The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

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.

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.

Today we want to look at something that I would like to call the relationship that can develop between the individual human soul and what we mean by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Today, wherever one hears about this spiritual science, one often does not yet look hard enough at how different this relationship of the human soul to spiritual science is supposed to be from the relationship of any other knowledge, any other insight, to this human soul. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, is indeed such that it speaks to the human soul in a completely different way than any other knowledge. Through any other knowledge, one gets to know this or that; one learns something about one or the other in the world; one then knows more than one knew before. Spiritual science does not relate to the human soul in such a way that it would only convey something that one knows afterwards. Spiritual science appeals to much deeper impulses of the human soul than mere knowledge, than mere thinking. Spiritual science seizes, or at least wants to seize, the deepest being in us, which, coming from spiritual worlds, moves into our human earthly being at birth and which this human earthly being then leaves in death to pass over into the spiritual worlds to other tasks. Only when we have a true intuitive grasp of this relationship between spiritual science and the outer world, and between the spiritual science and human life, shall we be able to comprehend the full significance of spiritual science for the human soul.

We do not understand the human being fully if we do not realize: that which lives in me as a human being, that which develops in me as a human being through the fact that I have taken on a physical body through birth, that which accompanies me in the course of my life, first as an inexperienced child, then more experienced, more skillful, what takes place in me as fate, everything that is present in my body and in my life, it is actually the transformation of a spiritual-soul being that lived in the spiritual-soul before the human being was conceived or born. And it is this spiritual-soul element that dwells in the body that is actually addressed by what is meant as spiritual science.

Now one might perhaps believe that it is not necessary for a person to occupy himself with this spiritual-soul element within him, because this spiritual-soul element will already find its way in the world. But that is not the case. That which is spiritual and soul in us takes hold of us and is in us, and is to some extent wrapped in our body, in part in our abilities, in part in our destiny. And one could say: It is precisely in the present developmental cycle of humanity, in which humanity has now arrived and in whose sense it will continue to develop towards the future, precisely in the sense of this present and the future, that the human being, as a spiritual principle of his body, as a spiritual principle of his life and his abilities, as a spiritual principle of his destiny, redeems what has become incarnate in him. We cannot escape the spirit. The spirit lives in us. We can leave it out of consideration, but it still lives in us. We can look at the laziest, most comfortable, most casual person who has never made an effort in his life to bring something that lies as a religious or spiritual disposition in his mind to independent development, who has remained quite dull, so to speak. We can look at him: he is not spiritless. To speak of people as spiritless is just an incorrect word. There are no spiritless people; nor is it possible to be spiritless in life. For the spiritual and the soul are our endowment when we enter the physical world from the spiritual worlds; they are allotted to us according to what we have gone through before we descended to this present life on earth. We cannot be without spirit, but we can disregard the spirit within us. We can, as it were, sin against it, we can refuse to want to redeem it. We can want it to merely slip into us, to shroud itself within us: then it is present in us, but we have not liberated it within us, we have not redeemed it.

In this way, too, we must gradually learn to look at people's lives. And our view of life will become quite different, and in the course of time it must become quite different. We can find people in life who have become dull and unfeeling. We will not say that they are spiritless, but we will say that they have committed the sin of burying their spirit during their lifetime, of leaving the spirit in its enchantment, of letting the spirit slip into the flesh, into the merely outward course of life, of letting the spirit degenerate in fate. When we are born, we can only become human beings if the spiritual-soul individuality descends from spiritual-soul worlds. And when the child appears in its first organization, it is still an imperfect image of the spiritual individuality. This lies within him. It can be ignored, or it can be disenchanted, or it can gradually be brought out of the flesh, out of the course of life, out of fate. But it is man's task, and in the future it will increasingly become man's task, not to let the spirit degenerate. We cannot kill the spirit, but we can let it go to rack and ruin by forcing it to take a different path than the one it takes when we bring it out.

If we endeavor from one day on to learn something about the spiritual worlds, to feel something about the spiritual worlds: we actually bring it out of ourselves. The other is just a suggestion. We get it out of ourselves. Whatever you have ever said to yourself about spiritual science, you have drawn from within yourself, because it is within your deepest inner being and wants to come out. And it is meant to come out, and it is a sin against the order of the world to leave the spirit within mere flesh, because there it goes astray; there we abandon it to a fate that it should not take. We liberate the spirit by bringing it out of the flesh. And by consciously permeating ourselves with the spirit, we release that which wants to be released from the underground of existence. One will understand this more and more. It will be increasingly recognized that materialism does not simply prevent the emergence of a [different] theory or allow a false theory to emerge, but that materialism consists in allowing that which wants to enter into the knowledge and perception of the human soul to flow down into coarse matter and to proliferate in coarse matter. This is the question that humanity must decide in the near future: whether it wants to let the spirit proliferate in matter – in which case the spirit becomes a deformity, it leads to diabolical, devilish, Ahriman delusion, or whether humanity will want to transform the spirit into thoughts, into feelings, into impulses of will: then the spirit will live among people and achieve what it wants to achieve by entering into the life of the earth through people. For that is what the spirit wants: to enter into the life of the earth through man. We should not hold it back. And every time we resist becoming acquainted with the spirit, we hold it back: it must, as it were, plunge down into matter, must make matter worse than it is. For the spirit has its allotted task: it is to enter into earthly life through the development of the human soul; there it has a beneficial effect. If it is pushed back into matter, then it has a devastating effect in matter, then it has a bad effect.

If you take this as the essence of spiritual science, you will see that it has a lot to do with our human life. Spiritual science does not want to be a theory like other theories, but wants to give people the opportunity to release and liberate the spirit that is enchanted in human nature, to work in the world what wants to be worked by the spiritual worlds. That is certainly also the reason why many people still very energetically reject spiritual science today. People gladly accept other science because this other science flatters the pride, the vanity of people, but it does not make the claim to be something real, but it merely makes the claim to give thoughts, to to educate the intellect, perhaps also to teach people some useful moral concepts; it does not claim to get to the core of the human being, to be brought from worlds in which a task is assigned to the spirit. I would like to say: only through spiritual science does human knowledge become serious, and people shy away from that. They would also like to have spiritual science only as something that splashes along at the surface of existence. People are afraid that it will get to the core and essence of man. That is why they do not want to accept spiritual science. If they would accept spiritual science, then many things in social life, in historical life, would have to change in the very near future, then people would have to think differently in the most everyday life. And that is what matters. That is why it is also the case that one can take in the other science, but one remains the same throughout one's life, one only becomes richer in knowledge. One should not take in spiritual science without it transforming one, and one cannot take it in without it transforming one. It slowly and gradually makes one into a different person. One must have patience, but it makes one into a different person, because it appeals to completely different human tasks, and it appeals to something completely different in human nature.

Let us take a look at human nature and see how diverse this human life is. The human being devotes himself to three currents: as a conceiving human being, as a feeling human being and as a willing human being. In imagining, feeling and wanting, what we can experience is actually exhausted. Now, all three impulses of the human soul, imagining, feeling and wanting, stand in a very specific relationship to what spiritual science actually wants to address in the human soul, in the core of the human soul.

Let us first take imagining. Imagining is certainly shaped by ordinary science and by what is increasingly being taken from this ordinary science and applied to child-rearing and is therefore so important for the whole development of human destiny, including for practical life, because it is intended to permeate the child. Imagining is not shaped by ordinary science. It is not so very long ago, a few centuries, that this has been the case in the most eminent way, which is why people do not notice it today. But it will not be long before what I am saying now can be observed in an almost comprehensive way. Scientific concepts, as they are taught today to the youngest people, to children, can be absorbed throughout one's entire life without becoming different in terms of one's imagination through absorbing so many concepts in the sense of today's science. One remains the same. Not only that, but it cannot be denied that one becomes more and more limited, even in intellectual terms, through the ordinary scientific concepts that are increasingly becoming part of general education. The mind, in so far as it is a thinking one, loses the flexibility to adapt to living conditions that are much more complicated than what a person can absorb through ordinary knowledge.

You see, it goes deep into the heart when you have some opportunities to see into life today. Those who have become completely accustomed to the concepts that science can provide today are increasingly unable to grasp the vital social interrelations and social demands. They are virtually pushed aside by real life. And that is why I have said here and elsewhere in recent days: Make parliaments and state assemblies out of people who are educated in the sense of today's world view. You will see what these scholars decide, who think scientifically! This is quite certainly suited to corrupting people in terms of social institutions, because in this area of social life, only unfruitful thinking can be done from a scientific point of view. It is the same in many, many respects. One loses a certain flexibility of mind through this merely intellectual knowledge. This will change as soon as you engage with the concepts of spiritual science. Try to realize how differently you have to tune your mind if you want to grasp what is offered in spiritual science and if you want to grasp what is offered in the education of the outer world today. Certainly, spiritual science encounters so much resistance because it requires more agility, more fluidity of mind, to find one's way into it. In what is available today in popular literature - or even its offshoots, which flow through the channels into journalism, where people then absorb information in their Sunday papers - people can move around with extraordinary ease. And if they go to today's lectures, where people are spoon-fed information in words and pictures, so that they don't even have to think, don't even have to set their minds in motion, you will find nothing in all of this that frees the mind to think, to imagine. It loses its freedom. The mind becomes narrow and limited. Our intellectual education is the path to spiritual limitation. Certainly, our intellectual education has made great strides in the fields of science and technology, but it is the path to limitation; it narrows thinking, imagination. And one must appeal to something quite different in the imagination if one wants to understand spiritual science. Therefore, when people approach spiritual science today, they are afraid to take the first step! When they have read only a few pages, some say: I lose myself there, I do not get any further, it goes into fantasy! - It does not go into fantasy at all, but the person in question has only lost the opportunity to really free his thoughts, to plunge into reality with his thoughts, when they are not leading the external sense world by the hand.

That is one thing: spiritual science appeals to the power in human nature that frees us from narrow-mindedness and enables our thinking and imaginative life to grasp not only a little but a great deal. I meant it very seriously when I said in a public lecture in Stuttgart these days: For the spiritual researcher, it makes no difference whether one is a materialist or a spiritualist; that is not the point, that is irrelevant. What is important is to develop sufficient spiritual strength to make real progress. Those who have this strength, this spiritual power, may be materialists, they find the spirit in matter and its processes if they are only consistent. And those who are spiritualists do not stop at saying: spirit and spirit and spirit...! but they delve into material life, into practical life as well, they allow their thinking to bear fruit even in their actions. Versatility, as demanded by today's life - and the life of the future will demand it even more - versatility is what will become of spiritual science in the near future. And that is what humanity needs as it works towards the future. Anyone who is familiar with life today and looks at the catastrophic events that are happening around us knows that one of the deeper causes of today's catastrophe is that people have become one-sided, despite all their high scientific education, that they lack the opportunity to penetrate things in a versatile way. They lack the flexibility of mind to immerse themselves in reality. Versatility is what is gained through spiritual science for the imagination.

Something is also gained for feeling through spiritual science. For the one who wants to think as spiritual science makes necessary, who must become accustomed to this much more mobile world, releases something that otherwise only lives [hidden] in the human being, so that it unfolds out of the human being. In our feeling, as we brought it with us at our birth, the rhythm of the world lives. More than we realize, the entire rhythm of the world lives in us. This can even be proven mathematically, but very few people know about these secrets of existence. Do not be afraid to join me in considering how the entire rhythm of the world lives in our own organism, in what goes on within us. You know that the sunrise moves a little further each year. If we go back in time, the so-called vernal point of the sun was in Taurus; then it came into Aries, but in Aries it moved further every year; now it is in Pisces. The sun does not rise at the same point every year on March 21; that's how it comes around the whole circle. And after about 25,920 years, the sun goes all the way around, apparently, of course, describing the whole ellipse. If it rises today at a certain point in Pisces, it will return there in 25,920 years. The strange thing is: if you consider these approximately 25,920 years as the great cosmic year, as the ancient Greeks did, and you now look for one day of this cosmic year, you have to divide by 365. What is one day of this great cosmic year? That is approximately 70 to 71 years. That is, on average, a human life when a person grows old. If you think of a human life as it is spent here on earth as one day, and take the whole Platonic year, it is 365 times as much. That is how long it takes the sun to make one revolution around the world: 365 days, of which a person lives through one in an earthly life. It is a beautiful rhythm, but this rhythm goes much further. Consider that we take about 18 breaths in one minute. These 18 breaths multiplied by 60 give the number of breaths in one hour; this multiplied by 24 gives the number of breaths in one day and one night. If you calculate 18 times 60 times 24, you get: 25,920. That means you take as many breaths in one day as the sun takes [Earth years] to go through its own year. The same rhythm is in your breathing inside that is in the course of the sun outside. And again, the strange thing is: you spend a day breathing 25,920 times in one day. Take a day and treat it as if it were a breath: in a sense, a day is a breath, because in the morning our body and our etheric body breathe in our ego and the astral body, and in the evening, when we fall asleep, we breathe out our ego and the astral body; it is one inhalation and one exhalation. How often do we do this in a single day, in about 70 to 71 years? We do this breathing, which means that we live – calculate it in a day – almost exactly 25,920 times. That is how many days we live in 71 years. The individual breath is therefore related to the breaths of the whole twenty-four-hour day like the advance of the vernal point in one year to the advance of the sun through 25,920 years. In relation to the great solar year of 25,920, a single human life on earth is like a day, a day of our life, a twenty-four-hour day occurs as many times in our 71-year life as there are years in the solar cycle. Imagine what it actually means that we are part of the wonderful rhythm of the sunlit cosmos, that our life, insofar as it is inner human life, is purely mathematically expressed in the great music of the spheres of the cosmos!

When a person begins to immerse himself in these things emotionally, only then does he feel like a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm. Only then does he feel how this whole great and infinite world of God has created its image in his human nature. But this is something to be sensed, to be felt. This sensing, this feeling, this feeling of oneself in the universe, this feeling of oneself in the whole spirituality of the world, that is something that ultimately comes to us from spiritual science! We open ourselves up to the world, whereas otherwise we close ourselves off in our narrowly limited ego. We are an image of God, but otherwise we know nothing; we begin to feel ourselves as the image of the divine world, as the microcosm in the macrocosm. We learn to know ourselves through feeling. This happens bit by bit, slowly. I would like to say: just as we go through this slow sequence of days through our lives, so does feeling with spiritual science bring forth this sense of the world. But man must acquire this sense of the world. For this feeling for the world will in turn inspire him to the great tasks that lie before humanity in the future. However strange it may still sound today, in less than fifty years people will no longer be able to build factories or cultivate the soil according to the requirements that will be placed on humanity if they do not have this feeling! The catastrophe we are currently facing is only an expression of the impasse into which humanity has entered. The world has moved on, but people have not yet come far enough with their thoughts and feelings; therefore, their thoughts and feelings are not sufficient to truly penetrate this world and make the work of humanity harmoniously concordant. Humanity will be condemned to develop more and more disharmony in social coexistence and to sow more and more seeds of war across the world if it does not find its way into harmony with the cosmos in feeling, in order to carry this into everything it does, even into the most mundane. Therefore spiritual science is already connected with that which must intervene directly in the course of the most extreme culture, or humanity will not come out of the impasse. In the future, factories and schools will not be maintained if concepts from the great tasks of the universe are not developed. These were already tasks today, but people have not taken them into account; that is why this catastrophe has come. The deeper causes already lie in what has just been said. These signs of God, which express themselves in these catastrophic events, must be taken into account by humanity. People must learn to develop a conscious relationship with the cosmos, because otherwise it will no longer be possible.

Let me give you an example that many people today will still consider foolish, some will denounce as insane: we have certainly made great progress, say in the field of chemistry, but we have done so without such a sense of the world as I have just expressed. In the future, this sense of the world will have to be developed as well: the laboratory bench will have to become an altar. The service to nature that is being developed, even in chemical experimentation, must be conscious of the fact that the great cosmic law is present over the laboratory table whenever one dissolves any substance with another in order to obtain a precipitate or the like. One must feel at home in the whole universe, then one will go about it differently, and then something quite different will be found from what people have found today, which is great but will not be able to bear the right fruit because it is found without reverence, without the feeling that permeates the harmony of the universe. How many people have abstracted what was called the music of the spheres in Pythagoras! Here you have a sense of the music of the spheres in the experience of the rhythm that runs through the universe. You don't have to imagine anything abstract, but something that goes into the living feeling (see note).

Do you know what would happen if this broad-mindedness of the soul did not enter into the feeling? We have just said: flexibility of thinking, versatility of thinking and imagination, that is one thing that helps thinking and imagining. For feeling, broad-mindedness, an open mind towards the world, should prevail. The opposite – you can already see it approaching if you just look at the world with a little courage – is philistinism. What has the great, for many materialistically thinking people 'blessed' culture of modern times brought to people? At the bottom of the soul lies philistinism. Philistinism and banality will only be overcome by that open-mindedness, that broad-heartedness of soul, which feels itself as a microcosm within the macrocosm, which can have reverence for everything that, as divine-spiritual, permeates and pulses through the world. Just as narrow-mindedness, intellectual narrow-mindedness in the life of the intellect must be conquered by spiritual science, so philistinism and vulgarity in the sphere of feeling must be conquered by spiritual science. And a third aspect presents itself to us when we look at the will. In many cases, things are in their initial stages as far as the will is concerned. Only the psychologist, the expert on the soul, can see what is being prepared, but it will come! Of course, many people today believe otherwise, but anyone who is able to see through the deeper course of human development already notices that nothing is as widespread in general human life in the realm of will — much more so in modern times than in older times — as clumsiness. Clumsiness is something that threatens to develop into a terrible evil for the development of humanity in the future. I think that today we can already see it quite clearly: people are taught to do this or that in a one-sided way. If they are to prepare to do something that they have not learned by rote, they will not be able to manage it. How few people today are capable - if you will allow me to mention such things - of sewing on a trouser button if necessary in special situations. Few people are able to do anything else that is not directly related to what they have learned in the narrowest sense. This is something that must not befall humanity. People would allow what was in them as spiritual heritage to wither away when they descended from the spiritual world through birth to existence if they became as one-sided as the “blessed” culture demands in many ways. Those who only look at things theoretically do not see the connections. But anyone who truly embraces spiritual science with a sense of life is an enemy of one-sidedness, for spiritual science gives rise to a mood in the human soul that also tends towards versatility. If you do not merely take up spiritual science with your head, but if you put yourself in a position to absorb spiritual science so that this spiritual science pulsates in your soul like blood in the body, you will certainly also gain a certain versatility in adapting to your surroundings. You will gain the ability to do things that you would otherwise not be skilled at doing. The skill in the will develops, and the person becomes adaptable to the environment. Of course, you can say, if you want to say this: We certainly do not notice that the anthroposophists, who are united in the society, have become terribly more skilled or more able to cope with life. Many say that. Not I say it, but it is said. Yes, that stems from something else. The anthroposophical life in the soul does not yet pulsate in people as blood pulsates in the body, but the bad habit of taking everything only into the mind, into the intellect, has been brought in from outside. Spiritual science, too, becomes only a theory for many; it becomes only something that they think, but that is not their nature. If you only think spiritual science, it does not matter whether you read a spiritual science book or a cookbook. Perhaps a cookbook will be more useful. Spiritual science must become so serious that it really seizes the whole person in his whole soul. Then it goes out to the limbs, then the limbs become agile, the person becomes more capable of living. Then it is a matter of gaining an inner power of conviction, of not being satisfied with the outer conviction, but of gaining an inner conviction.

Those who are familiar with the inner value of spiritual science know that it is indeed capable of extending the physical life of a person, provided it is taken up with freshness and vitality. Of course people may come and say: Well, there is someone who only reached the age of forty-five, or even twenty-seven! Yes, but just ask the counter-question: How old would the person who reached the age of forty-five through spiritual science have become if he had not taken it up in the twenties? Just ask the counter-question! The external forms of proof do not apply to these internal things. Statistics and the like have no value if you want to take the inner being into account. Statistics are of great value in external life, but even there they are limited to the external and do not grasp what is the principle of life. You can see this quite simply: it is completely justified to set up insurance companies according to statistics and arithmetic; they base themselves on how long a person is expected to live and then they insure people accordingly. But it would not occur to you to then have to die when, according to the probability calculation, your year of death for the insurance company arrives! So for reality, you do not consider what is decisive for the external life to be decisive. All that statistics and probability calculations possess of value for the outer life ceases to have significance when the value of conviction for the spiritual begins. But you will only gain this if you take spiritual science itself as a living elixir of life. But then it becomes such an elixir of life that the human being fits into the circumstances.

Then the opposite will take place. I was once extremely saddened - you can say: that's a strange person to be saddened by it! - when I once lived in a house and the master of the house always had to weigh himself on a scale to determine exactly how much meat and how much vegetables he had to eat. He had to weigh every single meal! Imagine the loss of instinct that would ensue for humanity if everyone wanted to weigh their rice and cabbage at every meal. This uncertainty of instinct would come from purely intellectual science, because it can only show the external statistically. But it is not a matter of losing our instinct - and through intellectual education we do lose it - but of spiritualizing it; of becoming as sure as instinct usually is, but spiritually.

This is what I have to characterize as particularly significant, taking into account the will. Spiritual science creeps into the will, prepares it, so that the human being is prepared for his surroundings, without even noticing how he actually grows into what is around him. By growing together with the spirit, he grows into the environment.

You see, you have to learn to experience the spirit. But you do that through spiritual science. And humanity will need it more and more in the future to experience the spirit.

For how does man experience what is given to him through conception or birth? Imagine: a cannon is fired at some distance from you. You hear the bang. You see the light a little earlier. But now imagine the following: You are standing next to the cannon and, due to some event, you are shot out as fast as the sound. You would fly through the air at the speed of sound: you would not hear the sound; you would stop hearing the sound the moment you move at the speed of sound. That is why man does not notice the spirit, because he moves from birth to death at the same speed as the spirit works. The moment you absorb spiritual truths, you put yourself at a different speed than the body. Therefore, you begin to perceive the world in a different light. Just as you perceive sound because you do not have the same speed, so you perceive the spirit in the course of your life by bringing yourself to a different pace, creating inner peace, as you can read in my book 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds'. Not living with the body, but creating a different pace! But this is something that humanity must acquire in the first place, something that is of tremendous importance.

People today take no account of how it actually was in earlier times. History is really a kind of fable convenante, but that is not what concerns us today. People were educated differently in earlier times. In earlier education, much more consideration was given to the life of the mind. This purely intellectual life has only really emerged in the last four or five centuries. In this, no consideration is given to the fact that the human being is a multi-part entity. The intellect is very capable of being educated in humans; it can develop, but unfortunately it is not capable of development throughout the whole of a person's life, and especially not in our present time cycle. It is bound to the human head, and the head remains capable of development only up to the age of twenty-eight at the most. A person needs to live three times as long as their head is capable of developing. Of course, we are intellectually capable of development in our youth, but we only remain so until around the age of twenty-eight. The rest of our organism remains capable of development throughout the rest of our lives; it also demands something from us throughout our lives. What is given to people today is only head knowledge, not heart knowledge. I call heart knowledge that which speaks to the whole organism, head knowledge that which is only intellectual and speaks only to the head. Now the head must stand in a continuous interrelationship with the heart, morally and spiritually as well. This cannot take place today because we give our children so little for the heart, so to speak, for the whole of the rest of the organism, and only give them something for the head. A person reaches the age of thirty-five. At most, he now has head knowledge; if he is lucky, he has the memory of the head knowledge he absorbs. He remembers purely intellectually what he has acquired. But ask whether today's teaching is able to achieve that later in life one not only remembers by heart what one has learned, but that one lovingly transfers oneself back to what one took in during one's youth with feeling; that one really still has something of what one was taught there, so that one can refresh it anew. But this must become the ideal of spiritual science in education, so that one does not just remember back. Now, today, people do not even do that. They take their exams and then forget what they have studied. But let us assume that people do remember back: is what people had at school a paradise to which one likes to be transported? Do you go back so far that you can say: As I think back, the morning of life shines in for me, and as I have now grown older, becoming older transforms it within me into something new; I have been taught in such a way that I can transform it, I not only remember it, I transform it, it becomes new to me.

The soul content of human beings will become full of life when the principles of spiritual science renew our entire education and our entire spiritual culture. And then the effects of early aging in humanity will become increasingly rare. Anyone who follows the development of humanity knows that before the 15th century, the oldest people were not as old as the youngest people today. The prevalence of old age is increasing to a devastating extent. This old age can only be controlled by creating the right mood, by giving us in our youth what can be transformed in old age, what can become new to us; what we not only remember but transform because we think back to a paradise. As a real elixir of life, spiritual science will also bring this into our immediate lives. The school will become something completely different. The school will become a place where people are aware that they have to take care of the whole of human life. Because what is offered to the child comes out in a completely different way in old age. Certain things are offered to the child in the form, let us say, of learning to look up with admiration and reverence. This comes to expression in later life. In middle age it remains more withdrawn, but in old age it comes to expression in that it gives us the power to have a beneficial effect on children. Or as I once said in a public lecture: Those who have not learned to fold their hands in childhood cannot bless in old age. The inner feeling that is connected with folding the hands reappears in us, as if transformed, in later life in the ability to bless. Today, if we only follow today's education, we have no idea what we are giving the child for later life, in the age from seven to fourteen and even earlier, and especially beyond the age of fourteen, with what is offered to today's youth. This is terribly serious, because it lays the foundation for all the megalomania that is being instilled in young people today, for all the arrogance and prejudice, as if one could somehow already have a “point of view”! Today, even the youngest people say, “That is not my point of view.” Everyone has a point of view. Of course, it is not possible for someone to have a point of view at the age of twenty. This awareness is not encouraged today.

