The Rudolf Steiner Archive

You will easily believe what very deep satisfaction it gives me to take up work again among you all on this building of ours. It is a fact that anyone coming into intimate contact with the whole aura of this building today would be able to receive the impression, as a result not only of deep reflection but also of quite superficial thought; that something connected with the most significant, the most weighty tasks of man's future is bound up with this building. And it goes without saying that after long, forced absence one is profoundly satisfied on finding oneself once more at this place where this building stands as a symbol of our cause.

To this I would add that particularly for me, my dear friends, it is a matter of infinite gratification every time I now return after long absence to be able to see how beautifully and significantly the work on the building has progressed through the active devotion of the workers. In these months of my recent absence in particular, when work has been carried out under such difficult conditions, part of the artistic work has gone forward in an unprecedented way; it has made progress in the spirit that should permeate the whole.

With deep pleasure too, I see, as a consequence of the spirit in our work, as consequence of all that is originating here, the real feeling of solidarity among many of our friends—the genuine feeling towards all that this building incorporates. What reveals itself to the soul when one lets this whole matter renew its effect upon one is that here we have a place with which is united such a true sentiment in a number of the friends of our spiritual movement, so sincere a sentiment that it promises a continuance of the best impulses in this movement for the future of mankind for which they are so necessary. In the work devoted to this building there is already something that could serve as a model for all that, in common with what we call today the Anthroposophical Society, is actually intended.

On the other hand, I have a strong feeling that what is favourable, what is so significantly good found here in our building, in the harmony of human work, and human feeling consists in this building being able through its objective nature to free what our movement wills from the subjective interests of individual men.

Concerning what we have just touched upon, my dear friends, there have been indeed, and still are, in all similar societies as well as in the Anthroposophical Society, certain remarkable views, that to be more exact, are remarkable illusions. A great deal is preached about selflessness and universal love between men; this is often, however, a mere mask for certain artful egoistic interests of individual human beings. It true that these individuals do not know that this is a question of mere egoistic interest; in face of their own consciousness they are innocent nevertheless, the fact remains.

The building itself, however, claims from a relatively large number of our friends a selfless devotion to something objective, to something standing out as a symbol of our cause, and free from all that is personal. And what is connected with our building can to that extent very well be, the model for what is sought in our Movement.

My dear friends! When, as today, we greet each other again, we need especially to dwell upon what if fruitful and all-embracing in the spiritual movement of ours. Meeting thus again, we need to reflect upon how earnestly we can believe that however it may happen—and the manner in which it does so depends upon how conditions take their course—man will never find his way out of the appalling blind alley into which he has come today until he decides in some way to seek a starting point for fruitful work, fruitful action, within a spiritual movement such as ours. We shall certainly not insist egoistically that the truth is to be found only in our small confined circle where it is recognised, through the very nature of the matter, that man has landed himself in the present terrible situation by neglecting his own spiritual substance. We should be able to recognise ourselves as men who are united in those ideas that alone can lead mankind out of this blind alley.

In the soul of modern men there is indeed very much that is not clear. When it has been possible to renew our knowledge here or there about the needs prevailing in our spiritual movement the following may be said on one hand: Yes indeed, the number of souls of those who are thirsting for spiritual life in our sense has very greatly increased. The longing for such spiritual life can well be said to have become infinitely greater; the attention given to our impulses has recently become undeniably greater, at least in those spheres that have been outwardly accessible to me in these last years and especially in recent months. It is not without meaning that I remark upon this distinct increase and strengthening of man's longing for the spiritual life. It is true that over against this strengthening and sharpening of the desire for spirit life there stands the terrible confusion from which the greater part of mankind is suffering. This terrible confusion among men comes about through the outworn ideas, or it would be better to say the outworn lack of ideas, the easy-going comfort where all keen vigorous thought concerned, the comfort that comes from the laxity, the indolence, with which during many decades, the thought-life on earth has been carried. This laxity, this laziness, leads souls astray in the present yearning after spiritual life. On the one hand, men are immersed in a genuine longing for spirituality, for strong supersensible impulses. On the other hand, these souls are fettered by the old powers that do not wish to withdraw from the scene of human activity, but should be able to see from this very activity how far they are removed from having any further place there. It might be said that one finds everywhere this dark impression, this impression of a cleft.

In many places in connection with repeated lectures with lantern slides, I have talked a great deal with our members about the Group that will take the chief place in our building. It could be seen on the one hand what powerful impulses have actually entered those souls who, by reason of the conditions during past years, have not even had a glimpse of what is going on here. A new human understanding is already arising from the very way in which what is ahrimanic and what is luciferic has been thought out in connection with what belongs to the Christ and has been represented and revealed in our Group. It makes a deep impression on souls when they are approached by all that is thus given. On the other hand, however, my dear friends, we find everywhere the obstructive influences of what is widespread among men in the remnants of what is old, rotten, in their so called cultural life.

This could be seen particularly in what might be called in a real sense the humorous frame of mind with which the lectures were received that were given at the art centre of our friend Herr von Bernus in Munich, when I tried to show a large audience the inner impulses active here in our conception of art. That did indeed arouse interest in people to an extraordinary degree, for I held lectures of this kind in Munich in February and in May and had to give each of them twice. Herr von Bernus assured me there were so many enquiries that I should have been able to give four times over each of the public lectures dealing with the principles of my conception of art, as they have found expression in the building here. Interest was certainly there, but it goes without saying one could find less reason to be pleased in the agreement shown with what was said by the critic of a Munich newspaper, which might be called a showing of teeth though politely and humorously. It was particularly facetious since inner resentment made itself felt against what could not be understood. It was all—not spoken,—but spat out, if you forgive the inelegant expression. And it was shown up by the very interest aroused by the matter where honesty and sincerity spoke in opposition to what was otherwise noticeable in this artistic centre (that is Munich, it goes without saying; it is a well-known fact). Thus was shown how in this centre of artistic activity the most intelligible as well as the unintelligible stuff was talked... It is just in this sort of discrepancy that we get an example of how today the two streams of which I have been speaking are present, and how we need to stand consciously within what is essential and important, towards which we must struggle for the sake of the world and its future.

I am certainly not saying all this because when our matters have publicity anywhere I would strive for what is called a “good press” for the moment we had a “ good press” I should think there must be something wrong, something of ours must have been untrue.

All these things are suitable for calling up in us a consciousness that it is very necessary for us to take a decided stand on the grounds of our cause. For nothing could promote greater confusion among us than our wishing to make any kind of compromise with—well with what the external world would consider it right for us to do. In what we do it is only towards the principles for which we stand that must look for guidance.

Another example of what we have been discussing, less directly connected with our cause, nevertheless connected inwardly, is the recent increasing interest shown in the most varied places for Eurythmy. And when we who were present remember how Eurythmy was received particularly in one place, where it had scarcely been seen before, it was partly something entirely new to the audience, namely in Hamburg, we have really to remember this reception with the deepest satisfaction. The significance of the impulses going out from even an affair of that kind was especially evident in Hamburg. People were there who to all intents and purposes were witnessing a proper performance of Eurythmy for the first time. And the possibility will yet arise perhaps for Eurythmy to be performed publicly. It is just at this juncture, however, that we must stand on the very firmest ground with our cause and do nothing that is not entirely consistent with it.Otherwise, my dear friends, it would soon be seen that, from a certain point of view, it must not be thought that I shall yield when some particular matter is in question that depends upon me. Most of you already know that where no principle is concerned, when some purely human affair comes to the fore, it goes without saying that I am always in it all with best of you. When it is a question, however, of approaching the boundary where any principle whatever has to be forsworn—even in the smallest degree—I shall show myself inflexible. Therefore, at the present time, when so much dancing can be seen—for there is dancing everywhere, it is quite dreadful, if you live in a town any night you join in a dance evening—when there is show-dancing everywhere, if it should be thought (I do not say all this without good reason; although I do not specify any particular instance, I have good reason to speak) if it should be thought that by giving public performances of Eurythmy, we meant to identify ourselves with any kind of journalistic stunt to put forward some kind of claim for attention, then I should take precautions against this in the most determined manner. A feeling for what is in good taste must be forthcoming solely out of our cause.

You see my dear friends, we have sometimes also to remember, especially on meeting again, to conduct according to the standard of spiritual impulses the necessary direct activity resulting from the will. These spiritual impulses will have to fight against a great deal of what today we can no longer call prejudice, for things work too powerfully be described by such a weak term. I do not say in a conceited, egoistical way “We” have to fight, but these impulses will have to fight against many different things. Now over and over again we have to refer to the terrible malady of our age, that consists in lack of control where the life of thinking is concerned. For, rightly conceived, the life of thought is already a spiritual life. It is because men give so little heed to their life of thinking that they seldom find their way into the spiritual worlds.

There is one thing upon which I must repeatedly touch from the most varied sides, namely, what an appalling value is put today upon the mere content of thoughts. The content of thoughts, however, is what is of least importance! The content of thoughts—Look! a grain of wheat is a grain of wheat, this cannot be gainsaid. Even though a grain of wheat is a grain of wheat, however, when you put it into suitable, good, fruitful ground you get a juicy ear, and when you, put it into ground that is barren and stony, you get either nothing at all or a rotten ear. But each time you are dealing with a grain of wheat.

Let us speak of something other than a grain of wheat. Let us say instead of ‘grain of wheat ’, ‘idea of free man’ which is so much discussed today. Some will say ‘idea of free man’ is the ‘idea of free man.’ It is just the same as a grain of wheat is a grain of wheat. But there is a difference in whether ‘idea of free man’ flourishes in a heart, in soul where this heart and soul is fruitful ground, or whether the ‘idea of free man’, exactly the same idea with the same foundation, flourishes in Woodrow Wilson's head! It matters not in the least if a grain of wheat is sown in stony ground or right into the rock, and it is just true that all the so called beautiful ideas that we are given in the programmes of Woodrow Wilson signify nothing if they come out of his head. But this is something that modern man comes to understand with such infinite difficulty, for he holds the view that it is the content of a programme, the content of the idea, has as little significance as the germinating power of a grain of wheat before it is planted in fertile ground.

To think with reality! Man has the greatest need of this. And something else is connected with the present unreality in thinking namely, men are taken unawares by almost all that happens. Indeed one might ask when has that not occurred in these last years?. Men are surprised by everything, and they will go on being more and more surprised. But they will not have anything to do with what is really working in the world, and this today makes it impossible for them to bring any foresight to bear on their affairs.

Working merely with ideas, one can from any side base anything upon anything. If one works with the content of ideas alone it is actually possible to base everything on anything. This is also something it is necessary to see into increasingly and ever more deeply; it is necessary but there is little will for it.

Generally, when such things are spoken of, and examples of them given, one meets with no real response because the examples seem too grotesque. But our whole life of soul and spirit today fairly hums with these things that give so grotesque an impression on being brought to light—my dear friends, they buzz around us! I know that many of you may feel resentment if I give you a really outstanding idea as an example—I will, however, quote this instance.

Now it is a case here of a University professor, an old respected professor at a university, who lit on the fact that Goethe during his long life was attracted by various women. Yes, our professor came up against this idea and took upon himself the task of making a real study of both the life of Goethe and that of the spirits connected with him. And we see how he obviously makes it his business, in spite of not being professor at a European university, to go to work as thoroughly as a mid-European professor usually does, and he made to pass before his soul the whole procession of Goethe's ladies in their relation to Goethe. What did he discover? I can quote this for you almost in his very words.

He discovered that each woman Goethe loved momentarily during his life can be said to have been for him a kind of Belgium, the neutrality of which he violated and then bemoaned that his heart bled for having been obliged to assail shining innocence. Neither did he forget to assert, each time, like the German Chancellor, that this sphere of violated neutrality had deserved a better fate but that he, Goethe, could not do otherwise since his destiny and the rights of his spiritual life obliged him to sacrifice the loved one—yes, even to offer up the pain of his very heart on the altar of the duty he owed to his own immortal ego.

Now I could give you here many other ideas that come in this book. You might ask for, what purpose? But, my dear friends, there is very good reason. For you find this kind of idea all over the world. The ideas of modern men are like that! And it is not without reason that such ideas should show themselves in literature where the essence of human thinking appears. This conception is upheld by Santayana, a professor at Harvard University in America, a much esteemed Spaniard who is, however, completely Americanised. His book was written during this present catastrophe, or at least Boutroux has translated it into French during the war. Shortly before this Boutroux gave a lecture in Heidelberg in which he eulogised German Philosophy in the most flattering terms! The book is called The Errors of German Philosophy and is entirely characteristic of present-day thinking. The appearance of this book was certainly not just a casual event but is very characteristic of modern thought and compares man with what is very far removed from him, with the same facility we find in Professor Santayana when he compares Belgian neutrality with Goethe's treatment of various women. For, if you have eyes to see it, this kind of thinking meets you in every sphere of so-called modern science. It is a fact; you come across it everywhere.

Now it is just the task of the spiritual impulse to which our Anthroposophy is devoted, to make a stand against three fundamental evils in the present so-called culture of mankind. There is nothing for it but to fight against these fundamental evils. One fundamental evil shows itself in the sphere of thinking, another in the sphere of feeling and the third fundamental evil is seen in the sphere of the will.

In the sphere of thinking we have gradually reached the point where men can only think in the way the thinking takes its course when it is strictly bound up with the brain. But this thinking, so closely connected with the brain, this thinking that refuses to make a flight to the spiritual, is condemned in all circumstances to be narrow and confined. And the most significant symptom of present scientific thinking in particular is narrowness and limitation. In the field of his narrowness and limitation great things can certainly be done. It is done for example, in modern science. But the thought applied to science today has no need of genius, my dear friends! Thus, narrowness, limitation, is what must be striven against, especially in the intellectual sphere. Today I will simply give these things in outline, but later we shall be describing them more in detail.

In the sphere of feeling it is a question of men having gradually arrived at a certain philistinism—we can only call it so—philistinism, lack of generosity, and being bound to a certain confined circle. It is the chief characteristic mark of the philistine that he is incapable of being interested in the big affairs of the world. Village pump politicians are always philistines. Naturally, in the sphere of Spiritual Science this does not suffice, for here one cannot confine oneself to a narrow circle, we have to be interested in what is outside the earth, therefore in a very wide circle indeed. And people get quite annoyed at the mere suggestion that there should be a desire to know something about a circle wide enough to embrace Moon, Sun, Saturn. In all spheres, however, philistinism must soften into non-philistinism if Spiritual Science is to penetrate. Sometimes that is not convenient or comfortable, for it means facing up unreservedly to the matter. It demands a more unprejudiced facing up to the matter.

