universal language.

[ 7 ] This speech was prompted in human souls by the inspiration of the super-human beings, man's true predecessors, who had perfected their evolution on the Moon. From this it may be seen that if that evolution alone had taken place, the entire human race would practically have remained one great unity, and there would have been uniformity of speech and thought all over the earth. Individuality and diversity could not have been developed, nor at the same time could human freedom. In order that man might become individual, cleavages had to take place in humanity, and the difference of language in different parts of the world is due to the work of those teachers in whom a Luciferic spirit was incarnated. According as a particular angel-being, who had fallen short in his evolution, was incarnated in a particular race, was he able to instruct its people in a particular language. Thus the ability to speak a separate language is, in all races, traceable to the illuminating presence of these great beings who were angels in a backward state and who stood far above the people of their immediate environment. For instance, the beings described as the original heroes of the Greeks and other nations, and who worked in a human form, were those in whom an angel who had fallen short was incarnated. Therefore these beings must by no means be characterized as entirely “evil.” On the contrary, they brought to man that which predestined him to be a free human being all over the globe, and they differentiated what otherwise would have constituted a uniform whole everywhere on earth. This is not only true of languages but of many other departments of life. Individualization, differentiation, freedom, we may say, come from the beings who fell short in their Moon-evolution. It is true that it was the purpose of the wise rulership of the cosmos to bring all beings in planetary evolution to their goal, but if this had been done in a direct way particular ends would not have been attained. Certain beings were therefore arrested in their development because they were to have a special mission in the progress of humanity. Since the beings who had fulfilled their mission on the Moon would only have been able to educate a uniform human race, beings who had fallen short on the Moon were set against them, and it thereby became possible for these backward ones to turn into good what appeared as a defect.

[ 18 ] This opens up the question, why do evil, wickedness, imperfection, and disease exist in the world? This problem should be looked at from the point of view from which we have just considered the imperfect angel-beings. Everything which at any time exhibits imperfection or backwardness will be turned into good in the course of evolution. It is obvious that this affords no justification for bad actions on man's part.

[ 19 ] Why does a wise Providence allow certain beings to lag behind and not reach their goal? There will be good reason for it at the time following the formation of such a purpose. For it was when nations were not yet able to guide and govern themselves that the teachers of particular periods and individuals arose. And all the different race-teachers, Cadmus, Cheops, Pelops, Theseus, etc, are, in one aspect, angel-beings in the depths of their souls. From this it appears that in this respect also, humanity is really subject to direction and guidance.

[ 20 ] Now at every stage of evolution there are beings who lag behind and do not attain the possible goal. Let us look once more at the ancient Egyptian civilization which ran its course thousands of years ago in the Nile valley. Super-human teachers manifested themselves to the Egyptians, who said that these teachers guided mankind like gods. At the same time, however, other beings were also at work, who had only half or partially attained the angelic stage. Now we must fully understand that the souls of people of the present day had attained a definite stage in the Egyptian period. But it is not only man who gains by letting himself be guided; the beings directing him attain thereby something which furthers their evolution. For instance, an angel is something more after he has guided humanity for a while, than he was before that guidance began. His guiding work helps him to progress, and this is true not only of one who has completed his evolution as an angel, but also of one who has lagged behind. All beings are able continually to advance; everything is in a state of perpetual development; but at every stage beings are left behind. Thus, in accordance with what has just been said, there can be distinguished in the ancient Egyptian civilization the divine leaders or angels, the semi-divine leaders who did not quite attain the angelic stage, and the men. But certain beings in the ranks of the angels again lag behind; they do not bring all their powers into expression when guiding humanity, but remain behind as angels during the ancient Egyptian stage of civilization. Similarly some of the incomplete angels lag behind. Thus while men below were progressing, certain of the beings above, the dhyanic spirits or angels, fell behind in their evolution. When the Egypto-Chaldæic civilization came to an end, and the Graeco-Roman period began, certain guiding spirits from the former period, who had fallen behind in their evolution, were present. But they could not use their powers, for other angels or half-angelic beings had replaced them, and that meant that their own evolution was at a standstill.

[ 21 ] Hence there comes under our notice a category of beings who might have used their powers during the Egyptian period, but did not at that time use them fully. In the ensuing Graeco-Roman period they were not able to use them, because they were replaced by other guiding spirits, and all the conditions of that time made their intervention impossible. But just as the beings who had not reached the angelic stage on the old Moon were, during the Earth-period, once more allotted the task of interposing actively in human evolution, so also the beings who, as guiding spirits in the Egypto-Chaldæic civilization, had stopped short in their development, had lagged behind, later received the mission of intervening again in civilization. We shall be able to watch a later period of civilization in which beings sent to be guides are certainly there to direct the normal progress of evolution, but in which, at the same time, other beings are intervening who were left behind at an earlier stage, and more particularly those who fell behind during the ancient Egyptian period. The civilization to which we are referring is our own. We live at a time when, side by side with the normal directors of humanity, others are interposing who were left behind in the ancient Egyptian and Chaldæic period.

[ 22 ] Now we have to look upon the evolution of events and beings in such a way that occurrences in the physical world must be considered only as effects or manifestations, the true causes of which are to be sought in the spiritual world. On the one hand our civilization is in the main marked by an upward movement towards spirituality, and this tendency of certain people towards spirituality is the manifestation of the spiritual directors of our contemporary humanity, who have attained their own normal stage of development. In everything which tends to lead man up to the great spiritual wisdom-truths transmitted to us by theosophy, these normal guides of our evolution are manifested. But the beings out-distanced during the Egypto-Chaldæic civilization are also affecting the tendencies of our age. They are manifest in much that is being thought and done at the present and will again be manifest in the near future. They are revealed in everything which gives a materialistic stamp to our civilization, and may often be seen even in aspirations after spiritual things. In our age we are virtually experiencing a revival of Egyptian civilization. The beings who are to be looked upon as the invisible directors of that which takes place in the physical world fall accordingly into two classes. The first includes those spiritual individualities who have passed through their own normal course of development up to the present time. They were able to interpose in the guidance of our civilization, whilst the directors of the preceding Graeco-Roman period were gradually finishing their task of guiding civilization during the first thousand years of Christianity The second class, who work simultaneously with the first class of beings, are spiritual individualities who did not complete their evolution during the Egypto-Chaldæic civilization. They were obliged to remain inactive during the ensuing Graeco-Roman period, but are now able to resume their activity because our present age has points of resemblance to the Egypto-Chaldæic period. It thus comes about that many things arise in contemporary humanity which look like a revival of ancient Egyptian forces, but there is also much which is like a materialistic resuscitation of forces which then worked spiritually. To illustrate this, we may point to an example of the way in which ancient Egyptian knowledge has been revived in our days.

Let us think of Kepler. He was quite possessed by the feeling of the harmony of the cosmos, and this idea was expressed in his important mathematical laws of the mechanism of the heavens, the so-called laws of Kepler. These are outwardly very dry and abstruse, but in Kepler they were the outcome of an understanding of the harmony of the universe. We may read in Kepler's writings that in order to discover what he did, he was obliged to go to the sacred Egyptian mysteries, purloin their temple-vessels, and by this means bring knowledge into the world, the importance of which to humanity would only be known in later times.

This utterance of Kepler's is by no means an empty phrase, but contains a dim consciousness of a revival of what he had learned in the Egyptian period, during a former incarnation. We may certainly entertain the idea that Kepler assimilated the ancient Egyptian wisdom during one of his previous lives, and that it reappears in his soul in a new form, adapted to a later age. That a materialistic impulse should enter our civilization through the Egyptian spirit is quite intelligible, for Egyptian spirituality had a strong materialistic tendency, which found expression, for instance, in embalming the physical bodies of the dead. This meant that the Egyptian attached value to the preservation of the physical body. This has come down to us from the Egyptian period in a different form, but in one corresponding to our time. The same forces which had not then run their course, affect our age, but in a different way. The temper of mind which embalmed dead bodies gave rise to that which idolizes the merely material. The Egyptian embalmed dead bodies and thereby preserved what he accounted valuable. He thought that the development of the soul after death was connected with the preservation of the physical material body. The modern anatomist dissects what he sees, and thinks that in this way he understands the laws of the human organism. Thus in our modern science are living the forces of the ancient Egyptian and Chaldæic world. At that time progressive forces, they now lag behind, and must be recognized for what they are if a correct estimate is to be formed of the character of the present time. These forces will injure a man of the present day if he does not know their real significance. If he knows their effect and thereby brings himself into the right relation to them, he will take no harm from them, but will turn them to good account. They must be used, for without them we should not have the present great achievements in technology and industry. They are forces belonging to Luciferic beings of the lowest stage, and the danger lies in the fact that if they are not recognized aright, the materialistic impulses of the present time are thought to be the only possible ones, and the other forces, which lead up to the spiritual world, are not taken into consideration. For this reason any clear diagnosis is certain to discern two currents of thought in the present age. [ 23 ] Now if a wise Providence had not allowed certain beings in the Egypto-Chaldæic period to fall short in their evolution, our contemporary civilization would have been wanting in necessary weight. In that case only those forces would be operative which would bring man into the spiritual world by main force. People would be only too ready to yield themselves up to those forces, and would become dreamers. The only life they would wish to know about would be one which is being spiritualized as fast as possible, and their standard of action would be a view of life showing a certain degree of contempt for what is physical and material. But the present epoch of civilization can only fulfill its mission if the forces of the material world are brought to the fullest perfection, and if thus by degrees their sphere too is won for spirituality. Just as the fairest things may become corrupters and tempters of mankind if pursued in a one-sided way, so if this one-sidedness took root, there would be great danger that all kinds of good efforts would come into manifestation as fanaticism, True though it is that humanity is helped forward by its noble impulses, it is also true that wild and fanatical advocacy of the noblest impulses may bring about the worst of results as far as true evolution is concerned. Only when people strive after the highest modestly and sensibly, not out of wild fanaticism, can anything beneficial to the progress of humanity take place. In order that the work done on earth at the present day may have the necessary weight, and that material beings of the physical plane may be understood, the wisdom which directs the government of the world left those forces behind which would normally have completed their evolution during the Egyptian period; and it is these which are now directing man's attention to physical life.

[ 24 ] It is obvious from the foregoing that evolution takes place under the influence both of normally progressive beings and of those who lag behind. Clairvoyant vision is able to trace the co-operation of both classes of beings in the super-sensible world, and hence is able to comprehend the spiritual events of which the physical facts surrounding humanity are the manifestations.

[ 25 ] We observe that, in order to understand cosmic events, it is not enough to have spiritual eyes and ears opened to the spiritual world by some kind of exercise. This only means that we see what is there, that we are cognizant of spiritual beings and know that they are entities of the soul-world or spirit-sphere. But it is also necessary to recognize what kinds of beings they are. We may meet some being of the soul or spirit world, but we do not necessarily know whether it is progressing in its evolution, or whether it belongs to the category of powers that have lagged behind; whether therefore it is pushing evolution onwards, or hindering it. Those people who acquire clairvoyant faculties and do not at the same time gain complete understanding of the conditions of human evolution which we have described may know absolutely nothing of the nature of the beings whom they meet. Mere clairvoyance must be supplemented by clear judgment of what is seen in the supersensible world. There is urgent necessity for this especially in our own time, but it had not always to be so much considered. If we go back to very ancient civilizations, we find different conditions. If in the most ancient Egyptian times a person was clairvoyant, and was confronted with a being from the supersensible world, the latter had, as it were, written on his forehead who he was. The clairvoyant could not mistake him. Now, however, the possibility of misunderstanding is very great. Whereas humanity in early times still stood very near the kingdom of the spiritual hierarchies and could see what beings it was meeting, it is now very easy to be mistaken. The only protection against being severely injured is the effort to gain ideas and conceptions like those indicated above.

[ 26 ] A person who is able to look into the spiritual world is called esoterically a “clairvoyant,” but merely to be clairvoyant is not enough, for such a man might be able to see well enough although unable to discriminate. He who has acquired the faculty of distinguishing the various beings and events of higher worlds, is called an “Initiate,” Initiation brings with it the possibility of distinguishing between different kinds of beings. It is possible to be clairvoyant in the higher worlds without being an initiate. In ancient times distinguishing between spirits was not specially important, for when the ancient occult schools had brought a pupil so far as clairvoyance, there was no great danger of error. Now, however, this danger exists to a high degree. Therefore in all esoteric training, care should be taken that initiation should be acquired in addition to clairvoyance. In proportion to the extent of his clairvoyance must a man become capable of distinguishing between the various kinds of supersensible beings and events.

[ 27 ] In modern times the powers guiding humanity are faced by the special task of bringing about a balance between the two principles of clairvoyance and initiation. Leaders of spiritual training had necessarily to pay attention to this at the beginning of the modern era. Therefore the esoteric spiritual movement which is adapted to present conditions, always makes a point of maintaining the right proportion between clairvoyance and initiation. This became necessary at the time when mankind was passing through a crisis with regard to its higher knowledge. That time was the thirteenth century. About the year 1250 was the point of time when mankind felt itself most shut out from the spiritual world. A clairvoyant looking back upon that period sees the following: The most eminent minds of that time who were striving after some kind of higher knowledge could only say to themselves: “What our reason, our intellect, our spiritual knowledge are able to find out is limited to the physical world around us. With all our human endeavor and power of perception, we cannot reach a spiritual world. We only know of it by accepting the information concerning it which our forefathers bequeathed us.” This was the time when direct view of the higher worlds was obscured. That this can be said of the era in which scholasticism flourished, is not without significance.

[ 28 ] About the year 1250 was the time when men were compelled to fix a boundary between what they were able to apprehend for themselves, and what they had to believe from the impression made upon them by the traditions which had been handed down. What they could find out for themselves then became limited to the physical world of sense. Afterwards, however, came the time when there was more and more possibility of again winning a view of the spiritual world. But the new clairvoyance was of a different kind from the old, which virtually became extinct just about the year 1250. In the new form of clairvoyance, western esotericism was obliged strictly to uphold the principle that initiation must be the guide of spiritual sight and hearing. This was the special task assigned to an esoteric current which then entered the stream of European civilization. As the year 1250 drew near there arose a new kind of guidance into the super sensible worlds.

[ 29 ] This guidance was prepared by the spirits then standing behind outer historical events, who centuries before had provided for the kind of esoteric training which would be rendered necessary by the conditions prevailing in 1250. If the term “modern esotericism” be not misused, it may be applied to the spiritual work of those very highly evolved personalities. External history knows nothing of them, but what they did is apparent in every form of civilization which has developed since the thirteenth century.

[ 30 ] The importance of the year 1250 for the spiritual evolution of humanity is specially apparent if we look at the result of clairvoyant research given in the following fact: Even those individualities who had attained high stages of spiritual development in previous incarnations, and who were re-incarnated about 1250, were compelled for a while to undergo a complete clouding over of their direct view of the spiritual world. Quite enlightened individuals were as though cut off from the spiritual world, and their only knowledge of it was through their remembrance of earlier incarnations. Thus we see how necessary it was that from that time onwards a new element should be brought into the spiritual guidance of humanity. This element was true modern esotericism. By its means it is for the first time possible rightly to understand how that which we call the “Christ-impulse” may intervene to guide in all eventualities, not alone the individual, but the whole of mankind.

[ 31 ] Between the accomplishment of the Mystery of Golgotha and the beginnings of modern esotericism, lies the first period of the working of the Christ-principle in human souls. During that period, people received Christ to a certain degree unconsciously as far as their higher spirit-forces were concerned, and this caused them afterwards, when they were obliged to receive them consciously, to make all kinds of mistakes, and to lose themselves in a maze instead of understanding Christ. In primitive Christian times we may trace the adoption of the Christ-principle by the lower soul- forces. Then came a new period, in which mankind of today is still living. Indeed, in a certain respect, people are only now beginning to understand the Christ-principle with the higher faculties of their souls. In the further course of this work it will be shown that the decline of supersensible knowledge down to the thirteenth century, and on the other hand its slow revival since that time, coincide with the interposition of the Christ-impulse in human evolution.

[ 32 ] We may therefore take modern esotericism to mean the raising of the Christ-impulse to be the motive power in the guidance of souls desiring to work their way to a knowledge of higher worlds, in accordance with the evolutionary conditions of modern times.

Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861 and died in 1925. In his autobiography, The Course of My Life,¹ he makes quite clear that the problems dealt with in The Philosophy of Freedom played a leading part in his life.

His childhood was spent in the Austrian countryside, where his father was a stationmaster. At the age of eight Steiner was already aware of things and beings that are not seen as well as those that are. Writing about his experiences at this age, he said, “... the reality of the spiritual world was as certain to me as that of the physical. I felt the need, however, for a sort of justification for this assumption.”

Recognizing the boy's ability, his father sent him to the Realschule at Wiener Neustadt, and later to the Technical University in Vienna. Here Steiner had to support himself, by means of scholarships and tutoring. Studying and mastering many more subjects than were in his curriculum, he always came back to the problem of knowledge itself. He was very much aware: that in the experience of oneself as an ego, one is in the world of the spirit. Although he took part in all the social activities going on around him—in the arts, the sciences, even in politics—he wrote that “much more vital at that time was the need to find an answer to the question: How far is it possible to prove that in human thinking real spirit is the agent?”

He made a deep study of philosophy, particularly the writings of Kant, but nowhere did he find a way of thinking that could be carried as far as a perception of the spiritual world. Thus Steiner was led to develop a theory of knowledge out of his own striving after truth, one which took its start from a direct experience of the spiritual nature of thinking.

As a student, Steiner's scientific ability was acknowledged when he was asked to edit Goethe's writings on nature. In Goethe he recognized one who had been able to perceive the spiritual in nature, even though he had not carried this as far as a direct perception of the spirit. Steiner was able to bring a new understanding to Goethe's scientific work through this insight into his perception of nature. Since no existing philosophical theory could take this kind of vision into account, and since Goethe had never stated explicitly what his philosophy of life was, Steiner filled this need by publishing, in 1886, an introductory book called The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception. His introductions to the several volumes and sections of Goethe's scientific writings (1883–97) have been collected into the book Goethe the Scientist. These are valuable contributions to the philosophy of science.

During this time his thoughts about his own philosophy were gradually coming to maturity. In the year 1888 he met Eduard von Hartmann, with whom he had already had a long correspondence. He describes the chilling effect on him of the way this philosopher of pessimism denied that thinking could ever reach reality, but must forever deal with illusions. Steiner was already clear in his mind how such obstacles were to be overcome. He did not stop at the problem of knowledge, but carried his ideas from this realm into the field of ethics, to help him deal with the problem of human freedom. He wanted to show that morality could be given a sure foundation without basing it upon imposed rules of conduct.

Meanwhile his work of editing had taken him away from his beloved Vienna to Weimar. Here Steiner wrestled with the task of presenting his ideas to the world. His observations of the spiritual had all the exactness of a science, and yet his experience of the reality of ideas was in some ways akin to the mystic's experience. Mysticism presents the intensity of immediate knowledge with conviction, but deals only with subjective impressions; it fails to deal with the reality outside man. Science, on the other hand, consists of ideas about the world, even if the ideas are mainly materialistic. By starting from the spiritual nature of thinking, Steiner was able to form ideas that bear upon the spiritual world in the same way that the ideas of natural science bear upon the physical. Thus he could describe his philosophy as the result of “introspective observation following the methods of Natural Science.” He first presented an outline of his ideas in his doctoral dissertation, Truth and Knowledge, which bore the sub-title “Prelude to a ‘Philosophy of Freedom’.”

In 1894 The Philosophy of Freedom was published, and the content which had formed the centre of his life's striving was placed before the world. Steiner was deeply disappointed at the lack of understanding it received. Hartmann's reaction was typical; instead of accepting the discovery that thinking can lead to the reality of the spirit in the world, he continued to think that “spirit” was merely a concept existing in the human mind, and freedom an illusion based on ignorance. Such was fundamentally the view of the age to which Steiner introduced his philosophy. But however it seemed to others, Steiner had in fact established a firm foundation for knowledge of the spirit, and now he felt able to pursue his researches in this field without restraint. The Philosophy of Freedom summed up the ideas he had formed to deal with the riddles of existence that had so far dominated his life. “The further way,” he wrote, “could now be nothing else but a struggle to find the right form of ideas to express the spiritual world itself.”