All these things can be summarized by saying that what lives in the human being will in turn be brought to reality. Reality is placed in a healthy relationship to the human soul. This is what the ideal of spiritual science must become in relation to the human soul and reality. Especially on the big plan of life, people today speak without any relationship to reality. Those who understand the relationship that must live in the human soul in relation to reality can sometimes suffer torments purely because of the form that today's thinking has. The child then, when the teacher thinks like that, endures these torments unconsciously. An example: a very famous professor of literature gave a lecture on taking up his post, at which I was present. He began: We can ask this, we can ask that. He listed a series of questions that were all to be answered during the semester, and then he said, “Gentlemen!” I have led you into a forest of question marks. I had to imagine a forest of question marks! Imagine what it is like for a person to stand before a forest of question marks without being able to visualize it! This is something that is often underestimated. What must be aimed at is a vital relationship to reality.

Recently a statesman said the words: Our relationship with the neighboring monarchy is the point that must become our political direction in our entire future life. - So imagine: the relationship of one country to another country is a point, and the point becomes a direction. One cannot think more unrealistically! But imagine what a configuration the entire inner life has, which is so far removed from reality as to turn out such empty phrases! But such an inner life is also just as far removed from the outer social life; it does not merge into the social life. What it dreams up does not become real. In spiritual science it is impossible to think as unrealistically as the conceptual shells that have been gradually developed in recent times. The present time is so conceited that it imagines itself to have become particularly practical. But it has only become schoolmasterly, out of touch with life. And a future age will characterize our age by the fact that, strangely enough, the world schoolmaster had a highly impressive effect on so many people: Woodrow Wilson, who is not connected to reality by a thin thread in his thinking either, but for whom all words correspond to unreality. But they are admired by those who are only a little hindered by the fact that they are at war with him. But there are many members of the Central Powers today who admire Woodrow Wilson! In the future it will be especially difficult to understand how political programs, without any relation to reality, can be found in which the crazy ideas of world treaties and peace treaties between nations and so on are laid down. If only it could have been done so easily! The abstract thinkers since the Stoics have been thinking about these things! What today emerge as Wilsonian ideas were there for those who know the subject, ever since there have been human beings. A healthy mind says, of course: because it was always there and could not be realized, it is unhealthy! Today's thinking has become alien to reality, which is why it takes no pleasure in such unreal thoughts.

Things are connected with the deepest principles and impulses of life. And the fact that there is so much confusion and chaos today stems from the fact that humanity has arrived at a way of thinking that it believes can master the practice of life, but which is basically very far removed from true reality. A union with true reality in a vigorous thinking, which develops such strong powers that it can penetrate into reality, that is what must come to mankind from spiritual science as an ideal. But to do this we must begin with the small. We must develop in the child not only an understanding of the abstract concept, but also of the real, the conceivable. We ourselves must first have the connection with it. He who wants to teach the child the idea of immortality in the image of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, but who does not himself believe in this immortality, teaches the child nothing. But anyone who is familiar with the field of spiritual science knows that the butterfly is the real image of immortality created by the spirit of the world. We ourselves believe in this image, and we choose nothing other than that in which we ourselves believe because we know it or strive to know it. In this way we seek to submerge ourselves in reality, to overcome the egoism that still wants to have something abstract in thinking. We seek to penetrate the spirit of reality, and in doing so we will find the paths that are necessary for newer humanity, and are all the more necessary because they have been most abandoned by those who call themselves practical people. They are not the practical people, but those who have become impoverished and who impose their impoverishment on humanity through brutality. Help in this difficult situation will only come if humanity seeks the spirit and through the spirit, reality.

This is what I wanted to share with you today as something that we must appropriate as a feeling for the relationship of the human soul to the world, as it arises from spiritual science as the fundamental mood of the soul. And more important than the individual spiritual-scientific truths is this fundamental mood with which we then go through life when it has been kindled in us through spiritual science.

When I made some suggestions last Sunday for a renewal of our Christmas thinking, I spoke of the real, inner human being who comes from the spiritual world and unites with the body that is given to him from the stream of heredity. I described how this human being, when he enters the life he is to experience between birth and death, enters it with a certain sense of equality. I said that someone who observes a child with understanding will notice how he does not yet know of the distinctions that exist in the human social structure, due to all the relationships into which men's karma leads them. I said that if we observe clearly and without prejudice the forces residing in certain capacities and talents, even in genius, we shall be compelled to ascribe these in large measure to the impulses which affect mankind through the hereditary stream; that when such impulses appear clearly in the natural course of that stream, we must call them luciferic. Moreover, in our present epoch these impulses will only be fitted into the social structure properly if we recognize them as luciferic, if we are educated to strip off the luciferic element and, in a certain sense, to offer upon the altar of Christ what nature has bestowed upon us—in order to transform it.

There are two opposite points of view: one is concerned with the differences occurring in mankind through heredity and conditions of birth; the other with the fact that the real kernel of a man's being holds within it at the beginning of his earthly life the essential impulse for equality. This shows that the human being is only observed correctly when he is observed through the course of his whole life, when his development in time is really taken into account. We have pointed out in another connection that the developmental motif changes in the course of life. You will also find reference to this in an article I wrote called “The Ahrimanic and the Luciferic in Human Life,” where it is shown that the luciferic influence plays a certain role in the first half of life, the ahrirnanic in the second half; that both these impulses are active throughout life, but in different ways.

Along with the idea of equality, other ideas have recently been forced into prominence in a tumultuous fashion, in a certain sense precipitating what should have been a tranquil development in the future. They have been set beside the idea of equality, but they should really be worked out slowly in human evolution if they are to contribute to the well-being of humanity and not to disaster. They can only be rightly understood and their significance for life rightly estimated if they are given their proper place in the sequence of a man's life.

Side by side with the idea of equality, the idea of freedom resounds through the modern world. I spoke to you about the idea of freedom some time ago in connection with the new edition of my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. We are therefore able to appreciate the full importance and range of this impulse in relation to the innermost kernel of man's being. Perhaps some of you know that it has frequently been necessary, from questions here and there, to point to the entirely unique character of the conception of freedom as it i is delineated in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. There is a certain fact that I have always found necessary to emphasize in this connection, namely, that the various modern philosophical conceptions of freedom have made the mistake (if you want to call it a mistake) of putting the question thus: Is the human being free or not free? Can we ascribe free will to man? or may we only say that he stands within a kind of absolute natural necessity, and out of this necessity accomplishes his deeds and the resolves of his will? This way of putting the question is incorrect. There is no “either-or.” One cannot say, man is either free or unfree. One has to say, man is in the process of development from unfreedom to freedom. And the way the impulse for freedom is conceived in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, shows you that man is becoming ever freer, that he is extricating himself from necessity, that more and more impulses are growing in him that make it possible for him to be a free being within the rest of the world order.

Thus the impulse for equality has its greater intensity at birth—even though not in consciousness, since the latter is not yet developed—and it then decreases. That is to say, the impulse for equality has a descending development. We may make a diagram thus:

At birth we find the height of the impulse for equality, and it moves in a descending curve. With the impulse for freedom the reverse is true. Freedom moves in an ascending curve and has its culmination at death. By that I do not mean to say that man reaches the summit of a freely-acting being when he passes through the gate of death; but relatively, with regard to human life, a man develops the impulse for freedom increasingly up to the moment of death, and he has achieved relatively the greatest possibility of becoming free at the moment he enters the spiritual world through the gate of death. That is to say: while at birth he brings with him out of the spiritual world the sense of equality which then declines during the course of physical life, it is just during his physical lifetime that he develops the impulse toward freedom, and he then enters the spiritual world through the gate of death with the largest measure of this impulse for freedom that he could attain in the course of his physical life.

You see again how one-sidedly the human being is often observed. One fails to take into account the time element in his being. He is spoken of in general terms, in abstracto, because people are not inclined today to consider realities. But man is not a static being; he is an evolving being. The more he develops and the more he makes it possible to develop, so much the more does he fulfill his true task here in the course of physical life. People who are inflexible, who are disinclined to undergo development, accomplish little of their real earthly mission. What you were yesterday you no longer are today, and what you are today you will no longer be tomorrow. These are indeed slight shades of differences; but happy is he in whom they exist at all—for standing still is ahrimanic! There should be shades of difference. No day should pass in a man's life without his receiving at least one thought that alters his nature a little, that enables him to develop instead of merely to exist. Thus we recognize man's true nature—not when we insist in an absolute sense that mankind has the right to freedom and equality in this world—but only when we know that the impulse for equality reaches its culmination at the beginning of life, and the impulse toward freedom at the end. We unravel the complexity of human development in the course of life here on earth only when we take such things into consideration. One cannot simply look abstractly at the whole man and say: he has the right to find freedom, equality, and so forth, within the social structure. These things must be brought to people's attention again through spiritual science, for they have been ignored by the recent developments that move toward abstract ideas and materialism.

The third impulse, fraternity, has its culmination, in a certain sense, in the middle of life. Its curve rises and then falls. (See diagram.) In the middle of life, when the human being is in his least rigid condition—that is, when he is vacillating in the relation of soul to body—then it is that he has the strongest tendency to develop brotherliness. He does not always do so, but at this time he has the predisposition to do so. The strongest prerequisites for the development of fraternity exist in middle life.

Thus these three impulses are distributed over an entire lifetime. In the times we are approaching it will be necessary for our understanding of other men, and also—as a matter of course—for our so-called self-knowledge, that we take such matters into account. We cannot arrive at correct ideas about community life unless we know how these impulses are distributed in the course of life. In a certain sense we Will be unable to live our lives usefully unless we are willing to gain this knowledge; for we will not know exactly what relation a young man bears to an old man, or an older person
to one in middle life, unless we keep in mind the special configuration of these inner impulses.

But now let us connect all this with lectures⁵ I gave here earlier about the whole human race gradually becoming younger. Perhaps you recall that I explained how the particular dependence of soul development upon the physical organism that a human being has today only during his very earliest years was experienced in ancient times up to old age. (We are speaking now only of post-Atlantean epochs.) I said that in the ancient Indian cultural epoch man was dependent upon his so-called physical development into his fifties, in the way that he is now dependent only in the earliest years. Now in the first years of life man is dependent upon his physical development. We know the kind of break the change of teeth causes, then puberty, and so on. In these early years we see a distinct parallel in the development of soul and of body; then this ceases, vanishes. I pointed out that in older cultural epochs of our post-Atlantean period that was not the case. The possibility of receiving wisdom from nature simply through being a human being—lofty wisdom which was venerated among the ancient Indians, and could still be venerated among the ancient Persians—that possibility existed because the conditions were not the same as they are now. Now a man becomes a finished product in his twenties; he is then no longer dependent upon his physical organism. Starting from his twenties, it gives him nothing more. This was not the case in ancient times. In ancient times the physical organism itself gave wisdom to man's soul into his fifties. It was possible for him in the second half of life, even without special occult training, to extract the forces from his physical organism in an elemental way, and thus attain a certain wisdom and a certain development of will. I pointed to the significance of this for the ancient Indian and Persian epochs, even for the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, when it was possible to say to a boy or girl, or young man or young woman: “When you are old you may expect that something will come into your life, will be bestowed upon you simply by your having become old, because one continues to develop up to the time of death.” Age was looked up to with reverence , because a man said to himself: With old age something will enter my life that I cannot know or cannot will while I am still young. That gave a certain structure to the entire social life which only ceased when during the Greco-Latin epoch this point of time fell back into the middle years of human life. In the ancient Indian civilization man was capable of development up to his fifties. Then during the ancient Persian epoch mankind grew younger: that is, the age of the human race, the capacity for development, fell back to the end of a man's forties. During the Egypto-Chaldean epoch it came between the thirty-fifth and the forty-second year. During the Greco-Latin epoch he was only capable of development up to a point of time between the twenty-eighth and the thirty-fifth year. When the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, he had this capability up to the thirty-third year. This is the wonderful fact we discover in the history of mankind's evolution: that the age of Christ Jesus when he passed through death on Golgotha coincides with the age to which humanity had fallen back at that time.

We pointed out that humanity is still becoming younger and younger; that is, the age at which it is no longer capable of development continues to decrease. This is significant, for example, when today a man enters public life at the particular age at which humanity now stands—twenty-seven years—without having received anything beside what he took in from the outside up to his twenty-seventh year. I mentioned that in this sense Lloyd-George⁶ is the representative man of our time. He entered public life at twenty-seven years. This had far-reaching consequences, which you can of course discover by reading his biography. These facts enable one to understand world conditions from within.

Now what strikes you as the most important fact when you connect what we have just been indicating—the increasing youthfulness of the human race—with the thoughts we have brought before our souls in these last days in relation to Christmas? The state of our development since the Mystery of Golgotha is this, that starting from our thirtieth year we can really gain nothing from our own organism, from what is bestowed upon us by nature. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, we would be going about here on earth after our 30th year saying to ourselves: Actually we live in the true sense only up to our thirty-second or thirty-third year at most. Up to that time our organism makes it possible for us to live; then we might just as well die. For from the course of nature, from the elemental occurrences of nature, we can gain nothing more for our soul development through the impulses of our organism. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, the earth would be filled with human beings lamenting thus: Of what use to me is life after my thirty-third year? Up to that time my organism can give me something. After that I might just as well be dead. I really go about here on earth like a living corpse. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, many people would feel that they are going about on earth like living corpses. But the Mystery of Golgotha, dear friends, has still to be made fruitful. We should not merely receive the Impulse of Golgotha unconsciously, as people now do: we should receive it consciously, in such a manner that through it we may remain youthful up to old age. And it can indeed keep us healthy and youthful if we receive it consciously in the right way. We shall then ' be conscious of its enlivening effect upon our life. This is important!

Thus you see that the Mystery of Golgotha can be regarded as something intensely alive during the course of our earthly life. I said earlier that people are most predisposed to brotherliness in the middle of life—around the thirty-third year, but they do not always develop it. You have the reason for this in what I just said. Those who fail to develop brotherliness, who lack something of brotherliness, simply are too little permeated by the Christ. Since the human being begins to die, in a certain sense, in middle age from the forces of nature, he cannot properly develop the impulse, the instinct, of brotherliness—and still less the impulse toward freedom, which is taken up so little today—unless he brings to life within himself thoughts that come directly from the Christ Impulse. When we turn to the Christ Impulse, it enkindles brotherliness in us directly. To the degree to which a man feels the necessity for brotherliness, he is permeated by Christ.

One is also unable alone to develop the impulse for freedom to full strength during the remainder of one's earthly life. (In future periods of evolution this will be different.) Something entered our earth evolution as human being and flowed forth at the death of Christ Jesus to unite Itself with the earthly evolution of humanity. Therefore Christ is the One who also leads present-day mankind to freedom. We become free in Christ when we are able to grasp the fact that the Christ could really not have become older, could not have lived longer, in a physical body than up to the age of thirty-three years. Suppose hypothetically that He had lived longer: then He would have lived on in a physical body into the years when according to our present earth evolution this body is destined for death. The Christ would have taken up the forces of death. Had he lived to be forty years old, He would have experienced the forces of death in His body. These He would not have wished to experience. He could only have wished to experience those forces that are still the freshening forces for a human being. He was active up to His thirty-third year, to the middle of life; as the Christ He enkindled brotherliness. Then He caused the spirit to flow into human evolution: He gave over to the Holy Spirit what was henceforth to be within the power of man. Through this Holy Spirit, this health-giving Spirit, a human being develops to freedom toward the end of his life. Thus is the Christ Impulse integrated into the concrete life of humanity.

This permeation of man's inner being by the Christ Principle must be incorporated into human knowledge as a new Christmas thought. Mankind must know that we bring equality with us out of the spiritual world. It comes, one might say, from God the Father, and is given to us to bring to earth. Then brotherliness reaches its proper culmination only through the help of the Son. And through the Christ united with the Spirit we can develop the impulse for freedom as we draw near to death.

This activity of the Christ Impulse in the concrete shaping of humanity is something that from now on must be accepted consciously by human souls. This alone will be really health-giving when people's demands for refashioning the social structure become more and more urgent and passionate. In this social structure there live children, youths, middle-aged and old people; and a social structure that embraces them all can only be achieved when it is realized that human beings are not simply abstract Man. The five-year-old child is Man, the twenty-year-old youth, the twenty-year-old young woman, the forty-year-old man—at the present time to undertake an actual observation of human beings, which would result in a consciousness of humanity in the concrete, human beings as they really are. When they are looked at concretely, the abstraction Man-Man-Man has no reality whatsoever. There can only be the fact of a specific human being of a specific age with specific impulses. Knowledge of Man must be acquired, but it can only be acquired by studying the development of the essential living kernel of the human being as he progresses from birth to death. That must come, my dear friends. And probably people will not be inclined to receive such things into their consciousness until they are again able to take a retrospective view of the evolution of mankind.

Yesterday I drew your attention to something that entered human evolution with Christianity. Christianity was born out of the Jewish soul, the Greek spirit, and the Roman body. These were the sheaths, so to speak, of Christianity. But within Christianity is the living Ego, and this can be separately observed when we look back to the birth of Christianity. For the external historian this birth of Christianity has become very chaotic. What is usually written today about the early centuries of Christianity, whether from a Roman Catholic or a Protestant point of view, is very confused wisdom. The essence of much that existed in those first Christian centuries is either entirely forgotten by present theologians or else it has become, may I say, an abomination for them. Just read and observe the strange convulsions of intellectualism—they almost become a kind of intellectual epilepsy—when people have to describe what lived in the first centuries of Christianity as the Gnosis.⁷ It is considered a sort of devil, this Gnosis, something so demonic that it should absolutely not be admitted into human life. And when such a theologian or other official representative of this or that denomination can accuse anthroposophy of having something in common with gnosticism, he believes he has made the worst possible charge.

Underlying all this is the fact that in the earliest centuries of Christianity gnosticism did indeed penetrate the spiritual life of European humanity—so far as this was of importance for the civilization of that time—and, moreover, much more significantly than is now supposed. There exists on the one hand, not the slightest idea of what this Gnosis actually was; on the other hand, I might say, there is a mysterious fear of it. To most of the present-day official representatives of any religious denomination the Gnosis is something horrible. But it can of course be looked at without sympathy or antipathy, purely objectively. Then it would best be studied from a spiritual scientific standpoint, for external history has little to offer. Western ecclesiastical development took care that all external remains of the Gnosis were properly eradicated, root and branch. There is very little left, as you know—only the Pistis Sophia and the like—and that gives only a vague idea of it. Otherwise the only passages from the Gnosis that are known are those refuted by the Church Fathers. That means really that the Gnosis is only known from the writings of opponents, while anything that might have given some idea of it from an external, historical point of view has been thoroughly rooted out.

An intellectual study of the development of Western theology would make people more critical on this point as well—but such study is rare. It would show them, for instance, that Christian dogma must surely have its foundation in something quite different from caprice or the like. Actually, it is all rooted in the Gnosis. But its living force has been stripped away and abstract thoughts, concepts, the mere hulls are left, so that one no longer recognizes in the doctrines their living origin. Nevertheless, it is really the Gnosis. If you study the Gnosis as far as it can be studied with spiritual scientific methods, you will find a certain light is thrown upon the few things that have been left to history by the opponents of gnosticism. And you will probably realize that this Gnosis points to the very widespread and concrete atavistic-clairvoyant world conception of ancient times. There were considerable remnants of this in the first post-Atlantean epoch, less in the second. In the third epoch the final remnants were worked upon and appeared as gnosticism in a remarkable system of concepts, concepts that are extraordinarily figurative. Anyone who studies gnosticism from this standpoint, who is able to go back, even just historically, to the meager remnants—they are brought to light more abundantly in the pagan Gnosis than in Christian literature—will find that, as a matter of fact, this Gnosis contained wonderful treasures of wisdom relating to a world with which people of our present age refuse to have any connection. So it is not at all surprising that even well-intentioned people can make little of the ancient Gnosis.

Well-intentioned people? I mean, for instance, people like Professor Jeremias of Leipzig, who would indeed be willing to study these things. But he can form no mental picture of what these ancient concepts refer to—when, for example, mention is made of a spiritual being Jaldabaoth, who is supposed with a sort of arrogance to have declared himself ruler of the world, then to have been reprimanded by his mother, and so on. Even from what has been historically preserved, such mighty images radiate to us as the following: Jaldabaoth said, “I am God the Father; there is no one above me.” And his mother answered, “Do not lie! Above thee is the Father of all, the first Man, and the Son of Man.” Then—it is further related—Jaldabaoth called his six co-workers and they said, “Let us make man in our image.” Such imaginations, quite self-explanatory, were numerous and extensive in what existed as the Gnosis. In the Old Testament we find only remnants of this pictorial wisdom preserved by Jewish tradition. It lived especially in the Orient, whence its rays reached the West; and only in the third or fourth century did these begin to fade in the West. But then there were still some after-effects among the Waldenses and Cathars⁸ that finally died out.

People of our time can hardly imagine the condition of the souls living in civilized Europe during the first Christian centuries, in whom there lived not merely mental pictures like those of present-day Roman Catholics, but in a supreme degree vivid, unmistakable echoes of this mighty world-picture of the Gnosis. What we see when we look back at those souls is vastly different from what we find in books that have been written about these centuries by ecclesiastical and secular theologians and other scholars. In the books there is nothing of all that lived in those great and powerful imaginative pictures describing a world of which, as I have said, people of our time have no conception. That is why a man possessing present-day scholarship can do nothing with such concepts—for instance, with Jaldabaoth, his mother, the six co-workers, and so on. He does not know what to do with them. They are words, word-husks; what they refer to, he does not know. Still less does he know how the people of that earlier age ever came to form such concepts. A modern person can only say, “Well, of course, the ancient Orientals had lively imaginations; they developed all that fantasy.” We ourselves must marvel that such a person has not the slightest idea how little imagination a primitive human being has, what a minor role it plays, for instance, among peasants. In this respect the mythologists have done wonders! They have invented the stories of simple people transforming the drifting clouds, the wind driving the clouds, and so on, into all sorts of beings. They have no idea how the earlier humanity to whom they attribute all this were really constituted in their souls, that they were as far removed as could possibly be from such poetic fashioning. The fantasy really exists in the circles of the mythologists, the scholars who think out such things. That is the real fantasy!

What people suppose to have been the origin of mythology is pure error. They do not know today to what its words and concepts refer. Certain, may I say, clear hints concerning their interpretation are therefore no longer given any serious attention. Plato pointed very precisely to the fact that a human being living here in a physical body has remembrance of something experienced in the spiritual world before this physical life. But present-day philosophers can make nothing of this Platonic memory-knowledge; for them it is something that Plato too had imagined. In reality, Plato still knew with certainty that the Greek soul was predisposed to unfold in itself what it had experienced in the spiritual world before birth, though it still possessed only the last residue of this ability. Anyone who between birth and death perceives only by means of his physical body and who works over his perceptions with a present-day intellect, cannot grant any rational meaning to observations that have not even been made in a physical body but were made between death and a new birth. Before birth human beings were in a world in which they could speak of Jaldabaoth who rose up in pride, whose mother admonished him, who summoned the six co-workers. That is a reality for the human being between death and a new birth, just as plants, animals, minerals, and other human beings are realities for him here in this world, about which he speaks when he is confined in a physical body. The Gnosis contained what was brought into this physical world at birth; and it was possible to a certain extent up to the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, that is, up to the eighth century before the Christian era, for human beings to bring very much with them from the time they had spent between death and a new birth. What was brought in those epochs from the spiritual world and clothed in concepts, in ideas, is the Gnosis. It continued to exist in the Greco-Latin epoch, but it was no longer directly perceived; it was a heritage existing now as ideas. Its origin was known only to select spirits such as Plato, in a lesser degree to Aristotle also. Socrates knew of it too, and indeed paid for this knowledge with his death.

Now what were the conditions in this Greco-Latin age in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch? Only meager recollections of time before birth could now be brought over into life, but something was brought over, and in this Greek period it was still distinct. People today are inordinately proud of their power of thinking, but actually they can grasp very little with it. The thinking power that the Greeks developed was of a different nature. When the Greeks entered earthly life through birth, the images of their experiences before birth were lost; but the thinking force that they had used before birth to give an intelligent meaning to the images still remained. Greek thinking differed completely from our so-called normal thinking, for the Greek thinking was the result of pondering over imaginations that had been experienced before birth. Of the imaginations themselves little was recalled; the essential thing that remained was the discernment that had helped a person before birth to find his way in the world about which imaginations had been formed. The waning of this thinking power was the important factor in the development of the fourth post-Atlantean period, which continued, as you know, into the fifteenth century of the Christian era.