Recently an awkward thing happened in our midst—but I stopped it because otherwise perhaps—well, nothing actually happened but something could have happened. Now you will remember the Zurich lectures of last fear; among various examples I gave then of how Darwinism can be overcome through the growth of natural science itself, I pointed to the excellent book by Oskar Hertwig called Des Werden der Organismen (How Organisms come into Being). Here, and every time the opportunity occurred, I referred to this excellent book. Very soon after this work a shorter book appeared by this same Oskar Hertwig, in which the same Oskar Hertwig spoke about the social, the ethical and the political life. And I then thought to myself: it may happen that some of our members having heard me call Oskar Hertwig's book about organisms an outstanding book will assume that this second volume is excellent also, when it is actually a worthless book, a book written by a man who in this particular sphere—in the sphere of the social life, the ethical life and the political life—cannot put into shape a single orderly thought. I feared lest certain of our members might already have judged that since it came from Hertwig this book too would have some kind of merit. So I had to step in and again whenever I could seize the opportunity I availed myself of it to point out that I considered this second book of the author, who had previously written so well about natural science, to be the worthless and foolish effort of a man who had no ability to speak of the things of which he spoke here.

Our Spiritual Science does not admit of one thing conveniently following from another, without each new fact being confronted and judged impartially. Spiritual Science demands from men actual proof of the concrete nature of every single case. Philistinism is something that will vanish when the impulse of Spiritual Science spreads. So much for the sphere of feeling.

And in the sphere of the will there is something that recently has particularly and in the widest sense taken hold of mankind, something I can only term lack of skill. As a rule, a man today is very able within the narrow circle of what he learns, but he is considerably inept about everything outside this circle. One comes across people who can't even sew on a button—that is only one example. There are men who are unable to sew on a button! Lack of skill in anything beyond a narrow circle is what is specially prevalent in the sphere of the will. Whoever takes what we call Spiritual Science with his whole soul, and not just with abstract thinking, will see that it makes a man more dexterous and fits him actually to spread his interest over a wider area, to extend his will over a wider world. Naturally it is just where this lack of skill is concerned that spiritual science is still too weak; but the more intensively we take it the more will it contend with unskillfulness.

This is what confronts the present-day acceptance of Spiritual Science with what might be called a trinity: narrowness in the intellectual sphere; philistinism, which means a lack of generosity, in the sphere of feeling; unskillfulness in the sphere of will.

And the three are loved nowadays even if loved unconsciously. Nothing in the world today is more loved than unskillfulness, philistinism and narrow-mindedness. Because they are loved it will not be easy for men to progress to the wide views to which they must come—to the way in which we must look at all that is connected with the names Ahriman and Lucifer. And it is just here that something important must understood today. For today among many other things there is an important transition from the luciferic to the ahrimanic. And as this transition is shown not simply elsewhere but also here in Switzerland one may well speak of it here. In this region the first has perhaps less significance owing to the very habits of the Swiss. The second, however, shows every prospect of attaining more importance precisely in this country. Where certain things are concerned mankind is indeed in a state of transition from faults that are luciferic to those that are ahrimanic, from luciferic impulses that run counter to human development to ahrimanic counter-impulses.

Now certain impulses of earlier days holding good in educational matters were of a thoroughly luciferic nature. Ambition and vanity were counted on in educational matters. (All of us when young, with the exception of the youngest among us, have known this quite well.) Perhaps this applies less to Switzerland but elsewhere it is pretty prevalent—this reckoning on ambition and vanity—orders, titles, and so on and so forth! Some people's whole career was based on the luciferic impulses of vanity and ambition, on the being worth more than other men. Just try to think back to how educational affairs were indeed built up on such luciferic impulses.

At the present time there is an endeavour to put ahrimanic impulses in the place of those that are luciferic. Today they hide themselves behind the elegant term “ability tests”. In the ahrimanic sphere this corresponds to what in the luciferic sphere was boasting about vanity and ambition even among children. Today there is an endeavour to seek out those the most gifted, or those who apart from that are most successful in class; out of these again individuals are taken. Among these gifted ones tests are made, intelligence tests, memory tests, perception tests and so on. This is something very suited to the Swiss disposition. And should the luciferic play a very small part here, the ahrimanic shows itself nicely in bud in the understanding for these ability tests. For these ability tests proceed from the intelligence, from science, from the present-day psychology of the learned. Then these gifted ones who are to be tested are made to sit down and are given the written words: murdered, looking-glass, the murderer's victim. And they sit there, poor lambs, in front of the three words murderer, looking-glass, the murderer's victim, and are supposed to look for a connecting link between them. One child finds that the murderer steals upon his victim, but the victim has a looking-glass in which the murderer is reflected so that the victim is able to save himself. So much for the first child. His gift of perception takes him as far as connecting the three words in this way.

Now comes another:—A murderer is creeping on his victim and sees himself in a looking-glass. His face appears to him in it as the face of somebody with a bad conscience, so he leaves his victim on account of seeing the reflection of his own face. That is the second child.

The third child makes yet another combination. A murderer comes creeping, he finds a mirror and falls against it so that the mirror falls down with a terrible noise, it makes a regular disturbance. The victim hears the noise and is in time to defend himself against the murderer.

The last child is the most talented! The first only found the nearest combination of ideas; the second an obvious matter of morals; the third child found a very complicated connection of ideas, and this one is the most talented!—That is more or less how it is. When describing things briefly one naturally gives them a little colouring of one's own. But this is how the ability of children is henceforward going to be tested to find out who is the most talented.

One thing is certain, my dear friends—if the men who invent these methods would just think of the great people they revere, Helmholtz for instance, and so on, Newton and so on, these great ones would one and all, if given these tests, have been looked upon as the most untalented little rascals. Nothing would have come of it. For Helmholtz who is certainly considered by those who give these tests today as a very great physicist—as I think you will agree—was a hydrocephalic and not at all gifted in his youth, and so on and so forth.

What is it that people want to test? Simply the outer organism, entirely what may be counted as the physical instrument of man, what is purely ahrimanic in human nature. If ever the fruits of these ability tests are to come to anything, more ghastly thought-pictures will arise than those that have led to the present human catastrophe. When, however, one speaks today about anything that may lead to catastrophic events in perhaps a hundred years, this does not interest man. For we live now in this transition from a luciferic educational system to an educational system that is ahrimanic; and we must belong to those who understand how to see clearly into such matters:

Men must change what is active force for the future into forces of the present. For this is what is demanded from us today—to confront concrete reality in a true, genuine, unprejudiced way.

Here one may have very strange experiences. I do not remember if I have already mentioned here a very interesting experience of mine. There are writings of Woodrow Wilson's—one about “Freedom”, another just called “Literature”. These writings have been very much admired—are still very much admired. In the publication called “Literature” an interesting lecture appears again which Woodrow Wilson once gave about the historical evolution of America. And elsewhere, too, interesting lectures by Woodrow Wilson have been repeated having wide historic standpoints. And reading these writings I had an interesting experience. In them one finds isolated sentences which appeared to me extraordinarily familiar yet certainly not copied from anywhere—certainly not copied they nevertheless seemed to me wonderfully familiar. And the idea soon struck me that these sentences of Woodrow Wilson's might just well have been written by Herman Grimm, that quite a number of these sentences indeed are found word for word in Grimm. Herman Grimm I love; Woodrow Wilson—Well, you know by now that I do not exactly love him! Nevertheless I cannot on that account conceal the objective fact that where the content of the subject is concerned one could simply take over whole sentences from Herman Grimm's lectures and articles and transpose them into those of Wilson—and, vice versa, transpose sentences of Wilson's into the works of Herman Grimm. Here are two people who as far as the actual text is concerned are saying just the same thing. We have, however, to learn today that when two people say the same thing it is not the same! For the interesting fact meets us that Herman Grimm's sentences are personally striven for, bit by bit they are wrenched from the soul. The sentences of Woodrow Wilson that sound so similar come from a kind of characteristic frenzy. The man is possessed by a subconscious ego forcing these sentences into the conscious life.

Whoever can judge of such things realises that this is the point here! A grain of wheat is a grain of wheat: The difference, however, lies in where it is sown, in what kind of soil. There is a difference in whether an idea becomes so much part of a personality because he has striven for it bit by bit in his own particular way, or whether one gets the idea by being possessed by the subconscious, everything sounding out of a possessed subconscious, out of a consciousness that is possessed by the subconscious.

Thus it is a question today of understanding that the content of thoughts, the content of programmes, are not of importance—the important thing is the livingness of the life lived by mankind.

My dear friends! We can teach materialistic philosophy, we can teach the philosophy of mere ideas; we can teach a science that is merely materialistic, and in this merely materialistic science become a most excellent European teacher, a credit to the university and a good citizen of the State. The type is not so rare, I fancy you can find them anywhere, these ornaments and lights of science, who at the same time are quite exemplary good citizens; one can well be this, my dear friends! But take some ideas, I should say an idea of a definite kind, let us take as a trivial idea the struggle for existence, for instance, or those ideas that are advocated by more peaceable people such as Oskar Hertwig, and so on, or ideas upheld by Spencer, Mill, Boutroux or Bergson who certainly are not wishing to press forward to the spiritual life, but are confined to the philosophy of mere ideas. But still more, take the materialistic ideas of science, take these ideas! It is true they might be able to spring up in the brain of the good subjects of the State. Very well. But, my dear friends, a grain of wheat is a grain of wheat; nevertheless it makes a difference whether it grows in soil that is fertile for it or in rocky soil, and it makes a difference whether these scientific ideas which can be striven for in Europe as a credit to science, and hold good in the universities, thrive in the brains of the university students, or whether they spring up in the brain of a man whose brother already as a young man at the end of the eighties was counted a shining light in science at the Petersburg laboratory... Such facts certainly like a flash of lightning illumine things that are working at the present time! Take this young man who was there in the Petersburg laboratory about the year already a shining light in science, full of productive ideas in chemistry with a medal—a very rare thing—distinguished by this special medal from all those working with him, and highly esteemed even as a young man—and suddenly he disappears! Even marked out by the university authorities—he is suddenly no longer there! In all manner of roundabout ways his colleagues have to find out that meanwhile he has been hanged for taking part in a conspiracy against the reactionary Alexander III. It makes a difference whether the same idea enters the brain of a worthy university professor of Western Europe, or the brain of the brother of the man who was hanged under such conditions. When it enters the brain of this brother it changes this brother into a Lenin—for the hanged mans brother is Lenin—then this idea becomes the driving force behind all that you now see in Eastern Europe.

Idea is idea, as grain of wheat is grain of wheat; one has, however, to realise whether something is the same idea that arises either in the brain of a university professor or in the brain of the brother of this man they hanged. We must have the will to see into the background of existence where lie the actual impulses behind events. And we must have the courage to reject all the empty nonsense about programmes, ideas, sciences, of those who believe in them. Something depends on what they uphold. This or that may be upheld according to its content, nevertheless it is of consequence in what sphere of actual life what is thus upheld lies, just as it is of consequence where the grain of wheat falls, whether in fertile or unfertile ground. In every sphere man must find the way out of the abstraction that in the present grave conditions is everywhere leading to illusion or to chaos; he must find the way to the reality that can be found in spirituality alone! And however long it be, this is the only road by which man can find his way out of the present confusion to what can bless and heal him.

This is what should be written on our hearts, my dear friends, something in which we can all be united. this is something with which we should greet each other in earnest, associating ourselves in this knowledge with what must be the cure for man's failings. For it is possible to cure them. But, my dear friends, this may not be done with quack remedies, they must be healed by something the lack of which has brought mankind into this chaos.

Leninism would never have taken hold of the East had not materialistic science—not always recognised as such—been taught in the West. For what has been produced in the East is the direct child of materialistic science. It is just a child of materialistic science. Through Karl Marx a changeling has arisen; the real child of materialistic science already exists in the East. But we must have the will really to see into these things.

This, my dear friends, is as it were the background against which our building is being erected. And individual men who work here at this building think about it quite apart from the ideas today affecting men in so many lands. We can well imagine that outside, in other countries, there may be people who consider that men are living here who keep aloof from what concerns the world and, as these people believe, should concern it. It is easy to imagine people looking reproachfully at this place. Those who have their whole heart and soul in this building need not worry themselves about being thus reproached. For even if this building does not perhaps fulfil its task, if it never reaches its goal, what works on the building, my dear friends, and what proceeds from those working with devotion on the building, is today the most important thing of all; it is what must rescue men from everything into which they have fallen. And when people outside believe that here men are working with no thought for the task of present-day mankind, the answer must be that here we are working on what is of supreme importance today, on what is preeminently essential, only others know nothing of it, it is something of which as yet they are ignorant. But the important point is that mankind will want to know something of what is happening here.

Once again let it be emphasised. It is not important whether this building attains its goal—although it would be good were it to do so. What is important is that this building should be worked upon out of certain ideas that men have discovered for this work. It is not the content of these ideas but the way in which they live that gives them their impulses for the future, whereas the ideas so many believe in today are simply and solely ideas that incline towards the grave, ideas of a former age which are passing into dissolution and are ripe for dissolution.

Recently I have become aware of mystics who have attempted to elucidate the nature of the human being in the following way. I will quote the result to which they believe they have arrived. They say something like this: If we look at the human being as he walks on earth, his whole existence is a kind of riddle. His soul-being towers mightily above what he is able to represent in his entire humanity, to reveal himself, as it were, in the living out of the interrelationship with other people. Therefore, one must assume - so such mystics think - that man is actually something quite different in his essence from what he appears to be here in his earthly walk. He must be a comprehensive cosmic being, who, according to his inner nature, is much, much more powerful than what he presents himself as being here on earth; he must have forfeited his place in the great cosmos for some reason and must have been banished into this earthly existence – as for example, a mystic follower of this direction - to learn modesty here, to learn to be modest here, to feel small here for once, while in truth he is a great, powerful cosmic being, but who in some way has made himself unworthy to live out this cosmic being.

I know that there are many people who just laugh at such an idea. But the one who understands life from a deeper point of view knows that even such a mystical idea ultimately arises from the great difficulty of solving the riddle of life, which difficulty imposes itself ever more sharply and sharply on the human soul, precisely the more this human soul seeks to delve into true reality. I do not, of course, want to cite anything in particular in support of this idea of a modern mystical trend, which I have just characterized. I just wanted to cite it as something that has also found a place in human souls as a concept. One could just as easily cite a dozen other, more or less philosophical or mystical solutions to the human riddle in abstracto.