While still at Weimar, Steiner wrote two more books, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom (1895), inspired by a visit to the aged philosopher, and Goethe's Conception of the World (1897), which completed his work in this field. He then moved to Berlin to take over the editing of a literary magazine; here he wrote Riddles of Philosophy (1901) and Mysticism and Modern Thought (1901). He also embarked on an ever-increasing activity of lecturing. But his real task lay in deepening his knowledge of the spiritual world until he could reach the point of publishing the results of this research.

The rest of his life was devoted to building up a complete science of the spirit, to which he gave the name Anthroposophy. Foremost amongst his discoveries was his direct experience of the reality of the Christ, which soon took a central place in his whole teaching. The many books and lectures which he published set forth the magnificent scope of his vision.² From 1911 he turned also to the arts—drama, painting, architecture, eurythmy—showing the creative forming powers that can be drawn from spiritual vision. As a response to the disaster of the 1914-18 war, he showed how the social sphere could be given new life through an insight into the nature of man, his initiative bearing practical fruit in the fields of education, agriculture, therapy and medicine. After a few more years of intense activity, now as the leader of a world-wide movement, he died, leaving behind him an achievement that must allow his recognition as the first Initiate of the age of science.³ Anthroposophy is itself a science, firmly based on the results of observation, and open to investigation by anyone who is prepared to follow the path of development he pioneered—a path that takes its start from the struggle for inner freedom set forth in this book.

The Philosophy of Freedom can be seen as the crowning achievement of nineteenth-century philosophy. It answers all the problems of knowledge and morality that philosophers had raised, argued over, and eventually left unsolved with the conclusion that “we can never know”. Yet this great achievement received no recognition, and only when Steiner had acquired a large following of people thankful for all that he had given them of his spiritual revelation, did there arise the desire to read also his earlier work, upon which he always insisted his whole research was firmly based. Perhaps if Steiner had spent the rest of his life expounding his philosophy, he would today be recognized throughout the world as a major philosopher; yet his achievement in going forward himself to develop the science of the spirit is much the greater, and this will surely be recognized in time. Indeed, philosophy has got itself a bad name, perhaps from its too-frequent negative results, and it might even be better to consider the Philosophy of Freedom not just as a chapter of philosophy, but as the key to a whole way of life.

Considered just as a piece of philosophy, it might in any case be thought out of date, having only historical interest. For instance, a modern scientist may well believe that any philosopher who spoke up against atomism has been proved wrong by the success of atomic physics. But this would be to misunderstand the nature of philosophy. Steiner deals in turn with each possible point of view, illustrating each one with an example from the literature, and then showing the fallacies or shortcomings that have to be overcome. Atomism is justified only so long as it is taken as an aid to the intellect in dealing with the forces of nature; it is wrong if it postulates qualities of a kind that belong to perceived phenomena, but attributes them to a realm that by definition can never be perceived. This mistaken view of the atom may have been abandoned by science, but it still persists in many quarters. Similarly, many of the old philosophical points of view, dating back to Kant, survive among scientists who are very advanced in the experimental or theoretical fields, so that Steiner's treatment of the problem of knowledge is still relevant. Confusion concerning the nature of perception is widespread, because of the reluctance to consider the central part played by thinking. Thinking is all too often dismissed as “subjective” and hence unreliable, without any realization that it is thinking itself that has made this decision. The belief that science can deal only with the “objective” world has led to the position where many scientists are quite unable to say whether the real world is the familiar world of their surroundings, as experienced through the senses and pictured in the imagination, or the theoretical world of spinning particles, imperceptible forces and statistical probabilities that is inferred from their experimental results.⁴ Here Steiner's path of knowledge can give a firmer basis for natural science than it has ever had before, as well as providing a sure foundation for the development of spiritual science. Although there are many people who find all that they need in contemplating the wonders of the spiritual world, the Philosophy of Freedom does not exist mainly to provide a philosophical justification for their belief; its main value lies in the sound basis it can give to those who cannot bring themselves to accept anything that is not clearly scientific—a basis for knowledge, for self-knowledge, for moral action, for life itself. It does not “tell us what to do”, but it opens a way to the spirit for all those for whom the scientific path to truth, rather than the mystical, is the only possibility.

Today we hear about the “free world” and the “value of the individual”, and yet the current scientific view of man seems to lend little support to these concepts, but seems rather to lead to a kind of morality in which every type of behavior is excused on the plea that “I cannot help being what I am!” If we would really value the individual, and support our feeling of freedom with knowledge, we must find a point of view which will lead the ego to help itself become what it wants to be—a free being. This cannot mean that we must abandon the scientific path; only that the scope of science must be widened to take into account the ego that experiences itself as spirit, which it does in the act of thinking. Thus the Philosophy of Freedom takes its start by examining the process of thinking, and shows that there need be no fear of unknown causes in unknown worlds forever beyond the reach of our knowledge, since limits to knowledge exist only in so far as we fail to awaken our thinking to the point where it becomes an organ of direct perception. Having established the possibility of knowing, the book goes on to show that we can also know the causes of our actions, and if our motive for acting comes from pure intuition, from thinking alone, without any promptings from the appearances and illusions of the sense-world, then we can indeed act in freedom, out of pure love for the deed.

Man ultimately has his fate in his own hands, though the path to this condition of freedom is a long and a hard one, in the course of which he must develop merciless knowledge of himself and selfless understanding of others. He must, through his own labors, give birth to what St. Paul called “the second Adam that was made a quickening spirit”. Indeed Steiner himself has referred to his philosophy of freedom as a Pauline theory of knowledge.

Notes on the translation:

This book was first translated into English by Professor and Mrs. R. F. Alfred Hoernle, in 1916, and was edited by Mr. Harry Collison, who wrote that he was fortunate to have been able to secure them as translators, “their thorough knowledge of philosophy and their complete command of the German and English languages enabling them to overcome the difficulty of finding adequate English equivalents for the terms of German Philosophy.”

Following the publication of the revised German edition in 1918, Professor Hoernle translated the new passages and other incidental changes that Dr. Steiner had made. For this 1922 edition the title was changed, at the author's request, to The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, with the added remark that “throughout the entire work ‘freedom’ should be taken to mean ‘spiritual activity’.” The reasons for this change and also for the present decision to change back to the original title are given below (see Freedom, below).

The translation was revised in 1939 by Dr. Hermann Poppelbaum, whose object was to “check certain words and phrases from the strictly Steiner point of view”. He wrote in his preface as follows:

The readers of the German original of this book will know that the author's argument is largely based upon a distinction between the different elements making up the act of Knowledge. English philosophical terms are rarely exact equivalents of German philosophical terms, and the translator's standing problem is to avoid, or at least to minimize, the ambiguities resulting therefrom. The aim of the present revision of the original translation has been to help the reader to understand the analysis of the act of Knowledge and to enable him to follow the subsequent chapters without being troubled by ambiguous terms.

In spite of Dr. Poppelbaum's removal of certain ambiguities, readers were still troubled by difficulties that did not derive from the original German. When I was asked by the publishers to prepare this new edition, it soon became clear to me that further alterations to words and phrases would not be sufficient to remove these difficulties. It may therefore be helpful to state briefly what my guiding principles have been in making this translation.

Steiner did not write his book as a thesis for students of philosophy, but in order to give a sound philosophical basis to the experience of oneself as a free spirit—an experience that is open to everybody. The book is written in such a way that the very reading of it is a help towards participating in this experience. For this reason all the terms used must convey a real meaning to the reader, and any explanations required must be in words that are self-evident. Indeed, Steiner states clearly that the terms he uses do not always have the precise meanings given in current scientific writings, but that his intention is to record the facts of everyday experience (see Chapter 2). I have tried throughout to convey the essential meaning of Steiner's original words, and to follow closely his train of thought, so that the English reader may have as nearly as possible the same experience that a German reader has from the original text. Thus the structure of the original has been preserved, sentence by sentence. It might be argued that a “free” translation, making full use of English idiom and style, would be far more appropriate for an English reader; this could cut out the wordy repetitions and lengthy phrases typical of German philosophical writing and make for a more readable text. But it would also have to be written out of the English philosophical tradition, and would require a complete reconstruction of Steiner's arguments from the point of view of an Englishman's philosophy. This might be an excellent thing to do, but would constitute a new work, not a translation. Even if it were attempted, there would still be the need for a close translation making Steiner's path of knowledge available in detail for the English reader.

The method I have followed was to make a fresh translation of each passage and then compare it with the existing one, choosing the better version of the two. Where there was no advantage in making a change, I have left the earlier version, so that many passages appear unaltered from the previous edition. This is therefore a thoroughly revised, rather than an entirely new, translation. It is my hope that it will prove straightforward reading for anyone prepared to follow the author along the path of experience he has described. The following notes explaining certain of the terms used are intended for those who want to compare this edition with the German original, or who are making a special study of philosophy.

FREEDOM is not an exact equivalent of the German word Freiheit, although among its wide spectrum of meanings there are some that do correspond. In certain circumstances, however, the differences are important. Steiner himself drew attention to this, for instance, in a lecture he gave at Oxford in 1922, where he said with reference to this book,

“Therefore today we need above all a view of the world based on Freiheit—one can use this word in German, but here in England one must put it differently because the word ‘freedom’ has a different meaning—one must say a view of the world based on spiritual activity, on action, on thinking and feeling that arise from the individual human spirit.” (Translated from the German.)

Steiner also drew attention to the different endings of the words; Freiheit could be rendered literally as “freehood” if such a word existed. The German ending -heit implied an inner condition or degree, while -tum, corresponding to our “-dom”, implied something granted or imposed from outside. This is only partly true in English, as a consideration of the words “manhood”, “knighthood”, “serfdom”, “earldom”, and “wisdom” will show. In any case, meanings change with time, and current usage rather than etymology is the best guide.

When describing any kind of creative activity we speak of a “freedom of style” or “freedom of expression” in a way that indicates an inner conquest of outer restraints. This inner conquest is the theme of the book, and it is in this sense that I believe the title The Philosophy of Freedom would be understood today. When Steiner questioned the aptness of this title, he expressed the view that English people believed that they already possessed freedom, and that they needed to be shocked out of their complacency and made to realize that the freedom he meant had to be attained by hard work. While this may still be true today, the alternative he suggested is now less likely to achieve this shock than is the original. I have not found that the title “The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” gives the newcomer any indication that the goal of the book is the attainment of inner freedom. Today it is just as likely to suggest a justification of religious practices. Throughout the book it has proved quite impossible to translate Freiheit as “spiritual activity” wherever it occurs. The word appears in the titles of the parts of the book and of some of the chapters; the book opens with the question of freedom or necessity, and the final sentence (see Consequences of Monism) is “He is free.” Undoubtedly “freedom” is the proper English word to express the main theme of the book, and should also appear in the book's title. Times have changed, and what may well have been good reasons for changing the title in 1922 are not necessarily still valid. After much thought, and taking everything into account, I have decided that the content of the book is better represented today by the title The Philosophy of Freedom. Moreover, with this title the book may be instantly identified with Die Philosophie der Freiheit, and I have already remarked that this edition is intended as a close translation of the German, rather than a new book specially written for the English.

SPIRIT, SOUL and MIND are not precise equivalents in English of the German Geist and Seele. Perhaps because we use the concept of mind to include all our experiences through thinking, the concepts of spirit and soul have practically dropped out of everyday use, whereas in German there is no distinct equivalent for “mind” and the concepts “spirit” (Geist) and “soul” (Seele) are consequently broader in scope. Any work describing Steiner's point of view in terms of English philosophy would have to deal with the mind as a central theme,⁵ but here our task is to introduce readers to Steiner's concepts of spirit and soul. For Steiner, the spirit is experienced directly in the act of intuitive thinking. The human spirit is that part of us that thinks, but the spiritual world is not limited to the personal field of the individual human being; it opens out to embrace the eternal truths of existence. The English word “spirit” gives the sense of something more universal, less personal, than “mind”, and since Steiner's philosophical path leads to an experience of the reality of the spiritual world, I have kept the word wherever possible, using “mind” or “mental” in a few places where it seemed more appropriate. The “spiritual activity” here meant is thus more than mental activity, although it starts at a level we would call mental; it leads the human being, aware of himself as a spirit, into the ultimate experience of truth.

The soul, too, is directly experienced; it is not a vague metaphysical entity, but is that region in us where we experience our likes and dislikes, our feelings of pleasure and pain. It contains those characteristics of thought and feeling that make us individual, different from each other. In many common phrases we use the word “mind” where German has the word Seele, but since Steiner recognizes a distinction between soul and spirit, it is important to keep these different words. Even in modern English usage something of this difference remains, and it is not too late to hope that Steiner's exact observations in this realm may help to prevent the terms “soul” and “spirit” becoming mere synonyms. Therefore I have kept these words wherever the distinction was important, though in a few places an alternative rendering seemed to fit better; for instance, the “introspective observation” quoted in the motto on the title-page could have been rendered literally as “observation of the soul”—this observation involves a critical examination of our habits of thought and feeling, not studied from outside in the manner of a psychological survey of human behavior, but from inside where each person meets himself face to face.

The whole book can be considered as a study of the mind, but using an exactness of observation and clarity of thinking never before achieved. Nevertheless, the stream of materialism still flows so strongly that there is a real danger that the mind, and indeed the whole realm of the soul and the spirit, will be dismissed as a metaphysical construction. Only by adopting a philosophy such as is developed in this book will it be possible to retain an experience of soul and of spirit which will be strong enough to stand up to the overwhelming desire to accept nothing as real unless it is supported by science. For in this philosophy Steiner opens the door to a science of the spirit every bit as exact and precise as our current science of nature would be.

CONCEPT and PERCEPT are the direct equivalents of Begriff and Wahrnehmung. The concept is something grasped by thinking, an element of the world of ideas. Steiner describes what it is at the beginning of Chapter 4 (see Chapter 4).

In describing the percept (see Chapter 4), Steiner mentions the ambiguity of current speech. The German word Wahrnehmung, like the English “perception”, can mean either the process of perceiving or the object perceived as an element of observation. Steiner uses the word in the latter sense, and the word “percept”, though not perhaps in common use, does avoid the ambiguity. The word does not refer to an actual concrete object that is being observed, for this would only be recognized as such after the appropriate concept had been attached to it, but to the content of observation devoid of any conceptual element. This includes not only sensations of color, sound, pressure, warmth, taste, smell, and so on, but feelings of pleasure and pain and even thoughts, once the thinking is done. Modern science has come to the conclusion that one cannot deal with a sensation devoid of any conceptual element, and uses the term “perception” to include the whole response to a stimulus, in other words, to mean the result of perceiving. But even if one cannot communicate the nature of an experience of pure percept to another person, one must still be able to deal with it as an essential part of the analysis of the process of knowledge. Using the word “percept” for this element of the analysis, we are free to keep the word “perception” for the process of perceiving.

IDEA and MENTAL PICTURE, as used here, correspond to the German words Idee and Vorstellung respectively. Normally these would both be rendered as “idea”, and this practice led to an ambiguity that obscured a distinction central to Steiner's argument. This was the main cause of Dr. Poppelbaum's concern, and his solution was to render Vorstellung as “representation” and Idee as “Idea” with a capital “I”. Though this usage may have philosophical justification, it has been my experience in group studies of this book over many years that it has never been fully accepted in practice; “representation” remains a specialist term with a sense rather different from its usual meaning in English, and it certainly does not have the same obvious meaning for the English reader that Vorstellung has for the German.

In explaining his use of the word “representation”, Dr. Poppelbaum wrote in his preface as follows:

The mental picture which the thinker forms to represent the concept in an individual way is here called a “representation” ...

Since “mental picture” is here used to explain the term “representation”, it seems simpler to use “mental picture” throughout. It fits Steiner's treatment very well, since it conveys to the reader both the sense of something conceptual, in that it is mental, and the sense of something perceptual, in that it is a picture. In fact, Steiner gives two definitions of the mental picture, one as a “percept in my self” (see Chapter 4) and another as an “individualized concept” (see Chapter 6), and it is this intermediate position between percept and concept that gives the mental picture its importance in the process of knowledge.

Another advantage of the term “mental picture” is that the verb “to picture” corresponds well with the German vorstellen, implying a mental creation of a scene rather than a physical representation with pencil, paints or camera, which would be “to depict”. Of course the visual term “picture” must be understood to cover also the content of other senses, for instance, a remembered tune or a recollection of tranquillity, but this broadening of meaning through analogy is inherent in English usage.

Although mental pictures are commonly regarded as a special class of ideas, here the term “idea” is used only for the German Idee, without ambiguity. Ideas are not individualized, but are “fuller, more saturated, more comprehensive concepts” (see Chapter 4). In the later part of the book, when discussing the nature of a conscious motive, Steiner uses the word to include all concepts in the most general way, individualized or not, which comes very close to the English use of the word “idea”.

IMAGINATION means the faculty and process of creating mental pictures. The word is the same as the German Imagination, but I have also used it for the German Phantasie, because the word “fantasy” suggests something altogether too far from reality, whereas “imagination” can mean something not only the product of our own consciousness, but also a step towards the realization of something new. Thus the title given to Chapter 12, Moral Imagination (for Moralische Phantasie), seemed to me to be correct, and I have kept it. It describes the process of taking an abstract idea, or concept, and creating a vivid mental picture of how it can be applied in a particular circumstance, so that it may become the motive for a moral deed.

In later writings Steiner describes how this ordinary faculty of imagining, or making mental pictures, can be developed to the point where it becomes the faculty of actually perceiving the creative ideas behind the phenomena of nature. In these later writings “Imagination” becomes a special term to indicate this level of perception, but in this book the meaning remains near to the ordinary usage. However, the gateway to such higher levels of perception is opened through the path of experience here set forth.

INTUITION is again the same as the German word, and means the faculty and process of grasping concepts, in particular the immediate apprehension of a thought without reasoning. This is the normal English usage, though Steiner uses the term in an exact way, as follows (see Chapter 5):

In contrast to the content of the percept which is given to us from without, the content of thinking appears inwardly. The form in which this first makes its appearance we will call intuition. Intuition is for thinking what observation is for the percept.

Later in the book he gives another definition (see Chapter 9):

Intuition is the conscious experience—in pure spirit—of a purely spiritual content. Only through an intuition can the essence of thinking be grasped.

From this it is not difficult to see how again, in later writings, Steiner could describe a stage of perception still higher than that called “Imagination”, the stage of “Intuition” in which one immediately apprehends the reality of other spiritual beings. Although this book deals only with the spiritual content of pure thinking, intuition at this level is also a step towards a higher level of perceiving reality.

EXPERIENCE has two meanings, which correspond to different words in German. “Actual observation of facts or events” corresponds to the German Erlebnis and to the verb erleben, while “the knowledge resulting from this observation” corresponds to Erfahrung. Thus the accumulation of knowledge can be described as “past experience” or “total sum of experience”, if the single word is ambiguous (see, for instance, Chapter 6). When speaking of human behavior that is based on past experience, Steiner calls it praktische Erfahrung, which is rendered as “practical experience” (see Chapter 9).

On the other hand, having direct experience as an activity of observation is expressed by the verb erleben, which means literally “to live through”. Thus, in the latter part of the book, particularly in those passages which were added in 1918 (see Chapter 7 and Consequences of Monism), Steiner speaks repeatedly of the “thinking which can be experienced”. This experience is to be understood as every bit as real and concrete as the “actual observation of facts and events” described above.

MOTIVE and DRIVING FORCE are two elements in any act of will that have to be recognized as distinct (see Chapter 9). They correspond to the German words Motiv and Triebfeder, respectively.

“Motive”, as used by Steiner, corresponds exactly to the common English usage, meaning the reason that a person has for his action. It has to be a conscious motive, in the form of a concept or mental picture, or else we cannot speak of an act of will, let alone a moral deed. An “unconscious motive” is really a contradiction in terms, and should properly be described as a driving force—it implies that some other person has been able to grasp the concept which was the reason for the action, though the person acting was not himself aware of it; he acted as an automaton, or, as we properly say, “without motive”. Nevertheless, modern psychology has contrived to define the “motive” as something no different from the driving force, which precludes the recognition of a motive grasped out of pure intuition, and therefore of the essential difference between a moral deed where a man knows why he acts and an amoral one where his knowledge is a matter of indifference. By making the distinction between motive and driving force, Steiner has been able to characterize all possible levels of action from the purely instinctive to the completely free deed.