Now in this fifth epoch the power to think must again be developed, out of our earthly culture. Slowly, haltingly, we must develop it out of the scientific world view. Today we are at the beginning of it. During the fourth post-Atlantean period, that is, from 747 B.C. to 1413 A.D.—the Event of Golgotha lies between—there was a continual decrease of thinking power. Only in the fifteenth century did it begin slowly to rise again; by the third millennium it will once more have reached a considerable height. Of our present-day power of thought mankind need not be especially proud; it has declined. The thinking power, still highly developed, that was the heritage of the Greeks shaped the thoughts with which the gnostic pictures were set in order and mastered. Although the pictures were no longer as clear as they had been for the Egyptians or the Babylonians, for example, the thinking power was still there. But it gradually faded. That is the extraordinary way things worked together in the earliest Christian centuries.

The Mystery of Golgotha breaks upon the world. Christianity is born. The waning thinking power, still very active in the Orient but also reaching over into Greece, tried to understand this event. The Romans had little understanding of it. This thinking power tried to understand the Event of Golgotha from the standpoint of the thinking used before birth, the thinking of the spiritual world. And now something significant occurred: this gnostic thinking came face to face with the Mystery of Golgotha. Now let us consider the gnostic teachings about the Mystery of Golgotha, which are such an abomination to present-day, especially Christian, theologians. Much is to be found in them from the ancient atavistic teachings, or from teachings that are permeated by the ancient thought-force; and many significant and impressive things are said in them about the Christ that today are termed heretical, shockingly heretical. Gradually this power of gnostic thought declined. We still see it in Manes⁹ in the third century, and we still see it as it passes over to the Cathars—downright heretics from the Catholic point of view: a great, forceful, grandiose interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha. This ebbed away, strangely enough, in the early centuries, and people were little inclined to apply any effort toward an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. These two things, you see, were engaged in a struggle: the gnostic teaching, wishing to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha through powerful spiritual thinking; and the other teaching, that reckoned with what was to come, when thought would no longer have power, when it would lack the penetration needed to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, when it would be abstract and unfruitful. The Mystery of Golgotha, a cosmic mystery, was reduced to hardly more than a few sentences at the beginning of the Gospel of St. John, telling of the Logos, of His entrance into the world and His destiny in the world, using as few concepts as possible; for what had to be taken into account was the decreasing thinking power.

Thus the gnostic interpretation of Christianity gradually died out, and a different conception of it arose, using as few concepts as possible. But of course the one passed over into the other: concepts like the dogma of the Trinity were taken over from gnostic ideas and reduced to abstractions, mere husks of concepts.The really vital fact is this, that an inspired gnostic interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha was engaged in a struggle with the other explanation, which worked with as few concepts as possible, estimating what humanity would be like by the fifteenth century with the ancient, hereditary, acute thinking power declining more and more. It was also reckoning that this would eventually have to be acquired again, in elementary fashion, through the scientific observation of nature. You can study it step by step. You can even perceive it as an inner soul-struggle if you observe St. Augustine,¹⁰ who in his youth became acquainted with gnostic Manichaeism, but could not digest that and so turned away to so-called “simplicity,” forming primitive concepts. These became more and more primitive. Even so, in Augustine there appeared the first dawning light of what had again to be acquired: knowledge starting from man, from the concrete human being. In ancient gnostic times one had tried to reach the human being by starting from the world. Now, henceforth, the start must be made from man: knowledge of the world must be acquired from knowledge of the human being. This must be the direction we take in the future. I explained this here some time ago and tried to point to the first dawning light in humanity. One finds it, for instance, in the Confessions of St. Augustine—but it was still thoroughly chaotic. The essential fact is that humanity became more and more incapable of taking in what streamed to it from the spiritual world, what had existed among the ancients as imaginative wisdom and then was active in the Gnosis, what had evoked the power of acute thinking that still existed among the Greeks. Thus the Greek wisdom, even though reduced to abstract concepts, still provided the ideas that allowed some understanding of the spiritual world. This then ceased; nothing of the spiritual world could any longer be understood through those dying ideas.

A man of the present day can easily feel that the Greek ideas are in fact applicable to something entirely different from that to which they were applied. This is a peculiarity of Hellenism. The Greeks still had the ideas but no longer the imaginations. Especially in Aristotle this is very striking. It is very singular. You know there are whole libraries about Aristotle, and everything concerning him is interpreted differently. People even dispute whether he accepted reincarnation or pre-existence. This has all come about because his words can be interpreted in various ways. It is because he worked with a system of concepts applicable to a supersensible world but he no longer had any perception of that world. Plato had much more understanding of it; therefore his system of concepts could be worked out better in that sense. Aristotle was already involved in abstract concepts and could no longer see that to which his thought-forms referred. It is a peculiar fact that in the early centuries there was a struggle between a conception of the Mystery of Golgotha that illuminated it with the light of the supersensible world, and the fanaticism that then developed to refute this. Not everyone saw through these things, but some did. Those who did see through them did not face them honestly. A primitive interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha, an interpretation that was rabid about using only a few concepts, led to fanaticism.

Thus we see that supersensible thinking was eliminated more and more from the Christian world conception, from every world conception. It faded away and ceased. We can follow from century to century how the Mystery of Golgotha appeared to people as something tremendously significant that had entered earth evolution, and yet how the possibility of their comprehending it with any system of concepts vanished—or of comprehending the world cosmically at all. Look at that work from the ninth century, De Divisione Naturae by Scotus Erigena.¹¹ It still contains pictures of a world evolution, even though the pictures are abstract. Scotus Erigena indicates very beautifully four stages of a world evolution, but throughout with inadequate concepts. We can see that he is unable to spread out his net of concepts and make intelligible, plausible, what he wishes to gather together. Everywhere, one might say, the threads of his concepts break. It is very interesting that this becomes more noticeable from century to century, so that finally the lowest point in the spinning of concept-threads was reached in the fifteenth century. Then an ascent began again, but it did not get beyond the most elementary stage. It is interesting that on the one hand people cherished the Mystery of Golgotha and turned to it with their hearts, but declared that they could not understand it. Gradually there was a general feeling that it could not be understood. On the other hand the study of nature began at the very time when concepts vanished. Observation of nature entered the life of that time, but there were no concepts for actually grasping the phenomena that were being observed.

It is characteristic of this period, at the turn of the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, halfway through the Middle Ages, that there were insufficient concepts both for the budding observation of nature and for the revelations of saving truths. Think how it was with Scholasticism in this respect: it had religious revelations, but no concepts out of the culture of the time that would enable it to work over these religious revelations. It had to employ Aristotelianism; this had to be revived. The Scholastics went back to Hellenism, to Aristotle, to find concepts with which to penetrate the religious revelations; and they elaborated these with the Greek intellect because the culture of their own time had no intellect of its own—if I may use such a paradox. So the very people who worked the most honestly, the Scholastics, did not use the intellect of their time, because there was none, none that belonged to their culture. It was characteristic of the period from the tenth to the fifteenth century that the most honest of the Scholastics made use of the ancient Aristotelian concepts to explain natural phenomena; they also employed them to formulate religious revelations. Only thereafter did there rise again, as from hoary depths of spirit, an independent mode of thinking—not very far developed, even to this day—the thinking of Copernicus and Galileo. This must be further developed in order to rise once more to supersensible regions.

Thus we are able to look into the soul, into the ego, so to speak, of Christianity, which had merely clothed itself with the Jewish soul, the Greek spirit, and the Roman body. This ego of Christianity had to take into account the dying-out of supersensible understanding, and therefore had to permit the comprehensive gnostic wisdom to shrink, as it were—one may even say, to shrink to the few words at the beginning of the Gospel of John. For the evolution of Christianity consists essentially of the victory of the words of St. John's Gospel over the content of the Gnosis. Then, of course, everything passed over into fanaticism, and gnosticism was exterminated, root and branch.

All these things are linked to the birth of Christianity. We must take them into consideration if we want to receive a real impulse for the consciousness of humanity that must be developed anew, and an impulse for the new Christmas thought. We must come again to a kind of knowledge that relates to the supersensible. To that end we must understand the supersensible force working into the being of man, so that we may be able to extend it to the cosmos. We must acquire anthroposophy, knowledge of the human being, which will be able to engender cosmic feeling again. That is the way. In ancient times man could survey the world, because he entered his body at birth with memories of the time before birth. This world, which is a likeness of the spiritual world, was an answer to questions he brought with him into this life. Now the human being confronts this world bringing nothing with him, and he must work with primitive concepts like those, for instance, of contemporary science. But he must work his way up again; he must now start from the human being and rise to the cosmos. Knowledge of the cosmos must be born in the human being. This too belongs to a conception of Christmas that must be developed in the present epoch, in order that it may be fruitful in the future.

• 5. Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 11 Jan. 1918, Ancient Myths, Their Meaning and Connection with Evolution, GA 180 (Vancouver, Steiner Book Centre, 1971).
• 6. David Lloyd-George: 1863–1945. British statesman. Elected to Parliament 1890; Prime Minister during World War I. One of the “Big Four” statesmen at Paris Peace Conference 1919.
• 7. Gnosis: esoteric knowledge in Greco-Latin world of the 2nd century A.D.
• 8. Waldenses and Cathars: heretical Christian sects in western Europe, 12th and 13th centuries. They joined the Reformation movement during the 16th century.
• 9. Manes: 216–274 A.D. See Rudolf Steiner, Nurnberg, 25 June 1908, Apocalypse of St. John, GA 104 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977).
• 10. Augustine: 354–430 A.D. See Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 22 May 1920, The Redemption of Thinking, GA 74 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 11. Scotus Erigena: 810–877 A.D. See Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, GA 18 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1973).

Yesterday we spoke at least in a few words about the extent to which the Earth itself is a source of inspiration for people living on it. Of course, only hints can be given in a field that is as all-encompassing as this.

It is important and significant, especially in our time, to become aware that such connections exist as those we have been talking about, because man within the evolution of the earth is at the point, especially in our present time, of emancipating himself, as it were, from this earthly influence, and, on the other hand, to allow himself to be permeated by those influences that do not come from the world of the earth but from the spiritual world surrounding the earth.

This endeavour to get into human abilities, into human thinking and feeling, that which is not merely earthly, underlies our spiritual-scientific endeavour. All tendencies of modern education are really moving towards this spiritual-scientific endeavour, and it may well be said that there are two things that must increasingly come to the consciousness of the modern human being.

The first is that man, in relation to his own soul essence, belongs to a world that does not reveal itself to the external senses, but that lies behind the external sense world. Man belongs to such a world with his innermost soul being, which can be reached neither through sense observation nor through inferences and logic based on sense observation. It will be the task of our time to gain clarity on this point, that all knowledge conveyed by the external senses and their philosophy, which is based only on external sensory knowledge, cannot approach what the human soul actually is.

The second truth is one that you are familiar with from your spiritual scientific life, but you also know that it is still very far from the general consciousness of the present day. It is the important truth of repeated earthly lives, of the fact that the human soul is not exhausted in the body in which it lives between birth and death, in all that is connected with this body, but that it goes from life to life.

Because these two truths, that the soul belongs to a world that lies behind the sensory world and that it goes from life to life, are among the most important for our time, which must be understood first, I have added a chapter to the second volume of my Rätsel of Philosophy», I have added a chapter in which these two truths in particular are pointed out in an intensive way from the course of human development, because it is an urgent requirement of our time that more and more people learn to understand precisely these two truths.

Since this book, “The Riddles of Philosophy”, is not specifically aimed at anthroposophists, but at all people who can read and understand what they read, an attempt had to be made to point out these two truths as briefly but as sharply as possible. It may be said that it lies in the deeper consciousness of people in modern times to direct their thoughts towards these truths. For the time being, I will just say to direct their thoughts. We can see such tendencies to direct thoughts towards these truths everywhere. I have sometimes tried to cite people from the new spiritual history who tend towards such truths. Today I would like to give another example.

Emerson is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of the 19th century, who wrote so meaningfully and forcefully, if not in pedantic philosophical language, then in a forceful language. Whether he is talking about nature or the human race, Emerson points out that the outer structure of the world, which man surveys with his senses and comprehends with his mind, is only the shell, the phantasmagoria, and that one can only arrive at the truth by trying to penetrate behind the phantasmagoria.

But minds like Emerson's go even further. And I would like to give an example of this. Among his very significant books, Emerson also wrote one called “The Representatives of the Human Race”. In this book, he treated Plato as a representative of all philosophical human endeavor; Swedenborg as a representative of mystical human endeavor; Montaigne, a significant mind of the 16th century , as representative of skepticism; Shakespeare as representative of the poetic faculty; Goethe as representative of the literary faculty; and Napoleon as the man of action, as representative of the man of action.

This book has certainly achieved something significant. It highlights the types of humanity in relation to the soul. It would make for an interesting reflection if one were to shed light on how Plato's representative of philosophical endeavor and Montaigne's representative of skeptical endeavor are actually met. This book marks one of the greatest achievements of human spiritual endeavor. Now, Emerson curiously devotes, I would say, a particularly loving portrayal to Montaigne, although this loving portrayal is only encountered when one thoroughly engages with this chapter on Montaigne. This is also very significant for Emerson's commitment to the spiritual-scientific world view. Anyone who seriously engages with this world view becomes aware of how truly every thing has two sides, how when one tries to express a truth, one can only say something one-sided and the second side must lurk in the background, as it were.

The skeptic who has a vivid sense of the fact that one is, as it were, already doing an injustice when formulating a truth strictly, is touched in the deepest sense by the spiritual-soul fluid that is always present in the human soul and that prevents one, as soon as one is only touched by the spiritual world, from stating a sharply contoured truth with too much aplomb, without pointing out that in a certain sense the opposite of it also has a justification.

This sense of having been touched by a feeling that comes from spirituality is what makes Montaigne an important figure. But that is not what I wanted to point out. I wanted to point out how Emerson tells how he came to Montaigne. He says: Even as a boy, I found a volume of Montaigne in my father's library, but I did not understand him. — When he had then graduated from college, he looked at the book again, and then he got the strange urge to get to know, sentence by sentence, what Montaigne had written. And he did that, following this urge. Now we see in the chapter about Montaigne, which Emerson wrote, that he was looking for an expression for why he was suddenly obsessed by Montaigne and suddenly began to absorb him completely. He finds no better expression for it than to say: It was as if I had written these books by Montaigne in a past life. From this you can see how a man of the most eminently modern mind, who approaches what is demanded by the present, is forced, when he wants to express himself about the most intimate things in his soul, to form an expression that tends entirely towards the spiritual-scientific truth of reincarnation. He cannot find a better expression and must therefore resort to the idea of repeated lives on earth.

Something like this is extremely characteristic and tremendously significant, and this now leads us to tie in with the idea that was expounded yesterday. If we look at the most distinguished minds of our time – and one of the most distinguished is Emerson – then, on the one hand, if they are as great as Emerson, they have inherited the knowledge of the earth, in that they are part of the evolutionary process of the earth. They know what is absorbed by a person today. They know that when you are placed at a certain point on earth, you speak a certain language and so on, that it is customary in the place where you are sent to hand these things down to the child, to the young person, and thus to bring that which is called education to the people. This knowledge, which is handed down to a people in this way, is knowledge of a wide scope. It is fair to say that this is knowledge of a broad scope, and one can see how Emerson actually proceeds.

We know that when he had a lecture to give, it seemed as if what he said sprang forth from his mind as he was saying it. Everything seemed improvised. If he was visited on a day when he was supposed to give a lecture, the visitors could see that all kinds of notes were lying around the room, from which he had gathered what he had to say, so to speak, about the outward appearance of his material. But behind what he passed on to humanity lay intimacies, and this is precisely an intimacy, which I have expressed, that the idea of repeated earthly lives shimmers quite chastely in one place.

One can see how even the best of our time, by feeling and feeling through such truths in their souls and also expressing them, remain chaste within themselves, do not yet want to carry these truths into the realm from which external knowledge arises.

If we now approach the matter from a spiritual scientific point of view, we have to illuminate it differently, because our time is the time whose mission it is to bring to clarity and to real knowledge what has so far been held back in the soul and only occasionally hinted at, clarity, to bring it to real knowledge, to shape it into forms of knowledge, so that our time really has the task of making many things that have emerged from the souls of the best up to this time of ours into full clarity, into a truth that is self-evident for people. And here we can describe exactly how it was when Emerson, in his rich lectures, would soon say a sentence expressing a realization about the industrial life of his surroundings and then a few lines later bring something that deals with ancient India, and then again something that deals with Shakespeare. So he gathers together, so to speak, the knowledge of the earth and then often a remark slips out of him that comes from the intimacy of his soul.

Where does what lies in such a remark come from? This can only be answered by considering all sides of human nature. Man recognizes only the least, only a part of his life, which takes place from waking to falling asleep, during his time on earth. The other part of life is spent asleep, and this part of human life is very, very diverse.

It is true that for many, many people this life in sleep proceeds in such a way that they come into contact with elemental world entities that are connected with lower expressions of human nature than the daytime expressions. One would like to say that people engage in all sorts of nonsense from the moment they fall asleep until they wake up, in the realm of elementary life, of nightlife, things that they have outgrown when they are in the outer life. Who would not know that he often has to be ashamed of his dreams. This is a general experience that anyone can have. Man, then, during sleep, does all kinds of foolish things, in a company that is not a good one, but one that appeals to his passions, his instincts, and is much worse than the one in which he is educated during his waking life.

Only if we understand this can we better understand many historical events. To prevent people today from making too much of a mess of things in the physical world, they need to be endowed with the gift of not attaching too much importance to their dreams. He therefore forgets his dreams very easily, forgets the Allotriia from the dreams, and that is good for him, because he should be prepared to enter the spiritual world in waking consciousness, while the prehistoric times were there to let people enter this spiritual world during sleep until they woke up.

Strictly speaking, a stronger awareness of this world is not as far behind us as is usually believed. I will give you an example of this too. There is a picture by Albrecht Dürer that has posed many riddles for many people, especially scholars. The etching is about a satyr-like, faun-like figure that is holding a female being, as it were. From the background, another female figure appears, approaching the couple as if to punish them. And a Hercules-like male figure stands nearby, holding a club in his hand, which he uses to hold back the punishing female figure from the group of the woman with the satyr, preventing her from approaching. It is, one might say, quite remarkable, extremely remarkable, how the scholars have struggled to understand this picture. It is usually called 'Hercules'. But what it expresses is not found in the usual Hercules saga. So one wonders: how did Albrecht Dürer come up with this scene? And some very curious ideas have been put forward. One can see, for example, how helpless Herman Grimm is in the face of this picture. He does not know what to make of it. He comes up with the strangest ideas. And why is that? Why can't people make sense of it? Because he and the scholars do not know — as Albrecht Dürer still did — that people can still enter a spiritual world when they are asleep. Today, this awareness has been lost. But Dürer still knew, for example, that there are men who, during sleep, engage in all sorts of antics with the elemental world, men who are quite civilized during the ordinary time, but during sleep they fall back into the world of drives and do all sorts of useless things, all sorts of antics.

In the painting by Albrecht Dürer, we see the satyr and Hercules with the club. Good old Hercules, who is standing there, would like to be this satyr himself. But he lives in the physical world, in a moral world on the physical plane, and his wife does not allow him to do so. She comes along and wants to drive him away. But he likes it and holds her back.

We see here an inner process of the soul and know that Albrecht Dürer still knew something of these things. Thus much in the art of not so distant centuries can be explained, because at that time there was still an awareness of the connection of man with the spiritual-elemental world immediately adjacent to the physical.

But if we turn to such noble minds as Emerson's, we have to say that they do not engage in frivolities during their sleep, but in noble things. When they are in the spiritual world with their ego and astral body, they come into contact with the truths that are to be true anthroposophy in humanity. What future physical knowledge is to become comes to her consciousness. One could say that Emerson receives something like this in his sleep. That is why it fits so chastely and intimately into what he has to say about the physical life with his physical senses and mind, surveying the wide expanse of earthly life.

Now it would not be in keeping with the evolution of humanity if people were simply to grasp, as I said, in their life of sleep, what lies behind the appearance of sense and behind the phantasmagoria of the senses. For that is again the meaning of evolution, that the life of sleep loses more and more of its significance in knowledge. One must be a great spirit like Emerson if one wants to conquer something out of the life of sleep, like the idea of repeated lives on earth. But what is spiritual must come into humanity, must find its way into humanity. Just as these truths are related to the innermost human soul life, as they reveal themselves there, as it were, in a kind of dawn, especially in spirits like Emerson, so on the other hand there must be an earthly disposition to understand such truths in the light of waking consciousness. There must be an earthly predisposition to perceive oneself in such a way that one finds it natural to recognize these truths. You understand that this is not yet natural in the present, because we are still such a small group as spiritual scientists, and all those who stand outside of spiritual scientific striving see us as fools or something similar.

It is not part of modern education to recognize these truths directly. Man's natural temperament argues against it. As a rule, the logical arguments people put forward against spiritual science are extremely inferior, because people do not resist on logical grounds; they resist because, by their very nature, they are not predisposed to accept such truths today, through all that they are through the forces of the earth.

But there must come a time when man's nature will be so constituted that he can immediately grasp these truths, just as he can grasp mathematical truths today. Man must be organized naturally so that he can grasp these truths. For this it is necessary that he is physically so constituted for the time that elapses between birth and death that his brain is so developed that he can see these truths.

In the sense of yesterday's discussion, such a relationship must be established between the spirits that work in the earth and people, that people are constituted in such a way that they can absorb these truths, and this happens in such a way that an area of land, as I showed and sketched yesterday, leans from east to west towards the three gulfs I spoke of yesterday. This area of land is only a phantasmagoria on the outside. This area of land is in reality composed of the spirits of the earth. In reality, the spirits of this area of land work on people and physically shape them in such a way that they understand the truths of the spiritual and mental constitution of man and repeated lives on earth. What I would say is more for the Western spirits, which have to conquer from sleep, will have to become a more self-evident truth in waking life for those who lean towards the East in the evolution of humanity. The earth prepares its bodies, one would like to say, for what they need for evolution. This earth is absolutely that which I discussed yesterday: a far-reaching organism that is ensouled and that, from time to time, sends out the earth spirits from its soul life, which organize the bodies in such a way that they can intervene in evolution in an appropriate way.

You see, these things are extraordinarily deep and significant, and one must really get involved with such things if one wants to understand what it is all about. However, if you compare the earth as an ensouled and spiritualized organism with what man is as an ensouled and spiritualized organism, there is a great difference. Man is related to the actual spirits of the earth through the exterior of his physical body, in which he actually does not usually live in it, but in which he is stuck in it. Through the etheric body, he is related to the spirits of water; through the astral body, he is related to the spirits of air, and through his connection with the ego, he is related to the spirits of fire.

When a person leaves their physical and etheric bodies during sleep, they live with their ego and astral body only in relation to the warmth that pervades the earth and the air that flows and breathes through the earth. They are torn away from everything that configures earth and water in the physical body. Man is truly torn out of everything that, I would like to say, the physical and etheric bodies do as earthly beings when they sleep. Of course, air and warmth also belong to the earth, but only to the earth, not to the parts of the earth. Now, for man as a spiritualized being, warmth is, so to speak, that in which he dwells as in his own element. In the higher animals, there is already a preparation for this. They have their own warmth, not just the warmth of their surroundings. They live in their soul, in their own warmth. Man has particularly developed this, that he lives in his own warmth, that he has his own temperature. This is something that separates him from the great variety of the outside world. Heat is, as it were, something that every human being carries within himself and carries with him. There he is in his actual self, there he is at home in the warmth.

In the air, he lives in it to a lesser extent. I would like to say that the differentiation of the earth already exerts a certain influence on him. Whether he lives in mountain air, sea air or country air, that makes a certain difference. In this way, the human being comes into relation to what affects him from the outside. This is the case with the human being as a soul-inspired and spiritualized organism.

The opposite is the case with the earth as a souled and spiritualized organism. What warmth is for human beings, that is for the earth just the earth, the solid earthly, and warmth is for it the 'outmost' that has a relationship to the souled earth like to us the earth. The earth is earth through and through, as we are warmth through and through. The earth is outwardly differentiated in relation to warmth. Depending on whether it extends its limbs into the icy regions or into the sultry region of the tropics, it opens its soul outwardly to warmth, just as we, in relation to our physical body, incline toward the region in which we happen to live. In the case of the earth, it is exactly the opposite of the human being, and this is the basis for the interaction between the earth as a spiritual and animate organism and the human being as a spiritual and animate organism. Through this interaction, that which comes about in the physical human body arises so that this physical human body, in the succession of nations and peoples, enters into the evolution of the whole earthly existence in the right way. We have an intensive relationship between the earthly and the human precisely in those peoples who, as a mass of people, moved from east to west. And one could express this intensive relationship as if one were to see a mighty being in the earth itself, and this mighty being would decide to intervene in evolution in an appropriate way, let us say from the 20th century onwards. Then it must say to itself: I must direct certain spiritual entities up to my surface, I must let them be active in such a way that they prepare physical bodies so that the physical bodies can receive through the brain the truths that are beneficial to humanity in this time of evolution.