If one then tries to understand the reason why the most diverse people try to understand in such different ways, sometimes in quite unusual ways, what it actually means to be human here on earth, one comes to different conclusions. Above all, it is found that precisely with regard to the great, real questions of existence, people do not want to fulfill one thing for themselves, which they certainly admit on a small scale on every possible daily occasion: on every possible daily occasion, man will admit that one should not obscure the truth with one's desires, that what one desires to be true cannot be decisive for the objectivity of the truth. In ordinary life, in small matters, man will readily admit this; but in the great matters we see, as it were, the impossibility for people to arrive at a realistic world view, precisely because people cannot help asserting their desires when it comes to grasping the truth. And most of the time, it is precisely those desires that play a major role that could be called unconscious desires, which a person does not even admit are desires in his soul. Yet these desires are present in the soul; they remain subconscious or unconscious. And that would be the task of spiritual training: to make one aware of such desires that remain unconscious, in order to rise above the illusory life and penetrate into the sphere of truth.

These unconscious desires play a particularly important role when the highest truths of life are to be asserted within the human being, the truths about the essence of human life itself, let us say now of this ordinary human life as it unfolds in the physical world between birth and death. A real, appropriate, realistic consideration must always look at the whole course of life if life is to be understood. And just imagine that such a realistic consideration of life should yield a result that man, even if only in his subconscious desires, does not desire at all. Then man would do anything to get away from such an inconvenient result by means of apparent logic.

Surely, if we consider only life on earth, there is nothing to suggest that the truth must correspond to human desires, even if these desires are unconscious. It could, after all, be that the truth about human life is also completely unpleasant.

Spiritual science shows that this is truly the case. Of course, a higher point of view can be found from which the matter may appear differently. But for the life that a person would like to lead on this earth, a truthful examination shows that the truth about man is such that most people who are too comfortable in life feel a slight shudder - albeit a subconscious shudder, but you will understand what I mean - a slight unconscious, sometimes very strong subconscious shudder. But then the whole of human life must be considered.

We know that this whole of human life, when considered objectively and in detail, breaks down into distinct periods. You can read about these periods in my little booklet The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science. We know that we can only understand the human being by observing life, first from birth to the change of teeth, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, from sexual maturity to the beginning of the twenties, let us say on average to the age of twenty-one; then again to the age of twenty-eight. We can understand the human being's life in the same way that we seek to understand anything scientifically, by looking at the seven-year cycles of human life.

Significant events occur in human life during each of these periods. From what we mentioned again yesterday, you know that the human being stands in life, integrating himself into the cosmos – I reminded you of the image of the magnetic needle yesterday – so that, for example, the formation of his head points far, far into the distant past, and the formation of his extremities points into the distant future, just as the magnetic needle points with one pole to the north and with the other pole to the south.

But this alignment with the cosmos is different in each of the main human periods. In each of the main human periods, different forces intervene in the organization of humanity. In the first seven years of our lives, something quite different prevails in us than in the second seven years. Everything that comes to expression in the seventh year, in that, one might say, all the growth is dammed up, as at a bank, by the eruption of the permanent teeth, everything that is dammed up in the eruption of the permanent teeth plays out of the forces of the cosmos in the first seven years of life. And again, there is something that the human being takes back in his education. What the human being takes back in his education, by becoming sexually mature, that with which he, I would like to say, tinges himself, it forms in that certain developmental forces, which are thoroughly grounded in the cosmos, develop in the second epoch of life and so on.

Now the thing is that one must say: in the whole human being, the various members do interact. The child, up to the change of teeth, also develops a certain psychic activity; and this psychic activity is extraordinarily important, especially in these first years of life. I am reminded of the truly wise saying of Jean Paul, who said that at the beginning of his life, one undoubtedly learns more for life from one's nurse than from all one's professors in the academic years. There is something very wise and very true in this saying. One must only assess things in the right way. One learns a lot in these first seven years of life, but what is learned remains, so to speak, intellectually and otherwise in the dullness of the soul life, which is still almost a physical life, down below. But if you read my booklet 'The Spiritual Guidance of the Human Being and of Humanity', you will see that this life, which the child develops in the first seven years, can also be evaluated differently from the usual way. In these first seven years, there is truly not much wisdom in the human organism. When the child - as the bourgeois expression goes - has seen “the light of day”, his brain is still quite undifferentiated. It only differentiates over time, and what emerges in terms of brain structures truly corresponds, when studied, to influences of a deeper wisdom than anything we can muster in later life when we construct machines or do anything scientifically. Of course, we cannot do this later in a conscious way, which we do unconsciously when we have just seen the light of the world, as I said. Cosmic reason rules in us, that cosmic reason of which we also had to speak when we mentioned the development of language. Truly, a high cosmic reason rules in the human being in the first seven years of life.

In the second seven years of life, this cosmic reason then focuses on tingeing the human being with what leads to sexual maturity; there it prevails, this cosmic intellectuality, to a small extent already. One might say: that which remains, which is not used inwardly, well, that just rises up into the head. And it affects the head – and usually it is afterwards! But what affects the head is actually something that is spared in the inner being, in the unconscious of the soul life. And then it continues in seven-year periods.

Nowadays, the usual approach is to study the whole of human life, the so-called normal human life; because to study this normal human life, a certain devotion is necessary, first to the real human being, but then also to the great cosmic laws. And however strange it may sound, what takes place in the first seven years of childhood cannot be understood, not as a child, not as a young man or woman, not even when one imagines that one has already grasped the whole of life in one's twenties. One cannot understand it. One can come to some understanding of what takes place in childhood if one seeks this understanding inwardly in the human being, in inner experience, say between the ages of fifty-six and sixty-three. Old age, old age itself, only gives us the opportunity to gain a slight insight into what rules in us during the first seven years of childhood. This is an uncomfortable thing, because today, when a person has barely outgrown the young badger years, he wants to be a full human being. And today it is uncomfortable to admit to oneself that there is something in the world, even in oneself, that can only be understood at the turn of fifty. And again, if it is a matter of understanding, of inner-human understanding, as we can first achieve it as human beings, then we can learn to understand something of what takes place in human nature during the years in which sexual maturity develops, that is, from the seventh to the fourteenth year of life. This takes place between the ages of forty-nine and fifty-six, at the beginning of the fifties.

It would be good if such truths were to be recognized, because through such truths one would learn to understand life, while the other truths that are usually established about human beings are such as one wishes. One just does not realize that unconscious desires are there. And again, what takes place in us from puberty to the age of twenty-one, one gets some inner, experienced insight into that, so that one can have a certain judgment about it between the forty-second and forty-nine, and again, what happens in the twenties up to the twenty-eighth year, about that one can get some information between the thirty-fifth and forty-second year. What I say about these things is based on real observation of life, which one must do by training oneself in spiritual-scientific observation, and not by engaging in the kind of nonsense of self-knowledge that is often called self-knowledge today, but by engaging in real self-knowledge, that is, by engaging in knowledge of human nature. And it is only in the period from about twenty-eight to thirty-five that one can experience something and at the same time understand it by experiencing it; there is a certain balance between understanding and thinking. In the first half of life one can think various things, one can imagine various things; in order to experience with understanding what one can imagine in the first half of life, one must await the second half of life.

It is an uncomfortable truth, but that is how life is. I can even imagine people saying: Yes, if the human being is so circumscribed in his or her entire inner conformity to law, where does that leave the free will of the human being? Where does freedom go? Where is the consciousness of humanity? - Certainly, I can also imagine that someone feels unfree because he cannot be in Europe and America at the same time, that someone feels unfree because he cannot reach down to the moon. But facts do not conform to human desires. Even when it comes to man gaining insight into himself, it is necessary to face the facts. These facts are as follows: We do not live a life that is constantly changing and metamorphosing for no reason. We live this life in such a way that each period of life has its meaning and significance in relation to others. And for that we live, as we say, the normal life, if we are granted such, until the age of sixty — we will also talk about early death from this point of view tomorrow — in a way that only in the second half of life does it become clear to us what prevails in the first half of life. People would be able to orient themselves in the world much more securely and correctly if this knowledge of life were to gain some ground. For then they would build on a true foundation of life, whereas today, because they do not base themselves on objectivity but on desires, they often simply cling to the idea that one must learn something until one's twenties, but after that one is a finished person, then one is ready for anything in life. In this way one completely overlooks the inner coherence of life. To get to know life is really an inner task. And one must not forget, especially when it comes to this intimate task, that desires must remain silent and that objectivity must be taken into account.

Now a certain balance is emerging in the course of human evolution. In earlier times the matter was quite different, as I have already presented: You remember how I spoke of the human development from the Atlantic time until today, of the ever-younger becoming of humanity. A certain equalization has occurred in that in the course of evolution it has been found that one element was related to the other. If that had not occurred, then one would simply have to keep the matter in life so: A person in their twenties would have to believe a forty-year-old when it comes to certain things that relate to truths in a person that can only be grasped as vividly as I have characterized them in the forties. It is not quite like that, but in the course of human development, the concepts themselves, the ideas, have become such that one can have a certain intuitive conviction at one age and at the other. If you are sufficiently devoted to let the forty- and fifty-year-olds tell you about their life experiences, provided, of course, that they have had any, today people usually don't, if you let yourself be told about these life experiences when you are still younger, you are not dependent on mere authority authority, that has already become the case through development; but by thinking – as a young person one can only think – there is more to the way and character that the thoughts have taken than what merely appeals to faith. There is already a certain possibility in it to also understand. Otherwise one would have to say: in youth man thinks, in old age he comprehends. But there is already something in it that can teach one more than a religious belief, a mere authoritative conviction. This gives a certain balance.

But take what I have said as a truth of life. If you take it as a truth of life, it will shed light on the practice of life. Just think, when what I have said is present in life, when it is thought and felt and sensed by people, how it expresses itself in the relationship between people! How it creates, as it were, binding links from soul to soul! A person who is still young looks at the old in a special way when he knows: He can experience something that, in relation to him, who can only think, is an understanding of what is thought. One is interested in a completely different way in the messages that a person in a different age can give, if one understands life in such a way. And one retains one's interest, even when one has reached a higher age, for what abounds as younger people, even as children. They remember how often I have said: The wisest can learn from the little child! Of course, the wisest of all will gladly and lovingly learn from a small child. Even if he does not want to be taught by a small child about morals or other views of life, he would be able to gain an infinite amount of wisdom from the child, especially with regard to cosmic secrets, which are expressed quite differently in a small child than in a later human being. The interest that prevails from soul to soul increases quite substantially when such things are not mere abstract theories, but when such things are wisdoms of life.

Real spiritual science has the peculiarity of strengthening, enhancing, and reinforcing the bonds of love that people have for one another, which must essentially be based on the bonds of mutual interest. Ordinary wisdom can leave people dry, as dry as some scholars are. Spiritual science, truly grasped in its substance, cannot leave people dry, but will, under all circumstances, make people love, wants to strengthen and increase mutual human interest.

I had planned to tell you a small number of such things today, things that are unpleasant for life, but are truths, are facts, because one does not progress spiritually if one does not get used to boldly facing facts, even if they are uncomfortable.

Another fact is this – it is already clear from yesterday's observations – that the intellect, as we can achieve it in the present cycle of humanity, is only suitable for awakening understanding over a certain period of time. I do not envy those people who today set about translating Aeschylus, or even Homer, the Psalms and so on, truly, I do not envy them! That faith can exist in our time, such philistine fibbing as Mr. Wilamowitz' translations of the Greek dramas, which really betray Aeschylus or whatever, that is just a sad sign of the times. You can't observe as soon as something big happens; often you don't even have the patience to observe small things. It would be good to try to observe small things as an exercise. I will give you an example of a very childlike, small thing.

Recently I read an article in one of these international magazines published here in Switzerland, in which the socialist writer Kautsky complained about a Russian socialist who quoted Kautsky in the most terrible way, so that the opposite of what is in Kautsky's books is given as Kautsky's opinion. That there was any intentional distortion of Kautsky's text was, given the nature of the matter and the personalities involved, quite out of the question. I then read the article by the person in question myself, but I also found it curious that what was quoted was presented as Kautsky's opinion. And while I was still reading, I formed an opinion about it, because I was interested in how something like this could be possible at all; but I very soon realized, by reading the essay, what must have happened, and this was also confirmed to me afterwards because the person concerned apologized; but I only saw that later. The person in question had not read Kautsky's book in German, but had read it in Russian translation, and, having written his essay in German, had retranslated it. So that was what had happened: translation from German into Russian and retranslation. In the process, the opposite of what was in the German book came out and was quoted!

All that is needed to turn things upside down is to translate a text from one language into another, honestly and accurately! It is not even necessary to talk about incorrect facts, but basically only about the principles that are commonly applied in translation today. The observation I have made is a small, childish one. But anyone who has the patience to observe such things in life should no longer find it incomprehensible when he is told that it is impossible to understand Homer with what is available to us today; it is only an imagined understanding.

Now, that is the external side of the matter. But there is also an essential internal side to the matter. The state of mind in Homer's time was so essentially different from the state of mind of today's man that today's man is also far removed from the possibility of understanding Homer. For today's state of mind is such that it is essentially tinged with intellectuality. That was not the Homeric state of mind. Man today cannot discard this tinge if he remains in the ordinary everyday state of mind. This state of mind forces man more strongly than he believes, and more strongly than he is aware of, to live in abstract terms, in which Homer did not live at all. But it is difficult for people to reconcile this with their subconscious or unconscious desires, so they say to themselves: Yes, with the understanding that is the normal understanding of the present, one must refrain from understanding something that comes from the time of Homer or even from the time of Aeschylus. This renunciation of man is something that does not correspond at all to the subconscious desires. This is where spiritual science must intervene, which does not remain with the ordinary state of mind, but evokes a comprehensive state of mind so that one can place oneself in states of mind that are different from the normal states of mind of the present. With the means of spiritual science, one can in turn penetrate into that which cannot be reached with the present-day mind, with the present-day state of mind. It would be of immense importance for the modern man to say to himself: Only over a certain stretch of the development of humanity does the understanding that we can have extend. Even with a view to the future, it is not entirely unimportant to keep such things in mind.

No matter how clearly you express yourself today, no matter how clearly you write or speak, record what is spoken, it will not be too long before, in the near future, times will move faster, if I may use the paradoxical expression, than they did in the past, it will be completely impossible to understand what we speak or write today in the same way as we understand it. It is only possible for our understanding to comprehend what we speak and write over a certain period into the future. The historian goes back to documents and wants to rely only on external documents. But it does not depend on whether one understands something or not, whether documents are there or not, but whether the possibility of understanding extends that far. Well, for more distant times, this possibility of understanding does not extend that far. And if one does not have resignation, then Kant-Laplacean theories or the like come out. I have spoken about this often enough. What, after all, is a Kant-Laplacean theory other than the impotent attempt to use the intellect of the present to think about the origin of the world, despite the fact that our understanding, our normal state of mind, has distanced itself so far from this origin of the world that what we think about time with our present understanding of the world, which should coincide with the Kant-Laplacean theory, can no longer resemble it at all.