The literal meaning of Triebfeder is the mainspring that drives a piece of clockwork. In previous editions, this was rendered as “spring of action”. While this is legitimate philosophical usage, I found that it was often misunderstood by the ordinary reader, being taken to mean a spring like a fountain or river-source, as in the phrase “springs of life”. This immediately causes confusion with the origin or source of the action, which is the motive. Of course, at the higher levels of action there is no other driving force than the idea which stands as the motive, but in order to follow the development from lower levels one must distinguish the idea, which is the motive, from whatever it is in us that throws us into action whenever a suitable motive presents itself. “Mainspring” does not always fit well in the text, and after trying various words and phrases I have chosen “driving force” as best expressing the dynamic nature of this part of our constitution. The driving force differs from the motive in that we may well remain unconscious of it. But if we are not conscious of the driving force behind our actions, we cannot be acting in freedom, even though we are aware of our motives. Only if we make our own ideals the driving force of our will can we act in freedom, because then nothing apart from ourselves determines our action. Thus the final triumph of Steiner's path of development depends on making this clear distinction between motive and driving force. A view that treats all motives as driving forces will not be able to recognize the possibility of freedom, while a view that regards all driving forces as ideal elements will not see the need for overcoming our unconscious urges and habits if freedom is to be attained.

WILL and WANT are two distinct words in English where the German has only one verb wollen and its derivatives. Here the task of translating runs into a considerable difficulty, for in any discussion of free will it is important to be clear what willing is. The noun forms are fairly straightforward: ein Wollen means “an act of will”, das Wollen means “willing” in general, and der Wille means “the will”. But the English verb “to will” has a restricted range of meaning, and to use it all the time to render the German wollen can be quite misleading. An example is the quotation from Hamerling in the first chapter (see Chapter 1):

Der Mensch kann allerdings tun, was er will—aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will, weil sein Wille durch Motive bestimmt ist.

The previous edition rendered this:

Man can, it is true, do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills, because his will is determined by motives.

If this means anything at all in English, it means that man cannot direct his will as he chooses. The archaic sense of “willing” as “desiring” is kept in the phrase “what he wills”, in keeping with current usage, for instance, in the remark “Come when you will.” But the active sense of “willing” as contrasted with “doing” implies a metaphysical power of compulsion quite out of keeping with Steiner's whole method of treating the subject. This metaphysical attitude to the will is clearly expressed in a sentence such as “I willed him to go”, which implies something more than mere desire but less than overt action. It is less obvious when dealing with the genesis of one's own actions, but the tendency to attribute a metaphysical quality to the will is developed in Schopenhauer's philosophy, and this may well be a tendency inherent in the German language. Steiner has no such intention, and he leaves us in no doubt that his use of wollen implies a definite element of desire (see Chapter 13); indeed, the highest expression of man's will is when it becomes the faculty of spiritual desire or craving (geistige Begehrungsvermögen). Therefore, whenever the archaic sense of the verb “to will” is not appropriate, I have decided that it is better to render the German verb wollen with the English “want” and its variants, “wanting”, “to want to ...” and so on. This makes immediate good sense of many passages, and moreover if one would translate this back into German one would have to use the word wollen. Hamerling's sentence now becomes:

Man can certainly do as he wills, but he cannot want as he wills, because his wanting is determined by motives.

Although Steiner has to show that this view is mistaken, one can at least understand how it could come to be written. That it can be a genuine human experience is shown by the similar remark attributed to T. E. Lawrence, “I can do what I want, but I cannot want what I want.” In other words, “I can carry out any desires for action that I may have, but I cannot choose how these desires come to me.” Both Lawrence and Hamerling leave out of account just those cases where man can want as he wills, because he has freely chosen his own motive. Steiner's treatment of the will overcomes any necessity for metaphysical thinking; for instance, it now makes sense to say that to want without motive would make the will an “empty faculty” (see Chapter 1), because to want without wanting something would be meaningless.

I have dealt with this at some length because it has been my experience that the message of the entire book springs to life in a new and vivid way when it is realized that the original motive power of the will is in fact desire, and that desire can be transformed by knowledge into its most noble form, which is love.

It was the late Friedrich Geuter who showed me, together with many others, the importance of this book as a basis for the social as well as the intellectual life of today. My debt to the previous translators and editors will already be clear. I also owe much to the many friends who have taken part in joint studies of this book over the past thirty years and to those who have helped and advised me with suggestions for the translation, especially the late George Adams, Owen Barfield, and Rita Stebbing. Finally I must mention my colleague Ralph Brocklebank, who has shared much of the work, and, with Dorothy Osmond, prepared it for the Press.

Michael Wilson,
Clent, 1964.

• 1. Published in parts from 1923–5, and never completed. The titles given for Dr. Steiner's books are those of the English translations.
• 2. The list of titles is long, but the more important books include: Christianity as Mystical Fact (1902), Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment (1904), Theosophy, a description of the nature of man and his relation to the spiritual world (1904), and Occult Science—an Outline, an account of the evolution of man and the universe in terms of spiritual realities (1910).
• 3. For an account of the life and work of Rudolf Steiner, see A Scientist of The Invisible, by A. P. Shepherd (1954). The range of his contribution to modern thought can be seen in The Faithful Thinker, edited by A. C. Harwood (1961).
• 4. See the discussion by Owen Barfield in “Saving the Appearances”, (1957).
• 5. See “Rudolf Steiner's Concept of Mind” by Owen Barfield, in The Faithful Thinker, pp. 11–21.

Dear attendees! Allow me this evening to summarize some of what has been said in the course of the lectures I have been privileged to give you here from this place, in relation to spiritual-scientific knowledge of the human being, and to place it under a particular point of view, so that in the next lecture, the day after tomorrow, I can succeed in speaking fruitfully about one of the most important questions of our present spiritual life: about the origin of the human being.

The human being who occasionally casts a glance at his own soul, at himself, will undoubtedly have the impression in some cases that he not only faces his own being as if it were something unknown, but this impression can deepen to the point that this own being may well appear to the person as something that sometimes fills him with apprehension, perhaps even seeming like fear of something unknown. What takes place in our conscious soul life, what we experience from morning, from waking up until we fall asleep in the evening, often seems as if everything that lives in our consciousness comes up from unknown depths, surges up and ripples up like ocean waves from the unknown depths of the sea. And although, when we look at this stormy sea and these rippling waves, we can well imagine that something or other is going on in the depths, we often say to ourselves: How little does what is happening on the surface reveal what is going on in the depths. And so it is sometimes with our own soul life. What takes place in our consciousness is like waves breaking up from unknown depths, and since we ourselves are the scene of all this activity, the question of what is going on down there sometimes takes on an anxious character. Yes, the impression can become even more profound when we see how, from the hidden depths of our soul life, these or those feelings, these or those passions or drives, these or those volitional impulses arise, which we cannot can't control, that are there to our chagrin, perhaps often also to our joy; we can also feel as if we were standing on the earth's surface and, as it were, as if the underground depths were beginning to tremble, as in an earthquake. It is the impression of not knowing what will come, which weighs on our minds. We can often have this feeling about what is coming up, and we are aware that it is not in our hands at all. We best gain access to the hidden depths of the soul when we start from the familiar processes in the life of the soul, that is, when we start from what we are aware of; and what, after all, would a person be more aware of than what he believes he has grasped, what he believes he has recognized, in which he believes he has insight from these or those branches of knowledge of this or that science or believes he has recognized from his life experience? What, after all, is more conscious and better known in our soul life than what we call our clear ideas? Yes, but when we survey these ideas, this knowledge of ours, this insight of ours, then – if we face the matter without prejudice – a feeling of powerlessness will arise in us in the face of this knowledge, so to speak a feeling of being closed off from the world in our knowledge.

From Greek intellectual history, we know that a great philosopher was once asked how people actually relate to life, and he is said to have replied: Those who want to recognize and actually achieve it, act like certain people at some fair. While some come to a fair to sell this or that and are interested in selling their goods, and others are interested in buying, there are also those everywhere at fairs who neither want to sell nor buy, who have simply come to look at the things, at life at the fair.

It is the same with people of knowledge. They come to the market of life, not to interfere with the conflicting interests, but to quietly observe life.

Now, it might seem that a person who is immersed in ordinary life could care little about the universal task of the special people of insight, but in a sense we must say that every person, wherever they are in life, has a corner where they are people of insight; and without being a philosopher, without being a person of insight, no one can actually walk through this life satisfied. So for those moments when we are just watching without getting caught up in the “fairground life,” when we are philosophers, we are able to have the qualities of those who merely watch. And as a spectator, as a little standing in the corner, one actually always feels when contemplating the most significant performances in terms of the urge for knowledge and insight. And what applies to ideas of the life of knowledge applies, so to speak, to our entire life of ideas. There we will realize something of what is called the powerlessness of the life of knowledge.

Now one could say: Yes, you label people of knowledge as a kind of gawker of life and make knowledge into something that does not really intervene in the real surge and hustle and bustle of life. But it is precisely from this impotence of life that one gains knowledge when one observes how the human being seeks to understand and recognize the hidden forces, how they work in life, how they can advance it and keep it in order. And yet, even when a person is completely imbued with the light that, let us say, emanates from moral or other ideas, it may still be the case that his urges speak, his instincts, his passions assert themselves, and that in reality he cannot follow what has arisen in his ideas. We have to say: the images have no power to intervene in our soul life, to work and weave in such a way that we would adapt our soul reality entirely to the life of images. The power, the strength of the impulse, that is what the images lack in relation to the reality of the soul life, and we feel the powerlessness of the life of images and the real impulses of life as a duality within ourselves.

How people here and there believe, how they have believed at all times, to grasp important worldviews, yes, the whole world - and lo and behold: if the ideas had the power to really implement into life impulses what they seemingly contain, then it would have to be easier to convince people of such ideas. Every time this is at issue, one recognizes the powerlessness of ideas in the face of reality, in the face of life.

One can understand only too well if the artist in particular, who is supposed to create out of the totality of his soul, would become sober and dry if he were not there with the whole of his soul - we can see how he of being absorbed in the soul process, because he feels: the moment when, instead of receptive soul impulses, a certain logical sequence of thoughts [constructed ideas] intervenes, the moment soul life becomes weak. That is why one speaks of [the] sobriety [of the life of ideas]. The artist knows that art cannot work if it is taken from mere conceptual life. Indeed, one recognizes works of art by whether they are created out of the life of the soul or out of abstract ideas.

The basis for such a feeling is an awareness of the powerlessness of the life of imagination. And since our imaginations are actually what makes us truly human in life, and we realize that our imaginations actually reach deep into our soul life, the question arises: is it all about these imaginations, what, so to speak, ripples on the surface and does not penetrate into the deeper regions of the soul life? Here we are confronted with the most primitive question of the hidden life of the soul. Nevertheless, we can only penetrate to the essence of the feelings and sensations of the deeper soul life if we start from the everyday, from this primitive question.

Now we all know that what we experience in our conscious waking state unfolds in this way: Those who have an eye for the peculiarities of their soul life will realize that in the course of what lives in their imaginations, emotional and mood experiences are connected with the ideas. Only with the most outstanding ideas do we really feel that we are experiencing joy or sorrow. This resonance of moods with the life of ideas, however, is basically always present. No one can say that anything takes place in their conscious life that does not bring with it, even if only to a small degree, a sense of pleasure or sorrow, hope or fear, and the like. In everyday life, we never have pure thinking, mere life of ideas in consciousness; but always connected with what takes place in the conscious life is that which we can call mood, feeling, sensation.

In the course of life, however, this element of the life of ideas behaves quite differently from that which arises as a concomitant of the life of ideas in the form of a state of mind. You can see this when you try, after ten or twenty years, to recall something you have experienced more or less clearly in such a way that you can recreate the event in the life of ideas. If things are linked, some with great pain, others with great joy, we will always realize that this joy or pain does not appear with the same strength and energy in our memory. For example, if someone has experienced a death, then they know that the pain cannot be relived in their memory with the original strength in their emotional life. It is the same with joy. So in our memory, the ideas play a completely different role.

The question may be raised: Yes, but if the images that we can form of painful or joyful events are alive in our memory, where are the moods, where is the emotional life that was connected with these ideas? Now this question, however much it belongs to the “primitive”, is not so very simple. And many people will still dispute that one can give an answer to such questions using strictly logical methods. But much of what has been said about elementary questions of spiritual research does put us in a position to get an idea about the fate of the moods associated with the ideas. While the images can be conjured up again from memory, the same cannot be done with the moods. If we look at life as intensely and thoroughly as is necessary to answer such a question, we find that every person we know for a long time The overall state of health of this person is expressed in the fact that he is a more or less happy person, so that his happiness is expressed not only in the way he perceives the outside world emotionally, but also in the way he feels in his organization, in terms of harmony and health. When we speak of a person's overall state of mind, we must not separate emotional experience from what we call overall state of mind, and this also includes those moods that depend on our physical condition, on how our blood flows, on how the flow of thoughts in our brain and nervous system takes place.

If we consider the overall state of a person at a certain point in time, when he is not in a happy frame of mind, when he is melancholy or downhearted or tired of what his whole being indicates as his overall ; if we observe this state of a person and compare it with how we knew him in earlier days of his life, we will [...] find there the moods and sensations and feelings that do not enter into the memories. He does not live in the regions from which we draw our memories, but has descended into the depths of life, where the constitution that makes up our mental life is worked on, but which is also connected to our entire physical organization as a state of mind. How we are full of life and hope, how we can be melancholy and downhearted, how we can be full of zest for work, tired, exhausted or prone to attack each of these states of mind has arisen from the fact that they separate from the life of ideas and descend into the deep foundations of the soul. Where our personal happiness is built, so to speak, we see a certain line separating itself from the life of ideas; we see that part of it that accompanies this life of ideas diving down and working in hidden depths of the soul, where our life essence is incorporated into our personal state. There we have an element that comes from conscious experiences, but is always submerged in those regions where it can work on our entire life.

But sometimes what has gone underground in our overall state is brought back up, but brought up in a certain way, not just brought up when the ordinary, everyday consciousness through which we connect with the external world is switched off in a certain way - what has gone underground can sometimes be seen rising in the semi-conscious states of the dream world. This is why the images of the dream world appear to us so meaningfully that they transport us to distant, past times in our lives. If we had tried to somehow reflect on what had happened, we might or might not have gotten a clear picture. But we cannot retrieve what we have experienced in our feelings. However, anyone who examines the dream images finds that it turns out that someone expresses ancient moods in the symbols of his dreams. It may well be, for example, that someone reaches a ripe old age and is no longer inclined to go out on the street with a paper cap or a toy sword and command children as they do. He will have an idea of what has happened to him, but the moods can no longer have the same power in his daily life. They take them on in his dreams. And it is not uncommon for someone of a certain age to dream every night that he is actually a major or that he is “taking a journey in his dream”. In his outer life, he may remember what he read in children's books, but he no longer experiences the bliss he felt at the time. But in his dreams he does.

Where everyday life ends, where the human being feels the images of his or her ideas in dreams, we find that the emotional states that play and work in the hidden depths of the soul life come up when they have not yet been used – and this is important – to work on our physical organization. If they still live in a corner of our hidden soul life, then they come up in dreams. When someone is transported in a dream to earlier moods, then the whole way in which they come up in the dream reveals to us: certain feelings have remained; they have not yet exhausted their strength, so the half-asleep life of the dream brings them up into our half-consciousness – the dream images present themselves to us. Here we have an example of how we can penetrate the ceiling of our everyday state of consciousness, how what lives in the hidden life of the soul can indeed come to mind, but how these ideas are not then checked against the outside world, but live entirely in the moods present in our inner life of the soul.

This is something very primitive, but it can lead our understanding to what can be explored from the hidden depths of the soul through spiritual science. We see a property of the moods that withdraw from our imaginative life; we see a property that they acquire that is extraordinarily important: by releasing the ideas, they gain power. And we can say to ourselves: While we used to speak of the powerlessness of knowing the life of ideas in consciousness, we can see precisely from this how used moods of mind transform themselves or how moods of mind, without our intervention as dream images present themselves to us in such a way that we do not have the power to correct them through logic. We see how this life of the soul snatches itself away from outer experience through the senses, away from outer thinking, which is bound to the brain. In this way, this subconscious soul life acquires a certain power, a certain reality.

At first, this reality is one that leads us only into ourselves, into our own reality. Dreams like the ones just discussed are a reflection of what we have stored up in terms of fear and hope, of anxiety and confidence in life. But we come to something that affects our inner state and is expressed in our dream life. We do not come out of ourselves, but we get to know reality and have to say: the moods had to break free to become real in us.

How the constitutions, these moods, work down there, how that which detaches itself from the ideas works, can be seen if one considers the training that has been discussed several times, which one must undergo if one really wants to become a knower of the spiritual world. You will find – this cannot, of course, be discussed in detail today – you will find the instructions for how to penetrate into that which has descended into the depths of the soul and which makes us appear healthy or ill and only shows itself in fleeting dream images, in the writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”.

Through training, through imagination, [inspiration] and intuition, when the soul is actively immersed – not in the vague way described in the two cases mentioned – when the soul is actively immersed, then the human being learns, albeit only initially, to know what is confronting him, to know himself. All methods of meditation and concentration lead, in a sense, to the study of deep self-knowledge. They do not lead to the self-knowledge that one thinks one has exhausted when one takes a normal look at the forces with which one works in everyday life, but they lead one to where that deep individuality is in oneself, in which those moods are. He gets to know what lies dormant in the hidden depths of his soul, as if kept under a blanket. And here the human being must familiarize himself with the fact that when the forces for his recovery or illness emerge from the soul, he can acquire completely new insights into the peculiarities of this hidden self.

Only real results of spiritual research can be cited. In particular, the human being gets to know how moods of joy, delight, bliss, moods of sadness and melancholy, impressions of ugliness or impressions of beauty, impressions of error, deception, impressions of truth or wisdom affect his or her entire being. Yes, you learn to recognize that everything that has just been mentioned, the impressions we have of joy or sadness, of beauty or ugliness, are connected with the becoming and passing away of something deeper within us, so that when we begin , when we move on to this realization, we are no longer indifferent to the outside world, but learn to know: certain things that take place in the world have a real destructive effect, taking something away; others have such a fertilizing effect that they help us.

We cannot say that at the moment when we consciously or unconsciously tell lies, we are really destroying anything. We cannot say that what has a destructive effect on our being when we tell lies, and what has a fertilizing effect when we speak the truth, is the same as the external forces of becoming and passing away, but something akin to them.

He who does not form his knowledge at the point where the soul benefits or destroys itself through what takes place in his mind, is not on the right path. Self-knowledge, which takes place in the hidden depths of the soul, is therefore not what could be given to humanity at a time when humanity had not yet matured to acquire this self-knowledge, which is related to the forces of arising and passing away; it must now be incorporated into humanity. Weak humanity has been spared from realizing the devastating effect of lying and deception, and the uplifting effect of honesty and sincerity. Usually, people believe that lying and deception or honesty and sincerity are things that can only be judged by means of ideas. But what is there, without our being able to judge it, penetrates down into the depths of our soul life and takes effect there as a real force.

Self-knowledge is the true starting point for all higher knowledge. A person who wants to recognize what lives out there behind the sensuality of the outside world must delve into his or her self and will see that moral and emotional forces are not just something abstract, but something that descends and is the decisive factor not only for our entire human value, but for our entire humanity. How we grow into the outer sensory world with our body, which we wear as the garment of our self and which has the sense organs, how we see this sense world with the eyes of the body, hear this sense world with the ears, how we establish a connection with the mind, which has its tool in the brain, with this sense world, develop an inner experience of what is outside of us in the sense world, and thus come into relationship with the outer world through our outer human being. In the same way, we come into contact with spiritual forces and impulses from our outer environment through the human being that we develop within us.

When we look out into the world with our eyes, we perceive colors and forms. When he has discovered his self resting in the deeper soul forces, then what is in the outer sense world does not emerge in the usual way, but the realities of the outer world also arise, and then we get to know a new context of things, that which stands between the beings of the outer world.

As we now take the first step into the qualities of the soul forces that have a destructive and constructive effect, we then learn that the inner self expands, so that we not only have it in its arising and passing away, but we feel it interacting with the external reality, with the spiritual reality of the outer world. Therefore, the images of the spiritual environment then arise in these hidden depths of the soul.