What I have just expressed is like a thought that the earth has. This thought can only be grasped if it is grasped with the right devotion and reverence, if it is not taken like the thoughts of external science, but if it is regarded as something sacred, as something that cannot be uttered without reverence, because one is reminded of man's connection with the spiritual world, because one is directly immersed in the communication between the human and the divine, where such things are expressed. Therefore, attention should be paid everywhere to ensure that the necessary atmosphere of feeling and sentiment is present when such things are expressed. This is extremely important in such matters. One might say: in a certain sense, such things must not be expressed in any other way than that they are based on the feeling, the mood of prayer. A looking up to the spiritual worlds must pulsate through what we think through so thoroughly as we approach such thoughts. And that this can happen in a natural way, through the external environment alone, is why our body is constructed, and why everything that is to appear in it is made.

Thus we see in what I have just described a kind of example of how the earth, as earth, works spiritually through what is contained in its solid element, how it creates and forms that which lives on it in evolution.

If, on the other hand, we go more to the west, we have different conditions. Yesterday I explained to you a situation where the west interacts with the east, where the liquid element leans over like a mighty being towards the east and expresses the three-part soul nature, leaning over into the three great gulfs, which the spiritually inclined peoples of ancient Finland still felt as Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen, and which today are so prosaically referred to as the Gulfs of Finland, Bothnia and Riga. In the ancient Finnish people, that which comes from the liquid element and that which comes from the solid element worked together. In the Finnish people, the element that more constitutes the ethereal human being and refines the physical human being, the liquid element, and the element of the earth, that which comes from the earth, that which constitutes the physical human being, united.

The question may be raised as to the significance of a people like the great Finnish nation, which has fulfilled such an eminent mission in the course of the Earth's mission and yet still remains for later times. All this has its significance in the whole progress of evolution, that such a people remain, that they do not disappear from the Earth when they have fulfilled their mission. Just as a person retains in living memory the thoughts that he has conceived at a certain age for a later age, so must earlier peoples also remain as a conscience, as a living memory in relation to what happens in later times: as a conscience.

And now one could say: The conscience of the European East will be that which the Finnish people have preserved. There must come a time when an understanding of the tasks of evolution will take hold of the heart, when the ideas of Kalewala will flourish from the very heart of the Finnish people, when this wonderful Kalewala epic will be imbued with modern spiritual ideas and when the whole of Europe will be made aware of its depth.

The European peoples revered the Homeric epics. The Kalevala flowed from even deeper sources of the soul life. This cannot be recognized today. But this will be understood when the teachings of spiritual science are applied in the appropriate way to explain spiritual phenomena in the evolution of the earth. An epic like Kalevala cannot be preserved without being preserved in living existence, without the souls that dwell in the body, which are related to the creative powers of Kalevala. It remains as a living conscience. In this way it can continue to work, not through the words but through that which has lived in it itself, continues to live, that there is a center from which it can radiate. What matters is that this is there, like the thoughts we have had earlier are there in later life.

In the West, there is more of what forms and shapes the etheric body. These are difficult truths, and you will have to get used to them, because I do not have the opportunity, which one will hopefully have one day in the evolution of the earth, to deal with the things that I have to deal with in an hour over the course of a whole year. You will have to be open to supplementing many things with your thoughts, to meditatively reflect on what has been said. Then it will become fully familiar to you. In particular, do not try to approach things with these or those hasty nuances of feeling.

In the West, there is more of an effect on the etheric body, which had to be formed in the same way, but at an earlier time, than it has to be done on the physical body in the East.

You see, it is very easy to misunderstand such things, because the differences are fine, very subtle. If, for example, we see in the West that it depends on the peoples that the etheric body has been formed more by the spirits of water, it is self-evident – because the physical body is an imprint of this – that the physical body has also been formed as an imprint of the etheric body, out of the forces of water. But the important thing is that in the East the forces of the physical body have a more direct effect. So we have to focus on what is important. External physical science cannot make this subtle distinction. It sees that the Eastern physical body is configured in one way and the Western physical body in another. It does not see any more than that. Only spiritual science can go into such differences in more detail. Furthermore, language is so clumsy and very unsuitable for expressing such differences. When you say something completely different, you often have the impression that you are actually saying the same thing. Yesterday, for example, I had to say that for Asian peoples it is important that the forces that build up the physical body lie in their own etheric body. Today I have to say that it is important for the peoples of the West that the etheric body is formed from the forces of water. If you take all of this together, you will understand that in the old days it was the case that the etheric body had to be formed in the Eastern peoples of Europe, but today, now, is the time when the physical body has to be formed , while in the western peoples it is the case that their etheric body is formed after their physical body has already received its character more from the outside, that their etheric body is directly exposed to the genii of the sea, the genii of the water.

In the case of Western peoples, what they are comes about through the impulses entering their etheric body. Where the impulses enter the etheric body more, what matters less is the spatial and more the temporal. How the impulses work in the succession of time is what matters more.

If we look towards the east, we see how thoughts well up out of the earth, as it were, to prepare human beings for future evolution. If we look towards the west, we see thoughts welling up out of the fluid, the forces that form the etheric bodies in the succession of time.

And there we see how, in the ancient times in the West, the etheric body of man was formed far into Central Europe in such a way that this etheric body lives out its immediate life in the body, alive, outwardly.

What does that mean? It means, my dear friends, that in ancient times in western Europe there lived people who brought their way of life to light from the etheric body in the same way that people now bring it to light from the physical body — where the etheric body has already worked with these old impulses. There were people who still had a living relationship with the spiritual world, especially with the elemental world. That belongs to ancient times. Those times are, so to speak, already over, when the genii of the liquid element spoke to the etheric body of man in the West in the most lively way. But when this etheric body is spoken to, it is different from our time, when it is mainly spoken to the physical body of man. The physical body of the human being is spoken to in such a way that an impression is made on his senses, that he acquires knowledge and adopts certain habits of life that are connected with the impressions of the senses.

These ancient Westerners were still more connected with the elemental world in their habits, in what lived within them. Among the Celts, there were people who knew about the elemental world just as we know about the physical world today; people to whom the elemental world was not closed, who could speak of nature genii, of water genii, of earth genii, just as we speak of trees, plants, mountains, clouds, who had direct contact with these nature genii. And the peculiarity of life in Europe is based on the fact that this was precisely the case in ancient times, because in those days, just as one acts today through the senses on the physical body, one acted on the etheric body of the human being.

Then, of course, work was still being done on the etheric body of the human being, but this etheric body was formed and developed in such a way that the relationship of the genii of fluidity to it took place more in the subconscious, and the conscious relationship with the nature spirits receded more.

How did this come about? For France, for example, it came about through the wave of Romanic evolution sweeping over the wave of Celtic evolution, permeating the Celtic element with the Romanic element. In the confluence of the Celtic and the Romance, we have two impulses. An old impulse, which directly mediates the connection between the elementary world and the etheric body, and in the new impulse, in the influence of the Romance, we have that which also enters the etheric body, but that it is like an historical, a historic wave, so that what I said in earlier lectures could occur, that a revival of the ancient Greek element could take place in the French element.

If we want to understand this western type of human being correctly, we must assess these various impulses, which also flow into the etheric body, in the right way. And now, so to speak, we have spoken of characteristic phenomena with regard to the influences on the physical body and with regard to the influences on the etheric body. The situation is different when we consider the middle region. There things are somewhat different. There we are dealing with something, I might say, much more unexpressed, with something that can be less clearly characterized. There we are dealing with the fact that both spirits of the earth and spirits of the liquid element have a direct effect on the physical body.

You see, it is a transition. Here, in the West, the spirits of the liquid element act directly on the etheric body. The spirits of the liquid element subside in Central Europe, and they are joined by certain spirits of the earthly element. They act directly on the physical body; less strongly on the etheric body. The spirits of the earthly element refine the physical body as you go further east. Therefore, in some way connected with Central Europe, we have everything that, over a long period of time, has provided Europe with such physical bodies that are accessible to the liquid and solid elements. And so we see how what flows into human evolution must become more complicated. We see how, out of this store, this reservoir, the people of the Franks, as I have described them, through the agency of the fluid and the solid, are preparing to reintroduce themselves into the Celtic-Romanic folk element; and only then does that which has confronted us as the active element in human evolution arise.

The Franks who remained behind thus retain the peculiarity of preferring to receive in the physical body that which emanates from the liquid and earthly spirits – the Saxons are related to them in this respect. The Franks who moved to the West united their nature with that which comes from the direct influence of the genius of the sea, which becomes even more significant when we consider that it incorporates the historical element of the Romance language.

In this way the impulses interlock and so we can understand how, above all, if we want to characterize Western Europe, we cannot come to an understanding unless we take into account everything that intervenes in the etheric body.

If we want to characterize Central Europe, we have to say that it depends more on the physical body, it depends more on what is configured in the physical body. Now we see how such impulses, like the ones expressed, concentrate in certain centers, as it were, how they characteristically emerge in certain centers. Two such centers, which are truly characteristic of each other, are found in Central Europe on the one hand and in the British Isles on the other. In Central Europe, where it is most strongly expressed, we have what I have called the solid element, and where what comes from the spirits of the liquid and the spirits of the solid flows into the physical body, where it is mixed, and in the British Isles, where - in some ways more strongly than in France, for example - what comes from the spirits of the liquid element has a preferential effect on the etheric bodies. This has led to people living in these two areas who basically carry the same impulses within them; only some carry them in their physical body and are suited to everything connected with the work of these genii in the physical ; the others, in the British Isles, have them in their etheric bodies and are thus called upon to bring about everything that is connected with the impulses of the etheric body. If I may say it grotesquely, I could say that if you put a German and an Englishman together, you notice the difference when you look at their physical bodies. You only notice the similarity when you put the German's physical body together with the Englishman's etheric body. Only then does it become apparent that the same impulses are alive there.

You see what emerges, caricatured, in the external view, which remains with the external phantasmagoria, I would say. Do not misunderstand the word. It only appears in its true form when one considers what becomes the basis of life, what the truth is. But because in the world the entities must work together, because it cannot be otherwise, because the world is a whole, it must be so that on the one hand certain impulses work through the physical body, on the other hand through the etheric body. I would say that is the way it should be. This is how the corresponding real interaction arises.

And so you see, what appears in the spiritual world is that a very special relationship has come about between the German world and the British world. I have explained this very special relationship for the East and West in a previous lesson, in which I showed you how a certain struggle takes place in the spiritual world for the East and West, caused by the diversity of the souls that come from an eastern and the souls that come from a western body.

The effect of the conditions just described is something else. I ask you not to take what I have to say today as if it can be understood or speculated upon rationally. One must observe in the spiritual world, otherwise one will not be able to arrive at the right conclusion. A harmony is gradually emerging between what is happening in Central Europe and the British Isles, a harmony, a true spiritual alliance that has gradually grown so strong that it can be said that spiritually speaking, no earthly souls love each other more than the earthly souls of Central Europe and the earthly souls of the British Isles. There the strongest love, spiritually conceived, exists, and that expresses itself outwardly in what we now see before us. Such are the complications of the situation.

One would truly not express such things if they were based only on a lightly founded knowledge, if one had not gained them through the most painful experiences. Do not think that you can generalize by thinking that every alliance in the physical world is a war in the spiritual world, and a war in the physical world is an alliance in the spiritual world. Things are as I have described them to you. And that this is expressed as a struggle is the expression in today's materialistic culture for the difficulty of really living out the matter in the spiritual.

Our time is reluctant to recognize what is present in the spiritual world, not only in words but also in deeds. It tries to present the opposite of what is present in the spiritual world, because the materialistic age is also reluctant to recognize the spiritual in deeds. And so the tendency of the spiritual world – namely, after the harmony of the physically achieved in Central Europe and the ethereally achieved in the British Isles – is drowned out in Maja by what is happening today in the form of struggle and mutual hatred.

You see, it is worthwhile for those who are not spiritual scientists to consider us fools, because the insights that emerge from the spiritual world are very much at odds with what can be observed in the physical world. But we can be assured that the further development of humanity depends on the fact that spiritual truths will really penetrate, that people really learn to see beyond the world of the senses. For this to happen, events are necessary, of which I have spoken more or less clearly in these days.

We can be glad that Karma has brought us together here in a neutral area, where it is possible to speak so frankly about these things, for it is not easy to speak about them, especially today. But it is good for the humanities to find their way into these things, because they may regard what happens in the outer world precisely as an incentive to look behind the veil. Much would remain quite incomprehensible if one could not see behind this veil. Things only get their full meaning when one sees behind this veil.

Does anyone have a question?

Questioner (Mr. Burle): I would like to describe an experience from my youth that is related to fate and that is described, for example, in religion as if we had a guardian angel. I was once setting up cones as a boy, I was nine or ten years old at the time, and just as I was busy setting them up, a voice called: “Get away!” It was so intense that I quickly jumped away. And a moment later, the large ball had come crashing down right where I was standing. I asked, “Who called me?” But none of the others wanted to have done it, and the voice could not have come from there either.

The other time it happened was in a smithy where people were grinding their ploughshares. There was a large wheel there. There were five or six of us boys, enjoying ourselves. I was maybe eleven years old. I stood on the wheel spoke to push the wheel down. I liked doing that. So I said to the other boys: “Pull the quick-release trap, then I'll step from one step to the other.” They all pulled hard, but they couldn't do it. Even though I was the smallest, I went to see. The wheel had turned very fast, and it would obviously have been my death if they had raised the quick-release trap.

I would be glad if the doctor would comment on whether a higher power can express itself in such a case.

Dr. Steiner: Well, gentlemen, I would like to speak to you about such things, but here, of course, everything must be discussed in such a way that it can be scientifically justified. Such things are not taken from anthroposophical spiritual science just as they are very often taken by people who indulge in all kinds of superstition, but these things must of course also be - because they are much more important for life than one might think - considered in a thoroughly scientific way. Now I will tell you one thing first, as a preparation.

You see, a person actually only pays attention to a very small part of life. They do not pay attention to a large part of it, and because they do not pay attention to it, they believe that part of life is not there. For example, If someone walks past a house and a brick falls from above and kills him, this is very much noticed, and of course it causes a great stir in the circles in which the person concerned is known, and also otherwise. People talk about it a lot.

But now suppose the following: someone wants to leave in the morning. Now, at the last moment, when he is about to leave, he notices that he has forgotten something that absolutely must be taken care of, and as a result he is delayed for five minutes. Now he leaves. Now the brick falls five minutes before he passes by, and since he is passing by, it does him no harm. If he had left five minutes earlier, the brick would have smashed his head in. But of course no one talks about that, because no one can overlook that. No one can know – he himself naturally forgets, no one pays attention – what would have happened if he had not delayed a few minutes. Now, you see, these things are simply not noticed, but they are present in life just the same. There are countless such things, where we are saved from misfortune by our destiny, but they are not noticed at all. They are not studied for the simple reason that they cannot be easily traced. You can only trace them if the matter is somehow particularly striking, if it demands attention. Then you follow such things.

There was once a person who sat at his desk a lot, and the rest of the family lived downstairs. He often went up to this room of his. Now he dreamed once that a great misfortune would befall him on a certain day, that he would be shot. Now, what did the person in question do? He told the others, and they told him to be very careful, because he could be shot during those days. So he did not go out, but stayed in his room all day. But he had such an eerie impression of the dream, because he had often experienced it in the past – it was back in the days when people paid more attention to such things – that there are such true dreams. He had an unpleasant feeling. And it was this unpleasant feeling that made him aware of himself. And then it happened that at a certain moment he became restless and had to get up from his seat because of this inner restlessness. At that very moment, a shot rings out, passing right by his chair! He had an old rifle from much earlier, which was hanging in the anteroom – the door was open – and a servant had picked it up. He hadn't realized that it was loaded, held the rifle carelessly, it went off, and the shot went past where the man had been sitting.

So you see, there is a double concatenation of fate. First there is a banal dream. On the other hand, because his fate is not yet fulfilled, because he is still supposed to live, he is driven away at just the right moment by an inner urge. But now the other comes into consideration. You see, at that same moment he could just as easily have heard: “Go away!” as you heard it (turned to Mr. Burle). He could just as easily have heard that. How would that have happened? You see, when one speaks of a spiritual world, one must be clear about the fact that one must not speak foolishly of the spiritual world. But one would still be talking nonsense about the spiritual world if one were to believe – as many people do, at least those who are spiritists – that there are Germans and French and English and Spaniards and Chinese in the spiritual world. But they would have to be there if one were to hear, from the spiritual world, “Go away!” because then some spiritual being would have to speak German. It would speak French to a Frenchman, because if it spoke German, he would think it was an inarticulate sound, or these days he might even think it meant something very bad. So that would be a very foolish thought if one were to imagine that “Go away!” was spoken by a spirit, because a spirit cannot be German or French or English. That is the nonsense of spiritualists, that they think they can get in touch with the dead through a medium and get answers and believe that this is how spirits speak. Of course they don't. Even though they are present, they don't do it. But the following is the case.

This kind of connection with the spiritual world, which gives one the possibility to also speak scientifically of a spiritual world, presupposes that one first gets out of the habit of thinking that the spirits speak in an earthly language. First one must get to know the supersensible world and then one can translate what the spirits say in a supersensible language into an ordinary language. If the person sitting at his desk had heard, “Go away!” — that could have been just as well. But the fact of the matter is, gentlemen, you have heard from me that the whole human being is filled with reason. I once explained to you: the liver perceives processes in the human abdomen, the lungs perceive, the whole human being is a sensory organ. The heart perceives, through the heart one perceives the blood circulation. But in ordinary life one does not need these organs for perception. One needs one's eyes and one's nose, but one does not need these organs for perception. These organs have a very specific peculiarity. Take, for example, the liver, gentlemen! You see, if you cut the liver out of the body, then it is this organ that you know from animals, because you have probably seen some kind of liver, at least goose liver. But this organ has an etheric body that is connected to the other etheric body (drawing, yellow), and it also has an astral body (violet) and then it is still permeated by the ego. So this organ, the liver, has something spiritual about it. In your head you perceive the spiritual, but in your liver you consciously do not perceive the spiritual. There you, as you are organized in ordinary life, cannot overlook anything, just as I recently explained to you that you do not perceive the spiritual in your small eye lens. But one can see the whole sky with the small eye lens. Through all head organs spiritual entities almost do not speak. The whole world speaks through the head organs, the stars with their movements and so on. But through the other organs, for example through the liver, spiritual beings actually speak. The stomach speaks to the liver, but so do spiritual beings, and to the lungs too. Spiritual beings speak to all the organs that are not needed in ordinary conscious life.

Now, gentlemen, if the head is actually dependent on perceiving only what it sees outside in the external world, then the inside of the human being, the lower organs, are designed to perceive in the spiritual world. These organs are extraordinarily fine. They are really quite fine. And you can see that they are fine from the fact that sometimes conditions arise from such organs. These conditions are usually not noticed, and they are not noticed because our medicine is so imperfect. You see, you will have experienced at some time or other that someone gets diarrhea from a huge fear. You do not pay attention to it because you do not even imagine that diarrhea can come from fear. But it comes from it. There is an influence from the outside world. But this influence can also come from the spiritual world. And from the spiritual world it does happen that these organs do perceive, but perceive quite different things than are in the outside world.

I have already told you several times: we humans go through different earth lives. Yes, if people were to go through different earth lives so far, they would not have been able to do so. If a person is to develop here on earth from an early age, he must have a guide, namely an educator or teacher or something like that, otherwise he would remain quite stupid. But in the spiritual world every person really has such a guide who leads him from life to life and who also really pays attention in each individual life, not to the things over which we are free, over which we ourselves think rationally, but to the things over which we cannot think, but with which our human organization is connected. And so it happens that when someone is sitting there and is in a certain state of anxiety, he then becomes particularly sensitive to what lies ahead for him. This sensitivity must also be judged in the right way. One must distinguish very carefully: does this sensitivity arise for the spiritual, or can this sensitivity still be explained physically? If someone is not critical, he cannot speak correctly about these things.

I will also give you another example. There was once a patient who lived on the fourth floor of a house, and the doctor had to come to her every day, even when she was already getting better, because the matter was quite dangerous. The doctor did not come to this patient at the same hour every day, but at very different hours, but this patient knew exactly every day up on the fourth floor: Now the doctor is coming - even when he was still downstairs. When he was still outside the gate, she already knew: Now the doctor is coming. But she knew it in particular when he was still at the bottom of the building's hallway, before he had climbed a single step. People told the doctor this and said: Yes, she knows that through clairvoyance. Well, the doctor was a bit twitchy at first. Doctors don't believe that right away. But now, when he was approached again and again by people who told him, “Yes, our daughter is clairvoyant, she knows when you are down there,” he said, “I'll give it a try!” And he quietly took off his boots before going into the gate. And then she didn't know! Now, you see, there are cases like that too, of course, and they have to be properly investigated. Because this sick woman had simply developed a highly sensitive hearing from lying there for so long and could hear the footsteps downstairs, which you wouldn't otherwise hear from below. If one immediately says that this is clairvoyance, then one naturally has no right to speak of spiritual worlds. One must know exactly how to distinguish between what can still be perceived with the senses and what can no longer be perceived with the senses.

The things that happen show, however, that the senses can become extraordinarily sensitive. Because in ordinary life, of course, a person on the fourth floor with steps below is not able to hear them immediately. But just as the senses in the head and the other senses can become sensitive, so too can the inner organs, which are also senses, become sensitive to the spiritual. And so if, for example, the liver is under the impression that “today I could be shot,” then it is particularly sensitive, and the consequence of this is that the liver can hear, but now not in some Italian or German language, the warning from the spiritual being that is really there.

But now the wonderful thing happens: the liver has to transmit it to the head first, otherwise the person cannot perceive it; because there, on the way from the liver to the head, it is translated into the language that the person speaks. That is the wonderful thing about it, because that is where the mystery lies. Only then can you say what a strange being this person is. He is not only able to have intuitions, but, what is much more wonderful, he actually unconsciously translates into his language what comes to him in spiritual language.

From this you can see: everything that is written down in some spiritualistic circles is said to the underbellies. It's just that people are reluctant to admit it. They think the spirits speak Italian or French, but it all comes from within the person. And yet, there is a connection to the spiritual world in these sessions too, only a very bad one. This is then translated into all kinds of things.

But from this you can see that when something like this 'go away' occurs, you have to be clear about one thing: the actual connection with the spiritual world still remains unclear. You don't have a proper idea if you simply imagine that the guardian spirit whispered in your ear. Instead, you have to know how this happens, albeit indirectly. Then you understand something else as well. Then you realize that people can refute something like that very easily. Because for an ordinary person, the one about the man who took off his shoes is a refutation. He says: People think it's clairvoyance, clairaudience, but there was no clairaudience there, just ordinary hearing. So it's the same in the other case.

Yes, that is precisely what must be investigated first, gentlemen! And then, if you exercise the necessary caution, you will see that the spiritual world does indeed constantly work with human destiny in these roundabout ways, especially strongly in childhood, of course. Why in childhood? Yes, in childhood the astral body is much more active, it works much more intensely. Later it no longer works so intensely. When the liver is still soft in a child, the astral body can transfer what it hears in the spiritual world to the liver. Later, when the liver has become hard, it can no longer transfer anything.

Now you have to think about what an event like the one experienced by Mr. Burle means when you are actually facing death and not what is quite well foreseen by the external nature of things. Because at that time, when you heard the “Go away!”, you could have died? (Confirmed.) So you would have died. There are many such cases in a person's life. It's just that many go unnoticed. But this is one that you noticed very clearly.

But now you have gone through many earlier ones before you went through your present life on earth. Yes, gentlemen, what you went through earlier in your lives on earth wants to be lived out in the right way. It wants to be lived out in such a way that, for example, you now have a really long life in this life, so that everything can be lived out as it was determined by your earlier lives on earth. Now, external nature can even contradict this. One day, due to external circumstances, I may be exposed to an accident, may have to die, and the matter could become such that, let us say, when I die, I actually die in my previous earth life after an unreasonably early period of time. It is not right after the previous earth life that I die so early because I still have something to do on earth. Now I could also die. Do not believe that it is absolutely certain that I will not die! I could also die, it could be my misfortune. I could die, but my whole destiny would be changed. Because I would then not have the little bit of life on earth that I should still have lived through. The whole destiny would be changed! Now this spiritual being, which guides the human being from life to life on earth, intervenes and can warn him. There is always a reason why it can warn him. But of course the circumstances are extremely complicated, and sometimes it can also be the case that this being, which wants to protect the person, if we want to use the word that way, succumbs to other beings that prevent it, that keep it away. In the spiritual world, such struggles can certainly take place. But when evil entities, if I may express myself so, have no particular interest in it, then the warning comes through. And so it came through at the time. And that very special things can happen, even outwardly, yes, that also happens countless times.