This knowledge, that it is necessary to resort to other types of knowledge when going beyond a certain period of time and distance, is what spiritual science must also produce. Man cannot recognize anything beyond a certain age if he does not resort to spiritual scientific research, if he does not try to understand existence with senses other than those to which the intellect is bound. Now, if we consider what I have just said, we can see how narrow the horizon of the modern man must be if he does not want to resort to other levels of research, to other levels of knowledge, for those things that ordinary intellectuality, which is actually the prevailing one today, does not suffice to recognize. We know that one can ascend to imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. These types of knowledge then lead to other paths; only they can supplement what can only be seen as an island of existence if one relies on the present state of the soul.

That which comprises the present state of mind is actually bound to the human ego; you can read about this in my “Theosophy”, “Secret Science in Outline” and so on. But the human being also carries other aspects of their being within them: we know of the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. But the soul's usual state today does not extend down into the astral body, not into the etheric body, not into the physical body. For what the anatomist recognizes from the outside is, after all, the outside. The inner recognition does not extend beyond the ego, let alone beyond the physical body. One must come to observe the human being from the inside with understanding, and the knowledge of life of which I spoke at the beginning of today's reflections is a beginning of this inner knowledge, and what one can comprehend in the second half of life is a beginning, albeit a weak beginning. When one takes hold of the human being inwardly, one descends from the mere intellect to the sphere of the will. Yesterday I mentioned that the subject of the will, the actual volition in us, preserves the cosmic memory. So one must descend into the human being. What the human being could develop if he had the will to do so, by developing normal wisdom in the second half of life, would be a beginning of this descent. It would not shed much light, but it would shed light on what the human being needs to live. But if he then descends with the developed higher knowledge, then by descending into his own being the memory of the cosmos opens up to him. Then, however, something different emerges than the Kant-Laplacean theory, for example, what we carry within us in our physical being. You know that, according to its nature, it is our oldest, going back to the fourth past incarnation on earth. If you go down there, you learn to recognize what this fourth past incarnation on earth was like in the Saturn era. But one can learn from the ordinary wisdom that opens up in the second half of life what one has to do to penetrate deeper and deeper into the nature of the human being, who is an image of the world, and by learning to recognize this image, to recognize the world.

It is usually subconscious or unconscious desires that dominate a person when he thinks up something with a light heart or in complete comfort, something that he should actually say is not accessible to his thinking, such as the Kant-Laplace theory or something similar. And so we touch again – we must, I would like to say, approach our tasks in circles – that which prevents people of the present from building the bridge between ideality and reality, which is of course of great concern to us now.

People of all ages have tried to find a way beyond these things. But it is difficult to fully understand these things, precisely because it is uncomfortable to approach the real facts. In our time it has become customary, I might say, everywhere to recognize half of the matter, the other half not. Here is a classic example: Karl Marx once said that philosophers had so far only endeavored to interpret the world with their concepts; but what was important was to change the world, one really had to find thoughts that would change the world. The first part is absolutely correct. Philosophers have endeavored, insofar as they are philosophers, to interpret the world, and if they were a little clever, they did not believe that they could do anything other than interpret the world. But the very archetype of all philosophical philistinism, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, who taught in Leipzig from 1809 to 1834 and wrote a great many books on everything from fundamental philosophy to the highest stages of philosophy, demanded that Hegel's philosophers should not only deduce concepts but also the development of the pen – something that infuriated Hegel. But even in this field, resignation is necessary, resignation that says: Of course, we human beings are called upon to change the world as whole human beings, insofar as the world consists of human life. But thinking, the thinking of the present, is simply not capable of bringing about this change. One must have the resignation to say to oneself: This thinking, which the human being of the present has, which is so gloriously sufficient, which is really quite suitable for understanding nature, this thinking is completely unsuitable for achieving something when it comes to the will to act. But that is an uncomfortable truth. Because once you see through this, you no longer say: Philosophers have so far endeavored to interpret the world, but what matters is changing the world – and secretly believe that they can contribute to this through some dialectic; instead, you say to yourself: Philosophers have only been sufficient for interpreting things because philosophers can cite them. With nature, it is enough for us to merely interpret it, because nature is, one might say, thank God, there without us, and we can content ourselves with interpreting it. Social and political life is not there without us, and we cannot be content with merely grasping it with such concepts, which are only suitable for interpreting life and not for shaping it. It is necessary to rise from mere theorizing, which mostly consists of hallucinations, as I explained yesterday, and which is so truly the hobbyhorse of the present, to the life of reality. And the life of reality in the facts demands that one does not take it so straightforwardly, this life, as one is accustomed to taking it. Certainly, ideas that one person conveys to another lead to something; but they do not always lead to the same thing. There are no absolute truths, just as there are no absolute facts, and there are no absolute facts just as there are no absolute truths. Everything is relative. And the effect of something I say is determined not only by whether or not I believe it to be true, but also by the nature of the people in a particular age, and how they react to it, if I may use the expression. I will cite a significant case that is very important to consider.

If you go back to around the 14th century of the Christian era, you could present mysticism to people before that century. In those days, mystical concepts still had the power to educate and inspire people. The Oriental population of Asia, the Indian, Japanese, Chinese, has retained these qualities in many ways, because older qualities are preserved by certain members of humanity in later times. One can still study many things in the present that were also the case with European populations in earlier times; but the whole state of mind of humanity has changed. And anyone who passes on mysticism today, for example, must be aware that we are approaching the age when, by teaching mysticism, real mysticism – Meister Eckhart's, Tauler's, and the like, you teach them by the way they react to it, what Lucifer only coaxes out of man, what brings them to bickering and quarreling. And it may well be that there is no better way to prepare a sect for quarreling and fighting, for disunity, for mutual grumbling, than to give them mystically pious speeches. Now, when understood in a straightforward way, this seems almost impossible; but it is a factual truth. It is a factual truth because it depends not only on the content of what one says, but on the way in which the person reacts to things. And one must know the world. And above all, one must not base one's views on one's desires.

I can always remember the conversation I once had in a southern German town with two Catholic priests who were in my lecture, which I gave at the time on the Bible and wisdom. The two Catholic priests could not really object to anything. The lecture contained precisely the things about which they could not reasonably object. But priests, even if they cannot object, cannot of course accept something like that; so they have to object to something. So they said: Yes, in terms of content, we could indeed say roughly what you said. But what we say, we say in such a way that every person can understand it; you, after all, are only saying it for a certain number of people who have a certain education, and what is said for people must be understandable for everyone. - Then I said to them: Yes, you see, what you believe is understandable to all people, and what I believe about it, that is not the point. What matters is not our theoretical views about what people understand, but the study of reality. And there you can easily do a reality test yourself. I ask you: If you now apply these methods and present this in your church today in the way you believe that all people will understand it – will all people go to your church, or aren't some already staying away today? That some stay away is much more important than you believing that you speak for all people. Because the reality is that some do stay away. That you believe you speak for all people is your belief. And for those who no longer go to church with you, I speak for them, because I believe that one has to submit to reality and that one can also speak to those who no longer go to church but who are still entitled to seek the path to the spiritual worlds. Here, in a trivial example, the difference is illuminated between how one thinks realistically, letting one's views be dictated by reality, and how most people believe they know what they just imagine, think up and wish for, and then swear by it. The reality researcher is even prepared at any time to discard anything he considers right, and when the facts teach him, to come to a different line of thought, because reality is not as straightforward as people wish it to be.

And so it may well be, and will increasingly be the case – this is the trend of the development of human nature – that while you want to teach the most pious mysticism, the most heartfelt mysticism of a sect, the people of that sect become more and more quarrelsome and quarrelsome. But it is just as unwise to teach people one-sided scientific views. To gain scientific knowledge, one needs a great deal of acumen, and you know that I am not at all inclined to be in any way inferior to anyone in fully recognizing scientific truths. But the fact also exists that if one were to teach the world only scientific truths or scientifically-oriented truths, the acumen that is applied to finding scientific truths would contribute significantly to condemning people to a lack of freedom. Just as one-sided mysticism would increasingly lead to quarrels and disputes, one-sided natural science in the sense of today's time would lead people to inner bondage, to inner bondage. So you see, it is fully considered when spiritual science strives neither to be one-sidedly mystical nor one-sidedly scientific, but to do justice to each individual without underestimating or overestimating it, but progressing from duality to trinity. Not the either-or, but the both-and, illumination of the one by the other, that is what spiritual science leads to by itself. For example, a person with a purely scientific mind who rants about mysticism is always going to be in the wrong, because what he says will generally be nonsense. But it is just as wrong, as a rule, for a purely mystical person who knows nothing of scientific knowledge to rant about science. Only a mystic should grumble about mysticism, if I may vary it, and only someone who knows about natural science should grumble about natural science now and then. Then his things will be as he says, because they will be weighed correctly. But it will always be bad if someone who does not understand natural science and perhaps believes himself to be a great mystic passes judgment on it, or if a scientist does not understand mysticism and passes judgment on mysticism. It has often been said in spiritual scientific circles that certain truths must appear paradoxical to people because they so strongly contradict the complacency of ordinary life.

Today I have presented you with a whole series of things that have, so to speak, struck your soul without being resolved. I have presented you with some facts of life that have to be admitted even if one would like things to be different. Many a person who today considers himself a great person, who is capable of much, has no idea of these truths of life. But this is precisely the basis of the catastrophes of our time, that our time so urgently needs to get to know this life and does not want to get to know this life.

Tomorrow we will talk about some of the things that should lead to the resolution of some contradictions that have rightly been brought to your souls today.

I have already indicated a few of the symptomatic forces that play a part in the development of contemporary history. I have only time to discuss a few of these impulses. To discuss them all—or even the most significant—would take us too far. I have been asked to give special attention to specific impulses of a symptomatic nature. This can be deferred until next week when I will willingly speak of those symptoms which have special reference to Switzerland and at the same time I will attempt to give a sketch of Swiss history.

Today, however, I propose to continue the studies we have already undertaken. I concluded my lecture yesterday with a picture, albeit a very inadequate picture, of the development in recent times of one of the most significant Symptoms of contemporary history—socialism. Now for many who are earnestly seeking to discover the real motive forces of evolution, this social, or rather socialist movement occupies the focus of attention; apart from socialism they have never really considered the Claims of anything else. Consequently people have failed in recent times to give adequate attention to the very important influence of something which tends to escape their notice. Even where they searched for new motives they paid no attention to those of a spiritual nature. If we ask how far people were aware of the impulses characteristic of modern evolution we can virtually discount from the outset those personalities who in the nineteenth century, and more especially in the twentieth century, were largely oblivious of contemporary evolution, who belonged to those circles which were indifferent to contemporary trends. The historians of the old upper classes were content to plough the old furrows, to record the genealogy of dynasties, the history of wars and perhaps other related material. It is true that studies in the history of civilization have been written, but these studies, from Buckle to Ratzel, take little account of the real driving forces of history. At the same time the proletariat was thirsting for knowledge and felt an ever-increasing desire for education. And this raised the three questions I mentioned yesterday. But the proletariat lacked the will to explore the more subtle interrelations of historical development. Consequently, up to the present, a historical symptom that has not been sufficiently emphasized is the historical significance of the natural scientific mode of thinking.

One can of course speak of the scientific mode of thinking in terms of its content or in relation to the transformation of modern thinking. But it is important to consider in what respect this scientific thinking has become a historical symptom like the others I have mentioned—the national impulse, the accumulation of insoluble political problems, etcetera. In fact, since the beginning of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, the scientific mode of thinking has steadily increased amongst wide sections of the population. It is a mistake to imagine that only those think scientifically who have some acquaintance with natural science. That is quite false; in fact the reverse is true. Natural scientists think scientifically because that is the tendency of the vast majority of people today. People think in this way in the affairs of daily life—the peasant in the fields, the factory worker at his bench, the financier when he undertakes financial transactions. Everywhere we meet with scientific thinking and that is why scientists themselves have gradually adopted this mode of thought. It is necessary to rectify a popular misconception on this subject. It is not the mode of thinking of scientists or even of monistic visionaries that must engage our attention, but the mode of thinking of the general public. For natural science cannot provide a sufficiently powerful counterpoise to the universalist impulse of the church of Rome. What provides this counterpoise is a universal thinking that is in conformity with the laws of nature. And we must study this impulse as symptom in relation to the future evolution of modern man.

Text-books of history, rather thoughtlessly, usually date the birth of modern times from the discovery of America and the invention of gunpowder and printing, etcetera. If we take the trouble to study the course of recent history we realize that these symptomatic events—the discovery of America, the invention of gunpowder, and the art of printing, etcetera—did in fact inspire seamen and adventurers to pioneer voyages of exploration, that they popularized and diffused traditional knowledge, but that fundamentally they did not change the substance of European civilization in the ensuing centuries. We realize that the old political impulses which were revived in the different countries nonetheless remained the same as before because they were unable to derive any notable benefit from these voyages of discovery. In the newly discovered countries they simply resorted to conquest as they had formerly done in other territories: they mined and transported gold and so enriched themselves. In the sphere of printing they were able increasingly to control the apparatus of censorship. But the political forces of the past were unable to derive anything in the nature of a decisive impulse from these discoveries which were said to mark the birth of modern times. It was through the fusion of the scientific mode of thinking—after it had achieved certain results—with these earlier inventions and discoveries in which science had played no part that the really significant impulse of modern times arose. The colonizing activities of the various countries in modern times would be unthinkable without the contributions of modern science. The modern urge for colonization was the consequence of the achievements of natural science in the technical field. It was only possible to conquer foreign territories, as colonization was destined to do with the aid of scientific inventions, with the application of scientific techniques. These colonizing activities therefore first arose in the eighteenth century when natural science began to be transformed into technics.

Applied science marks the beginning of the machine age, and with it a new era of colonization which gradually spreads over the whole world. With technics an extremely important impulse of modern evolution is born in the Consciousness Soul. Those who understand the determinative factors here are aware that the impulses behind worldwide colonial expansion, that these colonizing activities and aspirations are directly related to the epoch of the Consciousness Soul. This epoch, as you know, will end in the third millenium, to be followed by the epoch of the Spirit Self, and will as the result of colonization bring about a different configuration of mankind throughout the world. Now the epoch of the Consciousness Soul recognizes that there are so-called civilized and highly civilized men, and others who are extremely primitive—so primitive that Rousseau was captivated by their primitive condition and elaborated his theory of the ‘noble savage.’ In the course of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul this differentiation will cease—how it will cease we cannot now discuss in detail. But it is the function of the Consciousness Soul to end this differentiation which is a heritage from the past.