Man comes to know the spiritual world indirectly through his self. Much of what appears impenetrable or even random to the ordinary view, which is limited only to the external sense world, is revealed to us within the context of such knowledge, in which the self grows together in its hidden depths with the environment. The strange thing about this is that the deeper we penetrate into our own self, the more the horizon with which we are connected in the external world expands; the more we dive into our subconscious, the more spiritual aspects of the external world we recognize. To delve into the powers of the soul means to go beyond belief, to learn about the spiritual world. For down there we are much more deeply connected with the essence of things than we can be with the senses and the mind, which is bound to the physical brain. When one can say that consciousness has created a larger horizon, then at the same time a spreading of one's own self and an penetration into the spiritual worlds has been achieved. There is no other way to reach hidden depths of the soul than to gradually penetrate the external spiritual world. In the process, a real knowledge of the spiritual foundations of existence arises for those who penetrate it through the observation of everything we can achieve through the knowledge of the higher world. What is described in spiritual science and what you can find in theosophical books occurs.

But it is possible - although in our time one can only gain an unchallengeable view into the spiritual world through training - for certain individuals to gain insights that come from ancient heirlooms, from the inheritance of clairvoyant qualities, insights that are nothing other than a descent into the hidden depths of the soul, so that an expansion of the hidden human being beyond the external world occurs, through which the human being perceives what would otherwise remain closed to the external life of the senses and mind. Then intuitions arise, everything that a person can recognize without proper training - also about the fate of the soul, about the fate of the soul between death and a new birth in the sense of reincarnation. On the one hand, this can happen through proper training, on the other hand, these hidden depths of the soul can 'push themselves up'. Like dreams, what is in the deeper layers and cannot be perceived by the senses or the mind can be discharged; through a “second sight” or [deuteroscopy] it can be brought to light. Insights can also be brought to light about the fate of the human soul, even if it is not embodied in the body.

We must only realize in what respect one or the other is or is not beneficial for the human being, we must realize that there is a tangible difference between looking through spiritual training and that looking, which, as it were, pushes its way up out of the hidden into the known depths of the soul. There is a fundamental difference. When a person enters the spiritual world through proper schooling, as indicated, for example, in Occult Science, it happens in such a way that the person, after penetrating into the depths of the soul, consciously brings up the forces hidden there. However, visions can also occur with the full vividness of a play of colors and sounds, corresponding to what we receive as sense impressions. But while we receive them in such a way that we know we must surrender to the control of the external world, we let those colors and tones of the visions take effect on us in such a way that we do nothing to them – and then we become fantasists, dreamers. Such visions are removed from our inner arbitrariness, our generative power, our spiritual willpower.

Conversely, in the training we have to experience the hidden depths of our soul in such a way that we know: What is there has been brought forth by our free will, by our generative power. Only when one knows: What you perceive [gap in the transcript] is made by you, because you must — because you are experiencing something spiritual that is otherwise not perceptible in the outer world — fill what you experience with colors and sounds, then the person is protected from deception. If the visions confront him with the full vividness of a play of colors, then he is one who hallucinates. The moment the vision presents itself as a sensory perception, it is a hallucination; it does not yet belong to the realm of true clairvoyance, but to the realm where the hidden powers of the soul emerge without the conscious willpower of the human being, without arbitrary training.

When the trained clairvoyant can control the way in which things present themselves to him, when they present themselves without such conscious willpower in the soul's imagination, without the inner self-activity generated by training , then we find ourselves in the realm of unschooled clairvoyance, and then man is at the mercy of the forces that play into the hidden depths of his soul; then he is unfree. Then he is connected with all the dangers with which he must be connected when he is in contact with supersensible reality without conscious willpower. In the world of the senses every phantasm reveals itself. But in the spiritual world, the moment things present themselves, it is no longer possible to distinguish objectively between reality and fantasy, and there is a danger that the human will sphere will be affected in some way and that the human being - instead of facing the spiritual world as an individuality - will be surrendered to the things that play in the hidden depths of his soul; just as the unconscious life of the soul plays out, like the rippling of the sea over the depths of the sea, so the I, one's own personality, is opened up and then plunged down again, [and he is guided from another side, through] hallucinations [and visions], [...] carried by hidden depths of the soul, and it can happen that [that this] is presented to the outsider, to the one who wants to investigate scientifically, as a phenomenon, as a specific thing, so that he can distinguish what of what he sees is real objective reality and what is fantasy; but it can only lead to fruitful observation if a trained clairvoyance exercises criticism.

It can result in fruitful observation to extract insights from the depths of the soul in this way, and since science is allowed to take anything as an object, wherever it may come from, which it must then take up into right knowledge, one cannot speak of something unlawful can be said when these things are examined, which even the untrained clairvoyant sees and which can be based on correct, useful perception of what leads tremendously deep into the hidden depths of the soul. What the objective, critical clairvoyant can contribute regarding the facts that arise through untrained clairvoyance can be extraordinarily fruitful, especially today. I may here again and again point out the fact that we now have a fine book - as I have often pointed out - which, in addition to the so-called esoteric clairvoyance, also sheds light on this side of clairvoyance: “The Mystery of Man”, written by Ludwig Deinhard.

So, when the hidden depths of the soul are discussed, one must not forget that there is a difference between proper training and the kind of clairvoyance that breaks away with elemental force and rises from the subconscious to the conscious mind. The former must be examined with critical means, while the latter, who has expanded his consciousness within himself, can take on the criticism and exercise control himself. There will come an age in our culture when individuality will become more self-assertive, when humanity will 'enter' into what can be achieved through properly trained clairvoyance, when this will be introduced into culture. When this is made clear to him, the person can then test it out in life itself, in the ordinary things of life.

There is yet another difference between the trained clairvoyant and the person who has “exposed” his clairvoyance through elementary, primitive powers, namely that the trained clairvoyant first comes to realizations that are general; and he comes to see how the visible human body differs from the supersensible human being, to see how man, as a being with many parts, is endowed with visible and invisible members, to see what there is between birth and death, not just in one life, but in several. He comes to understand everything that arises as experiences in this life between birth and death and between death and new birth, and also to understand what the origin of man is, what the course of the great world order became, of which we will present an example here in the lecture the day after tomorrow. The clairvoyant comes to an understanding of the things that concern all people, and he works his way through them with great caution, so that he first gets to know his own intellectual processes and does not carelessly communicate the fate of some disembodied soul. He can work his way to perceiving such individual circumstances and to experiencing the spiritual that plays into everyday life, but he advances from the general to the individual only with difficulty. He first recognizes that a person has an etheric body at all, but only later the individual etheric body.

In the untrained clairvoyant, however, the opposite is the case when the hidden depths of the soul struggle to emerge; he begins with visions that actually need to be carefully controlled; he begins with individual, everyday things. It is peculiar that he has basically little interest in what are general great insights. Particularly in those who have retained an old, atavistic clairvoyance, one can observe that they have little interest in things [that must prove to be significant for all people through spiritual science]. And nowhere are there such snobbish people among clairvoyants as those who call a naturally inherited clairvoyance their own.

Thus we see that which leads us into the hidden depths of our soul life and what makes us healthy and sick there, we see that which connects us to the spiritual world. Now it is natural that this is not only there because one recognizes it, only there when man dives down and beholds it; it is just as truly there before the recognition as the whale was there before man saw it.

So we are deeply connected with our hidden soul life with the spiritual world that is there. The spiritual foundations play a role here, and we should not be surprised that there is a much deeper essence down there than comes up and comes to our consciousness. We see that the bases that connect us to the spiritual world actually lie there, in the hidden foundations, and that the forces that come from the spiritual worlds have an effect on them. Only part of it enters our consciousness, so that our consciousness is only part of what we actually are. But this consciousness of man is there because man is able to raise to a higher level what can emerge from the hidden depths of his soul. For we see these things emerging in many different ways – they could emerge distorted or embellished, of which we would otherwise know nothing – but what emerges from the spiritual worlds into the depths of our souls and strives upwards is expressed in the sublime and the beautiful, which consciousness can control.

What happens when that which penetrates from the spiritual worlds into the hidden depths of the soul's life is transformed on its way up to consciousness? Then it is so that the impressions can live out as artistic fantasy, as that about which no one but the artists can say: the things are there, they rise up from the depths of the soul. And then we understand the powerlessness of ordinary consciousness, understand how the artist wants to expose the depths of his soul, even if he does not have them in front of him like a clairvoyant, and that it seems more important to him how things permeate each other.

Everything that a person can have in his consciousness without being stimulated by the outside world comes from the hidden depths of the soul. Even that which each of us needs to make this life fruitful must arise from the hidden depths of the soul. Not only the poet needs this, not only the artist, but also the merchant, the engineer – each of us needs this fertilizing stimulus from the hidden depths of the soul. We can see what these depths are truly rooted in when what lies down there rises up into consciousness. When it permeates him and presents itself in such a way that it can be perceived, conceived, experienced, then it becomes dependent on the way in which the person can absorb it. If someone has the ability not only to perceive what can be perceived through the external senses and through the mind bound to the senses, but has the ability to perceive in images, in beautiful fantasy, what lives in the hidden depths of his soul, then he can give in images what he cannot draw from nature, but what lives in the hidden depths of his soul.

But if a person is so constituted that he is untruthful, then the hidden depths do indeed come to the surface, but in such a way that, on the way from the hidden depths into the manifest, the person takes on the character and appears as a liar, as a deceiver or the like, through that part of the hidden powers of the soul that he cannot control in relation to external reality. Thus we can see how these hidden soul forces can make one person an artist and another a liar. This is what is necessary to recognize in order to penetrate into what a person has in his hidden soul forces.

This should be our first goal today: to recognize that everything that takes place in our conscious mental life is rooted in the depths of the soul, in the depths that we find in many other ways.

Finally, I would just like to say – because time is pressing – that in our ordinary lives, precisely in our consciousness, in our interaction with the outside world, in our perception through the senses and the mind, we merge with this outside world, that in the most important things we cannot distinguish what we have within, what is at the core of our being, from the outside. The human being is not capable of detaching the core of his soul from what he has grown together with externally. That is why he must take the path into his inner being. He can take it if he imagines how the ball of sunlight rises out of the dawn. We can best recognize what we experience inwardly by whether it is present in one person or not. And when we feel compassion for something that our fellow human experiences, we cannot separate what lives in hidden depths from the sight of compassion and pain; we grow together with it.

But there is a way that leads from this conscious soul life into something that can be inferred from the faith of a great man like Goethe: that it is not what lives in the external world but what lives in the spiritual environment that is significant, and this includes basically all stellar worlds, everything that works in the external world.

If it does not awaken its own life in the human soul, if we only get stuck in what connects us to the outside world, if we only remain in consciousness, then we will not penetrate into the spiritual. But we can find the way into the spiritual world.

When we look back into the past and see that up to a certain point our parents and brothers and sisters can tell us about it, but when we go back to the point where our memory awakens, we see that we have not only gone through external experiences, but that something else is connected with these experiences: the carrier of our experiences, that which we call our I. By looking back over our lives, we can see our own development. We feel how we have become more mature and more mature, because we feel we have gained in life experience. There is one thing we have to tell ourselves: the most important thing we have learned is actually one that we cannot apply in life. We have attained our greatest maturity through the mistakes we have made. We only know how to do something better when we have done it. Man learns most important things from the unrepeatable, most from what has passed. Especially with the most intimate things in our soul, we feel that something has arisen in us, of which the materialist says: When man goes through the gate of death, it disappears, or at most it is handed over to the human race, to cultural life. But the spiritual person knows that what he has experienced in his innermost being cannot be handed over to anyone else. It shows when he delves into the hidden depths, it shows that what we allow to mature within us can be fulfilled directly in us. When we examine our lives and find that we were born into certain family circumstances, into a certain environment, then something occurs – if we do not grasp our destiny in an intellectual way with our ordinary consciousness, but appeal to forces that are somewhat hidden from our ordinary consciousness . It is something that cannot so much become knowledge as a volitional impulse, when we look back at our lives and our destiny as it was when we were placed in life, but then make the decision to depart from the experiences of ordinary consciousness. Those who face their destiny with ordinary consciousness, who say that everything has happened to us by chance, will be resentful of their destiny, will feel resentment. If we move away from these peculiarities such as antipathy and sympathy towards fate and appeal to a force that we can develop within us, to the power of non-self-will - letting our own will remain silent for a while, calmly facing this fate and indulging for once in the idea: How is it that this fate is there? It continues through our ego, after all. Was our ego not there before?

If we seek our self by calmly looking at our fate, and if we now trace our self further back, we find that through such a deeper contemplation of life, our self grows together with fate, and we understand our fate as if our self were included in this fate and brought about in it before we were there. Then we come to see that we pass through the gate of death with the best that is in us and that we have allowed to mature, and that what we have experienced in previous lives meets our ego again as fate in our next life. We see that it works in the depths of the soul, and when we leave this body, what we have acquired as forces to build a new life for ourselves continues to work in us. So we see our own hidden beingness building up this soul life anew, we see it becoming real down there, becoming constructive forces in the hidden soul life.

When we look at the world in this way, we grow out of the hidden depths and into the spiritual world. And the knowledge that penetrates into these depths is so truly connected with the spiritual worlds as thinking, feeling and willing are the powers of our soul, to which the soul clings as the bonds that penetrate from the spiritual world. By penetrating into it, the human being finds his connection with the macrocosm; the forces grow out of the microcosm, [the human being grows] into the macrocosm, as [it is presented in] the drama 'The Testing of the Soul', [and every] soul can say to itself:

In your thinking live thoughts of the world,
In your feeling weave world forces,
In your will work world beings.
Lose yourself in world thoughts,
Experience yourself through world forces,
Create yourself from will beings.
Do not end with world distances
Through the play of thought-dreams ---;
Begin in the expanses of the mind,
And end in the depths of your own soul: —
You will find divine goals,
Recognizing yourself within yourself.

On 13 October 1882, a dying man went from a hotel in Turin to the railway station. He still died on the way to the railway station, lonely, not surrounded by friends who wanted to meet him as agreed in Pisa again. A strange man whose death, one would like to say is symbolically typical for the way, in which he lived. Lonely he died in Turin on the way from the hotel to the railway station, at that time, actually, only nursed by the hotel director who had foreseen his bad bodily condition. Lonely the man died, as he had lived lonely long with the best that he had owned, lonely in his soul in a varied life. A strange man. He inquired his pedigree. Now we may acknowledge his inquiries more or less as historical truth, their result became effective in his consciousness as we shall recognise at once, and we can recognise his work as intermingled with the impulses which he got from these inquiries of his pedigree. He led his pedigree back to the ninth century, to a Viking, Ottar Jarl, and led his pedigree further back to Odin himself. One would like to say, a proud consciousness might have arisen from the result of such inquiries. With the personality that I mean here, with Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), this consciousness changed into far-reaching, significant ideas that have become principal and indicatory for the complete intellectual development of the nineteenth century.

When in 1853 Gobineau's most important work appeared (Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, English: An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) which contained the results of his study of ideas, the few people who understood something of its contents could gain the knowledge that in this man not a single one but the consciousness of Western humanity had spoken in a particular time of its development. Ideas were contained in it that were odd to many people. But for those who try to consider it spiritual-scientifically the work is fulfilled with ideas that point more than something else does to the way in which an excellent man had to think at the middle of the nineteenth century.

This work was inspirited by the views that Gobineau received with his many posts as diplomat, above all in the East. The idea had arisen to him from an exceptional wealth of observations that were done with the keenest urgency that humanity took its origin from some original human types, which he saw at the starting point of human evolution, at different places of the earth, human types of different figure and different value. To each of these human types he ascribed as it were a certain inner wealth of developmental contents which it has or had to develop with the further evolution from its inside, and to bring to the enclosing life on earth. Gobineau saw the ascending development in the fact, that these original human types, as long as they remained unmixed, got their original predispositions and unfolded them more and more about the earth, so that the results of this development appeared as world history. But to such an extent, Gobineau said to himself, as the members of these original human types intermingled a certain equality of the singles begins spreading out about the earth; but he saw everything great, immense, elementary and continuing to have an effect in the human culture in that which arises from the different, unequal human types or races. After his view the idea of equality flooded humanity in the course of time, the inequality of the races was overcome. But at the same time Gobineau regarded that as the impulses for the decadent cultures.

Hence, he imagined the human progress in such a way that that what should happen will happen most certainly that the human beings will more and more intermingle that with this mixture the human beings become equal, indeed, but also worthless as Gobineau means.

In particular, Gobineau believes to realise that the Christian culture with its ideas of equality and general humaneness has, indeed, infinite value for the further development of humanity, but it adapts the human beings gradually to each other. That is why, he characterises Christianity as the religion that can never change into a Christian civilisation. Sharply he expresses from that viewpoint that Christianity leaves the outer garb to the Chinese or to the Eskimo that it leaves the basic structure of his religious being to the Eskimo and to the Chinese even if he accepts Christianity. Since Gobineau regards Christianity as a religion which is not “from this world,” that means it gives the human being something that can be effective inside his soul but that it cannot change in such a way that it steps outwards, that it becomes impulses which change the outer civilisation and outer civilised behaviour. He thinks that everything that appears in the outer civilisation and civilised behaviour were original tendencies of the races that were unequal at the starting point of human evolution on earth.

From this view, Gobineau got his strange pessimism. While he realises that the contrasts of the original human types can be equalised as humanity takes up Christianity more and more, that something just develops in humanity in the future gradually that what is the holiest, the most important Christian view which can become no impulse for the outer civilisation. However, for it the Christian view will lead, while it equalises the human beings, to degeneration at the same time, so that less and less strong impulses will be there for the progress of humanity, and civilisation will become more and more decadent. Once the earth will outlive the human race that will become extinct on it, because it has set out everything that it contained embryonically in itself and has no other life impulses in the future. That is why Gobineau believes that once the earth stays behind as a living planet. Humanity becomes extinct, and the portents of this extinction are all those impulses that balance out the differences between the human beings.

Surveying this line of thought, we have to admit that it corresponds to all requirements of the intellectual life of the nineteenth century which is given only in such a way as these requirements of the intellectual life were reflected in a great, ingenious man who felt the urge to think the ideas of his time not only to a quarter or half, but to pursue them in their ultimate consequences really. But as significant his ideas are in the just characterised sense, they could settle only a little in the consciousness of his time. One may say that, the name Gobineau was known to few people only, also after the huge work On the Inequality of the Human Races had appeared.

Few years ago, the consciousness of time appeared quite different, again with a person in whom not only the individuality, but also the whole time expressed itself. In 1853, the two first volumes of the just mentioned work by Gobineau appeared, in 1855 the two last. In 1859, the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) appeared On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

At first, we can see in the effect, which the work had, that in this work of Darwin something significant was thrown into the mental development of humanity. How did it work, for example, in Germany? As something significant it has worked at first, it also worked, while the leading scholars who believed to enclose the whole science with their logic related to Darwin's work at first in such a way that they laughed at him, because he believed to be able to speak of the transformation of animal forms on account of observations of the phenomena of the animal realm. One was used up to then to put them side by side without remembering how they relate to each other, and without remembering to bring the idea of becoming into the idea of the continual being. But it took few years only, and the work of Darwin showed its effect, in particular within the German research. There the courageous Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) took the ultimate consequence from the Darwinian requirements on the naturalists' meeting in Stettin (now Szczecin) in 1863 that also the evolution of the human being is to be brought together with the evolution of the animal forms. Those do not stand only in the world side by side, but have developed from imperfect to more and more perfect ones.

Not only had this taken place but something quite different had happened. The leading ideas of the Darwinian view penetrated into the entire scientific research, settled down in such a way that within a few decades the complete scientific literature was interspersed with that which Darwin alleged as an idea. Today we realise that those who have not yet understood that Darwinism just leads beyond itself in the serious research, even found an entire worldview, one may say found a “religion,” on the Darwinian idea. Strange difference of the destinies of these two persons: the little known Count Gobineau, and the famous name of Darwin whose ideas settled down in the minds. So that one can say, Darwin transformed the thinking of many people within few decades.

Someone can doubt the last sentence only who did not familiarise himself with the current ideas, which penetrate the public thinking, and at the same time with ideas, which controlled the public thinking before Darwin. In the answer to the question, why the destinies of both persons are so much different, something is contained of that which makes us aware of the task and the significance of spiritual science in the present.

If we look at that which was brought in a part of the human consciousness with Darwinism, we have to say, Darwinism is completely based on the thought that scientific consideration of the becoming can originate only from outer sensory facts and the treatment of these outer sensory facts by the thinking that is bound to the brain. Everything that would exceed such a scientific direction would be unscientific or would belong to mere belief in the sense of the Darwinian way of thinking that should have no impact on science. Those who look at the course of the events will say lightly, well, what in former times people have thought about the becoming of the human being corresponds just to imperfect human research; science was able to construct a worldview strictly by real, knowledgeable investigations only in the nineteenth century .