You were surprised, weren't you, in the second case you told from your life, why it wasn't turned any further. Because if it had been turned further, you would have had to perish. The others couldn't let the water run, only you could do it then. Now, why was that? You couldn't see externally what it was. (Mr. Burle: No!) It was because this spiritual entity, wanting to warn you or to preserve you, paralyzed the will of the others at that moment. This always works through the person himself, not in an external way, not through another. The will was paralyzed in the others at that moment, they could not manage to move the muscles. So that's the way things are, that's how things are connected. So that whenever one wants to talk about the spiritual world, one must be sure that the spiritual world works through the human being. Just as one cannot see a color without an eye, one cannot perceive the spiritual world without this inner activity of the human being. That is indeed what one must always bear in mind if one wants to pursue real science and not end up in superstition. Because it is the case that what is on earth, the different languages, no longer applies to the spiritual world, but only languages that one must first learn apply there. If you want to penetrate into the spiritual world – and I have described what exercises you have to do to penetrate into the spiritual world – then, above all, you have to be able to stop thinking while you are penetrating into the spiritual world. Not forever, that would be bad, but for the moments when you want to penetrate into the spiritual world. Because human thinking is only for this earthly world. That is why thinking is so closely related to speaking. We actually think in words in the physical world, and only by gradually getting used to not thinking in words can we approach the spiritual world.

And now I will explain to you what it is like when a person looks directly into the spiritual world. Imagine that Mr. Burle was a clairvoyant at the moment when it happened to him, when he was told “Go away!”, but a real clairvoyant. What would have happened then? If Mr. Burle had been a clairvoyant, then he would not have needed to do this terribly ingenious work inwardly, to translate into German what a spiritual being had told him, but something else would have come. Because then he would have learned how the same spiritual being can interpret, can make gestures, can make signs. Because spiritual beings do not speak in words, but they make gestures. Of course not like the gestures of a deaf-mute, but they make gestures. People are usually not satisfied with these gestures because, like the spiritualists, they want to hear something. But in the real spiritual world it is not so, there things are not audible with the outer ear. One cannot grasp at all how a reasonable person can imagine that he hears the spirits with physical ears, because physical ears cannot listen there. It is nonsense to believe that physical ears can hear the spirits. Of course it must be the astral body of some organ that hears the ghosts. But that is also not real external seeing and hearing, but it is a knowledge of how one must interpret the signs that these beings make. And then Mr. Burle, if he had been clairvoyant, would have seen a spiritual image instead of hearing: “Go away!” he would have seen a spiritual image, you know, as if someone were pushing him away. And if he had then perceived it spiritually correctly inwardly, then it would not have needed to be translated first into ‘Go away!’ But all this happens quietly and calmly, and people are not accustomed to receiving the spiritual world quietly, calmly, in silence. If there were danger in the air, you would not want to be calm. You would be agitated, but agitation does not allow you to perceive the spiritual world. And if destiny is to speak, it will speak in such a way that the person can understand it.

You see, as you know, there are people who can think mathematically very easily and there are those who cannot think mathematically at all, those who are good at calculating and those who cannot calculate at all. These different abilities do exist. But precisely when one makes a real effort in mathematical thinking, then one can enter into real clairvoyance more easily than when one has no concept of mathematical thinking at all. And therein lies the reason why people today find it so difficult to enter into the contemplation of the spiritual world. For those who undergo training today are still mostly those who go through Greek and Latin, literature and all sorts of things, through all that where one can think sloppily. Yes, most so-called educated and learned people have actually only learned to think “sloppily” because they think in the way the ancient Romans or Greeks actually thought, and the others then learn it from them. And so today there exists just a terribly sloppy thinking, no thinking at all, that really has power in itself. That is why it is impossible today to understand correctly the things that have been taken from the spiritual world. If people had a truly sharp thinking, then they would come much sooner to an understanding of what is going on in the spiritual world. You can see from external events that have taken place in recent centuries how man, on the other hand, is almost anxious not to reach the spiritual world. I will explain this to you with an example.

You see, when a certain Stephenson first pointed out that carriages could be made with iron wheels that run on rails, it was presented to the scholars of his time. That was not so long ago. Now the scholars started to calculate, did the right calculation. What did they find out? They calculated: A wagon would never move forward if there is a rail here and a wheel there (it is drawn), where the wheel is supposed to go over the rail like that. It can't be. — And they continued calculating and worked out: The wheel can only move forward if the rail is toothed like this and the wheel is also toothed so that a raised tooth always engages with one of the same shape. So the scholars have calculated that if the carriages had cogwheels and the rails also had teeth in which the carriage cogwheels engage, it would then be possible for the carriages to move forward and they have proved that this is the only way that trains can move forward. Well, gentlemen, you see, things are going very well today without cogwheels and toothed rails! What did people do? Not so very long ago. Yes, they did calculations. But they only kept the calculations in their heads, they did not let the rest of their minds work with them. That dulls the calculations. Calculations are precisely the way to become enlightened. But in the last century people even opposed calculations. But as a result, all the rest of the thinking has also been confused. And in 1835, when it got to the point that people no longer debated about “cog wheels”, but the first railroad in Germany was set up from Fürth to Nuremberg, they in turn summoned the Bavarian Medical Council and asked them whether the railroad should be built, whether it was healthy. This document is extremely interesting. It was not so long ago, less than a century. The document was issued by a meeting of learned gentlemen, who said that it would be better not to build railways because the people sitting in them would become extremely nervous. But if people force them to build railways if they want to move forward quickly, then they should at least put up large, high wooden walls to the left and right of the tracks so that the farmers do not get concussions from the rapid passing of the trains. That is what the document of the learned gentlemen says.

Yes, that is how people judged. But do not think that today they would judge differently about those things that really make their way into the world in a forward-looking way. They do not judge differently today either. Because the fact that people laugh today about what happened in 1835 is just afterwards, and so people will only be able to laugh about what happens today afterwards, when it will be almost a hundred years ago. People have very particular ideas about things that are supposed to be new. The railways did not go down well at all, because they ran counter to people's way of thinking. When, for example, the first railroad to Potsdam was to be built in Berlin, the Postmaster General had to be asked, because he had supervised the four postal carriages that went from Berlin to Potsdam and back every week, and he had to give his opinion on whether a railroad should be built. So he gave his opinion: yes, he did let a postal carriage go from Berlin to Potsdam four times a week, and there was hardly anyone sitting in it. Why should we build a railroad when there is no one in the mail coach? Today, ten to twelve trains run from Berlin to Potsdam every day, and they are all full. Not just now, at this moment, but they were all full. You see, for a few centuries now people have found it difficult to find their way into what is actually happening in the world. Therefore, one does not perceive the things that are happening, and at most one believes a person who, I might say, is an external authority. One sometimes believes something. So I will tell you a story.

There was a very famous engineer in England – this was not so long ago, about forty years ago – I think his name was Varley, a very famous engineer, whose intellect was not doubted by anyone. The following happened to this very famous man. He went with his wife from London to the countryside because his sister-in-law, his wife's sister, was very ill; she was almost dying. They stayed out there for a few days. Now, on the first night, this gentleman, who was a very famous engineer, was lying in bed and suddenly had what is known as an 'alpaca', and he couldn't move a muscle. If the 'alpaca' passes quickly, it's not too bad, but if you can't move a muscle and stay awake for a long time, you can suffocate. Now he was lying there, actually already dazed, so that he just had the thought: I'm going to suffocate. Well, you know, there's a person who you think is going to die in a few days. You also want to keep the house quiet. So he tried to pull himself together, but he didn't succeed. Suddenly he sees the sick woman standing next to his bed, and she addresses him by his first name and says: “Get up!” This startles him so much that the shock enables him to move his limbs again. Since he was a very clever person, he knew that this had saved him. Well, he was naturally glad that something like that could happen. You can understand that, because other things have happened in the world. There were people who had been mute for fifteen or twenty years, who suddenly got a great fright and became able to speak again. So a great fright can, of course, create something terrible in a person, but it can also be beneficial. And in the morning, when the gentleman in question had got up, he visited his sister-in-law, who had been lying in bed all night. But the first thing she told him, without him mentioning it first – because he wanted to spare the sick woman the dream, of course, and did not want to tell it – was that she said: “You know, I had a strange dream that night. I dreamt that I had to go to you and scare you so that you wouldn't suffocate. And then I went and scared you so that you wouldn't suffocate. That was my dream. She was a few rooms away from him.

You see, this is a story that cannot be doubted. I relate this story to you only because it was related by a man who otherwise thought quite soberly in the world, for he was a sober electrician and famous in his profession. I do not want to relate stories that have been picked up on the street, but this is a story that is as authentic as if someone from the laboratory were to tell it.

What is the situation here? I have already told you, gentlemen, that during the night the ego and the astral body leave every human being. So when the patient was asleep, the ego and the astral body were not in the body that was lying in the bed. So what is now this so-called protective spirit could not get directly to the man, because the man had the sober thinking that people have acquired over the centuries. If Mr. Burle had had sober thinking back then – which of course he certainly did not have as a little boy, because after all, he was no more a scholar then than he is today – he would not have heard that, because sober thinking drowns it out, blows it away. This Mr. Varley had this sober thinking. His protective spirit could not have frightened him so easily. This protective spirit even took the detour of using the sleeping, sick sister-in-law in her astral body, so that he was frightened by the astral body that it brought to his bed. The sister-in-law would never have known that. She could have easily forgotten such a so-called dream, and would not have been able to tell anything if she had been a healthy person. She died a few days later, when the astral body goes into the spiritual world anyway. He had already prepared himself for that. As a result, the sick person was able to retain more easily what she had heard a few days before her death, which she was to learn afterwards. And the consequence of that was that she also knew the matter.

So you see, if you observe such things correctly, then you come to speak about them in the same way as you speak about them when you have a retort somewhere in the laboratory, a flame underneath, you put sulfur in there, it is yellow at first, but then it turns brown, later red. This can be described. In the same way, it is possible to describe the nature of spiritual phenomena if one applies truly sound thinking to them. But this must, of course, be the basic condition. Now in our time everything is made confused by the fact that just this confused thinking, which I have described to you, is prevailing. And I have described this confused thinking to you not just for the sake of describing thinking to you, but I have described it because I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that even in the case of a person in whose destiny an intervention was to be made, who thus still had something to do on the physical earth, the matter was such that, since he could never have had direct perception, this detour was chosen via the patient. But one must see the matter in the right way.

I think I have already told you what happened to Dr. Schleich, who recently died in Berlin, who was a very famous man in Berlin, a famous surgeon, but who also had a certain inclination – he was cleverer than the other doctors – to understand such things. Now, the following happened to Schleich: One evening a man came to him and said, “I just pushed a pen into my hand in my office, and some ink went into it. You have to take my hand off immediately, amputate it, because otherwise I'll die of blood poisoning.” Schleich said, “Yes, but, sir, I have to look at the wound first.” “No,” said the man, ‘it has to be done right away!’ ‘I can't do it, I'm not allowed to do it!’ said Dr. Schleich. Then he looked at the wound and said, ‘The wound can be sucked out very easily.’ So he sucked out the wound. The patient insisted that his hand be removed. “I can't remove your hand,” the doctor said. The man said, “Then I must die!” He didn't believe that the wound was harmless; he said he must die.

Now Dr. Schleich felt very uneasy. Then another doctor telephoned him and reported: “The patient told me that he was with you, but you didn't want to cut off his hand. Now he is with me.” But this doctor couldn't take his hand either because of the small stab wound. Dr. Schleich couldn't sleep all night, it was so scary for him.

The next day he went to the house where the man lived: he had died during the night! He was dissected, and there was no sign of blood poisoning. But the man had to die. Now, Schleich simply said to himself: This is a death by suggestion – as we know today, don't we, yes: suggestions take place. All sorts of things are done under the influence of suggestion. You can achieve a lot through suggestion.

To give you an idea of what can be achieved through suggestion, I would like to share the following with you. For example, you can say to someone: I'm putting a Spanish plaster on you! - but you just stick a small blotting paper on him, and he gets a big blister! The soul penetrates into the physical. You can achieve something like that. Anyone who studies such things knows that you can do that. Schleich said to himself: Well, now the man has imagined that he is dying. So this imagination has had a suggestive effect on him, so death by suggestion.

He absolutely refused to believe me when I said it was nonsense. In this case, it was nonsense to say that the man had died by suggestion, because the facts were quite different. You see, this man's nerves were destroyed because he had completely destroyed nerves in the excitement of his recent life as a clerk and businessman; blood had flowed into his nerves. One could examine the blood in the veins quite well, that was all right. And when you examined the nerves, there was so little blood in them, which cannot be examined by external means, but the nerves were destroyed by the penetration of blood. This made the man twitchy, he pushed the pen into his hand because he was clumsy, and without much being noticed externally, he was already marked for the next night. He had to die for internal reasons, because his nervous system was permeated with blood. And then he had a premonition and became anxious, so that the psychological effect was just the opposite. Schleich thought he had conjured up his own death. He did not conjure up his own death; death came through his physical organization, but he had a premonition in his soul that death would come.

You see, there you have a striking example of how one must think correctly if one wants to see into the spiritual world. One must know exactly where the crux of the matter lies, so to speak, otherwise one can be a great learned gentleman and yet interpret the spiritual world quite wrongly. That is exactly what happened to Sir Oliver Lodge, who is one of the greatest physicists in England. This happened to Oliver Lodge, that he interpreted the spiritual world wrongly. Because his son was killed in one of the battles that took place in the world war. He was terribly sad that he had lost his son, Raymond Lodge, and so he became involved with a whole network of mediums. A very skilled medium was brought to him and it was arranged that through this medium his son Raymond spoke to him after his death. Now, under the impression that his son died on the German battlefront, this naturally made a great impression on him and was also a great comfort to him.

But now Sir Oliver Lodge is also an extraordinarily great scholar and does not believe so easily. But then something happened that made him almost unable to do anything but believe. And behold, what happened is the following. The medium, as they say, made it known to him from a trance state, that is, from a semi-conscious state, that his son had had himself photographed in the last days before he died and told him that there were two photographs available.

Now it happens very often that several pictures are taken in succession by such photographers, and usually people are seated a little differently for the second shot. So the medium says that the son is sitting differently in the second picture and describes how it is slightly different from the first, quite correctly. And Oliver Lodge immediately said to himself: Gosh, if what she describes were true: photographed a few days before the death, in two different positions! —- At that time in England, no one could have known that this was true, because it had only happened a short time before the death; because the seance took place two weeks or three weeks after the death of the son. Lo and behold, eight days after the seance took place, the two photographs arrived in London by mail – after all, parcels took a long time back then. And it was true, absolutely true! So, in his opinion, there was no other explanation than that his son had told him this from the afterlife.

And yet it was not so in this case, but the medium had already come into a trance, into a different state, and had a premonition, as it happens, so she only had a premonition of it. The people who were sitting around the medium only now, after eight days, have known about the photographs when they had arrived, but the medium had a foresight of them and had already seen them eight days earlier. So there was no connection with the hereafter, but everything happened on earth. The medium only had a presentiment, and Oliver Lodge was deceived after all. You have to be so careful! So everything is correct, that man lives beyond death, that he can also express himself, but you have to be sure. When Raymond Lodge says in English: “Shortly before my death, I had two photographs taken, the positions have changed.” You have to wonder if that is really him. After all, after death, communication in English comes to an end; otherwise the spirit would also have to be able to speak English. The information must therefore come from the subconscious of the medium, from what is not conscious in ordinary life.

I wanted to tell you, precisely because I was prompted by Mr. Burle's question to tell you such delicate things today, how careful you have to be, because you are responsible for what you say; I wanted to show how you cannot just take any concept at face value, but have to investigate everything. And only after long reflection can one say: Yes, a protecting spirit has just spoken. But the fact that the words were expressed in German happened only through the mediation of man. And if any human beings cannot do something, then their muscles must first be paralyzed from the spiritual world. Everything must go through the human being.

Then, once you have learned this as a basis, you can move on. We will continue to talk about this next Saturday.

At this point of our educational studies I want to interpolate some remarks referring to the arrangements which were made in the Waldorf School in order to facilitate and put into practice those principles about which I have already spoken and shall have more to say in the coming lectures.

The Waldorf School in Stuttgart was inaugurated in the year 1919 on the initiative of Emil Molt, [Director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory.] with the purpose of carrying out the principles of anthroposophical education. This purpose could be realised through the fact that the direction and leadership of the school was entrusted to me. Therefore when I describe how this school is organised it can at the same time serve as an example for the practical realisation of those fundamental educational principles which we have been dealing with here.

I should like to make clear first of all that the soul of all the instruction and education in the Waldorf School is the Teachers' Conference. These conferences are held regularly by the college of teachers and I attend them whenever I can manage to be in Stuttgart. They are concerned not only with external matters of school organisation, with the drawing up of the timetable, with the formation of classes and so on, but they deal in a penetrative, far-reaching way with everything on which the life and soul of the school depends. Things are arranged in such a way as to further the aim of the school, that is to say, to base the teaching and education on a knowledge of man. It means of course that this knowledge must be applied to every individual child. Time must be devoted to the observation, the psychological observation of each child. This is essential and must be reckoned with in actual, concrete detail when building up the whole educational plan. In the teachers' conferences the individual child is spoken about in such a way that the teachers try to grasp the nature of the human being as such in its special relationship to the child in question. You can well imagine that we have to deal with all grades and types of children with their varying childish talents and qualities of soul. We are confronted with pretty well every kind of child, from the one whom we must class as being psychologically and physically very poorly endowed to the one—and let us hope life will confirm this—who is gifted to the point of genius.

If we want to observe children in their real being we must acquire a psychological faculty of perception. This kind of perception not only includes a cruder form of observing the capacities of individual children, but above all the ability to appraise these capacities rightly. You need only consider the following: One can have a child in the class who appears to be extraordinarily gifted in learning to read and write, or seems to be very gifted in learning arithmetic or languages. But to hold fast to one's opinion and say: This child is gifted, for he can learn languages, arithmetic and so on quite easily—this betokens a psychological superficiality. In childhood, say at about 7, 8 or 9 years old the ease with which a child learns can be a sign that later on he will develop genius; but it can equally well be a sign that sooner or later he will become neurotic, or in some way turn into a sick man. When one has gained insight into the human being and knows that this human being consists not only of the physical body which is perceptible to the eye, but also bears within him the etheric body which is the source of growth and the forces of nourishment, the cause whereby the child grows bigger; when one considers further that man also has an astral body within him, the laws of which have nothing whatever to do with what is being physically established but on the contrary work destructively on the physical, and destroy it in order to make room for the spiritual; and furthermore when one considers that there is still the ego-organisation which is bound up with the human being, so that one has the three organisations—etheric body, astral body, ego-organisation and must pay heed to these as well as to the perceptible physical body—then one can form an idea of how complicated such a human being is, and how each of these members of the human being can be the cause of a talent, or lack of talent in any particular sphere, or can show a deceptive talent which is transient and pathological. One must develop insight as to whether the talent is of such a kind as to have healthy tendencies, or whether it tends towards the unhealthy.

If as teacher and educator, one represents with the necessary love, devotion and selflessness the knowledge of man of which we have been speaking here in these lectures, then something very definite ensues. In living together with the children one becomes—do not misunderstand the word, it is not used in a bragging sense—one becomes ever wiser and wiser. One discovers for oneself how to appraise some particular capacity or achievement of the child. One learns to enter in a living way into the nature of the child and to do so comparatively quickly.

I know that many people will say: If you assert that the human being, in addition to his physical body, consists of super-sensible members, etheric body, astral body and ego-organisation, it follows that only someone who is clairvoyant and able to perceive these super-sensible members of human nature can be a teacher. But this is not the case. Everything perceived through imagination, inspiration and intuition, as described in my books, can be examined and assessed by observing the physical organisation of the child, because it comes to expression everywhere in this physical organisation.

It is therefore perfectly possible for a teacher or educator who carries out his profession in a truly loving way and bases his teaching on a comprehensive knowledge of man, to speak in the following way about some special case: Here the physical body shows signs of hardening, of stiffening, so that the child is unable to develop the faculties which, spiritually, are potentially present, because the physical body is a hindrance. Or, to take another case, it is possible that someone might say: In this particular child, who is about 7 or 8 years old, certain attributes are making their appearance. The child surprises us in that he is able to learn this or that very early; but one can observe that the physical body is too soft, it has a tendency which later on may cause it to run to fat. If the physical body is too soft, if, so to say, the fluid element has an excess of weight in relation to the solid element, then this particular tendency causes the soul and spirit to make themselves felt too soon, and then we have a precocious child. In such a case, during the further development of the physical body, this precocity is pushed back again, so that under certain conditions everything may well be changed and the child become for the whole of life, not only an average person, but one even below average. In short, we must reckon with the fact that what external observation reveals in the child must be estimated rightly by means of inner perceptiveness, so that actually nothing whatever is said if one merely speaks about faculties or lack of faculties.

What I am now saying can also be borne out by studying the biographies of the most varied types of human being. In following the course of the spiritual development of mankind it would be possible to cite many a distinguished personality who in later life achieved great things, but who was regarded as a child as being almost completely ungifted and at school had been, so to say, one of the duffers. In this connection one comes across the most remarkable examples. For instance there is a poet who at the age of 18, 19 and even 20 was held to be so ungifted by all those who were concerned with his education that they advised him, for this very reason, not to attempt studying at a higher level. He did not, however, allow himself to be put off, but continued his studies, and it was not so long afterwards that he was appointed inspector of the very same schools that it had not been thought advisable for him to attend as a young man. There was also an Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, who studied with the purpose of becoming a teacher in a secondary school (Gymnasium). In the examination he obtained excellent marks for Greek and Latin; on the other hand he did not pass muster for the teaching of the German language, because his essays were considered to be quite inadequate. Nevertheless he became a famous poet! We have found it necessary to separate a number of children from the others, either more or less permanently or for a short time, because they are mentally backward and through their lack of comprehension, through their inability to understand, they are a cause of disturbance. These children are put together into a special class for those who are of limited capacity. This class is led by the man who has spoken to you here, Dr. Schubert, whose very special qualities make him a born leader of such a class. This task calls indeed for special gifts. It needs above all the gift of being able to penetrate into those qualities of soul which are, as it were, imprisoned in the physical and have difficulty in freeing themselves. Little by little they must be liberated. Here we come again to what borders on physical illness, where the psychologically abnormal impinges on what is physically out of order. It is quite possible to shift this borderland, it is in no way rigid or fixed. Indeed it is certainly helpful if one can look behind every so-called psychological abnormality and perceive what is not healthy in the physical organism of the person in question. For in the true sense of the word there are no mental illnesses; they are brought about through the fact that the physical does not release the spiritual.

In Germany today [just after the First World War.] we have also to reckon with the situation that nearly all school children are not only undernourished, but have suffered for years from the effects of under-nourishment. Here therefore we are concerned with the fact that through observing the soul-spiritual and the physical-corporeal we can be led to a comprehension of their essential unity. People find it very difficult to understand that this is essential in education. There was an occasion when a man, who otherwise was possessed of considerable understanding and was directly engaged in matters pertaining to schools, visited the Waldorf School. I myself took him around for days on end. He showed great interest in everything. But after I had told him all I could about one child or another—for we spoke mostly about the children, not about abstract educational principles, our education being based on a knowledge of man—he finally said: “Well and good, but then all teachers would have to be doctors.” I replied: “That is not necessary; but they should certainly have some medical knowledge, as much as a teacher needs to know for his educational work.”

For where shall we be if it is said that for some reason or another, provision cannot be made for it, or the teachers cannot learn it? Provision simply must be made for what is required and the teachers must learn what is necessary. This is the only possible standpoint. The so-called normal capacities which man develops, which are present in every human being, are best studied by observing pathological conditions. And if one has learned to know a sick organism from various points of view, then the foundation is laid for understanding a soul endowed with genius. It is not as though I were taking the standpoint of a Lombroso [Italian criminologist.] or someone holding similar views; this is not the case. I do not assert that genius is always a condition of sickness, but one does actually learn to know the soul-spiritual in learning to know the sick body of a child. In studying the difficulties experienced by soul and spirit in coming to outer manifestation in a sick body, one can learn to understand how the soul seizes hold of the organism when it has something special to express.