Armed with this knowledge we see the connection between wars such as the American Civil War and modern colonizing activities in their true light. When we bear in mind the importance of these colonizing activities for the epoch of the Consciousness Soul then we gain insight into the full significance of isolated symptoms in this field. And these colonizing activities are inconceivable without the support of scientific thinking.

We must really give heed to this scientific thinking, if, from the point of view of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, we wish to penetrate to the true reality of human evolution. It is a characteristic of this modern scientific thinking that it can only apprehend the ‘corpse’ of reality, the phantom. We must be quite clear about this, for it is important. The scientific method starts from observation and proceeds to experimentation, and this applies in all spheres. Now there is a vast difference between the observation of nature and the knowledge which is confirmed by experimental proof. Observation of nature—with different nuances—was common to all epochs. But when man observes nature he becomes one with nature and shares in the life of nature. But, strangely enough, this communion with nature blunts the consciousness to some extent. One cannot live the life of nature and at the same time know or cognize in the sense in which the modern Consciousness Soul understands this term. One cannot do both at the same time any more than one can be asleep and awake at the same time. If one wishes to live in communion with nature one must be prepared in a certain sense to surrender one's consciousness to nature. And that is why the observation of nature cannot fathom its secrets, because when man observes nature his consciousness is somewhat dimmed and the secrets of nature escape him. In order to apprehend the secrets of nature he must be alive to the super-sensible.

One cannot develop the Consciousness Soul in a semiconscious state, a state of diminished consciousness, and therefore modern natural science quite instinctively attempts to dispense with observation and to depend upon experimentation for its findings. Experiments have been undertaken even in the fields of biology and anthropology. Now in experimentation the first consideration is to select and assemble the material, to determine the order of procedure. In experimental embryology for example, the order of procedure is determined not by nature but by intellection or human intelligence; it is determined by an intellectual faculty which is detached from nature and is centred in man. ‘We murder to dissect’—our knowledge of nature is derived from experimental investigation. Only what is acquired experimentally can be exploited technically. Knowledge of nature only becomes ripe for technical exploitation when it has passed through the indirect process of experimentation. The knowledge of nature which hitherto had been introduced into social life had not yet reached the stage of technics. It would be monstrous to speak of technics unless it is concerned purely with the application of experimentation to the social order or to what serves the social order.

Thus modern man introduces into the social order the results of experimental knowledge in the form of technics; that is to say, he brings in the forces of death. Let us not forget that we bring forces of death into our colonizing activities; that when we construct machines for industry, or submit the worker to the discipline of the machine we are introducing forces of death. And death permeates our modern historical structure when we extend our monetary economy to larger or smaller territories and when we seek to build a social order on the pattern of modern science as we have instinctively done today. And whenever we introduce natural science into our community life we introduce at all times the forces of death that are self destructive.

This is one of the most important symptoms of our time. We can make honest and sincere pronouncements—I do not mean merely rhetorical pronouncements—about the great scientific achievements of modern times and the benefits they have brought to technics and to our social life. But these are only half truths, for fundamentally all these achievements introduce into contemporary life an unmistakably moribund element which is incapable of developing of itself. The greatest acquisitions of civilization since the fifteenth century are doomed to perish if left to themselves. And this is inescapable. The question then arises: if modern technics is simply a source of death, as it must inevitably be, why did it arise? Certainly not in order to provide mankind with the spectacle of machines and industry, but for a totally different reason. It arose precisely because of the seeds of death it bore within it; for if man is surrounded by a moribund, mechanical civilization it is only by reacting against it that he can develop the Consciousness Soul. So long as man lived in communion with nature, i.e. before the advent of the machine age, he was open to suggestion because he was not fully conscious. He was unable to be fully self-sufficient because he had not yet experienced the forces of death. Ego-consciousness and the forces of death are closely related. I have already tried to show this in a variety of ways: In ideation and cognition, for example, man is no longer in contact with the life-giving, vitalizing forces within him; he is given over to the forces of organic degeneration. I have tried to show that we owe the possibility of conscious thought to the process of organic degeneration, to the processes of destruction and death. If we could not develop in ourselves ‘cerebral hunger’, that is to say, processes of catabolism, of degeneration and disintegration, we could not behave as intelligent beings, we should be vacillating, indecisive creatures living in a semiconscious, dream-like state. We owe our intellection to the degenerative processes of the brain. And the epoch of the Consciousness Soul must provide man with the opportunity to experience disintegration in his environment. We do not owe the development of modern, conscious thinking to a superabundant vitality. This conscious thinking, this very core of man's being grew and developed because it was imbued with the forces of death inherent in modern technology, in modern industry and finance. And that is what the life of the Consciousness Soul demanded.

And this phenomenon is seen in other spheres. Let us recur to the impulses to which I drew attention earlier. Let us consider the case of England where we saw how a specific form of parliamentary government develops as a certain tendency through the centuries, how the self-dependent personality seeks to realize itself. The personality wishes to emancipate itself and to become self-sufficient. It wishes to play a part in the life of the community and at the same time to affirm its independence. The parliamentary system of government is only one means of affirming the personality. But when the individual who participates in parliamentary government asserts himself, the moment he sacrifices his will to the vote he surrenders his personality. And, rightly understood, the rise of parliamentary government in England in the centuries following upon the civil wars of the fifteenth century provides ample evidence of this. In the early years of the democratic system society was based upon a class structure, the various classes or ‘estates’ not only wishing to affirm their class status, but to express their views through the ballot-box. They were free to speak; but people are not satisfied with speeches and mutual agreement, they want to vote. When one votes, when speeches are followed by voting, one kills what lives in the soul even whilst one speaks. Thus every form of parliamentary government ends in levelling down, in egalitarianism. It is born of the affirmation of the personality and ends with the suppression of the personality. This situation is inescapable; affirmation of the personality leads to suppression of the personality. It is a cyclic process like life itself which begins with birth and ends in death. In the life of man birth and death are two distinct moments in time; in the life of history, the one is directly related to the other, birth and death are commixed and commingled. We must never lose sight of this.

I do not wish you to take these remarks as a criticism of parliamentary government. That would be tantamount to insinuating that I said: since man is born only to die he ought never to have been born—which is absurd. One should not impute to the world such foolishness—that it permits man to be born only to die. Please do not accuse me of saying that parliamentary government is absurd because the personality which gives birth to this system proceeds to destroy the system which it has itself created. I simply wish to relate it directly to life, to that which is common to all life—birth and death, thus showing that it is something that is closely associated with reality. At the same time I want to show you the characteristic feature of all external phenomena of a like nature in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, for they are all subject to birth and death.

Now in the inner circles of the occult lodges of the English speaking world it has often been said: let us not reveal to the world the mystery of birth and death, for in so doing we shall betray to the uninitiated the nature of the modern epoch! We shall transmit to them a knowledge that we wish to reserve for ourselves. Therefore it was established as the first rule of the masonic lodges never to speak openly of the mystery of birth and death, to conceal the fact that this mystery is omnipresent, above all in historical phenomena. For to speak of this is to open the eyes of the public to the tragedy of modern life which will gradually be compelled—a compulsion to which it will not easily submit—to divert man's attention from the results of work to the work itself. One must find joy in work, saying to oneself: the external rewards of work in the present epoch serve the purposes of death and not of creative life. If one is unwilling to further the forces of death, one cannot work with modern techniques, for today man is the servant of the machine. He who rejects the machine simply wishes to return to the past.

Study the history of France and the attempts made to thrust inwards the emancipation of the personality, ending in that disastrous suppression of the personality which we observe in the final phase of the French Revolution and in the rise of Napoleonism. Or take the case of Italy. From what hidden springs did modern Italy derive that dynamic energy which inflamed the nationalism to the point of sacro egoismo? One must probe beneath the surface in order to discover the factors underlying world events. Recall for a moment that important moment before the birth of the Consciousness Soul. This dynamic energy peculiar to modern Italy is derived in all its aspects from that which the Papacy had implanted in the Italian soul. The significance of the Papacy for Italy lies in the fact that it has gradually imbued the Italian soul with its own spirit. And, as so often happens to the magician's apprentice, the result was not what was intended—a violent reaction against the Papacy itself in modern Italy. Here we see how that for which one strives provokes its own destruction. Not the thoughts, but the forces of sensibility and enthusiasm, even those which inspired Garibaldi, are relics of the one-time Catholic fervour—but when these forces changed direction they turned against Catholicism.

People will understand the present epoch only if they grasp the right relationship between these things. Europe witnessed those various symptomatic events which I have described to you. And in the East, as if in the Background, we see the configuration of Russia, welded out of the remnants of the Byzantine ecclesiastical framework, out of the Nordic-Slavonic racial impulse and out of Asianism which is diffused in a wide variety of forms over Eastern Europe. But this triad is uncreative; it does not emanate from the Russian soul itself, nor is it characteristic of that which lives in the Russian soul. What is it that offers the greatest imaginable contrast to the emancipation of the personality?—The Byzantine element. A great personality of modern times who is much underrated is Pobjedonoszeff. He was an eminent figure who was steeped in the Byzantine tradition. He could only desire the reverse of what the epoch of the Consciousness Soul seeks to achieve and of what it develops naturally in man. Even if the Byzantine element had made deeper inroads into Russian orthodoxy, even if this element which stifles everything personal and individual had gained an even stronger hold ... the sole consequence nonetheless would have been a powerful age for the emancipation of the personality. If, in the study of modern Russian history, you do not read of those events which it has always been forbidden to record, then you will not have a true picture of Russian history, you will be unaware of the really living element. If however you read the official version, the only version permitted hitherto by the authorities, you will find everything which pervades Russian life as an instrument of death. It appears here in its most characteristic form because Russian life is richest in future promise. And because Russian life bears within it the seeds of the development of the Spirit Self, all the external achievements of the era of the Consciousness Soul hitherto bring only death and destruction. And this had to be, since what seeks to develop as Spirit Self needs the substratum of death.

We must recognize that this is a necessity for the evolution of the Consciousness Soul, otherwise we shall never grasp the real needs of our time. We shall be unable to form a clear picture of the destructive forces which have overtaken mankind if we are unaware that the events of these last four years are simply an epitome of the forces of death that have pervaded the life of mankind since the birth of the epoch of the Consciousness Soul.

Characteristically the dead hand of scientific thinking has exercised a strange influence upon one of the most prophetic personalities of recent time. In contemporary history the following incident is symptomatic and will always remain memorable. In the year 1830 in Weimar, Soret¹ visited Goethe who received him with some excitement—I mean he betrayed excitement in his demeanour—but not with deep emotion. Goethe said to Soret: ‘At last the controversy has come to a head, everything is in flames’. He made a few additional remarks which led Soret to believe that Goethe was referring to the revolution which had broken out in Paris in 1830 and he answered him accordingly. But Goethe replied: ‘I am not referring to the revolution; that is not particularly important. What is important is the controversy between Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire in the Academy of Sciences of Paris’—Cuvier was a representative of the old school which simply compares and classifies organisms—a way of looking at nature that is concerned above all with technique—whilst Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire has a living conception of the whole course of evolution. Goethe saw Saint-Hilaire as the leader of a new school of scientific thinking, different from that of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. Cuvier belongs to the old school of thought; Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is the representative of a scientific outlook which sees nature as a living organism. Therefore Goethe saw the dawn of a new epoch when Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire prepared the ground for a new scientific thinking which, when fully developed, must lead to a super-sensible interpretation of nature and ultimately to super-sensible, clairvoyant knowledge. For Goethe this was the revolution of 1830, not the political events in Paris. Thus Goethe showed himself to be one of the most prescient spirits of his time. He showed that he sensed and felt what was the cardinal issue of our time.

Today we must have the courage to look facts squarely in the face, a courage of which earlier epochs had no need. We must have the courage to follow closely the course of events, for it is important that the Consciousness Soul can fulfil its development. In earlier epochs the development of the Consciousness Soul was not important. Because the Consciousness Soul is of paramount importance in the present epoch, everything that man creates in the social sphere must be consciously planned. Consequently his social life can no longer be determined by the old instinctive life; nor can he introduce solely the achievements of natural science into social life for these are forces of death and are unable to quicken life; they are simply dead-sea fruit and sow destruction such as we have seen in the last four years. In the present epoch the following is important.

Sleep, of course, is a necessity for man. In waking life he is in control of his normal free will ... he can make use of this free will for the various things he encounters through Lucifer and Ahriman, in order to develop guide-lines for the future. When he falls asleep this so called free will ceases to function; he continues to think without knowing it, but his thinking is no less efficacious. Thinking does not cease on falling asleep, it continues until the moment of waking. One simply forgets this in the moment of waking up. We are therefore unaware of the power of those thoughts that pour into the human soul from the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up. But let us remember that for the epoch of the Consciousness Soul the gods have abandoned the human soul during sleep. In earlier epochs the gods instilled into the human soul between sleeping and waking what they chose to impart. If they had continued to act in this way man would not have become a free being. Consequently he is now open to all kinds of other influences between sleeping and waking. At a pinch we can live our waking life with natural science and its achievements, but they are of no avail in sleep and death. We can only think scientifically during our waking hours. The moment we fall asleep, scientific thinking is meaningless—as meaningless as speaking French in a country where no one understands a word of French. In sleep only that language has significance which one acquires through super-sensible knowledge, the language which has its source in the super-sensible. Supersensible knowledge must take the place of what the gods in former times had implanted in the instinctive life. The purpose of the present epoch of the Consciousness Soul is this: man must open himself to super-sensible impulses and penetrate to a knowledge of reality. To believe that everything that our present age has produced and still produces without the support of super-sensible impulses is something living and creative and not impregnated with the forces of death is to harbour an illusion, just as it is an illusion to believe that a woman can bear a child without fecundation. Without impregnation a woman today remains sterile and dies without issue. Modern civilization in the form it has developed since the beginning of the fifteenth century and especially in respect of its outstanding achievements, is destined to remain sterile unless fertilized henceforth by impulses from the super-sensible world. Everything that is not fertilized by spiritual impulses is doomed to perish. In this epoch of the Consciousness Soul, though you may introduce democracy, parliamentary government, modern finance economy, modern industrialism, though you may introduce the principle of nationality the world over, though you may advocate all those principles on which men Base what they call the new order—a subject on which they descant like drunken men who have no idea what they are talking about—all these things will serve only the forces of death unless they are fructified by spiritual impulses. All that we must inevitably create today, forces that bring death in all domains, will only be of value if we learn how to transform these forces by our insights into the super-sensible.