Hence, these thinkers say, science itself makes the human being refrain from all supersensible and confine himself to the course of events that arises if one limits science only to the sensory facts and to that which the intellect can make of them.—That is why some people probably believe that science and its thinking make reject simply any supersensible research. Is it this way? Today a lot depends on the answer to this question! If it were really in such a way that science forces us to omit anything supersensible from the observations, then someone who takes science seriously would have to take this consequence without fail. But we ask, what is this scientific necessity based upon which has arisen to the matured humanity only in the nineteenth century?

For Darwin and the next Darwinians was the reason, why they attached the human being not only as a perfected bodily but also as a spiritual-mental being directly to the animal realm, that a striking resemblance appears everywhere, for example, of the skeleton, but also of the other organ forms and of the activities of the single beings, if one looks at the human being and also at the animal realm.—In particular, Darwinians like Huxley (Thomas H., 1825–1895) stressed that the human skeleton is like that of the higher animals. This leads, one said, to the assumption that really that which the human being carries in himself has, all in all, the same origin as the animal realm, yes, has developed gradually from the animal realm by mere perfection of animal qualities and organs. We ask ourselves, is the human reason forced to take the just characterised consequence from these events?

Nothing is more instructive to the answer of this question than the fact that before Darwin Goethe in a peculiar way became a precursor of Darwin. You find the whole Goethean worldview not only in my book, directly entitled Goethe's World View, but also in the preface which I wrote in the eighties of the last century for the Goethe edition of the German National Literature. If we see how Goethe occupied himself urgently with the animal and human forms to get to a particular result, and if we consider the significant fact that he was stimulated to the basic ideas by Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744–1803), then we must say, a person with another way of thinking, with a quite different scientific disposition and spiritual condition than Darwin could also get to the same results, nay, could also feel the necessity of these results.

In relatively young years, Goethe endeavoured against the dictum of all leading naturalists of his time to show that an outer difference does not exist between the bodily frames of the human being and of the higher animals. Strangely to say, one had assumed such a difference details. One had stated, for example, that the higher animals differ from the human being because they have the so-called intermaxillary in the upper jaw in which the upper incisors are, but the human being would not have this bone, that his upper jaw would consist of one piece. This was the opinion of the most significant naturalists at Goethe's youth that between the higher animals and the thinking human being must be a difference that appears also in the outer frame.

Goethe went about his work really with scientific conscientiousness when he proved that the human being as embryo, before birth, has the intermaxillary just as the animals have, save that this bone grows together with the human being, so that it does no longer appear in the full-grown state. This discovery seemed to be significant to Goethe. We see in particular in the way in which he wrote to Herder at that time that he also regards the importance of this discovery, because he writes on 27 March 1784: “You should be also glad, because it is like the keystone of the human being, it is not absent, and it also exists! And how! I have thought it also in the context with your whole how nice it becomes there.” The fact that one has really to ascribe this to no materialistic attitude, but to the opposite one proves that Goethe just regarded his discovery, in full harmony with Herder, as confirmation and consequence of a worldview based on spiritual facts that the spirit prevails everywhere from the lowest creatures to the highest ones and pursues the same basic plan everywhere.

It was Goethe's intention to prove this, and the result just was evidence of the effectiveness of the spirit. Hence, it was to him also evidence of the effectiveness of the spirit when he discovered something that, actually, natural science found again in the second half of the nineteenth century that one has to consider the cranial bones as transformed vertebrae. Goethe meant that this spiritual has a basic form in the dorsal vertebra that transforms it in such a way, that this form encloses the organ of the brain. It was a quite miraculous fact to me in certain respect when I found a notebook of Goethe during my several years' studies in the Weimar Goethe and Schiller Archive one day. There Goethe had put down with a pencil that the whole human brain is, actually, only a transformed ganglion, in any ganglion that is already included as it were embryonically which the spirit transforms, so that it becomes the complex organ of the brain.

There we realise that that which the Darwinians later regarded as evidence of the fact that one has to look only at the sensory facts if one wants to explain the becoming of the human being became evidence of the universally working spirit as to Goethe which conjures up, so to speak, the most complex forms from the simplest ones and develops the work of nature gradually this way. Are we allowed to assert compared with such a fact that scientific observations would have forced the human being to found a kind of materialist-monistic worldview on Darwinism? We are on no account allowed to do it, because we realise that with Goethe the same course of research leads to an idealistic spiritual result. What may it depend on that in the second half of the nineteenth century on basis of Darwinism that we can downright call a kind of Goetheanism in relation to the sensory facts, a Darwinian-materialist worldview or even religion develops? That does not result from the facts which urge the researchers, but only from the habitual ways of thinking, because to a man who is spiritually different from those who develop a Darwinian-materialist worldview from the results of Darwinism, just the same scientific way of thinking serves as basis of a quite different worldview. This is the important fact that we have to consider. Then we also understand that the materialist-monistic way of thinking is something that captivates the human beings in the second half of the nineteenth century that intervenes deeply in the thinking of the human beings regarding themselves as advanced, and we understand that this way of thinking also intervenes where one does not want to be Darwinian.

A researcher offers a significant example who is certainly not enough appreciated today who has, indeed, something unpleasant in his behaviour who is still, significant his scientific results for the present. I mean Moriz Benedikt (1835–1920, Austrian neurologist) whom I have also called here in the course of the years. Moriz Benedikt is no Darwinian, but a development theorist. He admits a development, even if not in the sense of the Darwinians. One single result from the wealth of Benedikt's results should be stressed here. Benedikt intended to examine morally defective persons, criminals. Before in a more popular way Lombroso (Cesare L., 1836–1909, Italian criminologist) pointed to such facts in a dilettantish way, Benedikt had done such investigations already some years before. He examined brains of criminals, of murderers. He discovered that all the brains had something characteristic. A quite strange fact appeared to him that certain furrows, which are, otherwise, at the surface of the brain, run more inside with the criminal's brain, were covered by the cerebral mass and did not run outwardly. But he also examined brains of murderers who made, otherwise, the impression of good-natured persons. There appeared everywhere that in the back of the head certain irregularities were that the lobes did not completely cover the hindbrain, and that with such persons the form of the brain was like the brains of apes in a way. Hence, Benedikt got to the result that strictly speaking in this physical organisation of the human being, in the fact that it was not completely developed the reason would be of his unusual actions, so that as it were the lower animal from which the human being originated is expressed in the inner forms of the brain. Because the human being bears that in himself, which he should exceed, he becomes a criminal. Thus Moriz Benedikt founds his whole view of law, of morality and punishment upon the fact that, actually, with the criminal something is to be found as heirloom of those times, when the human being was still below with his original being among the higher animals.

As I have said, Moriz Benedikt is no Darwinist, but he also does not get further with his thinking than believing that one has to stick to ascribing such an organisation to the criminal that forces him to his actions from the physical. In anthropology, this researcher of the nineteenth century searches that what he believes to need for the understanding of criminal actions. Thus, we see that everywhere the mere belief comes along in the decisive of the outer sensory facts and of that science which founds itself on these outer sensory facts. We also are not surprised that Darwin's results were interpreted in a materialist-monistic way. Not Darwin's results demand this interpretation, but the habitual ways of thinking in the second half of the nineteenth century. One may say, if it had been possible that Darwin would have done research in another age, it would be also conceivable that his results would have been interpreted in an ideal spiritual sense as Goethe did it, that the creative, prevailing spirit uses the transformation of the forms to let the manifold phenomena arise from few basic forms.

This is the peculiar fact that the age, which is just over, had to bring the deepening in the outer sensory facts that for a while humanity had to divert its attention from everything that turns the view to the supersensible worlds, so that the whole web of the sensory facts can once work on the human soul. Thus, we recognise the necessity of the materialist-monistic way of thinking in the whole human evolution as it were, we realise that the nineteenth century was destined to divert the attention for a while from the supersensible and to look only at the sensory. If we consider the deeper sense of this fact, we have to ask ourselves whether humanity has gained something significant for its spiritual life by deepening in the sensory world.

Answering this question, we have to consider something that I have already mentioned in these talks that an enormous amount of important facts could be really investigated only, while one looked impartially at this world of facts. One did not let the view be clouded by any kind of assumptions of the supersensible world, but turned it only to the outer world. That is much more important and essential compared with the prime concern of Darwinism that significant, great connections were explaind between the organs of the single animal forms and plant forms. We have seen in these talks that Darwinism has overcome itself that, actually, the facts demand to speak no longer as simply as Ernst Haeckel once spoke of a connection of the animal realm with the human being. However, in spite of all that if one surveys the immense amount of research results which have come about just under the influence of Darwinism, one finds enlightenment of a big, immense basic plan of the animal and plant realms.

Thanks to this research, we see into connections today, which would not have arisen in such a way if one had approached them with preconceived ideas of an old supersensible research. Thanks to the materialistic one-sidedness, we have results, which one once will interpret in the right way, but which could be found only with one-sidedness. Thus, we must not misjudge the big merit of Darwinism and not neglect the fact that it is significant if Haeckel, starting from his General Morphology of the Organisms (1866) to his extensive Systematic Phylogeny (1896), puts together the resemblance of the animal forms and plant forms to construct, so to speak, a pedigree of life from it. It may be that his pedigrees are wrong—they are not—, one may abandon them, the idea of descent may be quite wrong with Haeckel, we can disregard what arises as theories with him, and look at that what shows resemblances and connections between the forms in a way unexpected in former times. This is the significant.

How does the supersensible research place itself besides it? In such a way that it shows how the human being can experience, indeed, a certain development in his inside, can turn the sight into supersensible worlds, can find a supersensible world of facts, and that in this the true causes are to be found of the sensory facts. We have realised how the human being finds somethimg enclosing mental-spiritual with supersensible self-knowledge already in himself which lives not only in such a way in him as he grasps it with his normal consciousness, but exists as something real behind the normal consciousness that we have to search in a spiritual form, long before the human being enters the earthly existence.

We have to search it this way that that what comes from father and mother connects itself with that which comes from a spiritual world while it experiences the events in the time between birth and death. Entering the spiritual world by his Imaginative, Inspirative and Intuitive self-knowledge, the human being gets to know the creative being that still works on us before the consciousness appears which constructs the human body where the human being could not yet work with his consciousness on himself because this work goes into the finer organisation and configuration of the body. The ego just works there, which comes from the spiritual world, on the finer development not only of the brain, but also of the whole body.

Thus, the human being is able to recognise without going through the gate of death that a spiritual world shines through the sensory world, which is as real for supersensible knowledge as the sensory world is for the sensory knowledge. If he knows his spiritual-mental essence working, and if he knows that this gets the forces and impulses from the spiritual world to create a new life and a new earthly embodiment, then he can also easily get that knowledge which connects the views about the human nature with moral ideas which brings together the views of the spiritual-mental being with that which the human being needs as a force for life, as consolation and security in life and so on.

All questions whether the human being sees his relatives and friends again can be affirmed in a quite appropriate way that the human being lives with his true being not only in the physical body, recognising and acting, but can also live disembodied where then everything that he founded in the physical life lives on in the spiritual world and forms the bases of a new incarnation. Those relations from human being to human being remain important in the spiritual world and almost form the starting point of our next incarnation, so that we meet the same human beings whose connection arises if we are disembodied, while we feel attracted to them, and get the forces to be able to meet them in a new incarnation again.

The human being is led by spiritual research into the sphere of a spiritual world, so that he does no longer find his origin in an animal form of the past world, but he finds his origin and that of the animals in the spiritual world. Spiritual science will show this more and more. With it, it positions itself beside what the materialist-monistic culture has done in the course of the nineteenth century. If we realise that a common plan of the evolution of living beings forms the basis that we can really see basic ideas and basic forces that develop from imperfect to perfect stages of life, then such a result gets its real significance just in the light of spiritual science. Today we can draw attention in this comprising talk only by a simile how the indicated gets significance.

If we see the human being in a later age and compare him with that who he was, for example, as child, then we say to ourselves, our spiritual-mental essence has worked on our outer organisation. The same that I realise if I become aware of that which produces thoughts, feelings and will impulses from dark soul depths has worked on my body when it could not yet produce this, when I was dreaming into my life. This body was still an imperfect tool for the mind and became a more perfect one only later. That which is purely supersensible what lives only in my thoughts, feelings, and mental pictures has worked as a real being first on my physical body, but I could become aware of it only later.

If one understands that in its basic meaning, one has also understood how the spirit has worked for millions of years only to produce the whole range of living beings in their ascending forms to produce the human being of the present in the end. As that which we are as a 30-year-old human being must arise in its internal spirituality by the fact that we work first on our imperfect organism of our childhood, the human cultural life could arise only because this spiritual-mental essence which is yet the starting point of any spiritual becoming prepared the human organism only slowly and gradually in the whole range of organisms as well as the single human being prepares his organism in the childhood which should be later the tool of the developed mind. As it is the same ego which thinks, feels and wants at the age of thirty years and which works on the outer body in the first years, overcomes it and transforms it into the tool of the mind, one can also imagine that the human being had to overcome with his mental life which faces us developed in the animal realm. The actions of the human mind which prepares itself only to that which it should become in the outer animal or generally organic figure, face us while we survey the connection of the outer creations.

What has the Darwinian attitude of the nineteenth century done without knowing it? While it has developed the outer forms so admirably, it has shown the actions of the human spirit when it worked on the outside world, before it could penetrate to its inside and unfold its own being and becoming. This will be the progress in the human development the intellectual culture that one will recognise that in that what the Darwinian attitude has given the whole action of the human spirit is contained. It has prevailed in it as our ego prevails in the childish organism. Darwinism has studied the divine actions of the human spirit up to now, without knowing it. One appreciates correctly what was created on basis of Darwinism if one beholds the creative human spirit in all details which are brought to light if one admires what the human spirit had intended, before it has got its conscious, historical creating. Thus, something great has been prepared that one only misunderstands, as if it is effective from itself, while it is the plan that the creative divine spirit pursued on its way to humanity. With it, the human being can progress a certain step and can only recognise really, what was done, actually, in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Now we turn our glance once again back to the Count Gobineau. There we find how the ingenious mind of this man realises that what presents itself in the outer world, but he sees it with the proud consciousness of a person who knows something about the fact that the human being is descended from the spiritual. As fantastic this may appear today, one has to appreciate in this context that there was such a person in the nineteenth century to whom that was a personal fact what is only a theory, maybe religious conviction for other people that we come to something spiritual if we go back to our origin. One only appreciates the unique personality of Count Gobineau if one can put his consciousness in the right light which says to itself, if I trace back what I am what lives in my abilities and qualities as they are handed down to me by my ancestors, there I find that the line of heredity goes back to the Viking Ottar Jarl, to the descendants of the God Odin, and that it does not end with a physical, but with a supra-physical being like Odin himself.

However, in this line of thought no hint to that spiritual-mental essence was included which works in the human being, not within the line of heredity or race only, but works in the human being from incarnation to incarnation which is independent of the outer physical form and configuration. Thus, Gobineau looks only at the appearance, which does not enclose the spiritual-mental essence of the human being. That is why he stands there as just a courageous man who does not stop at a half measure, but takes the ultimate consequences of his requirements, saying to himself: surveying the world, I recognise a decline of the appearance; humanity on earth becomes extinct, and the earth will outlive humanity.

This idea is there, as if a plant would express it, a plant that has developed blossoms and cannot realise that it can take up something from without that flies to it, that it can take up the pollen from another plant for a new figure. Gobineau cannot imagine that in the human being in his race existence a spiritual core lives which can take up a new spiritual element at a suitable time which is not in the original races and the intermingling ones, but in the spiritual-mental essence which the individualities take up and which fertilises the spiritual-mental essence of the human being from the spiritual world and continues the human being if his appearance drops.

So Gobineau could properly imagine the outer appearance in such a way that it is on the way of decline. However, he still lacked the view at that spiritual-mental essence of the human being who arises to the supersensible research. He could still substitute it by his consciousness of his personal connection with the divine world. But he remained lonesome with it. However, humanity had arrived at that stage where it found looking back the sensory facts only as starting point of its origin; it found its ancestors in the animal realm, while, indeed, the animal realm is to be imagined as I have just characterised it.

But if the human being can understand what works there in him, regardless of all outer forms which the natural sciences of the nineteenth century explained so magnificently if he looks at the spiritual world and notices the resemblance of his spiritual-mental essence, then he also admits that the spiritual-mental essence is fertilised repeatedly, so that the pessimistic idea changes into the wonderful idea of a human development in the future. If we look with Gobineau at that which was given to the races originally, that dies, indeed, which one can see externally, but inside that lives which can take up new impulses which becomes more and more full of contents, and walks from the earth which it leaves as the spirit leaves the corpse at death—to new creations, to create a new existence from the spirit. We realise that, so to speak, in Gobineau a courageous, energetic, and ingenious thinker projects from a past time who thinks the idea through to the end what has to originate from humanity if we turn our glance to the appearance only. Thus we recognise that humanity, after it has come to these consequences, needs something in another idea that invigorates the becoming in such a way that the everlasting is recognised in it which carries the essentials over to other ways of life, even if the outer cover drops from the essentials and really takes the way which Gobineau predetermined.

Any force develops by overcoming the opposing force. Gobineau had still received the fulfilment of his thinking with a divine-spiritual from his personal faith in his origin. Finally, Darwinism expelled everything that was no sensory fact from the views about the human origin and about the spiritual origin of the organisms. From the counter force which the popular Darwinism develops from the mere looking at the only outer world of facts the longing for the supersensible world will arise which already approaches and works in the human minds. The number of the human beings will become bigger and bigger who feel this longing who feel that the old thinking leads even in the most ingenious thinkers to such consequences as Gobineau or the popular Darwinism have taken them. But if the human beings realise that they can stop impossibly at that which is so seemingly firmly founded in the outer science, then they will ask for supersensible research, and then one will realise more and more that the supersensible research can proceed as logically and conscientiously as the outer science proceeds.

If we survey the connections that way, we recognise the necessity of supersensible research in our time, and then we easily recognise what this supersensible research, actually, intends. An idea of that which it intends I wanted to awake in these winter talks too. The whole cycle of talks was a hint to that which I have summarised today, and I just wanted to show with it in detail how spiritual science positions itself quite consciously in the present cultural life to serve it appropriately. Hence, one has not to be surprised that this spiritual science is so often misunderstood today. One has repeatedly to experience that this or that objection which I do here are later are put forward as their own objections by those who have listened here, so that one does not regard that that which may be argued, spiritual science has already removed. But someone who understands the course of the human culture, will not become chicken-hearted about the judgements which spiritual science experiences today in the outer world, but he will be able to point to the many examples that that which was regarded as a matter of course, for example, Darwinism itself, caused the strongest opposition at first. Examples of this kind are many.

The true spiritual scientist will always concede: even if some things will not last, it is not different from any other science, but the basic truths remain and settle down, because every true sight to our life shows the necessity of spiritual science.

Just if we look at the greatest men like Count Gobineau and the confessors of Darwinism, we notice that it is necessary to insert the supersensible research to the cultural life of our time, and that supersensible research almost corresponds to the longing of those people who want the true progress of the cultural life in our time.

Indeed, in the next time one will more appreciate various sensational things which happened here and there or even happen—if at all one cares about spiritual science or anthroposophy—as outgrowths of spiritual science. You can easily regard spiritual science as something fantastic, absurd, maybe also as folly if you limit yourself to its outgrowths, but it will be just more comfortable for a certain public to mock at the outgrowths than to deal seriously with the scientific research within spiritual science. You must concede at least that I have tried in these talks to apply the same logic, the same scientific thinking to this spiritual science as they rule in the outer science. The German biographer of Count Gobineau also said that against the ideas of Count Gobineau some people had something to argue; what Gobineau meant could be easily disproved, because any pupil of a high school could know this and could understand his ideas. But you have to require that thoughts of a pupil are not sufficient to understand Count Gobineau, and that you have to exceed what you believe to own as firm logic and must not stop at the logic of a pupil if you want to touch the nerve of spiritual science.

Even if the evaluation of spiritual science and its results will take place long in the way I have just indicated, there will be always single human beings who will yet realise that at least one tries to go forward in spiritual research with the same conscientiousness and with the same strict logic as they are usual with the education of thinking during the last centuries. Spiritual science should be recognised by this intention, not by some mistakes and outgrowths that maybe appear within it. The few human beings who will realise this will form the core of that thinking and willing whose necessity one recognises just if one goes back to the most logical thinkers of our time. That is why I have gone back today not only to Darwin, but also to Count Gobineau.