So education comes up against not only slight pathological conditions, such as are present in children of limited capacity, but it meets what is pathological in the widest sense of the word. This is why we have also introduced medical treatment for the children in our school. We do not, however, have a doctor who only practises medicine and is quite outside the sphere of education, but our school doctor, Dr. Kolisko, is at the same time the teacher of a class. He stands completely within the school as a teacher, he is acquainted with all the children and is therefore in a position to know the particular angle from which may come any pathological symptom appearing in the child. This is altogether different from what is possible for the school doctor who visits the school on certain formal occasions and judges the state of a child's health on what is necessarily a very cursory observation. Quite apart from this, however, in the teachers' conferences no hard and fast line is drawn between the soul-spiritual and physical-corporeal when considering the case of any particular child. The natural consequence of this is that the teacher has gradually to acquire insight into the whole human being, so that he is just as interested in every detail connected with physical health and sickness as he is in what is mentally sound or abnormal.

This is what we try to achieve in the school. Each teacher should have the deepest interest in, and pay the greatest attention to the whole human being. It follows from this that our teachers are not specialists in the ordinary sense of the word. For in effect the point is not so much whether the history teacher is more or less master of his subject, but whether by and large he is the kind of personality who is able to work upon the children in the way that has been described, and whether he has an awareness of how the child is developing under his care.

I myself was obliged to teach from my 15th year onwards, simply in order to live. I had to give private lessons and so gained direct experience in the practice of education and teaching. For instance, when I was a very young man, only 21, I undertook the education of a family of four boys. I became resident in the family, and at that time one of the boys was 11 years old and he was clearly hydrocephalic. He had most peculiar habits. He disliked eating at table, and would leave the dining room and go into the kitchen where there were the bins for refuse and scraps. There he would eat not only potato peelings but also all the other mess thrown there. At 11 years old he still knew practically nothing. An attempt had been made, on the basis of earlier instruction which he had received, to let him sit for the entrance examination to a primary school, in the hope that he could be received into one of the classes. But when he handed in the results of the examination there was nothing but an exercise book with one large hole where he had rubbed something out. He had achieved nothing else whatever and he was already 11 years old. The parents were distressed. They belonged to the more cultured upper-middle class, and everybody said: The boy is abnormal. Naturally when such things are said about a child people feel a prejudice against him. The general opinion was that he must learn a trade, for he was capable of nothing else. I came into the family, but nobody really understood me when I stated what I was prepared to do. I said: If I am given complete responsibility for the boy I can promise nothing except that I will try to draw out of the boy what is in him. Nobody understood this except the mother, with her instinctive perception, and the excellent family doctor. It was the same doctor who later on, together with Dr. Freud, founded psycho-analysis. When, however, at a later stage it became decadent, he severed his connection with it. It was possible to talk with this man and our conversation led to the decision that I should be entrusted with the boy's education and training.

In eighteen months his head had become noticeably smaller and the boy was now sufficiently advanced to enter a secondary school (Gymnasium). I accompanied him further during his school career for he needed extra help, but nevertheless after eighteen months he was accepted as a pupil in a secondary school. To be sure, his education had to be carried on in such a way that there were times when I needed hours in order to prepare what I wanted the boy to learn in a quarter of an hour. It was essential to exercise the greatest economy when teaching him and never to spend more time on whatever it might be than was absolutely necessary. It was also a question of arranging the day's timetable with great exactitude: so much time must be given to music, so much to gymnastics, so much to going for walks and so on. If this is done, I said to myself, if the boy is educated in this way, then it will be possible to draw out of him what is latent within him. Now there were times when things went quite badly with my efforts in this direction. The boy became pale. With the exception of his mother and the family doctor people said with one accord: That fellow is ruining the boy's health!—To this I replied: Naturally I cannot continue with his education if there is any interference. Things must be allowed to go on according to our agreement. And they went on.

The boy went through secondary school, continued his studies and became a doctor. The only reason for his early death was that when he was called up and served as a doctor during the world war he caught an infection and died of the effects of the ensuing illness. But he carried out the duties of his medical profession in an admirable way. I only bring forward this example in order to show how necessary it is in education to see things all round, as a whole. It also shows how under certain definite educational treatment it is possible in the long run to reduce week by week a hydrocephalic condition.

Now you will say: Certainly, something of this kind can happen when it is a case of private tuition. But it can equally well happen with comparatively large classes. For anyone who enters lovingly into what is put forward here as the knowledge of man will quickly acquire the possibility of observing each individual child with the attention that is necessary; and this he will be able to do even in a class where there are many pupils. It is just here however that the psychological perception of the kind which I have described is necessary, but this perception is not so easily acquired if one goes through the world as a single individual and has absolutely no interest in other people. I can truly say that I am aware of what I owe to the fact that I really never found any human being uninteresting. Even as a child no human being was ever uninteresting to me. And I know that I should never have been able to educate that boy if I had not actually found all human beings interesting.

It is this width of interest which permeates the teachers' conferences at the Waldorf School and gives them atmosphere, so that—if I may so express myself—a psychological mood prevails throughout and these teachers' conferences then really become a school based on the study of a deep psychology. It is interesting to see how from year to year the “college of teachers” as a whole is able to deepen its faculty for psychological perception. In addition to all that I have already described, the following must also be stated when one comes to consider the individual classes. We do not go in for statistics in the ordinary sense of the word, but for us the classes are living beings also, not only the individual pupils. One can take some particular class and study it for itself, and it is extraordinarily interesting to observe what imponderable forces then come to light. When one studies such a class, and when the teachers of the different classes discuss in college meeting the special characteristics of each class, it is interesting for instance to discover that a class having in it more girls than boys—for ours is a co-educational school—is a completely different being from a class where there are more boys than girls; and a class consisting of an equal number of boys and girls is again a completely different being. All this is extremely interesting, not only on account of the talk which takes place among the children, nor of the little love affairs which always occur in the higher classes. Here one must acquire the right kind of observation in order to take notice of it when this is necessary and otherwise not to see it. Quite apart from this however is the fact that the imponderable “being” composed of the different masculine and feminine individuals gives the class a quite definite spiritual structure. In this way one learns to know the individuality of the different classes. And if, as with us in the Waldorf School, there are parallel classes, it is possible when necessary—it is very seldom necessary—to make some alteration in the division of the classes. Studies such as these, in connection with the classes, form ever and again the content of the teachers' conferences. Thus the content of these conferences does not consist only of the administration of the school, but provides a living continuation of education in the school itself, so that the teachers are always learning. In this way the conferences are the soul of the whole school. One learns to estimate trivialities rightly, to give due weight to what has real importance, and so on. Then there will not be an outcry when here or there a child commits some small misdemeanour; but there will be an awareness when something happens which might endanger the further development of the school. So the total picture of our Waldorf School which has only come about in the course of the years, is an interesting one. By and large our children, when they reach the higher classes, are more able to grasp what a child has to learn at school than those from other schools; on the other hand, as I have described, in the lower classes they remain somewhat behind in reading and writing because we use different methods which are extended over several years. Between the ages of 13 and 15, however, the children begin to outstrip the pupils of other schools owing, among other things, to a certain ease with which they are able to enter into things and to a certain aptness of comprehension.

Now a great difficulty arises. It is a remarkable fact that where there is a light, shadows are thrown by objects; where there is a weak light there are weak shadows, where there is a strong light there are strong shadows. Likewise in regard to certain qualities of soul, the following may be observed. If insufficient care is taken by the teachers to establish contact with their pupils in every possible way, so that they are models on which the children base their own behaviour, then, conversely, as the result of a want of contact it can easily happen that deviations from moral conduct make their appearance. About this we must have no illusions whatever. It is so. This is why so much depends upon a complete “growing together” of the individualities of the teachers and the individualities of the pupils, so that the strong inner attachment felt by the children for the teachers on the one side may be reciprocally experienced by the teachers on the other, thus assuring the further development of both.

These things need to be studied in an inner, human, loving way, otherwise one will meet with surprises. But the nature of the method is such that it tends to draw out everything that lies potentially in the human being. At times this is exemplified in a somewhat strange fashion. There is a German poet who knew that he had been badly brought up and badly taught, so that very many of his innate qualities—he was always complaining about this—could not come to expression. This was because his body had already become stiff and hardened, owing to the fact that in his youth no care had been taken to develop his individuality. Then one day he went to a phrenologist. Do not imagine that I am standing up for phrenology or that I rate it particularly highly; it has however some significance when practised intuitively. The phrenologist felt his head and told him all kinds of nice things, for these were of course to be found; but at one spot of the skull he stopped suddenly, became red and did not trust himself to say a word. The poet then said: “Come now, speak out, that is the predisposition to theft in me. It seems therefore that if I had been better educated at school this tendency to theft might have had very serious consequences.”

If we wish to educate we must have plenty of elbow room. This however is not provided for in a school which is run on ordinary lines according to the dreadful timetable: 8 to 9 religion, 9 to 10 gymnastics, 10 to 11 history, 11 to 12 arithmetic. What comes later blots out what has been given earlier, and as, in spite of this, one has to get results, a teacher is well-nigh driven to despair. This is why in the Waldorf School we have what may be termed teaching periods. The child comes into a class. Every day during Main Lesson, which continues for the best part of the morning, from 8 to 10 or from 8 to 11, with short breaks for recreation, he is taught one subject. This is given by one teacher, even in the higher classes. The subject is not changed hour by hour, but is continued for as long as may be necessary for the teacher to get through what he wishes to take with the class. In arithmetic, for instance, such a period might last 4 weeks. Every day then, from 8 to 10 the subject in question is carried further and what is given one day is linked on to what was taught the previous day. No later lesson blots out the one given earlier; concentration is possible. Then, after about 4 weeks, when the arithmetic period has been taken far enough and is brought to a conclusion, a history period may follow, and this again, according to the length of time required, will be continued for another 4 or 5 weeks. And so it goes on. Our point of view is the very opposite to what is called the system of the specialist teacher. You might for instance when visiting the Waldorf School find our Dr. Baravalle taking a class for descriptive geometry. The pupils sit facing him with their drawing boards in front of them. He lets them draw and his manner is that of the most exemplary specialist teacher of geometry. Now coming into another school and looking at its list of professors and teachers you will find appended to one name or another: Diploma in Geometry or Mathematics or whatever it may be. I have known very many teachers, specialists in mathematics for instance, who boasted of the fact that when they took part in a school outing they were quite unable to tell the children the names of the plants.—But morning school is not yet over and here you will see Dr. Baravalle walking up and down between the desks and giving an English lesson. And out of the whole manner and method of his teaching you will see that he is speaking about all kinds of things and there is no means of knowing in which subject he is a specialist. Some of you may think geography is his special subject, or geometry or something else. The essential substance and content of one's teaching material can undoubtedly be acquired very quickly if one has the gift of entering right into the sphere of cognition, of experiencing knowledge within the soul. So we have no timetable. Naturally there is nothing pedantic about this. In our Waldorf School the Main Lesson is given in periods; other lessons must of course be fitted into a timetable, but these follow on after the Main Lesson.

Then we think it very important that the children should be taught two foreign languages from the time they first come to school when they are still quite small. We take French and English. It must be admitted that in our school this can be a perfect misery, because so many pupils have joined the school since its foundation. For instance pupils came to us who should really be taken into Class 6. In this class however, there are children who have already made considerable progress in languages. Now these new children should join them, but they have to be put into Class 5 simply because they haven't the foggiest notion of languages. We have continually to reckon with the difficulties.

Another thing we try to arrange is that whenever possible the most fundamental lessons are given in the morning, so that physical training—gymnastics, eurythmy and so on—is kept for the afternoon. This however is no hard and fast arrangement, for as we cannot afford an endless number of teachers not everything can be fitted in as ideally as we would wish, but only as well as circumstances permit. You will not misunderstand me if I say that with ideals no beginning can be made. Do not say that anthroposophy is not idealistic. We know how to value ideals, but nothing can be begun with ideals. They can be beautifully described, one can say: This is how it ought to be. One can even flatter oneself that one is striving in this direction. But in reality we have to cope with a quite definite, concrete school made up of 800 children whom we know and with between 40 and 50 teachers whom we must also know. But what is the use (you may ask) of a college of teachers when no member of it corresponds to the ideal? The essential thing is that we reckon with what is there. Then we proceed in accordance with reality. If we want to carry out something practically we must take reality into account. This then is what I would say in regard to period teaching.

Owing to our free approach to teaching, and this must certainly be apparent from what I am describing to you, it naturally comes about that the children do not always sit as still as mice. But you should see how the whole moral atmosphere and inner constitution of a class depends on the one who has it in charge, and here again it is the imponderable that counts. In this connection I must say that in the Waldorf School there are also teachers who prove to be inadequate in certain respects. I will not describe them, but it can well happen that on entering a class one is aware that it is “out of tune.” A quarter of the class is lying under the benches, a quarter is on top of them and the rest are continually running out of the room and knocking on the door from outside. We must not let these things baffle us. The situation can be put right again if one knows how to get on with the children. They should be allowed to satisfy their urge for movement; one should not fall back on punishment but set about putting these things right in another way. We are not at all in favour of issuing commands; on the contrary with us everything must be allowed to develop by itself. Through this very fact however there also develops by itself what I have described as something lying within the teachers as their life. Certainly the children sometimes make a frightful noise, but this is only a sign of their vitality. They can also be very active and lively in doing what they should, provided the teacher knows how to arouse their interest. We must of course make use of the good qualities of the so-called good child, so that he learns something, and with a rascal we must even make use of his rascally qualities, so that he too makes progress. We do not get anywhere if we are only able to develop the good qualities. We must from time to time develop the so-called rascally qualities, only we must of course be able to turn them in the right direction. Very often these so-called rascally qualities are precisely those which signify strength in the grown-up human being; they are qualities which, rightly handled, can culminate in what is most excellent in the grown up man or woman.

And so ever and again one has to determine whether a child gives little trouble because he is good, or because he is ill. It is very easy, if one considers one's own convenience, to be just as pleased with the sick child who sits still and does not make himself heard, as with the good child, because he does not call for much attention. But if one looks with real penetration into human nature one often finds that one has to devote much more attention to such a child than to a so-called rascal. Here too it is a question of psychological insight and psychological treatment, the latter naturally from the soul-spiritual point of view.

There is another thing to be considered. In the Waldorf School practically all the teaching takes place in the school itself. The burden of homework is lifted, for the children are given very little to do at home. Because of this, because all the work is done together with the teachers, the children's attitude is a quite remarkable one. In the Waldorf School something very characteristic comes about, as the following example will show: There was an occasion when certain pupils had misbehaved. A teacher who was not yet fully permeated with the Waldorf School education felt it necessary to punish these children and he did so in an intellectualistic way. He said: “You must stay in after school and do some arithmetic.” The children were quite unable to understand that doing arithmetic could be regarded as a punishment, for this was something which gave them the greatest pleasure. And the whole class—this is something which actually happened—asked: “May we stay in too?” And this was intended as a punishment! You see, the whole attitude of mind changes completely, and it should never happen that a child feels that he is being punished when he has to do something which he actually does with devotion, with satisfaction and joy. Our teachers discover all sorts of ways of getting rid of wrong behaviour. Once it so happened that our Dr. Stein, who is particularly inventive in this respect, noticed that during his lesson in a higher class the children were writing letters and passing them round. Now what did he do in order to put the matter right? He began to speak about the postal service, explaining it in some detail and in such a way that the writing of letters gradually ceased. The description of the postal service, the history of the origin of correspondence had apparently nothing to do with the misdemeanour noticed by the teacher and nevertheless it had something to do with it. You see, if one does not ask in a rationalistic way: “What shall I do” but is able to take advantage of a sudden idea because one knows instinctively how to deal with any situation in class, the consequences are often good; for in this way much more can be achieved towards the correction of the pupils than by resorting to punishment.

It must above all be clear to every member of the class that the teacher himself truly lives in accordance with his precepts. It must never come about that a choleric boy who makes a mess of his exercise hooks, seizes his neighbour by the ears and tweaks his hair, is shouted at by the teacher: “How dare you lose your temper, how dare you behave in such a way! Boy, if you ever repeat such a performance I will hurl the inkpot at your head!” This is certainly radically described, but something of the kind may well happen if a teacher does not realise that he himself must be an example in the school of what he expects of the pupils. What one is has far more importance than having principles and a lot of knowledge. What kind of a person one is, that is the point. If a candidate in the examination for teachers, in which he is supposed to show that he is well-fitted for his calling, is only tested in what he knows,—well, what he knows in the examination room is precisely what later on he will have to look up again in his text books. But this can be done without the need of sitting for an examination. But in actual fact no one should enter a school who has not the individuality of a teacher, in body, soul and spirit. Because this is so I can say that in carrying out my task of choosing the teachers comprising the College of Teachers at the Waldorf School, I certainly do not regard it as an obstacle if someone has obtained his teacher's diploma, but in certain respects I look more closely at one who has passed his examination than at another who through his purely human attitude shows me that his individuality is that of a true teacher. It is always a matter of concern when someone has passed examinations; he can undoubtedly still be an extremely clever man, but this must be in spite of having passed examinations.

It is remarkable how Karma works, for the Waldorf School, which is intended to stand as a concrete example of this special education based on the knowledge of man, was actually only possible in Württemberg, nowhere else, because just at the time when we were preparing to open the school a very old school regulation was still in force. If at that time people had been taken hold of by the enlightened ideas which later came forth from the constitutional body of the Weimar National Assembly (Nationalversammlung) with which we have constantly to contend, because it wishes to demolish our lower classes, we should never have been able to create the Waldorf School. It will certainly become ever rarer and rarer for teachers to be judged according to their human individualities and not according to their qualifications. It will become even rarer in the lower classes to be able to do this or that; for the world works—how can one put it—towards “freedom” and “human dignity.” This “human dignity” is however furthered in a strange manner by the help of the time-table and general arrangement of lessons. In the capital city of a country there is a Ministry of Education. In this Ministry it is known what is taught in each school and class by means of regulations which apportion exactly how the subjects are to be divided up. The consequence is that in some out-of-the-way place there is a school. If information is required as to what exactly is being taught for instance on 21st July, 1924 at 9.30 a.m. in the 5th class of this Primary School it has only to be looked up in the corresponding records of the Ministry and one can say precisely what is being taught in the school in question.—With us, on the contrary, you have two parallel classes, 5A and 5B. You go perhaps into both classes, one after the other and are astonished to find that in the one parallel class something completely different is going on from what is happening in the other. There is no similarity. Classes 5A and 5B are entrusted entirely to the individuality of the class teacher; each can do what corresponds to his own individuality, and he does it. In spite of the fact that in the teachers' conferences there is absolute agreement on essential matters, there is no obligation for the one class to be taught in just the same way as the parallel class; for what we seek to achieve must be achieved in the most varied ways. It is never a question of external regulations. So you will find with the little children in Class 1 that a teacher may do something of this kind [Dr Steiner made movements with his hands.] in order to help the children to find their way into drawing with paintbrush and paint: you come into the class and see the children making all kinds of movements with their hands which will then be led over to mastering the use of brush or pencil. Or you come into the other class and there you see the children dancing around in order that the same skill may be drawn out of the movement of the legs. Each teacher does what he deems to be best suited to the individualities of the children and his own individuality. In this way life is brought into the class and already forms the basis of what makes the children feel that they really belong to their teachers.

Naturally, in spite of that old school regulation, in Württemberg, too, there is school inspection; but in regard to this we have come off quite well. The inspectors' attitude showed the greatest possible insight and they agreed to everything when they saw how and why it was done. But such occasions also give rise to quite special happenings. For example, the inspectors came into a class where the teacher usually experienced great difficulty in maintaining discipline. Time and again she had to break into her teaching and not without considerable trouble re-establish order. Well, the inspectors from the Ministry came into her class and the teacher was highly astonished at the perfect behaviour of the children. They were model pupils, so much so that on the following day she felt bound to allude to it and said: “Children, how good you were yesterday!” Thereupon the whole class exclaimed: “But of course, Fräulein Doktor, we will never let you down!” Something quite imponderable develops in the pupils when the teachers try to put into practice what I have stated at the conclusion of all these lectures. If children are taught and educated in such a way that life is livingly carried over into their lives, then out of such teaching life-forces develop which continue to grow and prosper.

Dear attendees!

In the time of the tremendous struggle for existence in which the German people find themselves, it may perhaps be possible to take a look at what lies within the German soul, within the German spirit, from the point of view, that is, from the perspective of the way of feeling of a spiritual-scientific world view, as the content of the most sacred and highest spiritual task of this soul, of this spirit. I believe, however, that in so doing I am not going beyond the scope of actual spiritual science, because it has become clear from the various observations I have been privileged to make here over the years how closely I must regard a spiritual-scientific world view as connected with what the German spirit, what the German national soul, will and has always strive for by its very nature, by its innermost nature. And so, while tomorrow's lecture will also be directed towards what moves us so deeply in our present time, in a narrower sense it will be devoted to a purely spiritual-scientific theme. Today's lecture serve more as a reflection on what has been thought of the unique character of the development of the German nation by all those who have reflected in a deeper sense on this unique character of the development of the German nation and on its task in the overall development of the German spirit. I believe it would not be German to imitate the methods which are now often used by the enemies of the German people, those methods which are born of hatred, of annoyance or of the desire to justify in some way an undertaking for which one does not want to seek the real reasons for the time being and perhaps cannot immediately seek in the present.

So let the starting point be taken not from something that could push towards a characterization of German idealism from the immediate present, but rather let the starting point be taken from a thought of a German personality who, in relatively quiet times, in memory of great, significant experiences with one of the greatest German minds, wanted to give an account of the German character. The starting point is taken from the words that Wilhelm von Humboldt inserted in 1830, when he wrote down his reflection on Schiller, at that time this reflection on German nature - from those words in which Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the best Germans, wanted to characterize how German nature, when it works spiritually, in all spheres of human activity from the center of the human soul, the human spirit, from the deepest inwardness of the human , of the human spirit; how German nature cannot think of man in a fragmented way in his spiritual connection with poetry and philosophy and science, but how German nature wants to grasp man in his all-encompassing way and, in summarizing all the forces that express themselves in the great minds of the last century, always wants to bring to revelation that which, in the totality of the human being, moves the soul in its innermost being. It was in this spirit that Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller's great friend, sought to characterize the German essence in 1830. He said:

"To view art and all aesthetic activity from their true standpoint is something that no nation has achieved to the same degree as the Germans, not even those who pride themselves on being poets and who recognize all ages as great and outstanding. The deeper and truer direction in the German lies in his greater inwardness, which keeps him closer to the truth of nature, in the tendency to occupy himself with ideas and sensations related to them, and in everything that is connected with this. This is how he differs from most newer nations and, in a more precise definition of the concept of inwardness, also from the Greeks. He seeks poetry and philosophy; he does not want to separate them, but strives to combine them; and as long as this striving for philosophy, even pure, abstract philosophy, which is often even among us in its indispensable essential work, lives on in the nation, the impulse will also endure and gain new strength, which powerful minds unmistakably provided in the last half of the previous century. Poetry and philosophy are by nature at the center of all intellectual endeavors; only they can unite all the individual results; only from them can unity and enthusiasm flow into everything at once; only they truly represent what man is, since all other sciences and skills, if they could be completely separated from them, would only show what he possesses and has appropriated. Without this focus, which both illuminates and sparks enthusiasm, even the most extensive knowledge remains too fragmented and the effect on the ennoblement of the individual, the nation and humanity is inhibited and rendered powerless, which, after all, can be the only purpose of all investigation into nature and man and the inexplicable connection between the two.

Such minds have always sought to fathom what Germanness is by trying to delve into the center of the German character. And they never wanted to fall into the trap of elevating German character at the expense of other characters. If we now seek a characteristic feature of the intellectual development of mankind that also relates to such words as those just quoted, we find it in what is called idealism; a term that can literally only be understood to refer to the German world view.

This is not to say that idealism is something that is only found within the German people; that would, of course, be a ridiculous assertion. Human nature everywhere strives out of the external sensory life into the realm of ideals, and this universal trait of idealism has been emphasized by no one more strongly than by the most German of Germans. But it is another matter entirely when one gains insight into the fact that, within German development, idealism is connected not only with the individual striving of the individual, with that by which the individual stands out from the totality of the people, but when one sees that idealism is something that is connected with the innermost nature of the German people, and gains insight into the fact that German idealism blossoms out of the German national character itself. Today, we will reflect on this and on the fact that, in a very unique way, this German idealism has elevated the German worldview to the realm of ideas, and it can rightly be said – as many of the best of the Germans have stated as their conviction – that life in the realm of ideas in such a way is a distinctly German peculiarity!

How little is needed to disparage anything else when this German idiosyncrasy is mentioned is confirmed in this consideration itself by the fact that the starting point is now taken, perhaps from a comparison of German feeling and German creativity with other feelings and other creations in a field where, from a certain point of view, even foreign feelings and foreign creativity can be given absolute priority.