Let us realize the seriousness of this situation and let us remember—as we have learnt from our study of the symptoms of recent history—that what man considers to be his greatest achievements, natural science, sociology, modern industrial techniques and modern finance economy, all date from the fifteenth century. These are destructive agents unless fructified by spiritual impulses. Only then can they advance the evolution of mankind. Then they have positive value; in themselves they are detrimental. Of all that mankind today extols, not without a certain pride and presumption, as his greatest achievements, nothing is good in itself; it is only of value when permeated with spirit.

This is not an arbitrary expression of opinion, but a lesson we learn from a study of the symptoms of modern history. The time has now come when we must develop individual consciousness. And we must also be aware of what we may demand of this consciousness. The moment we begin to dogmatize, even unwittingly, we impede the development of the consciousness. I must therefore remind you once again of the following incident. I happened to be giving a course of lectures in Hamburg on The Bible and Wisdom.^T1 Amongst the audience were two Catholic priests. Since I had said nothing of a polemical nature which could offend a Catholic priest and since they were not the type of Jesuit who is a watchdog of the Church and whose function is to stick his fingers in every pie, but ordinary parish priests, they approached me after the lecture and said: we too preach purgatory; you also speak of a time of expiation after death. We preach paradise; you speak of the conscious experience of the Spirit; fundamentally there are no objections to the content of your teaching. But they would certainly have found ample grounds for objection if they had gone more deeply into the matter—a single lecture of course did not suffice for this. And they continued: You see the difference between us is this: You address yourself to a certain section of the population which is already familiar with the premises of anthroposophy, people who are educated and are conversant with certain concepts and ideas. We, on the other hand speak to all men, we speak a language which everyone can understand. And that is the right approach—to speak for all men. Whereupon I replied: Reverend fathers (I always believe in respecting titles) what you are saying is beside the point. I do not doubt that you believe you speak for all men, that you can choose your words in such a way as to give the impression that you are speaking for all men. But that is a subjective judgement, is it not? that is what one usually says in self-justification. What is important is not whether we believe we speak for all men, but the facts, the objective reality. And now I should like to ask you, in an abstract, theoretical way: what evidence is there that I do not speak for all men? You claim to speak for all men and no doubt there are arguments that would support your claim. But I ask you for the facts. Do all those for whom you think you are able to speak still attend your church today? That is the real question. Of course my two interlocutors could not claim that everyone attended their church regularly. You see, I continued, that I am concerned with the facts. I speak for those who are outside the church, who also have the right to be led to the Christ. I realize that amongst them there are those who want to hear of the Christ impulse one way or another. That is a reality. And what matters is the reality, not personal opinions.

It is most desirable to base one's opinions on facts and not on subjective impressions; for, in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul nothing is more dangerous than to surrender to, or show a predilection for personal opinions or prejudices. In order to develop the Consciousness Soul we must not allow ourselves to become dogmatists unwittingly; the driving forces of our thoughts and actions must be determined by facts. That is important. Beneath the surface of historical evolution there is a fundamental conflict between the acceptance of what we consider to be right and the compulsion of facts. And this is of particular importance when studying history, for we shall never have a true picture of history unless we see history as a truly great teacher. We must not force the facts to fit history, but allow history to speak for itself. In this respect the whole world has forgotten much in the last four years. Facts are scarcely allowed to speak for themselves; we only hear what we deem to be facts. And this situation will persist for a long time. And it will be equally long before we develop the capacity to apprehend reality objectively. In the epoch of the Consciousness Soul what matters in all spheres of life is an objective apprehension of reality; we must strive to acquire an impartial attitude to reality.

What our epoch demands—if we wish gradually to look beyond the Symptoms of history (I will speak more of this in my next lectures)—is that we turn our attention to those spiritual forces which can restore man's creativity. For, as we have seen, the most characteristic feature of all phenomena today is a decline in creativity. Man must open himself to the influences of the super-sensible world so that what his Spirit Self prepares may enter into his ego; otherwise the paths to the Spirit Self would be closed to him. Man therefore must familiarize himself with that which is pure spirit, with that which can penetrate to the centre of his psychic life. The moment he is prepared to turn his attention to this centre of his soul life through a sensible study of the symptoms in history, he will also be prepared to examine more objectively the events at the periphery.

In man there exists a polarity—the psychic centre and the periphery. As he penetrates ever more deeply into his psychic and spiritual life he reaches this centre. In this centre he must open himself to those historical impulses which I have already described to you. Here he will feel an ever increasing urge for the spirit if he wishes to become acquainted with historical reality. In return however, he will also feel a desire to strive towards the opposite pole at the periphery. He will develop an understanding for what is pressing towards the periphery—his somatic nature. If in order to understand history we must look inward, as I have indicated, to the underlying symptoms, then in order to understand medicine, for example, hygiene and medical health services we must look outwards, to cosmic rhythms for the source of pathological symptoms.

Just as modern history fails to penetrate to spiritual realities, so modern medicine, modern hygiene and medical health services fail to penetrate to the symptoms which are of cosmic provenance. I have often emphasized the fact that the individual cannot help his neighbour, however deep his insight into current problems, because today they are in the hands of those who are looking for the wrong solution. They must become the responsibility of those who are moving in the right direction. Clearly, just as the external facts are true that the outward aspect of James I was such and such, as I pointed out earlier, so, from the external point of view it is also true that a certain kind of bacillus is connected with the present influenza epidemic. But if it is true, for example, that rats are carriers of the bubonic plague, one cannot say that rats are responsible for the plague. People have always imagined that the bubonic plague was spread by rats. But bacilli, as such, are of course in no way connected with disease. In phenomena of this kind we must realize that just as behind the symptoms of history we are dealing with psychic and spiritual experiences, so too behind somatic symptoms we are dealing with experiences of a cosmological order. In other cases the situation of course will be different! What is especially important here is the rhythmic course of cosmic events, and it is this that we must study. We must ask ourselves: In what constellation were we living when, in the nineties, the present influenza epidemic appeared in its benign form? In what cosmic constellation are we living at the present time? By virtue of what cosmic rhythm does the influenza epidemic of the nineties appear in a more acute form today? Just as we must look for a rhythm behind a series of historical symptoms, so we must look for a rhythm behind the appearance of certain epidemics.

In the solfatara regions of Italy one need only hold a naked flame over the fango hole and immediately gases and steam escape from the dormant volcano. This Shows that if one performs a certain action above the surface of the earth nature reacts by producing these effects. Do you regard it as impossible that something takes place in the sun—since its rays are directed daily towards the earth—which has significance for the earth emanations and is related to the life of man, and that this reaction varies according to the different geographical localities? Do you think that we shall have any understanding of these matters unless we are prepared to accept a true cosmology founded upon a knowledge of the soul and spirit? The statement that man's inclination to resort to war is connected with the periodic appearance of sun spots is, of course, regarded as absurd. But there comes a point when statements of this kind cease to be absurd, when certain pathological manifestations in the emotional life are seen to be connected with cosmological phenomena such as the periodic appearance of sun spots. And when tiny creatures, these petty tyrants—bacilli or rats—really transmit from one human being to another something that is related to the cosmos, then this transmission is only a secondary phenomenon. This can be easily demonstrated and consequently finds wide public support—but it is not the main issue. And we shall not come to terms with the main issue unless we have the will to study the peripheral symptoms as well.

I do not believe that men will acquire a more reasonable and catholic view of history unless they study historical symptomatology in the light of super-sensible knowledge which is so necessary for mankind today. Men will only achieve results in the sphere of health, hygiene and medicine if they study not historical, but cosmological symptoms. For the diseases we suffer on earth are visitations from heaven. In order to understand this we must abandon the preconceived ideas which are prevalent today. We have an easy explanation: a God is omnipresent ... but whilst recognizing the presence of God in history mankind today is unable to explain the manifold retardative or harmful phenomena in history. And when we are faced with a situation like the last four years (1914–1918), then this business of the single God in history becomes extremely dubious, for this God of history has the curious habit of multiplying, and each nation defends its national God and provokes other nations by claiming the superiority of its own God. And when we are expected to look to cosmology and at the same time remain comfortably attached to this single God, then this same God inflicts disease upon us. But when we can rise to the idea of the trinity, God, Lucifer and Ahriman, when we are aware of this trinity in the super-sensible world behind the historical symptoms, when we know that this trinity is present in the cosmic universe, then there is no need to appeal to the ‘good God’. We then know that heaven visits disease upon us by virtue of its association with the earth, just as I can evoke sulphur fumes by holding a naked flame over a solfatara. We can only advance the cause of progress in the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, when men recognize the validity of spiritual realities. Therefore everything depends upon this one aim: the search, the quest for truth.

• 1. Frédéric Jean Soret (1795–1865). Scientist and author. A frequent visitor in Goethe's house. Notes from his journal were used by Eckermann for his ‘Conversations with Goethe’.
• T1. 5th December, 1908. See Bibl. Nr. 68.

It is often difficult for a person to find his bearings within the course of world events, especially when they are considered from a higher point of view. People are so very loath to view the truth without prejudice, which often resolves certain conflicts of life only after long periods of time. They would like only too well to be guided by the reins of the cosmic powers, even though they do not admit this to themselves. It becomes especially difficult for a person to find his bearings in an unprejudiced way when he is compelled in any single incarnation to live in such a catastrophic time as the present. He likes then to ask why the gods permit such things. He does not like to ask about the necessities of life. He always has in the background a longing to have everything as comfortable as possible.

In such a time as ours, man must behold all sorts of things that are in course of preparation from chaos. Chaos is necessary for the total course of events, and he must often take up his position in the midst of the chaotic, as well as in what has been harmonized. Especially is our fifth post-Atlantean epoch such a time as causes man to pass through much that is chaotic. But this is connected with the entire characteristic, the whole nature, of this epoch. We are living at a time in which man must pass through those impelling forces in the course of evolution that set him upon his own feet and permeate him with individual consciousness. We are living in the epoch of the consciousness soul.

Now, after all that we have considered, in connection with which we have brought together a great variety of things that may be suited to make our age understandable to us, we must ask ourselves what is the most profound characteristic of the evolution of the consciousness soul in our epoch. The profoundest characteristic of this epoch is that man must become acquainted in the most profound and the most intense way with all those forces that oppose the harmonizing of humanity as a whole. For this reason a conscious knowledge of those ahrimanic and luciferic powers working against man must gradually spread. If he should not pass through these evolutionary impulses in which the luciferic and ahrimanic forces are participating, he would not arrive at the complete use of his consciousness, and thus at the development of his consciousness soul.

This integration of the consciousness soul into human nature has to be recognized as a strongly antisocial impulse. Thus we have in our epoch the peculiar fact that the manifestation of social ideals appears as a reaction against what is striving to emerge out of the innermost nature of man, a reaction against the evolution of individual consciousness. What I mean to say is that the reason we have such an outcry about the need of socializing is that the innermost nature of man, precisely in our age, is most violently opposed to this socializing. For this reason it is necessary that we should obtain a view of everything in the cosmos, in the universe, that sustains a certain relationship to man, in order that we may become aware of the relationship existing between the antisocial impulses streaming today out of the depths of human souls and the clamor for social harmonizing, working like a reaction to what streams forth from the inner nature of the human soul. It is simply necessary that we should come to see clearly that man represents in his life a state of balance between conflicting powers. Every conception characterized by the idea of mere duality—a good and an evil principle—will always fail to illuminate life. Life can be illuminated only when we represent it from the point of view of a trinity, in which one element represents a state of balance and the two others represent the opposite poles, between which the state of balance tends to move continually like a pendulum. This is the reason for the Trinity we undertake to represent in our Group¹ ; the Representative of Man balancing Ahriman and Lucifer, which is to constitute the middle point of this building.

This consciousness of a state of balance for which one strives, but that is always in danger of swinging toward the one or the other side, must become the essential element in the world conception of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. As man passes through the stage of the consciousness soul, he develops toward the spirit self. This epoch of the evolution of the consciousness soul will continue for a long time. But within reality things do not proceed in such a way that one always follows the other in a beautiful scheme. On the contrary, one is telescoped in a way into the other. While we are developing in ever stronger measure the consciousness soul, there is always waiting in the background the spirit self that will then develop during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch just as strongly as the consciousness soul during this fifth epoch. Just as strongly as the consciousness soul works antisocially in its development, will the spirit self work socially. Thus we may say that, during this epoch, man develops from the innermost impelling forces of his soul what is antisocial, but behind this something spiritually social exerts its influence. This spiritually social element that is exerting its influence in the background will appear in its essential nature when the light of the spirit self shall dawn in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. It is not surprising therefore, that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch what can enter livingly and in a well-ordered way into humanity only during the sixth epoch appears in all sorts of abstruse, extreme forms.

Man is exposed during the fifth post-Atlantean epoch to the preliminary disturbing movements of what is to come during the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. Everything will depend upon the acquisition of an understanding of what we must pass through during this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The antisocial instincts will play a tremendous role, and they can be restrained and integrated into a true social life only in the way that I recently explained. To assist him, man shall employ the social science that is to be derived from a general spiritual science.

Behind all the many struggles, therefore, of the present time, and also of the immediate future, the social question will remain in the background because its time has not yet come. But we must repeat from all possible points of view the fact that this social formation that is demanded cannot attain to real life unless it enters into a union with two other things. In the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, this union will appear more or less spontaneously. During this fifth epoch, social life must be regulated through the fostering of spiritual science. Every effort to regulate social life outside the sphere of spiritual science will lead only to chaos and radicalism, bringing about unhappiness for humanity. As regards a social shaping of life, this fifth post-Atlantean epoch is dependent in preeminent degree upon the science of the spirit. Just consider what I referred to yesterday and also recently in a public lecture in Basel. Just consider that man has mastered a nature that is distributed over the whole animal kingdom. He is the conqueror of the animal nature; he bears the animal nature within him.

Naive Darwinism maintains that human morality is only the development of the social impulse among animals. The social impulses are inborn in the animal, and they become, just to the extent that they are social impulses in the animal, antisocial impulses in man. He can awaken again to a social life only when he grows above what has developed as an antisocial impulse in him out of the animal nature. This is the truth. Thus, if we wish to represent the human being schematically from this point of view, we may say that man overcomes and develops beyond animality. What is social in the animal becomes antisocial in man. But he grows into spirituality and within the spiritual he may again achieve the social for himself. At a higher stage than the one that man has reached in the epoch of the consciousness soul, where he has grown out of animality, he will gain the social element. This shines amid the chaos of this middle stage where he now is.