Those who form the core of such a human thinking and willing may still be alone today. Lonesome were all those who became bearers of such ideas which were matters of course in a later time. In the time in which science bore a materialist-monistic religion from its bases, you must not be surprised if spiritual science also makes the human being lonesome in a way.

For many people regard the real object of spiritual science as a non-existent object or deny the possibility of a knowledge of this object at least. But the human being cannot stay without knowledge of the spiritual. With it, spiritual science appears on the scene so that he does not remain without this knowledge of the spirit. We have to consider the outer sensory world like a shell of a crustacean. The spiritual appears as that which has overcome the shell, which creates itself by itself, by spiritual science. The outer science teaches what had to be overcome, and what still serves as tool that we have to use. But spiritual science will urgently teach that the knowledge of the outer shell of the being must not remain limited. It will show that we have to see the actions of the spirit in the outer figure that it lives in its results, and that it is the same if it withdraws into its place of origin, in its inside but that it has something in this place of origin that gives it a perspective to eternity.

Spiritual science will renew and raise—this was the program of these winter talks—a certain Goethean view which has given the whole program of these talks with a deep conviction with which Goethe faced the natural sciences of his time when from one of its representatives, Haller (Albrecht von H., 1708–1773), the words sounded:

No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.
Blissful is that to whom
She shows her appearance only.

Goethe replied what spiritual science always answers to an outer knowledge and conviction that wants to limit itself to the outside world. Spiritual science answers: you also recognise this outside world in its true figure only if you behold the real spirit. You will recognise what Darwinism has created in its true figure if you regard it as actions of the active spirit.—Spiritual science makes the human being completely aware of the fact that one also recognises the shell only if one recognises it as the expression of the spirit, and because one recognises the spirit only if one grasps it in its creating as it already promises in the current existence to raise new creations from the bosom of the future that it must become creative in its inside. The outer shell shows what the spirit has created. Therefore, spiritual science answers to the words:

No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.
Blissful is that to whom
She shows her appearance only.

with Goethe:

Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.

With it, I would like to close these winter talks. I would like to hope that spiritual science really finds its goal and solves its task so that it does not remain a mere theory, a mere sum of thoughts, but an elixir of life that works in the human being. It does not work only in the knowledge of the outer shell, but above all is inside effective so that the human being recognises whether it is a kernel or a shell, so that the impulse arises from a strong will not to remain a shell, but to be always a kernel and become a kernel.

Somebody who speaks about spiritual science today cannot count on general approval. Since all habitual ways of thinking of our time have grown out of a ground which is different from that of spiritual science.

Since the aurora of modern natural sciences, the essential progress of human mind is based on the observation of the outer world and on the application of the reason to this outer world. Spiritual science has completely to acknowledge natural sciences and their results. However, today we live again in a time in which mind and soul of the human being long more and more for an answer of those questions that exceed the sensory view and rise to the creative powers of existence, and look for them in the spiritual.

Spiritual science is based not only on quite different requirements but also on another way of research than natural sciences apply. However, one must not believe that spiritual science contradicts natural sciences in any sense. On the contrary. Even if it takes its starting point from quite different requirements and research methods, spiritual science—understood properly—completely complies with the scientific results.

Natural sciences are based on the outer view. They have achieved great things also with the development of those tools that enable us to look into the physically smallest things. However, if natural sciences want to do their task, they have to limit themselves to that which approaches the human being from without which one can grasp with the senses and understand with the reason. Knowledge of spirit can establish only on an inner deepening of the human soul by which the soul discovers cognitive abilities and forces in itself that exist neither in the usual day life nor in the outer science. Yes, if this usual science were intermingled in ambiguous way with spiritual-scientific methods, it would get only to unjustified results in its area. Still one will find if one deeper invades into the matter that the same kind of thinking, the same logic that our natural sciences apply one also applies in spiritual science. However, we have to realise that the human soul itself is the only instrument to invade into the supersensible world. It is not allowed to stop at the everyday life, but requires that it can deeper invade into the things from the point of view of the everyday life. So that this can happen, so that the human being can become a spiritual researcher, it is necessary that the soul behaves in its whole inner life different than it was accustomed before it entered the way to spiritual research.

Our soul life proceeds in such a way that we think and feel certain things, that we have mental pictures in our soul. Which sense and purpose do we connect with this soul life? We mostly connect the purpose with it to get to know the outer world and to orient ourselves in this sensory world. The spiritual researcher is concerned with something else. He has to select single mental pictures, sensations, ideas, or impressions that can be useful for him. I would like to take a comparison.

Let us assume that we compare the whole soul life that proceeds in manifold mental pictures, which change at every moment, with many corns that exist in ears on a field. The owner of the field selects some of the corns. While he lets the other corns achieve their goal to serve as food, he selects single ones that should serve as seeds and have to produce new fruits.

In a quite similar way, the spiritual researcher has to behave with his soul life. While, otherwise, the mental pictures proceed without surveying them, he has to select single mental pictures that he does not use for the outer cognition of the world. One calls that concentration, meditation, and contemplation. Which sense does one connect with these words? We want to figure out the process that the spiritual researcher carries out.

At certain times, the spiritual researcher must try to turn away his attention completely from the outside world. Then he also suppresses all worries of life, all desires, affects, and passions. He has to empty the soul, to cause a kind of empty consciousness. He selects single mental pictures of his soul life or of spiritual science whose contents do not matter and is engrossed in these mental pictures—not in their contents, they do not matter. However, the spiritual researcher behaves in such a way that he moves a mental picture arbitrarily in the centre of his consciousness, and calls all soul forces and retains this one mental picture in his consciousness, namely for longer time and with all inner strain. It only matters that the soul makes an effort that everything is concentrated upon one point. If you have to do any work where you have always to strain your arm and if this work has a purpose, you must exert yourself constantly to fulfil the purpose of this work. However, if you want to strengthen your muscles, it may just mattes not to reach this or that purpose, but to evoke the forces that exert the muscles, so that they develop. That also applies to the soul forces with meditation and concentration, namely with forces which are different from those which one applies in the usual everyday life. We never exert our souls, so to speak, concerning the forces that we consider here if we live in the everyday life. We have to evoke deeper soul forces to concentrate on a mental picture. That is the point that we strain the soul in such a way that we also have the inner will for it.

If we get a mental picture because we can be stimulated from without, then the mental picture is caused in our soul without our assistance. It is there—we have not produced it. The mental pictures that are attached to worries, to desires, and passions originate without any effort. They are to no avail to us if we want to make our soul the instrument of the higher world. Not that is the point that we have a mental picture, but that we exert ourselves to move the mental picture in the centre [of our consciousness]. If the human being calls his deepest soul forces in patience and perseverance this way, something new happens for the soul. You can find the details about that in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. This is something that today many people do not want to believe that for the soul something new can happen. We can compare this new to a moment which takes place in the human soul life [at a certain time]. The little child lives up to the second, third years consciously, but not self-consciously. One may say in a way that the consciousness of the child sleeps, before in the child the moment comes where it knows: I am an ego. This is a kind of awakening. It is a kind of awakening also if in the described way the soul is raised to another level of existence if it is made an instrument to behold into the spiritual world.

What you experience in your soul if you carry out such exercises can be compared with something with which it is similar on the one hand and from which it is, on the other hand, quite different: with falling asleep. How does this usual sleeping state approach the human being? I do not go into the details of the scientific hypotheses of sleep. Without special scientificity, I talk only about that which the human being experiences in the everyday life falling asleep.

We know that at the moment of falling asleep the senses no longer deliver impressions. The mind starts darkening. The human being transitions into a state in which his body is not active. At first spiritual science has to say—what logic already confirms—that the whole human being does not exist in the sleeping human being, but that the real human being leaves the body in sleep and is free from the body, that the human being is beyond his body. Now this is a hypothesis at first, but spiritual science verifies this hypothesis as a reasonable truth. Natural sciences more and more approach that which spiritual science has to say at this point. Du Bois-Reymond states that natural sciences can understand the sleeping but never the conscious-wake human being.

If one does not want to be so illogical to state that every evening all desires and passions disappear and originate anew in the morning from nothing, one has to suppose that they are still there. However, within the physical body they do not exist. This means that the human being is with his inner being beyond his body. However, this inner being is of supersensible nature, hence, one cannot see it.

There may be people who say that just certain things take place in the human being and cause other processes so that the soul life takes place.—Someone who speaks that way is in the same position as someone who believes that one can understand the nature of the air investigating the lung and its activity. One can understand the air if one investigates it beyond the body. Then it penetrates into the human body; the lung is there to use the air. Natural sciences will just discover more and more that one can compare the inner activities of the human body during sleep with the inner activities of lung and heart. It is an inner bodily work. However, just as little as the lung produces the air, just as little is that which penetrates as soul life the organism more and more a product of the body; rather it penetrates into the body, and it is beyond the body from falling asleep up to awakening.

One can still argue many things against that. One can understand these things only really, if one can prove by facts that that is something essential which leaves the body in sleep as one supposes it.

This just happens with the spiritual researcher if he does those soul exercises that I have discussed just now. Thereby he causes that soul condition which is free of the body. While the spiritual researcher refrains from that which his body provides for him, he causes that—completely awake—he leaves the body unexploited. During the soul activity, the body must not be active like in sleep. The senses must be quiet; the worries and passions that the outer life stimulate must be quiet as they are quiet, otherwise, only in sleep. The spiritual researcher causes a completely empty consciousness. Then, however, he puts one single mental picture in the centre of his soul life. For it, he needs forces that slumber, otherwise, in the depths of the soul and that he strengthens now by exercises so that he can perceive them.

What the spiritual researcher experiences he has just to experience if it should be conceded as fact. It resembles the sleep under the mentioned circumstances: it is connected neither with the movements of the body nor with the outer senses and the reason. While such state is caused, otherwise, only in sleep, the spiritual researcher gets around to getting to know his soul from a new side with his exercises. He knows, there is an inner life of the soul, even if the soul renounces everything that comes from the body. One may prove ever so much with some outer reasons that the human soul cannot live free of the body—the insight that, nevertheless, it is able to do it originates only if the body-free state is caused. Then one knows that one has a soul life that is completely different from the former soul life that the body has caused. One would like to say, this is a basic experience which the spiritual researcher attains if he has done such exercises long enough if he has already conjured up strong forces from his soul. In my book How Does One Attains Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, you can read up further details about that. I would like to describe the typical of this experience.

If one has carried out the exercises long enough, a particular inner experience appears. Either one awakes from the depth of sleep, or, one feels tempted to pause in the middle of the day life. What happens then is a kind of pictorial experience. Then you have the feeling that something goes forward, as if a lightning has struck you. What goes forward?

The human being thinks possibly that way: now you feel what you have always felt as your body, filled with physical elements, and is taken away from you.—Indeed, you realise now that strong forces are necessary to keep upright compared with such an experience. One feels that which one has always called approaching the gate of death. One is vividly acquainted with that which appears at death. Indeed, now changed feelings and mental pictures appear in the soul. Now you know what it means to stand no longer by yourself as it was the case before. Now you feel the soul transformed so that you know, it is not dark and quiet, but is internally active if you renounce any co-operation of the physical body.

This experience is very significant. It is a dramatic experience for the soul. It is something about which the soul says, whatever I have experienced up to now in life, I cannot compare the significance of this experience that sometimes shakes the soul. A lot of that which I have felt up to now only as slumbering in the backgrounds of existence of which I believe that I can only anticipate it, takes place before my eyes. Hence, I know now: yes, the human being is connected in his innermost core with that world which is behind the sensory world and which, actually, the sensory world veils only.

However, you know something else. You know that it was necessary to do such exercises, to strengthen the soul. You know this, because you realise that to the experience of the described a certain faculty of judgement is necessary and a kind of moral courage to maintain yourself. The soul forces that you have taken out of its depths give this courage and faculty of judgement. You find the further details of this way again described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. If you have arrived at this point, you just know: unless you have prepared yourself, you would approach this event with two qualities which are doubtful to the highest degree if they appear in the context with these experiences and which you get to know only at this point of soul development: self-love, or more precisely, self-sense, and a certain fear and insecurity of those regions which are behind the sensory world. Self-sense or self-love plays a big role in the usual life, but the soul can always master them. Bad habits appear in our souls, and we can change them. Unless we want to change them, we can at least feel that we could change them. Compared with a force of nature, flash and thunder, we do not have the feeling that we can change it. If we entered without preparation into the state that I have just described, you would realise that you have strengthened, indeed, your soul forces, but that you have also brought out something else, namely reinforced self-love. Only if you have also strengthened the other soul force, you are able to decrease this self-sense. Just as little as you are able to resist flash and thunder, just as little you are able to resist self-sense, to snatch it away from the soul life.

However, if you have made the soul an instrument for the spiritual world in the right way, then the survey of the picture enables you to recognise this self-sense in its true form. Since this picture shows something else than one could describe it with few words. It shows everything that we have called our ego, our soul up to now as put beyond ourselves. It shows what we have wanted up to now from which you suffer, with which you are pleased. Now you know: I have to place down all that from myself if I want to develop that out of myself, which can lead me into the supersensible world.

You get to know yourself as soul at this point of existence only. You know now what it means to face yourself with true self-knowledge; you know that you retain nothing of that for a higher knowledge which you have called your ego up to now—you have to cast off it and retain it as something external. Facing yourself objectively, considering yourself as another person or as an object is a preparation for penetrating into the spiritual world. However, this requires that you have also developed the strong forces to defeat the reinforced self-sense. Someone who has not done this would experience infinite pain if he realised that he has to cast off and renounce everything that he has suffered in order to behold into the spiritual world.—Nothing of that which serves to you in the world seems suitable to lead you into a higher world.

Hence, it is necessary that you defeat self-sense. Something else yet appears. If the human being does this experience, he notices that his whole security of life was contained in that which you have to set aside from yourself, which you ignore now. There fear seizes you, because you must leave behind for a while what gave you security up to now. Now it is as if you lose ground. Only if you have attained other forces, you do not have fear but courage to penetrate into the unknown land of spirit. What lives there in the soul as fear appears quite different to you. The soul life is something very complex. Only a part of it is aware; another part rests always down in the depths of the soul that the spiritual researcher brings out with his power. The human being only knows a part of his soul life; other parts work into the usual soul life. However, the human being knows nothing about them. Yes, the usual soul life often is there to blanket what rests in the concealed depths of the soul. The human being helps himself to get over them, while he deceives himself. For that who knows the soul a phenomenon is very interesting which appears to the human being of the present paradoxical, but it is true.

In the present, we see people, materialists, who do not want to search the spirit in its true figure on the way of spiritual life. Why does one become a materialist? If you understand, why this is the case, you become tolerant on one side towards the materialist because you realise that under certain conditions the soul cannot be different if it does not receive the suggestion to come out of materialism. Since that who investigates the soul of the materialist notices that in its depths nothing but the fear of the spiritual world prevails.

It is that way. Even if the materialists resent that, it is in such a way. They are afraid in the depths of their souls without knowing it; they are afraid of the spiritual world because they have a dark feeling of the fact that they lose ground if they leave the sure ground of reason. They are afraid of it, and, therefore, they blanket this fear with materialist theories, as one dazes himself against fear. The materialist monism is nothing but dazing fear in the depths of the soul. The true psychologist will be able to recognise this always. In the materialist-monistic theories is not only that which the materialists say, but always fear is visible between the lines. The reinforced soul power must overcome this fear, and then the human being dares to jump over the abyss and to penetrate into the spiritual area.

Then the human being becomes aware that, indeed, his soul life splits for the experience of the spiritual world in a way. What does this splitting mean? Expressly I would like to emphasise that the true spiritual researcher should not be a dreamer or romanticist who wants now to leave the sensory world completely and to live in the spiritual world. He has to attract that again about which he knows that he must cast off it for the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher must manage to move about freely between beholding the spiritual world and living in the sensory world, otherwise he is no spiritual researcher but a daydreamer for the outer world. He reaches this if he takes a healthy soul life as starting point.

Hence, you can convince yourselves that the real spiritual researchers are sober in the everyday life because they have realised objectively, not only subjectively that it is necessary to consider everything soberly to be no romanticists. They position themselves in the usual life as practical people. They know how to keep the balance between the usual life praxis and the life in the spiritual world. It is very important just to stress this point because the soul life must split, as well as a big number of corns are separated from a few which are not consumed, but are used as seeds.

Thus, the human being realises that his soul life is not completely separated from himself. He sees as it were a part of this usual soul life beside himself; he feels it as something that cannot place him in the spiritual world: the corns that serve as food. However, the other part bridges the abyss. This is that part which develops from concentration; it is that part which is used as seeds for the soul life that goes to the spiritual world. So that it develops healthily, it is necessary that the spiritual researcher is able at this point to behave different from that who—with a pathological soul life—has reached this special point which he learns to feel as very painful.

That which approaches the spiritual researcher if he has fulfilled all preconditions is that he does no longer need from a certain time on to concentrate upon certain mental pictures, but they appear spontaneously from his empty consciousness which show a new world. A new world fills his consciousness. For the outer viewer this world becomes very similar to the pathological hallucinations. However, they are only externally similar. A pathological soul life leads to hallucinations. The healthiest soul life of the spiritual researcher leads to the world of pictures or Imaginations. We realise with that who sees an imagery emerging with an unhealthy soul life that he believes with an inner force in their reality that he believes that his delusions are true. Many of us know that one can dissuade a person who is ill this way often from that which he sees with the eyes but not from the “reality” of his hallucinations. Why is this the case? Because just in such pathological soul life which appears with such strong force also the self-sense increases. The person concerned is one with his mental pictures; he produces them from his soul; they are the silhouettes of the soul life, they are compressed imagination. Because he himself is that, he believes so firmly in them. Since the human being must believe absolutely in himself if he wants to stand firmly in the world—and then he believes in his visions like in an objective world.

The spiritual researcher has to attain defeating the self-sense that he has now to remove that imagery arbitrarily again which can work so blissfully on him. If anybody does the exercises in the right way about which I have spoken, he attains the ability to extinguish this imagery—which appears really as a spiritual world as in the morning the sun appears on the horizon. The exercise has to consist of the special will training that one not only gets around to evoking this imagery but also to extinguishing it again—any knowledge is based on it in the higher world. This is the difference compared to the pictures of the pathological soul life. If the exercises are done, the human being attains the peculiar force to make his will gradually stronger and then to diminish it again. One does not have this ability in the usual life. One can make efforts and refrain from them. One has to learn this only by training that one makes the will as strong as I have described it. If the whole imagery has emerged, one must consciously weaken the will more and more which has conjured up this world and must be able to let sink this whole world. However, one is able to do this only after defeating the self-sense.

Think only what you demand from your soul. You demand that you assert yourself at first to evoke such a world; then, however, you must extinguish it again. You cannot enjoy it. You must see the whole world, which we have developed by external strains, sinking in the depths of your consciousness as mental pictures that you have forgotten. If you have attained this, you enter only into the true spiritual world, the world of spiritual beings and facts. The spiritual researcher knows by the preceding exercises that he lives now in the spiritual world. If he did not have acquired this ability to let disappear all that again, he could not be a free observer of the spiritual world. You can compare that with a situation where you look at a thing and cannot turn away from it. Turning your attention to and away from something corresponds in the area of spiritual observation to attaining the impressions and removing them. If the human being has come to this point, not only the splitting takes place which I have already described but he faces two separate areas as it were. From one area he experiences that he has to set aside it from himself; he feels, it is that which he has estimated up to now as his only possession about which he also recognises that he casts off it at death. A certain courage is necessary to grasp this in real knowledge. Since the human being recognises that he must learn to deprive himself of something willingly to which he is attached and which is snatched away from him usually only at death.

Then he gets to know that as it were the fruit that is chosen as seed is the human essence which is not taken up in the physical body, but which is only the basis of it. The essence is due not to the ancestors, but originates from the spiritual world; it uses what the parents give to the external-bodily existence.

Spiritual science points out that in the human being probably the qualities of the ancestors live that, however, it is an inexact consideration if one says that the human being is only composed of that which he inherited from the parents. Physically the human being bears the characteristics of his physical heredity, but something spiritual-mental can come only from something spiritual-mental. You can get to know the spiritual-mental core this way. Because the human being is an internally closed individuality, you are not concerned with something generic. That is, the spiritual-mental core is rooted in the individual of the human being. However, with it we realise that teaching of repeated lives on earth.