I would like to start with an image, with a conflicting image. Imagine yourself in front of the painting that everyone knows, at least in reproduction, that Michelangelo created in the Sistine Chapel – the painting of the “Last Judgment”. And compare the experience you can have in front of this painting with the one you can have when you look at the painting “The Last Judgment” by the German artist Cornelius in the Ludwigskirche in Munich. You stand in front of Michelangelo's painting and you have the impression of having a great, powerful sense of humanity's riddle in a comprehensive way. And by looking at the painting, you completely forget yourself. You absorb every detail of this image, you empathize with every line, every color scheme, and when you walk away from this image, you have the feeling, the desire, to be able to stand in front of this image again and again. The impression you take away with you is this: You can only experience this painting if you recreate it in your mind, forgetting all the details and allowing your imagination to run free, so that you see the figures and colors vividly before you.

And if one then imagines the relationship of the human soul to the painting that Cornelius created here for the church in Munich, one will not receive the same dazzling impression of the design, and perhaps will not feel the soul as if one were being drawn into the eye, and the eyes, in turn, with their activity resting in what the painter has created; but one will nevertheless feel transported in the holy realms of an artistic fantasy before the painting, and have an experience that does not go hand in hand with what one sees in the same way as with Michelangelo's painting, but which lives in the soul like a second soul experience alongside what the eyes see – stirring all the deepest and highest feelings through which man is connected to the course of the world. And much that cannot be seen in the picture forces its way out of the depths of the soul, and a wealth of thoughts connects us with those impulses from which the artist created, which comes to life through what he has created, but which perhaps does not lie directly in his picture. And one leaves the picture with a sense of longing to visualize this image again and again through the elevation of sensuality into the imagination, as it is painted on the outside; but one feels transported through the image with one's soul into a living connection with the workings of the world spirit; one feels: not only has the work of artistic imagination, but that what can be experienced by man on the stage of thought, if he is able to enter this stage of thought in such a way that he feels and experiences what connects the soul with the riddles of the world, what connects the soul with the beginning and end of all becoming of the sensual and moral, of the sensual and world events. One must go from the image of Cornelius to the scene of the thoughts, and that is because Cornelius, who is one of the most German painters, had to paint in a German way according to his whole disposition, his whole nature, that is to say: He could not help but go to the scene of the thoughts in art as well. As I said, one may place the Cornelius painting far, far below that of Michelangelo in the absolute artistic sense. That is not the point, but rather that each people has its task in the world, and that even in art - when it is so connected with the German national spirit, as was the case with Cornelius - that even art rises to the arena of thought.

From this image, we will move on to another, one that may also illustrate how one of the most German of Germans moves from the arena of thought to that which affects him from the world around him. We will follow Goethe as he stands in front of the Strasbourg Cathedral. We know from Goethe's own biography how he felt an infinite deepening of his soul when he stood before the Strasbourg Cathedral. What did he feel at that time? What he felt at that time must be characterized, if one wants to characterize it more precisely, by showing the contrast. It may be said that Goethe's German Weltanschauung was then confronted in a natural, elemental way by the way in which the French Weltanschauung appeared to him at that time, which he, Goethe, certainly least of all wanted to belittle in its value for general development. A whole wealth of historical impulses were at work in what Goethe felt in his soul at the time at the sight of Strasbourg Cathedral, at the place where German nature had to fight so hard against French nature, at the place where German blood has to be shed again today to defend German nature against French nature.

The following consideration may perhaps illustrate the historical impulses unconsciously at work in Goethe at that time. When the newer peoples in the last centuries - one might say - emerged from the twilight of human spiritual development with the qualities that have given these peoples their present character, there, in that time, we find a French mind that shows us so clearly what the innermost impulse is in the French world view, insofar as it does not arise from the individual but from the individuality of the people. I am referring to Descartes, who lives on from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. Descartes also lifts humanity onto the stage of thought from the French essence. As a lonely thinker, emerging entirely from what the education of his people of his time could give him, Descartes stands at the dawn of newer spiritual development with the question: How can one attain certainty about the true reasons for existence? What is really true within that which appears to man in the stream of phenomena before his eyes and soul? The French spirit from which Descartes emerged had, after all, produced one of the greatest and most significant doubters, Montaigne, who had made doubt almost the content of healthy, true human feeling. Only a soul, he believes, over which doubt is poured out, is a wise soul, a soul that says to itself: “The revelations of the external world of space and time appear to my senses; but who dares to say that the senses do not deceive?” Within me, the thoughts that want to prove themselves appear to me, emerging from this inner self. But if you look more closely, as Montaigne says, then for every proof there arises the necessity to find a new proof. There is no source of truth, neither outside nor within. Unwise is he who believes unconditionally in any truth. Only he is wise who approaches everything with doubt, because doubt alone is appropriate to that which can develop as a relationship of the thinking and seeing human being to the world.

And it was out of this doubt, as an intense fighter for the attainment of a certainty of truth, that Descartes developed his thinking. He started from doubt. Now, is there no point to which one can hold when this sea of doubt is poured out? - he asked. He found only one thing in the wide sea of doubt in which the soul initially swims when it enters the world: the certainty of one's own thinking; for we do this ourselves, we can always conjure it up. Therefore, we can believe in thinking; only to that extent are we when we think. Thus, in his own way, Descartes raised humanity to the level of thinking.

But now there is something peculiar about this – and I really don't want to make a one-sided, disparaging criticism – that is peculiarly French about Descartes's world view, that Descartes now experiences in his soul everything that this certainty of one's own thinking can give, that he seeks to show everything in the soul that the soul can get from the certainty of its own thinking, how the soul itself finds God from thinking. But from this point of certainty, Descartes cannot arrive at what holds sway as truth in the nature surrounding man. He does raise humanity to the scene of thoughts; but he limits the scene of thoughts to the boundaries of the soul's experiences.

And it is characteristic, very characteristic, that Descartes, in his quest to explore everything that thinking can find, becomes entangled with this thinking in the merely human inner being, cannot escape from this inner being and, starting from the soul, cannot find a way to what lives and exists in nature. Even animals are, as paradoxical as it may seem to people today, only walking machines for Descartes. A soul can only be attributed to that which thinks; but thinking cannot go beyond the soul, cannot penetrate into that which lives and exists in nature. The animals are mechanisms, the plants too, everything is nothing more than clockwork, because the soul spins itself into itself. But this had consequences, and led to France becoming the classic land of the purely materialistic world view in more recent times, which had broken in when Goethe felt he was part of it. At that time, the French world view was dominated by the inability to see anything but mechanism in the things that surround us in the world and uplift and delight us. Thus was born that materialistic philosophy which so permeates and underlies Voltaire's outlook; that materialistic philosophy which confronted Goethe and of which he says: “If it, in spite of being so barren and desolate, would only make an attempt to explain from the moving atoms something that the human eye beholds.” But not even an attempt has been made. In place of the all-pervading Nature, there is set up a dry, barren, mechanical fabric.

That was how Goethe felt. That was the feeling that settled in his soul when he allowed the world view, which had so characteristically emerged from the French national sentiment at the time, to take effect on him, and it was this that he unconsciously felt weighing on his soul when, with his soul's feeling, he . from the Germanic nature, he turned his eyes to the sky-scraping spire of the Strasbourg Cathedral and felt in his soul, in external spatial forms, the human spirit that strives from space into the spaceless-timeless spiritual-soul. One would like to say: In the Strasbourg Cathedral, Goethe's living worldview of Germanic culture stood out against the mechanical worldview that was pressing against him in the background, weighing on his soul as the then newest French materialism.

And now, in that period, we see precisely within German development the urge of the soul, from the contemplation of nature and of humanity, to push forward out of the depths of the German soul, out of its innermost being – as we shall characterize it in a moment – to push forward to the realm of thought; but not on the scene of thought in such a way that it would be so restricted for the human soul that it could no longer find its way into the great, wide reality of nature, but in such a way that the soul feels the living possibility of immersing itself in everything that creates and lives and works and is in nature. Two minds within the German development should be emphasized, which show especially in that time how German nature is in relation to the search for a worldview at the innermost core of being. One of these minds, who as an external personality places himself in the striving for a worldview, and another who actually does not stand as an external personality, but is again created out of German nature as an ideal figure.

One of them is called Kant. Let us try to imagine Kant, especially in the period of German history when this image, which was created in connection with Goethe, emerged in the course of German development. What was he basically concerned with? It is easy to say that Kant would have tried to make human knowledge doubt any kind of true reality around 1780 – that is, around the time when Goethe had that feeling, when Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” was published. In truth, whoever delves to the innermost nerve of Kant's endeavor also finds in him the opposite of the innermost nature of Descartes' endeavor. Kant does not assume that the human soul is separate from the innermost source of the world and the world spirit. Kant only stands before the world by asking himself: How can we discover the secrets of the world? Through that which the human being develops in the sensory observation of the world. Kant does not believe that in this way the human being can enter into the true sources of being. Therefore, Kant does not fight knowledge, but rather, by seemingly fighting knowledge, he is actually fighting doubt. In order to divert doubt from the human soul, doubt about that which must be most important to this soul, Kant seeks access to the sources through a different path than that which can be reached through ordinary knowledge. Therefore, the words were spoken from deep within Kant's soul: He had to dethrone knowledge in order to make room for faith. But for him, faith is the inflow into the human soul of the conceptual world of the spirit, of ideas and ideals that come from the divine. And in order for these to live in the human soul, so that they are not disturbed by external knowledge, so that the human soul may have an inner certainty, Kant dethrones external knowledge, ascribing to it only the possibility of arriving at a revelation, not at true reality.

And, we may say, Kant made it difficult for himself to conquer the validity of ideas and ideals for the human soul. Before he began his critique of reason, he dealt with the spiritualist Swedenborg. What Swedenborg had attained as a spiritual vision of what lies behind the sensual world, Kant examined with the intention of gaining an insight into whether there is another way through the gates of nature to the sources of nature and spiritual existence than that which external intellectual knowledge can conquer. And from the contemplation of the spiritualist Swedenborg, Kant emerged with what he had in mind: to expand the arena of thoughts for ideas and ideals by dethroning knowledge that can only deal with the external world of appearances.

Deepened and individualized, this Kantian striving now appears – I would say – in an ideal figure, in the ideal figure that for many people is rightly one of the greatest poetic and artistic creations of human existence to date, in the form of Goethe's Faust. And by looking at Goethe's Faust as Goethe presents him to us, we directly see the path of German idealism to the arena of thought. What does Goethe's Faust actually look like? It is certainly well known how Goethe has his Faust strive for the sources of existence, and it seems almost superfluous to say anything more about Goethe's Faust. But perhaps it is worth reminding ourselves that two traits of human spiritual life are inseparably linked with Goethe's Faust creation, which show in a very special way a kind of human spiritual life that, when examined closely, emerges from the immediate nature of the German character. What two traits, then, are inextricably linked with Goethe's Faust creation, regardless of one's personal opinion of these traits?

One may, so to speak, scoff at these two traits if one regards them separately from this work from the standpoint of a particularly high-minded materialistic worldview. But these two traits are so seriously connected with Goethe's world view and with what Goethe feels is the German world view that one must think of them nevertheless as directly connected with what Goethe felt was at the core of the impulse for a world view, despite the often trivial way in which the materialistic world view dwells on these two traits. The one is the way Faust faces the pursuit of knowledge of nature. And connected with this is the fact that Faust, after feeling unsatisfied by all external sense and intellectual knowledge, reaches for what is called magic. Superstitious notions associated with this word may be dismissed.

How does this magical striving present itself to us? It presents itself to us in such a way that we can say: Faust relates to nature in such a way that he feels: Faust feels at one with everything that can be perceived directly by the human being, and with what can be intellectually grasped on the basis of sensory impressions. But he also feels excluded from the secrets of nature; he feels the necessity to develop something that is not present in the human being, who only directly places himself in the world, but which must first be developed out of the innermost depths of nature. The human being must be expanded in such a way that something germinates within it, which creates living links from within into living nature itself: an expansion of the human being beyond what one finds what is given by the senses, and what lives in thinking, to which Descartes pointed out humanity; make this human nature more alive than it is placed by its own immediate formative power.

Thus, what the senses offer is, for Faust, only a crust that appears to cover the true essence of nature. This crust must be penetrated, and under this crust there must be something within nature that works and lives in it in a soul-spiritual way, just as the soul-spiritual in man himself works and lives. Thus Faust stands as a living protest against what Descartes describes as the scene of thoughts.

And in that Faust seeks the spirit that “rolls up and down in the floods of life”, shaping, working and living everywhere, in that Faust seeks “all power of action and seed”, he is the very opponent of that Cartesian world view, which, quite consistently and out of its own nature and its folklore, looks at nature and, through its folkloric nature, de-animates and de-souls it, turning it into a mechanism. That which could never be found by following the path of Descartes is, for Faust, the direct starting point at a certain point in his life. And with this trait, which we can describe as magical, which does not seek concepts, ideas, thoughts in nature, but through these seeks that which lives and works in nature as the soul lives and works in us — with this trait, there is directly connected another in the Faust legend, which, in turn, can be ridiculed if viewed separately from the Faust legend. Directly connected with this is something that can be described as a special regard of the human soul for evil, which we encounter in the character of Mephisto in the Faust story. This evil in the Faust story is not something that merely enters the human world view conceptually, or is regarded as a mere law, such as a law of nature. Rather, this evil is not in the usual anthropomorphic way, but in the way it consciously emerges from human struggles – this evil is personalized, made into a being that dramatically confronts man. Just as Faust strives on the one hand out of what is provided by the senses and the intellect, as he seeks to pierce the cortex to seek the living, so he must break through what appears to be mere moral legitimacy, to pierce through to what is experienced in living spirituality behind the surface of mental experiences like a personality, like a being.

Thus, on the one hand, Faust strives towards the living behind the sensory world in contrast to nature; on the other hand, Faust strives towards a relationship between the human soul and evil, which now also penetrates – I would say – the shell that rises above the deeper soul than the everyday soul. In both these respects Faust seeks a way out of the straitjacket into which, for example, Descartes and his philosophy have confined the human soul: out into nature, into the spiritual depths of the soul! And that this striving for a relationship to evil, not as a conceptual idea but as a positive experience, is deeply rooted in the spiritual development of the German character can be seen from the fact that in 1809 a German philosopher, Schelling, who was much inspired by Goethe, , Schelling, in 1809 in his treatise “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and the Related Objects”, was deeply concerned with the question of the origin of human evil. So that, by raising the question: To what extent is that which enters our world as evil compatible with the wise divine world order and divine goodness? - comes to the answer: In order to recognize evil, one must not only proceed to the very foundations of existence, but one must proceed to what Schelling, in harmony with other minds at the time, called the “unfounded grounds of existence”. Thus the power of evil came to life, so vividly within the German world view that the tragic struggle of the human soul with evil could be understood in its vitality, not from mere concepts.

And if we connect what Goethe embodied in his Faust out of German feeling with what Goethe sometimes said when he wanted to characterize the course of his own mind, we are repeatedly referred back to that wonderful prose hymn by Goethe to nature, written in the 1880s:

“Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by it... Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance”;

then the wonderful words in it:

“She has thought and is constantly pondering; but not as a human being, but as nature.”

This means: Goethe is clear about one thing: weaving a mechanical network of concepts over nature does not provide an understanding of nature. Only such a deeper search in the existence of nature creates knowledge of nature, through which the human soul finds in the depths of this natural existence that which is related to what it can find in the depths of its own being when it penetrates into them.

We may now ask: Is such striving, as it can be characterized by Kant, can be characterized by the ideal figure of Goethe's Faust -, is this striving an isolated, a merely individual one, or does it have anything to do with the overall striving of the German national spirit, the German national soul? Even if one considers Kant, the abstract philosopher, who hardly ventured a few miles beyond Königsberg and spent his whole life in abstract thought, one finds it clear and obvious, precisely in the way he works his way from his earlier world view to his later one, everywhere that he, despite his reclusiveness, develops out of from all that in the German national spirit strives for certainty, and how, by virtue of this national spirit, he did not actually come to a narrowing of the human soul to the realm of merely human thinking, but was led up to the horizon on which the full range of ideas and ideals appeared to him, which give man impulses in the course of his human development. One is tempted to say that what was later expressed by the most German of German philosophers, Fichte, already lives in Kant; that what has become so dear to the German world view, especially from the eighteenth century onwards, already lives in Kant.

This German world view came to value having a view of the world that does not need to be disconcerted by what presents itself to the senses, for the absolute validity of that which is man's duty, love, divine devotion, moral world. When man looks at the world and considers the way in which he is placed in it, he sees himself surrounded by the field of vision of sensual impressions and what he can divine behind them; but he also sees himself placed in such a way that, in the strictest sense, he cannot conceive the value of the world without this second side of the world; he sees himself so placed that behind him, in his soul, the divine ideals are at work, which become his duty and deed, and these ideals do not bear the coarse sensual character that the world of external movement and external revelation has. One would like to say: When the German mind looks at the - symbolically speaking - stiffness and smoothness of natural existence, at the mechanical movement in the unfolding of natural processes, it feels the need to realize: How can one become at home in that which is so indifferent in nature, that which appears in ideals as a demand, as a duty, as a moral life - how can one become at home in that which appears as the highest value of life, as a moral ideal, how does the reality of moral ideals relate to the reality of external nature?

This is a question that can be felt so lightly, but which can also be found in tremendous depth, heart-wrenching. And so it was felt in the best German minds at the time when Kant's worldview was forming. Sensuality had to be presented in such a way that it was no obstacle to the moral world flowing through people into the world. Morality must not be a reality that presents itself indifferently and against which moral ideas must rebound. By becoming an act through people, the moral ideas from the spiritual world must not rebound on the stiff materialistic barrier of the sensual world. This must be taken as a deep feeling, then one understands why Kant wants to dethrone ordinary knowledge so that a real source can be thought for the moral idea. Then one understands Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who coined the paradoxical but which arises from deep German striving: All sensuality, everything we can see and feel outside and think about the external world, is only “the sensitized material of our duty”. The true world is the world of the ruling spirit, which lives itself out by being felt by man in ideas and ideals. And these are the true reality, they are what pulses through the world as a current, what only needs something to which it can apply itself, to illustrate it. For Fichte, sensuality has no independent existence, but is the sensitized material for human fulfillment of duty. From a philosophy that seeks to validate everything spiritual, that must seek to do so from an inherent tendency towards idealism, such words emerged; and one may find such words one-sided – that is not the point, the point is not to turn such words into dogma. But to take them as symptoms of an aspiration that lives in a people is what is significant; and to recognize that such minds, which create in the sense of such a word, elevate Germanness to the arena of thought precisely because of the idealistic character of the German national soul.

In order to give life to thought, human knowledge and striving must go beyond what Cartesius could merely find. And Goethe's “Faust”, this image of the highest human striving, this image, to understand which one must first struggle through it by allowing many German educational elements to take effect, from what did it emerge? It is truly not something that was thought up or created by an individual; rather, it emerged from the legends and poetry of the people themselves. Faust lived in the people, and Goethe was familiar with the puppet show of “Doctor Faust”; and in the simple folk character, he already saw the traits that he only elevated to the realm of thought. Nothing illustrates as clearly as Goethe's Faust how something supreme can arise from what lives most deeply, most intimately and most elementally in the simple folk being. One would like to say: not Goethe and Goethe's nature alone created Faust, but rather Goethe brought forth Faust like a germ that lay within the German national organism, and gave it his essence, embodied it in a sense so that this embodiment corresponds at the same time to the highest striving of the German spirit for the arena of thought.

Not the striving of isolated personalities out of their idiosyncrasy, but precisely when it confronts us in its greatness from the entire national character, then it is the result of German idealism. And how does thought work within this German idealism? One comes to an understanding of how it works precisely by comparing this German idealistic striving of thought with what is also a striving of thought, let us say, for example, in Descartes. In Descartes, thought confines man within the narrowest limits; it works as a mere thought and as such remains confined to the world in which man lives directly with his senses and his mind. Within German Idealism, the personality does not merely seek thought as it enters the soul, but thought becomes a mirror image of that which is alive outside the soul, that which lives and moves through the universe, that which is spiritual outside of man, that which is above and below the spirit of man, of which nature is the outer revelation and the life of the soul is the inner revelation.

Thus thought becomes an image of the spirit itself; and by rising to the level of thought, the German seeks to rise through thought to the living spirit, to penetrate into that world which lives behind the veil of nature in such a way that by penetrating this veil, man not only visualizes something, but penetrates with his own life into a life that is akin to his. And again, since man is not satisfied with what he can experience in his soul, he seeks to penetrate into what lies behind thinking, feeling and willing, for which these three are outer shells, for which even the thought is only an inner revelation, in which man lives and works, in which he knows himself as in a living being that creates the scene of thoughts within him.

And so we can see how, especially in those times when the German mind, seemingly so divorced from external reality, from external experience, strove for a Weltanschauung, this German mind felt itself entirely dominant and weaving within the arena of thought. And there is first of all Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who regards external nature only as an external stimulus to that which he actually wants to seek, to whom, as already mentioned, the whole of the external sense world has become only the sensitized material of our duty; who wants to live only in that which can penetrate from the depths of the world in a mental way and can be directly realized before the human soul. That is the essence of his world view, that only what emerges in a contemplative way from the deepest depths of the soul and announces itself as emerging from the deepest depths of the world is valid for him.

For his follower Schelling, the urge for nature, the Faustian urge, becomes so vivid within that he regards as worthless any knowledge of nature that seeks to express itself only in concepts about nature. Only when the human soul comes to regard the whole of nature as the physiognomy of man, only when nature is regarded in such a way that nature is the physiognomy of the spirit that reigns behind it, only then does one live in true knowledge of nature; but then, by penetrating through the bark, one feels creative in nature. And again, a paradoxical but fitting expression for the essence of Germanness is a saying of Schelling: To recognize nature is actually to create nature! Of course, this is a one-sided saying at first; but a saying that represents a one-sidedness need not remain so; rather, if it is properly recognized, this creative knowledge of nature will lead the mind to reflect inwardly, to awaken slumbering powers within itself that penetrate to the spiritual sources of nature. The source, the germ of that which can be true spiritual science – we can find it precisely within this world view of German idealism!

In the third of the German idealistic philosophers, in Hegel – who is difficult to understand and so far removed from many people – this lively character of the arena of thought appears in the same way within German idealism. In our own time, when the abstract is so much decried and mere thought is so little loved, this world-view strikes us as strange. And yet Hegel feels intimately connected with the spirit-seeking aspect of Goethe's nature. The content of his world-view – what is it if not mere thinking, a progression from one thought to another? With his world-view we are presented with a thought organism; necessity is produced for us, so that we stand face to face with a mere thought organism, which we can only produce by creating it, as we would with any other organism through our senses. But behind this presentation of a thought organism there is consciousness, a certain attitude. This is the attitude that when a person strips away their world view, all sensations, all sensory perception, for a few moments of world viewing, when they strip away everything they want and feel as individuals, when they surrender to what is being, as if the thought itself were taking one step after another, that man then immerses himself in a world that is a thinking world - but no longer his thinking world - so that he no longer says to this world, “I think, therefore I am,” but rather, the spirit of the world thinks in me, and I give myself to the spirit of the world as a theater, so that in what I give as soul to the all-pervading spirit of the world, this spirit can develop its thoughts from stage to stage and show me how it bases its thoughts on world-becoming.

And the deepest religious impulse is connected with the striving to experience in the soul only what this soul can experience when it surrenders all its own being to the thinking that thinks itself in it. One must also look at this Hegelian philosophy, this so idealistic departure from the German essence, in such a way that one does not take it as a dogma, which one can swear by or not, but as something that can stand before us like a symptom of German striving in a certain time. In the Hegelian world view, the world spirit appears, as it were, as a mere thinker.

But as true as it is that much more than thinking alone was needed to shape the world, it is nevertheless true that the path that once led to it, so the logic would have it, is one of those that creates in man an attitude towards the life that reigns behind existence and leads man to the scene not of abstract, intellectual thought, but of living thought, which has world experience in the experience of thought. The three idealists – Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – sought to raise the human spirit to the realm of thought in three different directions: Fichte by trying to shine a light into the depths of the human ego and not saying, like Descartes, “I think, therefore I am!” For if Fichte had only been able to arrive at Descartes' thought, he would have said: I encounter within me a rigid existence, an existence that I have to look at. But that is not an ego. I am only an ego if I can secure my own existence myself at any time. I cannot come to my ego through the act of thought, not through mere thinking, but through an act of action. This is a continuous creative process. It does not rely on looking at its being. It leaves its previous being, but by having the power to create itself again in the next moment, out of the act, it arises again and again in a new way.

Fichte does not grasp the thought in its abstract form, but in its immediate life on the scene of the thought itself, where he creates vividly and lives creatively.

And Schelling, he tries to understand nature, and with genuinely German feeling he immerses himself in the secrets of nature, even though one can of course, if one wants to take his statements as dogma, present them as fantastic. But he immerses himself in natural processes with his deepest emotions, so that he does not feel merely as a passive observer of nature, as a being that merely looks at nature, but as a being that submerges itself in the plant and creates with the plant in order to understand plant creation. He seeks to rise from created nature to creating nature. He seeks to become as intimate with creating nature as with a human being with whom one is friends. This is an archetypally German trait in Schelling's nature.