This must be supplemented by two other facts. When the socializing process becomes manifest as an elemental impulse as a demand within humanity, this socializing alone must always bring a curse. The socializing process can become a blessing only if it is linked with two other things that must develop during the entire course of our postAtlantean age, up to the seventh post-Atlantean epoch. This may occur only when it is linked with what may be called the free life of thought and an insight into the spiritual nature of the world lying behind the sensible nature. Socializing without a science of the spirit and without freedom of thought is an impossibility. This is simply an objective truth. But man must awaken to freedom of thought; he must make himself ripe for freedom of thought precisely during our epoch of the consciousness soul.

Why must he awake to freedom of thought?

During the course of human evolution, man has come in a certain respect to a decisive point in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Up to this fifth epoch he possessed the possibility of having the prenatal time continue its influence into the postnatal life. Let us grasp this quite clearly. Up to our epoch man has borne forces within him that are not acquired by him during the course of life but were possessed by him when, as the expression goes, he first beheld the light of the world, when he was born. These were imprinted upon him during the embryonic time. These forces that were impressed upon man during the embryonic time and that then continue to work throughout life, were possessed by man up to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Only now do we face a great crisis in the evolution of humanity through the fact that these forces can no longer be determinative; they can no longer work in such an elemental manner as hitherto. In other words, during this fifth postAtlantean epoch man will be in much greater measure exposed to the impressions of life, because forces opposing the impressions of life, which were acquired in the embryonic period before birth, are losing their sustaining power. This fact is something of enormous importance.

Only in one respect was life even prior to this time such that man could acquire something between birth and death, something that was not imprinted upon him during the embryonic time. But this was possible only because of the following facts. We explained yesterday the peculiar phenomena of sleep in relation to social life. When man is asleep, his ego and astral body are outside the physical and the etheric body. There is a different relationship between the ego and the astral body, on the one hand, and the physical and etheric bodies on the other hand during sleep from that existing in the waking state. While man is asleep, he stands in a different relationship to his physical and etheric bodies. Now, there is a certain resemblance between our sleep and our embryonic period—a resemblance, not an identity. In a certain sense, our life during the period from sleeping to waking is similar to the life that we live from conception—or actually three weeks thereafter—until birth—again similar, not identical. While we rest as an infant in the body of our mother, our life is similar to what we experience later during sleep, except that during sleep we breathe the outer air. For this reason I have to say only “similar” but not “identical.” We do not breathe the outer air when we rest in the body of the mother. We are stimulated to breathe the outer air when we are born.

Thus, in this way life during sleep is different from the embryonic life. Now hold firmly to the fact that, while the human being is sleeping, his life is in many respects similar to that of the embryonic state except that something is at work that can occur only between birth and death and not in the embryonic life. Breathing works here. The fact that man breathes the outer air causes his organism to be influenced in a certain way. But everything that influences our organism affects the totality of our life-expressions, even our psychic expression. Because we breathe, we understand the world otherwise than if we did not breathe.

Now, there was a cultural element in the evolution of humanity. We touch upon a significant mystery of human evolution when we undertake to explain this. This was the Old Testament cultural element, which was permeated in an especially profound way for its initiates by the fact that man is different, by reason of the breathing between birth and death, from the embryonic life, which is otherwise like the life of sleep. It was upon this inner knowledge of the nature of breathing that the relationship between the old Jewish initiates, the Hebrew initiates of the Old Testament, and their Jehovah God was based. The Jehovah God manifested himself, as we need only learn from the Bible, to his people. Which was the people of Jehovah? It was the people who had a peculiar relationship to this truth of breathing that I have just explained. This is the reason why precisely this people received the revelation that man became man when the breath of life was given to him.

We acquire a special understanding when this is developed on the basis of the nature of human breathing. We acquire an understanding of the life of abstract thinking, which was called in the Old Testament the life of law, an understanding of the reception of abstract thoughts. Strange as this may seem at present to materialistic thought, it is nevertheless true that the human power of creating abstractions is determined essentially by the breathing process. The fact that man can abstract, that he can conceive abstract thoughts, just as laws are abstract thoughts, is connected with his breathing process and even physiologically with his breathing process. The instrument of abstract thinking is, of course, the brain. This brain is involved in a continual rhythm synchronized with the breathing rhythm. I have already spoken here repeatedly in regard to this relationship of the brain rhythm with the breathing rhythm. I have explained to you how the brain is floating in the cerebral fluid, and how this fluid, when the air is breathed out, flows down through the spinal column and empties below into the abdominal cavity; how the fluid is pressed upward again when the air is breathed in so that a continual vibration occurs: with exhalation, a sinking of the cerebral fluid; with inhalation, an ascent of the cerebral fluid and the immersion of the brain in the cerebral fluid. The capacity of the human being to form abstractions is connected even physiologically with this rhythm of the breathing process.

A people who based things in special measure upon the breathing process was likewise the people of the abstraction process. For this reason the initiates could impart a special revelation to their people, as they perceived things in their Jehovah manner, because this revelation was completely adapted to the process of abstract thinking. This is the secret of the Old Testament revelation. Man received a wisdom that was adapted to the abstracting capacity, the capacity of abstract thinking. Jehovah wisdom is adapted to abstract thinking.

As regards this Jehovah wisdom, man is asleep in the ordinary state of consciousness. The Jehovah initiates simply received in connection with their initiation what man experiences through his breath from falling asleep until waking. Because of this fact, persons who love half-truths have often designated Jehovah as the divinity who regulates sleep. This is true also. He imparted to man that element of wisdom that he would experience if he should become as clairvoyant as the initiates became, and should experience consciously the life between falling asleep and waking. Now, this was not experienced by the ordinary consciousness in the Old Testament times, but was given to man as a revelation, so that he thus received as revelation in this Jehovah wisdom that through which they had to sleep. It was necessary to sleep through this, since otherwise the life process could not continue.

This is the essential element of the Old Testament culture. The night wisdom was revealed as Jehovah wisdom. To a certain extent—but I beg you to note that I say to a certain extent—this possibility for man was exhausted during the period when the Mystery of Golgotha drew near because this wisdom, which is in a sense the wisdom of sleep and breathing, is one-seventh of all the wisdom that man must develop in the course of his evolution. It is the wisdom of a single one of the Elohim, that is, Jehovah. The other six-sevenths could and can come to humanity only as the Christ impulse flows into mankind. We may thus say that, as Jehovah revealed himself, he revealed the wisdom of night and breathing in anticipation. The six other Elohim, constituting in their totality together with the seventh Elohim the Christ impulse, reveal all other wisdom, which comes to man between birth and death otherwise than through breathing.

Within the life of Old Testament culture man would have been entirely antisocial if Jehovah had not revealed the social element to his people in that abstract law that regulated and harmonized their life.

Now, Jehovah was able to gain complete control for himself by thrusting back the other Elohim, as I have explained to you, and dethroning them in a certain way. This caused other, lower spiritual entities to come in contact with human nature and to take possession of it. Man was exposed to these other entities, so that we have two conditions in the course of Old Testament evolution: first, the harmonizing Jehovah wisdom in what was given to the Jews as their Law, which included at the same time their social life; second, what opposed this social union, the lower entities coming close to human nature because the other Elohim were not yet given access in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha. These lower entities directed their powerful attacks in an antisocial sense against the Jehovah element.

It is a peculiar fact that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the fifth decade, Jehovah ceased in a certain sense to master the opposing spirits with his influence, so that they acquired special power. Not until the course of the nineteenth century was it really necessary for the first time that the Christ impulse, which had previously been only in a preliminary stage as I have often pointed out, should really be understood. Human culture could not progress further without this impulse and it was the social element particularly that stood face to face with this important crisis. It was necessary that the Christ impulse should be understood for the future. Without an understanding of this Christ impulse, no social demand takes the direction leading to any sort of wholesome objective.

The almost twenty centuries during which Christianity has previously been disseminated were only preparatory stages for the real understanding of the Christ impulse because the Christ impulse can be understood only in the spirit. Everything happens gradually. In our critical times, when we face a crisis in regard to just those things I have called to your attention, the situation is as follows. The instinct leading toward a mere Jehovah wisdom still extends into our age as a remnant, tending toward the wisdom that depended upon what was acquired during the embryonic life and is modified only by the unconscious breathing process. The Jehovah wisdom requires a revelation in order to enter our consciousness. This sufficed up to the time when the consciousness soul had not yet evolved to a certain degree. Now, since the consciousness soul has evolved to this degree, humanity cannot get along further with Jehovah wisdom that is adapted to the breathing, but it is invariably true that an effort is made to continue to get along with something that has become insufficient according to inner necessities. Since, for the life between birth and death, what is 'connected with the breathing remains unconscious, the Jewish culture was a folk culture, not an individualized culture of humanity. It was a folk culture in which everything is related to the descent from a common tribal father. Jewish revelation is, in its essential nature, a revelation adapted to the Jewish people, because it takes account of what is acquired during the embryonic life and is modified only through an unconscious element, the breathing process.

What is the result of this fact in our critical times? The result is that those who will not become adherents of the Christ wisdom that brings into the human being the other element, acquired during the life between birth and death apart from the breathing process, wish to continue in their relationship to the Jehovah wisdom and to have humanity established only on the basis of folk cultures. The present clamor in favor of an organization consisting of individuals from mere peoples is a retarded ahrimanic demand for the establishment of such a culture, in which all the peoples represent only folk cultures, that is, Old Testament cultures. The peoples in all parts of the world are to become like the Jewish Old Testament people. This is the demand of Woodrow Wilson.

We are here touching upon a most profound mystery, which will be unveiled in the greatest variety of forms. A social element that is antisocial as regards the whole of humanity and undertakes to base the social life upon individual peoples alone is striving to come to manifestation as an ahrimanic element. The cultural impulse of the Old Testament is to be maintained in an ahrimanic form.

Thus you see things are not so simple as people suppose in thinking that it is necessary only to think out one thing or another in order to propose ideals to men. We must be able to look into reality. We must be able to say what really governs and develops its powers amid these realities. Man is faced, in fact, with the prospect of not being able any longer to base his life upon the merely unconscious or of finding it necessary to base his life upon the conscious element within life between birth and death. The unconscious depends upon the breathing process and thus inevitably upon what is connected with the breathing process, upon the blood circulation, that is, upon the line of descent, upon connections by blood, upon heredity. The culture that must come into existence cannot base the social order upon mere blood connections because these blood connections yield only one-seventh of what must be established in the culture of humanity. The other six-sevenths must be added through the Christ impulse: In the fifth epoch, one; in the sixth epoch, the second; in the seventh epoch, the third. The rest stretch out into the following periods of time. For this reason there must gradually develop in humanity what is connected with the true Christ impulse, and what is related to the mere Jehovah impulse must be superseded.

Typically, far-reaching endeavors of the Jehovah impulse will take place, for the last time, in what the proletariat understands as international socialism. In essence, this is the last stirring of the Jehovah impulse. We face the strange situation that every people will become a Jehovah people, and every people will at the same time demand the right to spread its own Jehovah cult, its own socialism, throughout the world.

These will be the two contending forces between which a balance must be found. In all that comes to manifestation as objective necessity in the course of humanity's evolution there mingles the feeling, the sentiment, of human beings who take one relation or another to the various national groups, and who work disturbingly within the objectively inevitable course of evolution. Through the Jehovah wisdom one of the seven doors to the union of humanity has been opened. A second door will be opened when it shall come to be known that what man bears with him as the physical and the etheric nature becomes ill in the course of life. Naturally, I do not refer to an acute illness, but in our fifth epoch life is identical with a gradual process of becoming ill. This has been true since the fourth epoch; it is especially true in the fifth epoch. The life process is the same thing, only gradual in its stages, as an acute illness, except that this takes a more rapid course. If, therefore, an acute illness must be cured by a specific healing process, something must enter also into human life that brings healing.

In short, the natural life of human beings, from the fifth post-Atlantean epoch on will be a sort of continual, gradual becoming ill. All influences of education and of culture must be directed to the objective of making well. In a certain way, this is the first true activation of the Christ impulse: healing. This is the special mission of Christ in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—to be the Healer, the One who heals. The other forms of the Christ impulse must remain in the background. For the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, the Christ impulse must work in the direction of seership. There the spirit self comes to development within which man cannot live without seership. In the seventh postAtlantean epoch a sort of prophetic nature will develop as the third element, since it must, indeed, pass prophetically over into an entirely new period. The other three members of the sixfold Christ Being will do their work in the following periods. Thus must the Christ impulse find its way into humanity, as the element that permeates mankind with social warmth in the course of the present and the two following cultural epochs, that is, as the healing process, the seer process and the prophetic process. This is the real living entrance of the Christ impulse. This will interpenetrate other things necessary for evolution that we have already mentioned. One door has been opened through the Jehovah wisdom, but this door became unusable in the middle of the nineteenth century. If mankind should pass through this door alone, the only result that can follow would be that all peoples would in a way develop Hebraic cultures, each in its own form. Other doors must be opened. Initiation wisdom, which will become known through a second, third, and fourth door, must be added to the wisdom that has become known through the Jehovah door. Only in this way can man grow into other connections than those that are regulated by the bonds of blood and breath.

This constitutes, in turn, the critical element of our age. It is a fact that human beings wish to preserve a regulation of the world order according to the bonds of blood, coming in an ahrimanic way out of ancient times, but that an inner necessity strives outward beyond these bonds of blood. In the future what controls the social life cannot proceed from anything having to do with kinship. On the contrary, only what the soul itself in its own free decision can experience as regulating the social order will be valid. An inner necessity will so guide men that everything that penetrates into the social order out of mere bonds of blood will be eliminated. All such things enter into manifestation at first tumultuously. In our age there must evolve spirit knowledge and freedom of thought, especially freedom of thought in the religious realm. The science of the spirit must develop for the reason that man must enter into relationship with man. But man is spirit. Man can enter into relationship with man only when the approach is from the spirit. The relationship into which men entered at earlier stages had its origin in the unconscious spirit vibrating in the blood, in accordance with Jehovah wisdom, which leads only to abstraction. That to which the men must next be led must be something grasped within the soul. The heathen peoples had their myths in pictorial form, created through atavism in ancient cultural forms. The Jewish people had its abstractions, not myths, but abstractions: the Law. This has continued its existence. This was the first elevation of the human being to the conceptual force and into the force of thought. But from humanity's present view of the matter, which is only the revival of the command, “Thou shalt make unto thyself no image,” man must revert to the capacity of the soul that can once more, and this time consciously, form images. It is only in images, in imaginations, that the social life also can be rightly established in the future. The social life could be regulated only as regards a single people in abstractions, and the regulation for a people in social relationships was that of the Old Testament. The next form of regulation of the social life will depend upon the capacity to exercise in a conscious way the same force that once existed atavistically, in unconscious or half-conscious form, in man's myth building capacity. Men would be completely filled with antisocial instincts if they should endeavor to continue disseminating mere abstract laws. They must come again by way of their world conception, to the pictorial. Out of this conscious myth creation there will arise also the possibility for the development of the social element in the intercourse of man with man.