This spiritual-mental that we bear in ourselves and through the gate of death is rooted in a former life on earth and further ones, until there comes a time when it lived for the first time. What rests in this part of our being walks through the gate of death and lives then in a supersensible existence. From this, the human being enters into a new earthly life while he proceeds towards the line of heredity.

You realise, the logic is completely the same as in natural sciences. He who wants to fight against it does only not know about which he talks, actually. Since if that who stands on scientific ground wanted to say: nevertheless, one can prove that the qualities are inherited from the parents—, one must answer to him: as far as natural sciences can prove it, one can only say: it is true!—If, however, the materialist monist says, because one has inherited these qualities from the ancestors, they could not be due to that which the human being has acquired in a former life as forces which appear in his current life again, then one has to answer, one can say just as well, the human being is wet because he has fallen into water.—The one is true because the other is true. It is true that the human being has inherited certain qualities from his ancestors—it is true, however, also that he was attracted by these parents because he has to appropriate the forces which he can get just from these parents. Something spiritual causes something spiritual only.

Someone who wants to look properly at this matter admits that today spiritual science has to go forward as Francesco Redi did who had to establish the sentence as a scientific truth: life can only originate from life.—Spiritual science will experience the same destiny with reference to the acceptance of this truth. People did not accept this sentence with pleasure. Only by the skin of the teeth, Francesco Redi escaped from the destiny of Giordano Bruno. Today one does no longer talk of heresy, but today one calls the persons daydreamers who have to announce something new. Today one has milder methods than burning at the stake to prevent what must come into our civilisation. However, it will happen in such a way as it always happened in such cases. What one called pipe dream at first becomes self-evident afterwards.

I have already said, one is not surprised about opposition. The thing is in such a way that not only those who deal a little with these things, but also those who want to enter into the spiritual world with good will do not yet want to understand the teaching of the repeated lives on earth.

With the teaching of reincarnation, we face the question of immortality quite unlike if one judges it concerning an infinite time. Then you face immortality in such a way that you see it establishing link about link. One speaks of the fact that the soul lives on because one realises that in one life on earth the seed of another life is enclosed

We see a human being growing up from his earliest childhood in affectionate surroundings, and we see another human being growing up in surroundings that can work only badly on him. Why is it that way? There we must consider the one and the other life caused by a former life on earth. Even if it sounds hopeless, on the one hand, that every misfortune is self-inflicted, one has to say, and nevertheless that good luck and misfortune concern something else if one considers good luck and misfortune from the only entitled viewpoint.

What I mean with it, I would like to show by an example. An eighteen-year-old young man whose father was very rich led a loose life. He wanted to learn nothing, enjoyed life only, and was on the way to become a scapegrace. Then his father died, and at the same time, his property got lost. The young man was thereby forced to learn something, to work, and he became a capable person. There he had to say to himself, what seemed to be misfortune was good luck for me.

Thus, we have to say to ourselves in a misfortune, we have determined ourselves for this misfortune from a former life; we have led ourselves to this destiny. Then it is unjustified to judge a misfortune, while we experience it. One has to consider it as the result of a former imperfection. We have to say to ourselves, the soul would not be able to develop completely if it did not experience this misfortune. The misfortune can be a school of perfection.

If anybody has already here attained a knowledge that he has gained in life, and we ask him, you have experienced grief and pain, joy, and bliss—which experience would you rather give away?—If the human being contemplated about the true issue, he would answer: I accept joy and bliss gratefully; but from the sufferings, I have just received my knowledge: I would never have become that who I am.—One judges suffering different from the viewpoint of the usual sensations. Thus, one must not call the teaching of repeated lives on earth hopeless. What is given to us with this teaching? The question of immortality and the question of destiny. The question of immortality is solved because we know that this life carries the seed of the following life in itself. Thus, the whole life combines to an immortal one quite scientifically. The question of destiny is solved because destiny is necessary for development. Trying to understand death and pain means strictly speaking that you develop interest for the big riddles of life.

In 1909, a great scholar, Charles W. Eliot, held a lecture about the future of religion. He admitted that the human being has to get from the natural processes to assuming spirit and soul; however, he also demanded that the future worldview must not take death and pain as starting point. He said, the worldviews of the past talked about pain and grief. The sufferings are reduced with joy. A worldview should talk only about joys and overcome pains.—One would like to agree with him, because, indeed, it would be desirable that the human being could speak also about a joyful material life. However, if the human being wants to refrain from death and pain and says, I do not want to build up a worldview on grief and pain, I want to accept a joyful life only, then one must answer to him, even if you accept a joyful life, death and grief come automatically, they approach you, they enter into your life. Only such a worldview can really cope with the riddles, which, like spiritual science, encompasses suffering and joy because both are means of perfection. A worldview can only cope with death if it understands that the spiritual-mental core has to cast off the cover that it has around itself as the plant seed has to cast off the withering leaves and blossoms. To enter into the next life we have to develop the spiritual-mental core that has to cast off the body, has to go through death.

There one copes with death because one recognises that one can get to a new life with it. One recognises death as the root of the immortal life. Not because one copes with the world riddles grief and death that one closes the eyes before them as Charles Eliot means, but that one recognises them as necessary like luck and life. I have just said that in the present many preconditions are not yet there to penetrate into these things. I would like to quote a man who tried to settle deeply in spiritual problems who delivered some wonderful, however, also often mystically-blurred things, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949, Belgian author). He approached the question of immortality in the last time. He got to know the teaching of reincarnation and karma. You can literally read in the translation of his newest work (La mort, On Death, 1913) about that which he regards as “faith.” He regards spiritual science as faith. He says: “Since there never was a faith, which is nicer, fairer, purer, more moral, more fertile, more comforting and more probable in a certain sense than this.”—He means the “faith” of theosophy.—

“With its teaching of gradual atonement and purification it only gives a meaning to all physical and spiritual dissimilarities, to any social injustice, to any outrageous injustice of destiny. However, the goodness of a faith is no proof of its truth, although 600 million people follow this religion. Although it is closest to the origins wrapped in darkness, although it is the only religion that is not spiteful and not vulgar, it would have had to do what the others did not do: to give us unquestionable proofs. Since what it gave us up to now is only the first shade of the beginning of a proof.”

There you see such a person who has approached spiritual science who finds, however, no possibility to provide a proof—what he calls a proof.

One has to say to that first: if he does not regard anything as proof, it does not mean that this view cannot be proved, but it means that this view has not penetrated him. It is typical for the present that it is so hard for people to find their way to something that once will be a matter of course.

Secondly, one has to say, if you just find such a statement like that of the brilliant Maeterlinck and you figure it out deeper, the thought suggests itself automatically: should this view of repeated lives on earth be proven? As well as I have today discussed that—even if sketchily—I have given what you can call a rationale. However, it may be that anybody demands something of a proof that one cannot demand at all from a proof.

I would like to remind of something else. There were always people who dealt with squaring the circle. Those persons who invented proofs over and over again have gradually become a real scourge of mathematical societies. Since they received a number of such proofs every year, which all were nonsense. However, one always believed that the proof would be found once. Finally, the Paris academy did not know how to escape and cast them into the wastebasket. Nevertheless, it was not allowed to suppose that the proof could not be found. Once one could reflect on squaring the circle, now no longer, because meanwhile one proved that this proof could not at all exist. The squaring the circle is not possible. Nevertheless, there are very simple means to transform the circle into a square. One takes a paper, cuts a circle out, carves it into small pieces; and puts them into a square. Then one has not done it with calculation but with an action. One cannot calculate it, but one can go forward this way. Nevertheless, the thing is true and reasonable, but one has searched the proofs in the wrong way. Maeterlinck does it that way. He demands something that requires a wrong way of thinking.

We realise from it which difficulties even today exist to acknowledge spiritual science. We realise just in this newest work of Maeterlinck that also such a man manages hard [with these thoughts]; we realise that it is difficult to introduce spiritual science into humanity.

One cannot say, well, if the thing is in such a way as you have told, then only the spiritual researchers can enter into the spiritual world. That is not the case. To be a spiritual researcher is only necessary to search the things in the spiritual world. If one has found them, however, one has to transform them into a thought-image as I tried it in my book Occult Science. An Outline. If then this thought-image is properly created, the common sense can understand it, and then one does not need to prove it in such a way, as Maeterlinck believes it. Everybody can understand spiritual science who considers that unbiasedly which the spiritual researcher has transformed into thought-images. As you do not need to be a painter to understand a picture, you do not need to be a spiritual researcher to understand the spiritual facts that the spiritual researcher has received from the spiritual world. The common sense is able to do this if it is not bound to prejudices. The soul needs that which the spiritual researcher has transformed into a picture for its security and strength. The spiritual researcher has still nothing of the spiritual world if he only walks around there; he has something only if he transforms that which he beholds into thought-images and ideas.

Although in our time everybody can become a spiritual researcher to a certain degree as I described it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, so that he can convince himself directly of that which I have said today, it is not necessary that everybody is a spiritual researcher. It is as with a riddle that you have to solve; you have not to prove the solution if you find it out for yourself. If you face spiritual science properly, you combine with it from understanding, as well as one can find the solution of a riddle.

He who delves into spiritual science settles in it. Because the soul is destined for truth and not for error, we know if we have penetrated into the spiritual world by the messages of the spiritual researcher: we have understood it.—If the solution of a riddle is told to us, we believe not only that it is in such a way, but we also know it. This is the case with the understanding of spiritual science. It cannot be accepted only on authority, but as soon as it has been informed to us, our soul adjusts itself so that we also understand it. The spiritual researcher has a little bit more of this understanding if he has transformed the spiritual facts and truths into thought-images. Every human being who approaches spiritual science has the same for his soul; he has a new relationship to the riddles of life, to the question of death. This understanding is not only theoretic, but can serve as an elixir of life. If a human being is so educated that the spiritual-scientific concepts live in him, he will also feel towards age in such a way that he can probably understand the Goethean word “one becomes a mystic in old age.” Then he says to himself, if my limbs start withering if my body pines away, I am like the plant seed whose leaves wither. The spiritual-mental core arises in me. One will not only know about this essence, one will feel it as a force that goes through the gate of death and through a spiritual world to prepare a new life again. This solution of the question of immortality is practical for life. The human being will experience the immortal in himself.

Spiritual science will become an elixir of life this way; it will be able to give the human being strength and security. We know that today life is more complex because of the triumphs of natural sciences than it was once. We also realise that the soul sometimes needs a support that it cannot have from that which you can get spiritually from the past. Natural sciences continue to lead humanity from triumph to triumph. However, with it the human being will be torn more and more. Strong inner forces have to be there. Only spiritual science is able to strengthen the human beings enough not to get nervous by the effects of modern life. If, however, anybody really penetrates into spiritual science, he rises more and more to those viewpoints to which the true spiritual researcher rises already today.

Dear attendees! When I had the honor of speaking here a few weeks ago about the figure of Zarathustra, the intention was to show the significance that such a leading individuality has for the general spiritual life of humanity. We may say that we can feel this significance to an increased degree in a figure whose effects still extend so strongly into the immediate present, as is the case with the figure of Moses. For who would deny that a large part of our emotional and intellectual life, and a large part of what takes hold of the institutions and conditions of our environment through our thoughts, is still deeply influenced by the after-effects of those deeds in the development of humanity that are associated with the name of Moses. Although we go back almost one and a half millennia before the founding of Christianity, we can say that the after-effects of this act can be felt right to the innermost part of our soul tissue. Therefore, it must be of the greatest interest to us to understand what this mission, this teaching of Moses, means in the evolution of humanity as a whole.

Now it is not that easy to speak about the figure of Moses. On the one hand, it is not like the figure of Zarathustra or Zoroaster, whose historical outlines are blurred for us and of whom we can hardly specify even minor character traits from external documents; rather, the personality of Moses stands sharply outlined and vividly before modern man from the biblical record of the Old Testament. On the other hand, however, it cannot be denied that in the broadest sense, especially among those who deal with so-called critical Bible research, all sorts of doubts are attached to this description of the personality of Moses – doubts that not only challenge what the Bible tells us about the figure of Moses, but doubts that even go so far as to question the existence of Moses himself.

Now, as we have already shown on a number of occasions in other descriptions here, a genuine spiritual scientific approach to the religious documents provides the proof that we cannot so easily dismiss what is written in these documents, because more precise research in particular has often shown that the statements of the old religious documents are much, much more correct than one sometimes believes. But it is precisely when one adheres to the image that is given to us from the Bible of the figure of Moses that it is difficult to work this figure out spiritually – difficult for the reason that one must have insight into the way in which it is spoken in those parts of the Bible in which Moses is mentioned. These descriptions are very peculiar; they are so peculiar that we can characterize them in a few words in the following way.

In the Old Testament portions of the Bible, external physical events, external facts that once took place historically before the eyes of men, are continually interwoven with allegorical descriptions; without our being able to immediately and easily recognize the transition, the historical external facts merge into allegorical descriptions of inner soul processes. In the Bible, for example, a character may be presented as undertaking this or that journey, doing this or that, and then as the story unfolds, it may appear that what is being described are external events, whereas in fact the descriptions of these events are being used to depict inner soul conflicts, inner soul developments, soul stages. The description of external events then serves only to illustrate inner soul processes in certain parts. As I said, in the biblical description the transition from one to the other is not always readily recognizable. Only that measure of understanding that can be gained from spiritual scientific principles enables us to recognize: Here, in a biblical account, the will stops describing purely external, physical processes and a sequence of symbolic actions begins, which suggest to us that the personality, which until then did this or that externally, is now undergoing a soul development; it ascends from stage to stage and acquires this or that in its soul life. But it is not the soul life that is described, but symbols are given.

This has even led to the fact that a great theological-philosophical writer who lived around the time of the founding of Christianity, Philo of Alexandria, based on his opinion, regarded all the events described in the oldest parts of the Old Testament as symbols of soul processes [of the Hebrew people]. Such an opinion, however, goes much too far; it does not take into account that in the biblical account, external events are mixed up with internal soul processes. Today, we will endeavor to present the image of Moses that can be gained from the Bible in such a way that the two different descriptions can actually be distinguished.

To get to know the personality of Moses, one must consider the whole culture from which the deed of Moses has grown. And so it is incumbent upon me to first characterize the ancient Egyptian culture in spiritual scientific terms with a few strokes - that culture from which, after all, in terms of external events, what we can call the mission of Moses has grown. Now, however, one can only understand this ancient Egyptian culture in its development and the outgrowth of the deed of Moses [from this culture] if one knows two important spiritual scientific laws, and these two spiritual scientific laws must be the basis of our consideration. One law has been mentioned here several times. It is the fact that the entire nature and configuration of human consciousness and the human soul's makeup has not always been as it is now, but that it has changed significantly over the millennia of human development. We already know – and here it is only briefly hinted at – that the further back we go in human development, the more we encounter a different state of mind, a different kind of consciousness in people than what is considered normal consciousness today.

Where prehistory merges into history, that is, in those times from which we have historical documents, the old state of mind is already changing into the newer one. That is why people today find it so difficult to imagine that the word 'development', which today, in terms of its outward form, exerts such a magical power on people, must above all be applied to the process of the human soul in its becoming. And the further back we go, the more we find that the way we look at things today, which we perceive through our senses and link through the ordinary mind tied to the physical brain, that this way of viewing things by merely alternating our waking consciousness with our sleeping consciousness, which is interrupted at most only by irregular dreams, was not always present, but that this form of consciousness has only developed gradually.

The further back we go, the more we come to another form of human consciousness. Although what we call our present waking and sleeping consciousness has already been prepared in the millennia we are talking about today, in those ancient times, which still reach into the oldest times of Egyptian culture and of which external history does not know much to report, there was a kind of old clairvoyant consciousness, a kind of pictorial consciousness. It was this consciousness that asserted itself as a third state of consciousness, like an intermediate state between waking and sleeping. The waking consciousness, as it is today and on which our present-day view of the world is based, was preparing itself in its beginnings, and our “sleeping unconsciousness” was also essentially already present. But people still had a third form of consciousness that was not permeated by those thoughts, concepts and ideas through which we today enlighten ourselves about our environment. It was filled with images, of which the symbols of today's dream are an atavism. But in these images, which undulated up and down, nothing was arbitrary, but these images could be clearly related to supersensible facts and entities that stand behind our sensual world, so that in this state, man actually of an ancient clairvoyance, he reached into the spiritual, into the supersensible world and, from direct experience, from the ancient, dream-like consciousness of clairvoyance, had knowledge of what takes place in the spiritual world.

The further development of humanity consists in the fact that the power of one soul develops at the expense of another. Our present-day intellectuality, the way in which we connect the external objects given by our senses through our concepts and ideas, could only develop by darkening the clairvoyant consciousness, by descending into an indefinite subconscious of man and transforming itself into the present mental state. This will later combine again with a certain kind of clairvoyant consciousness, but this will then be interspersed with our intellectuality, whereas the intellectual element was precisely lacking in the old clairvoyant consciousness.

Now we have to familiarize ourselves with the fact that this ancient consciousness had to take on the most diverse forms. And for this to be possible, each of the ancient peoples - in accordance with their national character - was called upon to develop this ancient consciousness in a very specific way. One can literally speak of the fact that each nation had the mission to develop consciousness in a very specific way. The Egyptian people, for example, whose ancient, sacred wisdom, on which the ancient Egyptian script is based and which we can still admire today, was the one that received its wisdom in ancient times from its leaders through such clairvoyant awareness, that is, through direct insight into the spiritual worlds. And from the most ancient times the tradition went right down to the later times of the Egyptian people. What we find from these later times as historical accounts is essentially the echo of what the leaders of the Egyptian people saw clairvoyantly in the spiritual worlds in times gone by.

Now, however, we must be clear about the fact - and this is the other fact that is to be presented today from the basis of spiritual science - that for every human soul disposition, for every way of looking at things in the environment, there is a specific epoch for it, and when this has passed, another soul disposition must take the place of the old one. A nation that retains this old state of mind beyond the very specific point in time when an old state of mind should be replaced by a new one must face the decline of its spiritual powers, decadence. And we also see this, because why do nations face decadence? Because, so to speak, they have been inoculated with a certain soul-disposition from their national origin, and now, out of a certain conservative element, they want to keep it. But the world's development says: Up to here [with the old soul-disposition], and now a new one must come in! The nations can keep the old one, but then they will decay, because the time for a new soul-disposition has come.

Now, while the development of Egypt was taking place, a new era was dawning. The clock of the old, clairvoyant culture had run down, and within this culture of the ancient peoples an intellectual culture was to arise, one that was directed towards understanding, towards reason in the ordinary sense, towards the intellectual combination and comprehension of the things of the outer world. This intellectual culture, this kind of state of mind, extends far into our present time. We ourselves have the peculiarity of still bearing in our souls what had to be integrated into the course of Egyptian culture at that time, namely, what we have as our intellectuality, as our way of looking at things. What had to take the place of ancient Egyptian culture in Egypt at that time extends to us. The personality of Moses was destined to bring [man] to an intellectual understanding of the world around him - in contrast to the old, clairvoyant culture. It is therefore no wonder that the deed of Moses reaches to us, sending its offshoots into our souls. Because it has made fruitful precisely that kind of human soul-condition to which we ourselves still belong, we still feel in some way akin to the deed of Moses. Moses was placed in the midst of the Egyptian people, and out of Egyptian culture he was to found the modern culture of the intellect in its very first basis. He founded the New for which the cosmic clock was attuned, and the ancient Egyptian culture was outgrown and fell into decay. He brought what he had to give to the people to whom he had come of his own accord, and led them out of their Egyptian background, in whom the germ of the rational culture of humanity was to develop.

People who are called upon to recognize the course of the world's history are always described to us in such a way that something happens in connection with their birth that has a symbolic significance for the development of their soul. The biblical story describes how Moses was found by the daughter of Pharaoh in the well-known box in which he was placed. Whether or not this is an accurate account need not be discussed further here. We are simply meant to be shown by this description that there were originally predisposed forces in this Moses that were destined to bring something quite new, a completely new kind of soul-disposition into the world. Therefore, it had to be shown symbolically that this soul, in which the germ of something new was, had to remain completely unaffected by its surroundings for a while, closed in on itself, and then placed in that environment from which the new was to be carried out. And now we are presented with facts that belong to the area I have characterized, where biblical history tells us what really happened physically in the outer world - [that area] where one can see [the events] with one's own eyes and follow them historically.