From his point of view, Goethe sought to approach nature in a similar way, as his Faust expresses it, as to the “bosom of a friend”. Goethe then says – to describe how far removed any abstract observer is from such a contemplation of nature – that he, as an external naturalist in relation to the earth, is a friend of the earth. In Goethe, the German spirit feels so human, so directly alive in the spirit that reigns in nature, in the desire to be scientific, in that he wants to raise science itself to the level of the realm of thought.

And Hegelian logic – abstract, cold, sober thought in Hegel – what becomes of it? When one considers how mere logic often appears to man, and compares that with what prevails in Hegelian idealistic world view, then one first gets the right impression of the world significance of this Hegelian idealism. In Hegel, what appears to be the furthest thing from mysticism, the clear, crystal-clear (one might say) crystal-cold thought itself, is felt and experienced in such a way that although the thought prevails in the soul, what the soul experiences in thought is a direct mystical experience; for what Hegel experiences in thought is a becoming one with the divine world spirit, which itself permeates and lives through the world. Thus, in Hegel, the greatest clarity and conceptual sobriety become the warmest and most vibrant mysticism. This magic is brought about by the way in which the German spirit rises from its direct, living idealism to the realm of thought. In doing so, it proves that what matters is not the individual expressions that arise, but the soul's underlying basis for seeking a worldview. Hegel is said to be a dry logician. In contrast to this, one can say: the one who calls Hegel's logic that is only dry and cold himself. The one who is able to confront this logic in the right way can feel how it pulsates out of German idealism; the one who can feel the seemingly abstract thoughts that are spun out of one another in Hegel's work can feel the most lively warmth of soul that is necessary to let all the individuality of man fall away from man and to connect with the divine, so that in Hegel logic and mysticism can no longer be distinguished; that although nothing nebulous prevails in it, but that a mystical basic feature prevails in all its details.

Even today, the German mind, even the opponents of German idealism, has endeavored time and again to explore the fundamental idealism of this German essence in its significance as a riddle. And the best German minds, even those who are opponents of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel – if you turn to them, you find that German development consists in absorbing more and more of the basic impulses of this idealism. How these basic impulses can lead to a living experience of the spiritual worlds has been discussed often and will be discussed more often.

Attention should only be drawn to how – one might say – German Idealism, after it had reached one of the high points of the German world view, then continued to have an effect on German intellectual life as a different impulse. It was a period within this German intellectual life, and it was lived out in minds of the very, very first order until the middle of the nineteenth century, until the last third of the nineteenth century, when the view was that such creative work as is expressed, for example, in Goethe's Faust, where thought really takes hold of the imagination directly and can unfold dramatic creativity - was the opinion that this was only possible within poetry, but that the development of humanity shows that, for example, music has a different area; that music is, so to speak, the area that does not grasp the highest in man in a roundabout way, as it is sought through such poetry as the poetry of Faust – that music is the area in which sensuality must be grasped directly. One argument, with a certain justification after the experiences that could be had up to that point in the development of humanity, is the contrast between the Don Juan saga and the Faust saga; another is how misguided it is to as the Faust saga; it has been claimed that what this other saga, which shows man completely absorbed in sensual experience, can be correspondingly portrayed only within music that directly gives rise to and seizes sensuality.

The way in which the German does not rise to the scene of thought in the abstract, but in a lively way, has also brought the refutation of this view. In Richard Wagner, we have in more recent times the spirit that has triumphed over the merely external element in music, the spirit that sought to deepen the setting of the thoughts so that the thought itself could take hold of the element that was thought to live only in music. To spiritualize music from the standpoint of thought, to show that, was also only possible for German idealism. One can say: Richard Wagner showed that in the most brittle element for thought there is nothing that could resist or resist the strength of life that prevails in German thought. In his philosophy and his view of nature, the German has tried to present nature to the soul in such a way that what appears to be mechanical and externally rigid loses its mechanical quality and what would otherwise appear in a formal way comes to life and moves as soulfully and vividly as the human soul itself. On the other hand, the element which flows in the immediate sensual sequence of tones, is allowed to seek its connection, its marriage with that which leads the human soul to the highest heights and depths in the realm of thought, in Wagner's music, which has thus effected a raising of an artistic-sensual element into an immediately spiritual atmosphere.

This aspect of German idealism, which leads to a result that can be characterized as the soul standing on the scene of thought – I wanted to characterize this aspect today with a few strokes. This trait of German idealism, this living comprehension of the otherwise dead thought, is one side of the nature of the German people, but it is a remarkable side. It will appear as a remarkable phenomenon to anyone who is able to place themselves within the German national character through the invigoration of thought within themselves. Indeed, the German cannot arrive at the fundamental trait of his people's character other than by penetrating ever deeper into the self-knowledge of the human being. And this the German may, as it seems to me, feel most keenly in our immediate present, where this German essence really has to defend itself in a struggle forced upon it, where this German essence must become aware of itself by waging a struggle that it feels is befitting to it, arising from the task that appears to it as a sacred one, entrusted to it by the world forces and world powers themselves.

And although today, in a different way than in the times of which we have mainly spoken, the German must fight for his world standing, his world importance, it must still come to life before our minds that the German today enters into a world-historical struggle. The deeper connection between the German soul struggling through the course of the world and the bloody events of the day, which, however, bring us bliss out of pain and suffering – a future history will have to establish this deeper connection more and more.

I wanted nothing more from today's reflection than to show that the German has no need to speak out of hatred or outrage when he wants to compare his nature with that of other nations. We do not need to point out the nature of the German soul in order to exalt ourselves, but in order to recognize our duties as conferred by world history, we may point this out. And we do not need, as unfortunately happens today in the camp of our enemies, to invent all sorts of things that can serve to belittle the opponent, but we can point out the positive that works in the German national substance. We can let the facts speak, and they can tell us that the German does not want to, but must, according to his abilities, which are inspired by the world spirit, his nature, his abilities - without any arrogance - in comparison to the nature of other peoples.

From this point of view, we do not need to fall into what so unfortunately many of our opponents fall into. We look over to the West. We certainly do not need to do as the French do, who, in wanting to characterize German nature in its barbarism, as they think, in its baseness, want to elevate themselves; truly, the French needed, as they believe, a new sophistry to do so. And minds that spoke highly of the German character just before the war, even at famous teaching institutions, can now, as we can see, find the opportunity to advocate the view that, given the nature of his world view, the German cannot help but conquer and , as Boutroux says, to assimilate what is around him; for the German does not want to ascend humbly, as Boutroux thinks, to the sources of existence, but claims that he is connected to these sources, that he carries the deity within himself and must therefore also carry all other peoples within himself. This German world view is certainly profound; but it is not conceived immodestly.

Nor perhaps does the German need what is sought today from the British side when German character is to be characterized. The British, in emphasizing the peculiarities of their own national character, have never taken much interest in penetrating the German national character. When the forties in Germany were passing through this development, it was, I might say, the very expression of what the German can experience on the plane of thought. The way in which the disciples of Hegel thought, that of Schelling and his students was felt to be too abstract, too logical, and that on Schelling's side, efforts were made to gain a greater liveliness for the thoughts themselves on the stage of thoughts. While in Hegel one sensed that he allowed one thought to emerge from another with logical rigor, Schelling wanted people to perceive thoughts as active, living things that do not need to be proven in logic, just as what happens from person to person in living interaction cannot be encompassed in logic. He wanted to grasp it in something that is more than logic, wanted to grasp it in a living way, and that is how a great dispute arose on the scene, which the German tries to illuminate with the light he wants to ignite from his living knowledge. The English observed this dispute that arose. A London newspaper wrote what seemed to them a clever article about this dispute, in which it said: These Germans are actually abstruse visionaries. Many are concerned with the question of who is right: Schelling or Hegel. The truth is that Hegel is obscure and Schelling even more obscure; and the one who finds this wisdom, which is roughly equivalent to the point of view of not studying the world when it is illuminated by the sun but in the night when all cats are black or gray, will most easily cope with things.

But anyone who today surveys what has been decided in Britain about the necessity of what is happening within the German nation will perhaps be reminded of such “deeply understanding” words, especially when these words are used primarily to conceal what is actually taking place – and what one does not want to admit to oneself either. A new mask is truly what contemporary Britain needs to characterize its relationship to Germanness, a new sophistry is what the [French] philosophers need to disparage Germany – a new sophistry that they have found themselves in just since the outbreak of war. And the Italians? They also need something to reassure them about their own actions at the present time. Without arrogance, the German may say: it will lift him up within the difficult world situation when he thinks precisely of the duty assigned to him by the world spirit, as he gains self-knowledge and this becomes knowledge of the German essence. What he should do flows from the knowledge of the German essence. When D'Annunzio spoke his ringing words before the Italian war broke out, he truly did not delve as deeply into Italian folklore as he could have. But we Germans, who have gladly immersed ourselves in what the Roman spirit has created, do not dare to believe that d'Annunzio's hollow words really come from the deepest essence of Italian culture, but that they come from the motives that d'Annunzio needs to justify himself. The others needed sophistry, a mask, to get the causes of the war off their own ground, so to speak. The Italian needed something else, a justification that we saw coming in the years to come, a strange justification: He needed a new saint, a saint newly appointed right within the profane, “holy egoism”. We see it recurring again and again, and it is to this that we see the representatives of the Italian character repeatedly appealing. A new saint was needed to justify what had been done.

Perhaps it will be able to lead the objective, unbiased observer of the German character to a place within today's historical events; for German uniqueness does not arise from such “sophistry”, such “masquerade”, nor from the “appointment of a new saint”, but from human nature, from what this human nature allows to speak through itself, what the best minds have revealed to this people, but also what these spirits hoped for the people, because that is also a peculiarity of this German nature, which can be described by saying: the German always sought to direct a soul's gaze to what was aroused in him from the scene of thoughts, and from this he also wanted to recognize what hope he could harbor for what his people could achieve.

And today, when we need to develop love, a great deal of love, for what the ancestors of the German character have established within the German national soul and national strength, in order to place ourselves in today's historical events through this love, today, when we need faith in the strength of the present, today when we need confident hope for the success of that which the German essence must achieve for the future – today we can look in just such a way at what the Germans have always loved, believed, hoped for in the context of their past, present and future. And so let us conclude with the words of a man who is indeed unknown today in the broadest circles, but who, in lonely thought, wanted to fathom the popular and the intellectual of Goethe's Faust in those years of German life in which Germany had not yet produced the German state in its modern form. In those years, which preceded the deeds of German might, in the 1860s, a lonely thinker was pondering the idea that In his imagination, in his soul life, in his idealism, the German wanted to rise to the highest that he could only somehow sense. He had a power to develop that must lie in his nature and that gives us the hope that this power will be realized fruitfully, victoriously in action. A simple German Faust observer, an observer of poetry that truly shows that German character holds future forces, is quoted with his words. By pointing to words that Goethe himself, intuitively projecting himself into the German future, spoke as a sixty-five-year-old old man, he ties his own words to them and says:

"The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
the primeval secret of eternal forms,
it is familiar with men and with gods,
it will leaf through rocks as through books.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
will never live in the learned hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew into the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken it,
It has taken the glass of the hothouse with it.
Now grow, O oak, grow up to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
a mild light will still pour forth,
from whose reflection of those stars
the late grandchildren will learn to see,
to report in prophetically higher visions
on God and humanity higher.

And the Faust viewer from the sixties continues:

"Let us add the wish that the words of the Master, who looks down on us from better stars with a mild light, may come true for his people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and urge, but with God's will, with indestructible strength, and that “in those higher accounts of God and humanity which the poet of Faust expects from the coming centuries, and that German deed, no longer a symbolic shadow, but a beautiful, life-affirming reality, will one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!"

We believe that in our own day, out of the blood and the creative energy, the courageous deeds of our own day, such hopes as have been expressed by the best among the Germans and arise from the deepest German national feeling may be fulfilled. We believe that in these difficult days the German can develop to his strength, over which the atmosphere of hatred spreads, still another: that he can vividly grasp to strengthen his strength the love for what has been handed down in spirit and strength, in the life and work of his fathers as a sacred legacy, because he can be convinced that he, by permeating himself with this love for the past, he finds the strength in which to believe; because in this faith and this love he may find the hope for those fruits which must blossom for the German character out of blood and suffering, but also out of the blessed deed of the present, which the German performs not out of bellicosity but out of devotion to a necessity imposed on him by history.

Thus, in the difficult times we are going through, the following must be part of German life, German work, German feeling and thinking: that which may sustain the German, may uplift him, and may lead him through the difficult struggle in which he finds himself: love for the German past, faith in the German present, confident hope for the German future!

[ 1 ] Sleep and Waking has been a theme frequently discussed in our anthroposophical studies, and from various points of view. But with the facts of life such as these, the understanding of them requires to be carried to a new depth every time, after studying a different aspect of the world. All that has been said about the Earth as life-seed of a new rising Macrocosm, makes it possible now to bring a deepened understanding to our views of sleeping and waking.

[ 2 ] In this waking state, Man lives in the thought-shadows cast by a dead and dying world, and in will-impulses into whose inner being he as little sees in ordinary consciousness, as he sees what is going on in deep dreamless sleep.

[ 3] With the inflow of the sub-conscious will-impulses into the thought-shadows arises the free, self-directed consciousness of the individual Self. In this Self-consciousness lives the I.

[ 4 ] Whilst Man is in this state, awake to the life of the world around him, through all the feelings that inwardly arise in him there run non-earthly, cosmic impulses that reach from a far distant cosmic Past into the Present. He is not conscious of this. A being can be conscious of that alone, in which it takes part through its own dying forces, not through the forces of growth which feed its life. Thus Man comes to Self-realization through the loss from his mind's eye of that which is the very basis of his own inner being. This however is precisely what enables him, whilst in the waking state, to feel himself utterly immersed in the thought-shadows. No flicker of life disturbs the inner state of participation in the world of the dead and dying. This ‘life amid the dead and dying’ conceals however the essential characteristic of the Earth-world, namely that it is the life-seed of a new Universe. Man in his waking state does not perceive the Earth as the Earth truly is; her first beginnings of new cosmic life escape him.

[ 5 ] So Man lives in that which the Earth gives him as basis for his Self-consciousness. He loses sight in his mind's eye of the true form of his own inner impulses, during this age of self-conscious Ego-development; and loses sight, too, of the true form of his surroundings. But it is just in this hovering above the stable reality of the World that Man realizes the stable reality of his I, realizes himself as a self-conscious being. Above him is the non-earthly, extra-terrestrial Cosmos; beneath him, in the Earth-region, is a world whose real being remains concealed; between the two the free being of the I becomes revealed, radiant in the fullness of perceptive knowledge and free will.

[ 6 ] In sleep it is otherwise. Here Man lives in his astral body and I amid the young seed-life of Earth. The most intense ‘will to life’ is all about Man during his dreamless sleep. Through his dreams also runs this stir of life; though not so strongly but that the man can be aware of them in a sort of half-consciousness. And in this half-conscious dream-panorama are seen the forces by whose means the human being is woven out of the Cosmos. In the passing flash of the dream can be seen the astral power as it flows into the ether-body and quickens the man to life. In the surging life and light of dreams, Thought is living still. Only after awakening, is Thought hemmed in by those forces which bring about its death—reduce it to a shadow.

[ 7 ] This connection between the dream-picture and the waking thought is of great significance. Man thinks with the same forces as those which enable him to grow and to live; only, for Man to become a Thinker these forces must be every dying.

[ 8 ] Here is the point where true understanding may dawn upon the mind, of why it is that Man in his Thinking grasps reality. He has in this thoughts the dead likeness of that by which he himself is formed and created out of a living, life-giving reality.

[ 9 ] The dead likeness! But this dead likeness is the life-work of the greatest of all painters, the Cosmos itself. From the likeness the life indeed is gone. Were the life not gone, Man's I could not evolve. Nevertheless this likeness contains the whole content of the Universe in all its glory.

[ 10 ] So far as was possible at the time, within the general lines of the book, I pointed out this inner relation between Thinking and World-Reality long ago, in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom;’ {Published in English under the title ‘The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity’} it is indicated in the place where I speak of a bridge leading from the depths of the thinking I to the depths of Nature's reality.

[ 11 ] The reason why sleep acts upon the ordinary consciousness as an extinguisher, is because it leads into the teeming life of Earth, shooting and sprouting up into the new, growing Macrocosm. When the Imaginative consciousness puts an end to this extinguishing action of sleep, the Earth which then presents itself to the human soul is not one of sharp outlines, in mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms; it is rather a living process that the soul has then before her—a living process kindled in the Earth and flaming out into the Macrocosm.

[ 12 ] Thus Man has to raise himself with the reality of his own ‘I am’ out of the world's reality in his waking state, in order to arrive at free and independent self-consciousness. In his sleeping state he unites himself once more with world-reality.

[ 13 ] Such, at the present cosmic moment, is the rhythm of Man's earthly life; outside the inner being of the world, but with the conscious experience of his own being; and within the inner being of the World, whilst the consciousness of his own being is extinguished.

[ 14 ] In the state between death and a new birth, the I of Man is living within the beings of the spirit-world. There, everything comes to consciousness, that escaped consciousness during the waking life of earth. There the macrocosmic forces pass across the scene, from all their fullness of life in the far distant Past, down to their dead and dying existence in the Present. But the Earthly forces too display themselves, which are the life-seed of the growing Macrocosm that is to be. And Man looks there into his sleeping states, as during Earth-life he looks at the Earth shining in the sunlight.

[ 15 ] Only because the Macrocosm, such as it is in the present, has become a thing of the dead, is it possible for the human being between death and new birth to lead a life which, compared to the waking life on Earth, signifies a higher awakening—an awakening which enables man completely to master the forces of which but a transitory flicker is seen in dreams. These are forces filling the whole Cosmos. They permeate everything. From them the human being draws the impulses with which, on his descent to Earth, he fashions his own body—the masterpiece of the macrocosmic artist.

[ 16 ] What in dreams is but a brief sun-abandoned glimmer, lives in the spirit-world transfused with spiritual sunlight, waiting until the beings of the higher Hierarchies, or Man himself, shall call it forth in creative work to the moulding of new life and being.

Leading Thoughts

[ 17 ] In the waking state, in order to gain living knowledge of himself in full and free Self-consciousness, Man is obliged to forgo the living knowledge of Reality, in its true form, both in his own existence and in Nature's. He lifts himself out of his sea of Reality, so that in his Thought-shadows he may make his own I his own real experience.

[ 18 ] In the sleeping state, Man lives with the life of the Earth around him, but this life extinguishes his consciousness of Self.

[ 19 ] In dreams, there flickers up in half-consciousness that forceful World-Reality of which Man's being is woven, and from which he fashions his body when he comes down out of the Spirit-world. In Earth-life this forceful World-Reality is reduced to death in shadow-thoughts, since only thus can it give the basis for Self-conscious Man.

[ 1 ] The first science in which the human spirit deals with itself is psychology. The mind here stands observing itself.

[ 2 ] Fichte assigned an existence to man only to the extent that man ascribes this to himself. In other words, human personality has only those traits, characteristics, capacities which it ascribes to itself through insight into its own being. A human capacity of which a man knew nothing would not be recognized by him as his own but would be attributed to some one alien to him. When Fichte supposed that he could base the whole knowledge of the universe on this truth, he was in error. It is ordained to be the highest principle of psychology. It determines the method of psychology. If the human spirit possesses a characteristic only in so far as it attributes this to itself, then the psychological method consists in the immersion of the mind in its own activity. Here, then, self-apprehension is the method.

[ 3 ] It is obvious that in this discussion we do not restrict psychology to being the science of the fortuitous characteristics of any one human individual (this one or that one). We release the single mind from its fortuitous limitations, from its accessory traits, and seek to raise ourselves to a consideration of the human individual in general.

[ 4 ] Indeed, what is determinative is not that we consider the wholly fortuitous individuality but that we clarify our minds as to the self-determining individual in general. Whoever should say at this point that we should in that case be dealing with nothing more than the type of humanity confuses the type with the generalized concept. It is essential to the type that it, as the general, confronts its single forms. Not so with the concept of the human individual. Here the general is active immediately in the individual being, except that this activity expresses itself in various ways according to the object toward which it is directed. The type exists in single forms and in these comes into reciprocal activity with the external world. The human spirit has only one form. But in one case certain objects move his feelings; in another this ideal inspires him to actions; etc. It is not a specialized form of the human spirit; it is always the entire and complete man with whom we have to deal. He must be released from his surroundings if he is to be comprehended. If we wish to arrive at the type, we must ascend from the single form to the primal form; if we wish to arrive at the human spirit, we must ignore the expressions in which it manifests itself, the special acts which it performs, and observe it in and of itself. We must discover how it behaves in general, not how it has behaved in this or that situation. In the case of the type we must separate the universal form, by comparison, from the single forms; in psychology we must separate the single forms only from their surroundings.

[ 5 ] Here the case is no longer the same as in organics, that in the particular being we recognize the molding of the primal form; but here, in perceiving the single forms, we recognize the primal form itself. The spiritual being of man is not one formation of its Idea, but the formation thereof. When Jacobi believes that, in becoming aware of our inner entity, we at the same time attain to the conviction that a unitary being lies at the basis of this entity (intuitive self-apprehension) his thought is in error, because we really become aware of this unitary being itself. What is otherwise intuition becomes here self-contemplation. In regard to the highest form of being this is also an objective necessity. What the human spirit can read out of phenomena is the highest form of content which it can attain at all. If the spirit then reflects upon itself, it must recognize itself as the direct manifestation of this highest: as, indeed, its very bearer. What the spirit finds as unity in multiform reality, this it must find in its own singleness as immediate existence. What it contrasts with particularization as the general,—this it must attribute to its own individuality as its very nature.

[ 6 ] From all this it becomes clear that a true psychology can be attained only when we enter into the character of the human spirit in its activity. Nowadays in place of this method the effort has been made to set up another in which the subject matter of psychology has been, not the human spirit itself, but the phenomena in which the spirit expresses its existence. It is supposed that the external expressions of the mind can be brought into an external interrelationship, as can be done with the facts of inorganic Nature. In this way the effort is made to found a “theory of the soul without any soul.” From our reflections it becomes evident that, by such a method, we lose sight of the very thing that is important. [ 7 ] What ought to be done is to separate the human spirit from its manifestations and return to the spirit itself as the producer of these. Psychologists restrict themselves to the former and lose sight of the latter. Just here they have allowed themselves to be brought to the false standpoint which would apply to all sciences the methods of mechanics, physics, etc.

[ 8 ] The unitary soul is given to us in experience just as are its single actions. Every man is conscious of the fact that his thinking, feeling, and willing proceed from his ego. Every activity of our personality is bound up with this center of our being. If, in the case of any action, we ignore this union with the personality, it ceases to be a manifestation of the soul. It belongs under the concept either of inorganic or of organic nature. If two balls lie on the table, and I thrust one against another, all that happens is resolved into physical or physiological occurrence, if my purpose and will are ignored. In all manifestations of the human spirit—thinking, feeling, willing—the important thing is to recognize these in their essential nature as expressions of the personality. It is upon this that psychology rests.

[ 9 ] But man does not belong to himself alone; he belongs also to society. What manifests itself in him is not merely his own individuality, but at the same time that of the folk-group to which he belongs. What he performs proceeds from the folk-force of his people as well as from his own force. In his mission he fulfills a part of that of his folk-kindred. The important thing is that his place among his people shall be such that he may bring to complete effectiveness the power of his individuality. [ 10 ] This is possible only when the folk-organism is of such sort that the single person can find the place where he may plant his lever. It must not be left to chance whether or not he shall find this place.

[ 11 ] The way to inquire how the individual lives within the social group of his people is a matter for the science of peoples and the science of the state. The folk-individuality is the subject of this science. It has to show what form the organism of the state must assume if the folk-individuality is to come to expression within it. The constitution which a people gives to itself must be evolved out of its innermost nature. Here also there are current fallacies of no small importance. The science of the state is held not to be an experiential science. It is held that the constitution of every people can be determined according to a certain stereotyped pattern.¹⁴

[ 12 ] But the constitution of a people is nothing else than its individual character brought into well determined forms of law. Whoever would indicate beforehand the direction in which a definite activity of a people has to move must not impose upon this anything from without: he must simply express what lies unconscious in the character of the people. “It is not the intelligent person who controls, but intelligence; not the rational person, but reason,” says Goethe.

[ 13 ] To grasp the folk-individuality as rational is the method in the science of the peoples. Man belongs to a whole whose nature consists in the organization of the reason. Here also we may cite a significant word of Goethe's: “The rational world is to be conceived as a great Immortal Individuality which unceasingly brings to pass what is necessary and thus makes itself master over the fortuitous.” As psychology investigates the nature of the individual, so the science of the peoples must investigate that “immortal individuality.”

• 14. Omitted from the new edition.