There we are made aware of how Moses, through a certain act he has committed, is led to flee. He flees to Midian to a priest, to the priest Jetro. And in this transition from the purely external events that are presented to us - from the killing of the Egyptian and the escape of Moses - we are gently led to an event that looks like a physical continuation of the facts, but which is nothing other than a symbolic representation of the events that Moses is now experiencing [internally] and that he can only experience by coming into the presence of a priest, a bearer of the most comprehensive cosmic wisdom. This is hinted at and is clear enough for those who understand the images that are used again and again in the same way.

We are told that Moses, when he fled to the priest Jetro, first came upon a well. The well always indicates the source of wisdom - the source of human culture, of spiritual educational elements that someone finds. And then we are led further in a very strange way. We are shown how Moses finds the seven daughters of Jetro, who is also called Reguel by another name. That he was a priest of the deity that was placed above all other gods in those ancient times is indicated to us by the fact that we are told – told by his name – that he belongs to this supreme deity. This is always indicated by the suffix '-el', as in Gabriel, Michael, who 'belong to the highest God'. So Jetro-Reguel was a priest of the highest God. And we are told, by means of symbolic images of the soul processes, that Moses was to come into contact with a priest who could pour the most powerful wisdom into the soul of Moses. It was a wisdom such that his soul became full of light and strength, so that he could fulfill his mission of bringing a new soul state into humanity.

Now, in the old psychology of the soul, things were thought of somewhat differently than they are today, and so we have to realize how ancient psychology actually thought. Today we speak more or less of the human soul as something unified, and for our time we are quite right to do so. We speak of thinking, feeling and willing as forces that live in our soul, and we even know that if these three forces are not in the right harmony in our soul, the health of our soul is affected. And this is based on the fact that our soul has developed from what it used to be into what it is today. In ancient times, the wise said that different areas lived in the human soul, and they listed seven such areas. Just as we list the three areas of thinking, feeling and willing today, they listed seven different areas of the soul, but they did not imagine the soul as a single unit.

We can visualize the ideas of these ancient sages something like this. Let us assume that the human soul today does not feel as a unity, but rather says to itself: Thinking, feeling and willing live in me, but a special kind of spiritual current from the cosmos penetrates into thinking, which is only connected to the thinking of the human being; another current penetrates into feeling and yet another into willing. And these forces would not be held together by the power of the present ego, but by the intervention of divine spiritual beings from without, as it were, who shape our soul life into harmony. Thus it would not be we ourselves who harmoniously unite the members of our soul life with each other, but external powers that reach in from the cosmic expanses. The ancient sages assumed seven such powers, and these seven powers reached into the soul independently, as it were. What was grasped with this wisdom was the outpouring of seven forces that flowed through the world and poured into the seven soul regions of man. And what flowed in as soul forces was imagined in the image of the seven daughters of the bearer of the total wisdom.

This is something that still resonates in all the later mystical ideas, which imagined that which flowed into the soul as wisdom or as soul light or as impulses of will, as female: This also still resonates in Goethe's “Faust”, where it says, “The eternal feminine draws us up,” which must not be interpreted frivolously. And when we are told that Moses met with the seven daughters of Jethro at the well, it means that the seven rays of wisdom emanated from Jethro and poured into the soul of Moses — separate from each other, as was thought everywhere in ancient psychology. In those ancient times, wisdom, the spiritual forces of inspiration in the world, was thought of as personal and concrete, not abstract, as it is today.

In our study of Zarathustra, we saw how that which flows into man is conceived by Zarathustra as concrete world powers, as the Amshaspands and the Izeds or Izards. And here we see the progress in the thinking of mankind: what was presented in living spirituality as having a personal character and flowing into the human soul fades in the Platonic ideas, for example. The seven different powers of inspiration of the soul are presented to us figuratively in the seven daughters of the high priest whom Moses meets at the well. And the fact that he is called to develop one of these powers in order to begin his special mission in humanity is indicated by the fact that he is married to one of Jethro's seven daughters. And we will see which of the seven basic powers falls precisely within the mission of Moses. We can trace these seven soul forces throughout the Middle Ages, for what we encounter in the so-called seven liberal arts as the animators of the human soul are the faded abstractions of the seven ancient spiritual sources.

These seven spiritual sources, which were to flow into the soul of each individual, were conceived in such a way that one was more related to the wise understanding of the world – clairvoyant wisdom, of course – another spiritual power was more related to the loving embrace of facts and entities, a third more to the impulses of the will, a fourth to memory, and so on. It was now intended that Moses should incorporate one of these seven spiritual powers into his special mission and replace what had previously ruled humanity with the wisdom that permeates the world. This spiritual power is intellectuality; it is the kind of understanding and grasp of the world that no longer relies on clairvoyance but on the powers of the external mind.

Now a transition must be created everywhere. The old cannot easily be transformed into the new. Moses was called upon to replace the old clairvoyant wisdom, which was still native to Egypt and had already begun to decline in Moses' time, with the new intellectuality, the rational overview of things. He himself, however, still had to develop the new way out of a certain clairvoyance that he still had through grace. The fact that Moses still saw things in the old way of clairvoyance, but saw them as the new intellectuality should see them, created the bridge, as it were, between the old clairvoyance and the new intellectuality of humanity, free from clairvoyance.

What is this new intellectuality bound to? It is bound to that center of our soul that we designate with the simple word “I”. By consciously ascribing existence to the center of our soul, we enclose the realm of our consciousness as the realm of intellectuality - that realm in which reason and intellect, concept and idea are at work. If one wants to enclose this area, one must be aware that it only holds together because it is held together by the unified ego.

So what was given to Moses [as a task]? Well, an infinitely important deed lay before Moses - one can express it that way if one wants to put Moses' experience into words. Moses could say to himself: The gods have worked through their various powers into the human soul, and when people of ancient times, in their clairvoyance, looked over this or that, when they felt this or that in the outer world, they always spoke of the gods who lived outside in the cosmos. But for intellectuality – for that grasping of the outer world that is bound to the deepest human center – the God must enter into the innermost center of the human being, must connect with this I. And a God must be recognized who is not merely seen in the clouds, in the stars, but of whom it must be said: He works in the clouds, that is the power of the clouds; but when He streams into the soul, He brings about what this human soul experiences in itself.

Not only could this be said of the external gods, but also this: Now such a soul power must develop in humanity, which can only develop through the power of a god who has his being in the I of man. This God, who was to enter into the innermost being of man, into his I, appeared to the clairvoyant consciousness of Moses through the inspiration of the priest. And through clairvoyance, Moses beheld God, that is, through that which could still be kindled in him of clairvoyant power — which is indicated to us by the image of the burning bush. As this is described, everyone who understands these things recognizes that an astral-clairvoyant vision of a reality is present. The new God, who was to have his being in the ego, appeared in the burning bush. And Moses asked this God: If I am now to lead my people in your name, what must I say, who has sent me? You can read it in the Bible yourself – even if the translations of the Bible are otherwise very inadequate, here they are correct. To the question: Who has sent you?, Moses is given the answer: Tell your people that 'I am' has sent you. And that means: That divine power has sent you, which kindles in the innermost human center the possibility that man can speak in this innermost center “I am”, thus attaches his existence to himself, experiences his existence himself: “I am, who I am”!

That was what Moses clairvoyantly pre-experienced: the intellectuality of humanity. With this, he stood at a point where the old culture, in relation to the human soul, was to merge into a completely new culture. This was a transition over an abyss of human culture, as if the world powers had said: In the future, intellectuality must prevail, and those who want to continue the old ways are heading for decline. We must cross over this abyss. Moses might have said this to himself. And so the followers of Moses felt that the transition over a cosmic world abyss had been won. That is why the followers of Moses celebrated the Passover, the festival of the transition over a world abyss, in memory of this act of Moses. Oh, these ancient festivals, which today we are accustomed to celebrating in such a trivial way, relate to great mysteries of the existence of the world. Now when Moses, endowed with the power for thousands of years, came to the court of Pharaoh, it is no wonder that this Pharaoh, who had grown out of the old Hellschic culture of Egypt, could not understand the signs that Moses displayed before him.

We cannot go into the details of the misunderstandings that took place between Moses and Pharaoh. These are all images that are intended to show us that Pharaoh spoke out of an ancient clairvoyant culture and out of a state of mind that also came from this clairvoyant culture. The ancient pictographic script also originated from such a culture. Everything that Egyptians could understand about the course of natural events arose from this. But Moses developed such an understanding of world phenomena, such a combination of facts, as emerged from modern intellectuality. Of course, to those who were still steeped in the old clairvoyant consciousness, this appeared as a miracle, as miraculous events, for just as people today cannot imagine that things happen other than as they imagine them, the ancient cultural people could not imagine that things happen as modern people imagine them. Thus, the concept of miracle has only been reversed.

And we know, of course, as the Bible presents it to us, that Moses really did succeed, through his great strength, which arose from an inspiration of the soul, in leading this people, who were his descendants through blood, as it were, out of Egypt, but in such a way that afterwards, separated from Egyptian culture, they were able to develop an intellectual culture. Therefore, we see that from this mission of Moses everything that we can call thinking, which can be traced back to a unity - to the unity of Yahweh - and can permeate the world with reason, with concepts and ideas, arises from this mission of Moses. That was the mission of the ancient Hebrew people: to infuse human culture with reason, intellectualism, concepts and ideas. And anyone who wants to see things as they are will understand that to this day this peculiar mission of the ancient Hebrew people has been at work and that this peculiar intellectual culture could only emerge from such a source.

How did those for whom Moses was the inspirer relate to those who still came from the old clairvoyant culture? How did the followers of Moses, whom he led out of Egypt, relate to the Egyptians? Here we have to familiarize ourselves with some peculiarities of the state of mind of people who were influenced by the old clairvoyant culture and perhaps still are today. There are always stragglers, and these are the ones whose intellectual development is retarded. To make it clear to us how certain soul powers prevail there, I would like to remind you first of certain things in animals, although I do not want to compare the human with the animal. One speaks of instinctive activity in animals. We will not criticize the word instinct further; everyone knows what is meant by it, namely this elementary, direct action and doing, as we find it in the animal kingdom, which contrasts with [purposeful] human action. In humans, we have considered action; in animals, actions come from instincts. The more we go back to the old clairvoyant state, the more instinctive action becomes for people as well. They are led, driven to their actions; they do not first give account of themselves in concepts and ideas. We also find a certain instinctive action in every old soul condition.

Now I remind you of something that is truer than one might think. You will have heard descriptions that, for example, when eruptions from volcanoes are imminent, the animals move away beforehand and thus do not fall prey to the catastrophe. There is some truth behind these descriptions: just as I follow my instinct when flying, so do animals follow a mysterious urge when volcanoes erupt. Now, people, who have already risen to the level of thinking in terms of concepts and ideas, can no longer act so instinctively; they remain [and succumb] to the disaster. Even though such reports are often exaggerated, But there is some truth in them, because where there is an instinct, there is a more intimate connection between natural events and what is felt in the human soul than there is in such actions, which are based on concepts and ideas. Thus, the state of mind of the ancient peoples also changed; it became different in those who thought intellectually.

And so the followers of Moses now faced the ancient Egyptians: the Egyptians, an ancient people, the followers of Moses, the new people. And this was due to its entire blood composition, intellectually, rationally combining natural phenomena, thinking rationally. Yes, it now comes into consideration that the time for the old instinctive in the state of mind has expired. [And when this time has expired], then the [old] powers come into decline, then they are no longer useful. They were useful in ancient times; then people instinctively sensed the course of natural events and acted accordingly. But this came into decline around the time that Moses was called upon to bring a completely new culture, and there was no longer time for the old instinctive soul powers. And now let us imagine that on the one hand Moses and on the other the ancient Egyptians are confronted with natural events. The ancient Egyptians could not intellectually combine natural phenomena. In ancient times they had felt it instinctively in their souls when the sea level rose again; there was an intimate bond between the soul life and the external natural phenomena. Never would the soul have failed to feel when the sea level receded so that one could cross the dry land. But the ancient times were over. The Egyptians no longer had these ancient, instinctive powers, because the time had come when one should intellectually survey the context of things. Moses was called to do this. He now stood before the sea, and he knew from the course of natural events when to retreat so that he and his people could cross over. Through the newly developed intellectuality, it was possible for him to read this point in time from nature. In ancient times, the Egyptians would have sensed that they could no longer cross, but they were not yet ripe for the new kind of knowledge; they fell prey to the waves because their soul forces had come into decadence, into decay. Thus we see Moses leading his followers across the receding waters by intellectual deduction, and we see the Egyptians falling prey to the floods, because they could only have sensed from their ancient, instinctive strength that the sea was rising again, but they no longer had this instinctive strength.

We are standing at the boundary between the old and the new times, we are standing at the point where the mission of Moses stands out clearly from the mission of the ancient Egyptian people. At such a point, we feel how profound and significant the descriptions of the religious documents are, but one needs spiritual science to understand the religious documents; this wants to be a servant to the understanding of these documents. Today I can only sketch out an outline, but try for yourself to compare everything you find in the Bible or in other documents with what has been said today, and you will see: the more closely you take what spiritual science has to say, the more you will find that what can only be sketched out today with a few lines of charcoal is true, because it corresponds to reality everywhere.

Let us now see further: We see how the special disposition that Moses has to convey to his people as his mission is particularly linked to protecting the purity of the blood. Especially with this people it should not mix, it should keep itself separate from the other peoples, so that the same blood runs down through generations and generations. Why is that so? We can understand that too, if we visualize the changes in the state of mind. Clairvoyance – whether it is the old, pictorial kind or the kind that is often described here, which the modern person can achieve by going through the appropriate exercises – clairvoyance is always tied to the person's spiritual part being able to become independent of their physical body, that they can, in a sense, draw their spiritual part out of their physical body. What the clairvoyant experiences, he experiences only through the tool of the soul, which frees itself, as it were, goes out of physical corporeality. The modern materialist will regard this as foolishness from the outset; he cannot believe that all the activity of his soul is bound to the physical brain. But clairvoyance is not bound to the brain, but takes place in the life of the soul without the brain. Only experience can confirm this, and anyone who does not have this experience can refute it with a thousand seemingly sufficient reasons, much like a blind person can refute the existence of colors. But that is not the point. According to the principles of today's research, one should admit that only experience can decide. So clairvoyance is dependent on the spiritual part of the human being freeing itself from the instruments of the physical body.

We have to look at all ancient cultures in such a way that they were based, in a certain way, on the paths of imagination, inspiration, and intuition, which flowed into the soul. These cultures therefore had something that was independent of the physical body and merely flowed down into the physical world. This is why the remains of ancient cultures are so difficult to interpret, because the moment you become independent of the physical body through consciousness, you can only live in more plastic forms than the physical body. In clairvoyance one does not have such sharply defined contours as in the physical; one has something pictorial that does not refer so directly to the physical world as is otherwise the case with intellectual comprehension; one has something that refers more symbolically to external things. We may say, then, that the clairvoyant cultures - and this includes the Egyptian in all its greatness - must be given to us in such a way in all their traditions that they use images instead of external, sharp conceptual contours. The myths, the old legends, in which the secrets of the world are immersed, are pictorial representations of the secrets of the world; they are echoes of the old pictorial clairvoyance. In a certain sense, the transmission of culture was still bound up with spiritual processes.

But now it was precisely the mission of Moses to give the souls such a constitution and to lay the foundation for culture that was bound to intellectuality, but thus also to the outer instrument of the body. For that is the peculiarity of [intellectual] thought: it conceptualizes things in the same way as our normal, waking consciousness, and this consciousness is entirely bound to the tools of the brain and the rest of the body. Intellectuality is bound to the tools of the physical body. It is no wonder that this special intellectual gift was bound to a special configuration, to special organ predispositions of a people, and had to be transmitted from generation to generation through the physical blood until the mission of the ancient Hebrew people was fulfilled. Thus, the physical instrument for intellectuality had to be bound to the physical peculiarity of this people through the blood flowing from generation to generation, and had to be refined more and more until it was so refined that the physical vehicle for that spiritual power, which then poured in to a much higher degree than the Divine power into the human 'I am' - to a much higher degree than had happened through the old power of Yahweh. And in this respect, the mission of Moses was indeed the preparation for the deed of Christ. But first the outer instruments had to be trained in the appropriate way. And so we also understand that this deed of Moses was bound to a very specific people, whose blood had to be kept pure because this special power, which is bound to the instrument of the outer body, was to flow into human cultural development.

Thus, the act of Moses fits entirely harmoniously and uniformly into the overall development of humanity. We perceive him as the great standard-bearer of intellectuality – in all its peculiarity, which is even expressed in mysticism, that is, in human spiritual activity, which is otherwise the most alien to understanding and reason. Even in mysticism, for example in Hebrew Kabbalah, it is clear to us that this culture has the mission of bringing understanding and reason, combinatory comprehension of external events into human culture.

And when we look back to the Hermes culture of ancient Egypt with its wonderful, old clairvoyant culture, we see how it is called upon to bear the no longer clairvoyant Moses culture in its bosom, but that it itself must perish because the clock of world development is now set to intellectuality. And that is the significance of the Christ event, that with Him and the Mystery of Golgotha, such a powerful spiritual thrust has come into intellectual development – such a powerful spiritual impulse – that little by little, as humanity, having become intellectual, more and more familiarizes itself with the Christ event, the intellectual can also be absorbed by this powerful spiritual impulse, and can be caught by that which in turn leads into the spiritual, into the clairvoyant realm, and carries intellectuality into this realm. We still feel so touched by the significance of the Moses event today because we ourselves are still immersed in the age of intellectual culture and only glimpse a new spirituality and a new mission in the distance.

So, with a few strokes, I was able to draw this picture of Moses for you, my dear audience, as it presents itself to spiritual research in the clairvoyant consciousness, which has an enlightening effect on the external, historical account. This is the only way to distinguish between what is historical and what is a symbolic representation of inner processes in Moses himself. And so Moses stands before our soul as a living being, and we feel how unjustified it is to say that such an impulse should have formed by itself. There are people today who do not understand that effects must also have causes and that effects that point back to the personal also presuppose a personality.

Nevertheless, there are people today who doubt the existence of such a personality as that of Moses. This is certainly a sign of our time. One may say that critical biblical research has a hard time with these things. Those who are familiar with it have a great deal of respect for it, above all because perhaps in no other field of science, not even in the natural sciences, has so much diligence and devotion been expended as in the field of critical biblical research. And yet, in many respects, we see that today it has reached a point where it no longer knows how to help itself in the face of the greatest figures and impulses of humanity, where it only knows how to deny them, just as the historical existence of Jesus is already being denied today. But nevertheless, one must have all respect for the tragedy of this research, which in our materialistic age, out of materialistic ideas, wants to find the inner value of the accounts in the Bible or in other documents. But if one approaches a figure like Moses from a spiritual scientific point of view and shows, based on the secrets of human development, what had to be sunk into the soul of Moses in order for humanity to reach the level we have today, then it seems the most absurd to assume an effect without a cause, that is, a personal creation without personality.

In contrast to this, we can say that it is only through the presentation of spiritual science that the details of the Bible are illuminated in a wonderful way and that the Bible takes on a new value. For now we approach the Bible as a person familiar with mathematical laws approaches a mathematical problem. Those who do not know the mathematical laws see nothing in them but incomprehensible signs, just as they see in problems. Those who do not know the language of the Bible also see only incomprehensible things in it today, perhaps childish images that prehistoric man conjured up. But anyone who gets to know the basics that spiritual science provides and, with its help, deciphers the religious documents, feels something of what has been going on so magnificently through the ages. They feel the language of the nations, of the people in whose souls the spiritual impulses for the progress of humanity are living, that choir of humanity's leading spirits that communicate across the millennia. It is a wonderful phenomenon when the spiritual researcher peers into the spiritual worlds and then looks at the Bible and realizes from the Bible that it tells us something that we can also find through spiritual research ourselves. So we cannot but say: Whoever wrote this must have known what is going on in the spiritual worlds and what is there if such human progress as we now have before us could happen at all.

And so, through spiritual research, we look to Moses as a great leader of humanity. These leaders of humanity become more and more precious to us as we penetrate into the depths of their spirit through spiritual research. And we feel more and more blessed when we look with such sharpened thinking and feeling at these leaders of humanity, of whom it can rightly be said: They illuminate our souls with their spiritual light in order to strengthen our souls with their mighty spiritual power.