You may look at such a sculptural form as that of our Group: the Representative of Man, Lucifer and Ahriman. There you confront for the first time what is working in the whole human being, because man is the state of balance between the luciferic and the ahrimanic. If you permeate yourself in actual life with the impulse to confront every person in such a way that you correctly see this trinity in him, then do you begin to understand him. This is an essential capacity, bearing within itself the impulse to evolve in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Thus we shall no longer pass by one another as one specter passes another, so that we form no picture of each other but merely define the other person with our abstract concepts. The truth is that we do nothing more at the present time We pass by each other as if we were specters. One specter forms the conception, “That is a nice fellow,” and the other, “That is not such a nice fellow” ... “That is a bad man” . . . “That is a good man,”—all sorts of such abstract concepts. In the intercourse of man with man we have nothing but a bundle of abstract concepts. This is the essential thing that has entered into humanity out of the Old Testament form of life: “Make unto thyself no image.” It must inevitably lead to an antisocial life if we should continue it further. What is flowing out from the innermost nature of man, striving toward realization, is that, when one individual confronts another, a picture shall stream forth in a certain way from the other person, a picture of that special form of balance manifested individually by everyone. But this requires, of course, the heightened interest that I have often described to you as the foundation of social life, which each person should take in the other person. At present we have not yet any intense interest in another person. It is for this reason that we criticize him, that we pass judgment upon him, that we form our judgments according to sympathies and antipathies and not according to the objective picture that leaps to meet us from the other.

This capacity to be mystically stimulated in a certain way as we confront another person will come to realization. It will enter as a special social impulse into human life. On the one hand, the consciousness soul is striving to come in an antisocial way to complete domination in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. On the other hand, something else is striving outward from the nature of man, that is, a capacity to form pictures of the human beings with whom we live. It is here that the social impulses arise, the social instincts. The simple fact is that these things lie at a far greater depth than is ordinarily supposed when people talk about the social and the antisocial.

Now the question may arise in your minds as to how we shall gradually attain to the capacity of causing the picture of the other person to leap to meet us. It is in life that we must gain this capacity. Jehovah capacities are given to us at birth; we evolve them in the embryonic life. The culture of the future will not make things so comfortable for people. The capacities a person must manifest will have to be developed during the course of his life. Far more concrete and definite principles must enter into education than those that are now being brought into dominance in such an utterly confused manner in today's pedagogy. It is most important of all that the instinct shall be implanted in people to look back more frequently during this life, but in the right way. What people develop at present as memories of earlier experience is marked as yet for the most part by a selfish character. If a person looks back in a more unselfish way to what he has experienced in childhood, youth, etc.—according to the age he has reached—there emerges as if out of the gray depths of the spirit various persons who have had something to do with his life in all sorts of relationships.

Look back into your life and pay less attention to what interests you in your own respectable person and much more to those figures that have come into contact with you, educating you, befriending you, assisting you, perhaps also injuring you—often injuring you in a helpful way. One thing will then become evident to you and that is how little reason a person really has to ascribe to himself what he has become. Often something important in us is due to the fact that one person or another came into contact with us at a certain age, and—perhaps, without knowing it himself, or perhaps, being fully aware of the fact—drew our attention to something or other. In a comprehensive sense, a really unselfishly conducted survey of our lives is made up of all sorts of things that do not give us occasion to immerse ourselves selfishly in our own being, to brood over ourselves egotistically, but lead us to broaden our views to include those figures who came into contact with us. Let us immerse ourselves with real love in what has come into our life. We shall often discover that what evoked an antipathy in us at a certain period is no longer so disagreeable to us when a sufficient length of time has passed because we begin to see an inner connection. The fact that we had to be affected in an unpleasant way at a certain time by one person or another might have been useful to us. We often gain more from the harm that a person does to us than from the furtherance afforded us by another. It would be advantageous to a person if he more frequently exercised such a survey of his life, and should permeate his life with the convictions flowing from his self observation. “How little occasion I really have to occupy myself with myself! How immeasurably richer my life becomes when I look back to all those who have entered my life!” In this way we free ourselves from ourselves when we carry out such an unselfish survey. We then escape from that terrible evil of our times, to which so many fall victims, of brooding over ourselves. It is so extremely necessary that we should free ourselves from this brooding over ourselves. Anyone who has once felt the power of such self-observation as I have just described will find himself far too uninteresting to spend much time brooding over his own life. Unlimited illumination is cast over this life of ours when we see it irradiated with what enters into it from the gray depths of the spirit.

But this has such a germinating power over us that we really acquire the imaginative forces necessary to confront the contemporary human being in such a way that in him the thing is manifest that appears to us only after many years in our backward survey of those figures with whom we have lived together. We thus acquire such a capacity that pictures actually come to meet us from the individuals we confront.
The cultivation of the social life, which in earlier times had its source only in the bonds of blood, does not depend so much upon any sort of socialistic programs, but upon man's becoming a spiritual-social being. He will become such a being by awakening within himself, in the manner I have described, the deeper forces that can bring to birth within him the capacity for conceiving pictorially the other human being. Otherwise, we shall always remain antisocial beings, capable of approaching others only according to our sympathies and antipathies, incapable of approaching them according to the picture that may stream forth from each person if we only develop the picture-forming forces in our intercourse with them. Precisely in the social life of humanity must the principle come into existence, “Thou shalt make for thyself an image of thy fellow man.” Then, when we form a picture of our fellow man, we enrich our own soul life; then do we bestow a treasure upon our own inner soul life with each human acquaintanceship. Then we no longer so live that A lives there, B there, C there, but A, B and C live in D; A, B and D live in C; C, D and E live in A; etc. We gain the capacity to have other human beings live in us.

But this must be acquired; it is not born in us. If we should continue simply to cultivate those characteristics that are born in us, we should continue within the limits of a mere blood culture, not the culture to which could be ascribed in the true sense of the word human brotherhood. Only when we carry the other human being within us can we really speak of human brotherhood, which has appeared thus far only in an abstract word. When we form a picture of the other person, which is implanted as a treasure in our souls, then we carry within the realm of our soul life something from him just as in the case of a bodily brother we carry around something through the common blood. This elective affinity as the basis of social life must take the place in this concrete way of the mere blood affinity. This is something that really must evolve. It must depend upon the human will to determine how brotherhood shall be awakened among men.

Human beings have hitherto been separated. They ought to become socialized in brotherhood. In order that the manifoldness shall not be lost, the innermost element in man, thought, must be able to take form individually in every single person. With Jehovah the whole folk stood in a relationship. With Christ each individual person must stand in relationship. But the fact that brotherhood will thus awaken requires that there shall be a compensation in an entirely different field, that is, through freedom of thought.

• 1. Three figures in heroic size carved in wood by Rudolf Steiner.

My dear Friends,

If spiritual science is to be, as it can be, a life-draught for our souls, it must prove to be strong and also suited for times as important as our present epoch, in which so many things are taking place which widen the soul-spiritual vision of those who have dedicated themselves to spiritual science. This enables us to see events in a clearer light than our contemporaries, for their outlook is frequently—I repeat, frequently—kept within narrow limits by materialism. All that has been cultivated for so many years in our spiritual-scientific movement shows us that one of our goals is to increase the soul's life of feeling, so that we become emancipated from mere thought, thus transcending the narrower limits of our own being and its environment; we may then envisage to some extent the great impulses, the great manifestations of forces which pervade the whole development of mankind on earth. When we have thus striven to increase, as it were, the tension of our feelings, then the forces acquired through spiritual science should enable us to see something of all that remains externally invisible in the events, and still more, all that the ordinary intellect is unable to see. This is above all necessary in the present time with its tempestuous waves beating so painfully against our soul, but raising it, on the other hand, to special heights, just because they conceal so many significant things. We should be able to face above all the following question: Is there a prophetic meaning in the terrible torch of war burning above our heads, does this have a prophetic meaning for the whole development of the earth?

Only those who look upon these events in a light as significant as possible can face them in the right way. Some of our friends may often have asked themselves why we have in recent years spoken in these circles of times to which we must look ahead with special attention, times which will break in upon us daring the 20th century. The children and grand children of those who are now living will have to pass through great and important and at the same time tragic and painful events, and those who are now entrusted with the task of giving the souls of these children and grandchildren forces which enable them to hold out in the midst of the events which will befall mankind in the 20th century must realise that a strong inner spiritual force must be given to these children. In the 20th century our descendants will need strong inner forces as a support for their souls, to a far greater extent than can be imagined in the ordinary life of to-day, so that they may take along with them the treasures of mankind which have been accumulated throughout the centuries of human development. And other storms will also have to be experienced by the descendants of the present inhabitants of the earth! I have said that people may wonder why we speak of such things among ourselves, but now they will more easily have a feeling for such things because we are living in the midst of the greatest and most terrible war-events which have ever occurred in the historical course of development upon the earth, in the course of history of which mankind is conscious.

Indeed, it would be quite wrong, my dear friends, not to pervade ourselves as intensely and strongly as possible with the significance of the present moment and not to envisage the question: What has spiritual knowledge—the object of our soul's deepest longing—what has spiritual knowledge to do with the events which will break in upon the development of mankind? Even when considering things quite superficially, is it possible to ignore the storm which has arisen long ago in the East and which is now threatening to break out over the modern culture and civilisation of Europe. We should at least know that very strong and powerful forces live in the womb of the East and by the way in which they now assert themselves it is already possible to see that they are forces aiming at the destruction, at the breaking up of European culture. To-day we can only have a pale idea of the full extent of this danger.

We now live in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture. This is the epoch of the consciousness soul and in it live souls that have something to give to mankind. If we look back upon the Graeco-Latin epoch, we see that it is essentially, but in an entirely different form, an echo, a repetition upon a higher stage, of what once existed upon Atlantis. Although there it appeared in a different form, the fourth postAtlantean epoch of culture is a kind of repetition of Atlantis. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture in which we are now living is a new form; it is something quite new which has been added to the course of development which mankind has followed so far. We are now living in the midst of this epoch.

This should not be taken as an abstract truth, as a theory, but it should be grasped with the deepest and most intense feeling of responsibility, and we should realise that a long time will have to go by in the evolution of the earth before the hearts and souls of men can bring forth all that the divine order of the world has given mankind during the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture. The impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha arose during the fourth epoch of culture, as the most important event in the whole development of the earth. During the fifth epoch of culture the Mystery of Golgotha will not work in the same way in which it worked during the fourth epoch. For the task of the fifth epoch of culture is to approach the Mystery of Golgotha little by little with full spiritual understanding, with all the forces which the human soul contains, not only with the religious forces based merely upon feeling, but with all the forces of the soul. Little by little all the truths and forces of knowledge which the soul can develop of its own accord will serve to grasp Christ fully, the Christ who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, so that St. Paul's words, “Not I, but Christ in me”, will become a reality in a new way. After all, everything we develop through spiritual science prepares us to grasp the true essence of Christ with all the soul's inner forces of knowledge. This is a significant, important task of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture.

Let us now try to penetrate somewhat into the meaning of these words. If this is the task of the fifth epoch of culture, let us first bring before our souls the way in which the Christ-Impulse has influenced mankind since the Mystery of Golgotha. If its influence were limited to what people have grasped in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha throughout the centuries which have elapsed since that time, the Christ-Impulse could only have exercised a weak influence upon men. Yet the Christ-Impulse does not only appeal in an intellectual way to human reason or to an understanding based on feeling, but it is a real impulse. The Christ-Impulse streams with living strength into the course of history itself. The Mystery of Golgotha, the external symbol of which is the blood that flowed on Golgotha, is a living force streaming into the history of mankind.

Let us take a historical event in order to understand how the Christ-Impulse worked in man before he was able to grasp it; let us try to understand how it worked, as a living, driving force in the evolution of mankind. The fifth epoch of culture is called upon to bring into human consciousness the whole inner nature and essence of the Christ-Impulse; but this Impulse already worked as a living force in the sub-conscious soul-forces of man before it could rise to full consciousness in him. And a historical character who picked out, I might say, the Christ-Impulse and brought about through it important events in history is, for example, the Maid of Orleans. But other characters might also be taken as an example. When we trace back the history of Europe to the event connected with the personality of the Maid of Orleans we must say, even if we only consider the external course of history: What the Maid of Orleans did, when she rose up from the heart of the French nation and vanquished the English forces—for she actually achieved this—really implied that the map of Europe took on the aspect which it afterwards gradually assumed. Any other concept of history relating to the past centuries, in so far as it refers to the European distribution of nations and states, is an invention that does not take into account the fact that the Christ-Impulse lived in the Maid of Orleans that a living Impulse brought about the distribution of the European nations and national forces.

One might say that while the learned people disputed over many things—for example, they already began to dispute on the question as to whether the Holy Supper should be eaten in this or in that form, and whether this or that should be interpreted by this or that formula,—while the learned people showed that their understanding, their conscious understanding could not the Christ-Impulse, this impulse worked through the medium of a simple country maid, through the Maid of Orleans; it worked in such a way as to mould and shape the history of Europe. The influence of the Christ-Impulse does not depend on the comprehension we have for it. I might say that the Christ-Impulse penetrated into the Maid of Orleans through Michael, its representative.

For this purpose the Maid of Orleans had to pass through a kind of initiation. To-day we speak of initiation, and in addition we give to human consciousness the rules collected in my book, “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”. Of course, one cannot speak of such an initiation in the case of the Maid of Orleans. In her case we can only speak of an initiation which is a remnant of old initiations that took place more in man's sub-conscious soul-forces. These old initiations continued to exist up to the present time almost like elemental forces, and many things described in old legends and fairy-tales, for example that some people passed through experiences which roused their inner soul-forces so that they could perceive certain things connected with the spiritual world, indicate that independently of man, and through the influence of divine-spiritual forces which pervade the world, certain people are, I might say, predisposed by Karma to be natural initiates, thanks to the place given to them by the general Karma of humanity, where their own Karma flows together with the Karma of humanity.

A very beautiful echo of such a natural initiation, as one might call it, is contained in a Norwegian poem that speaks of Olaf Asteson, “the Son of the Sun”, who lived in a kind of sleep during the thirteen nights and days between Christmas Eve and January 6th, the festival of Christ's appearance. Olaf Asteson's very name indicates that he possessed unconscious hereditary forces of knowledge, for its real meaning The man in whose veins flows the blood of his ancestors. The Son of the Sun, Olaf Asteson, sleeps and dreams through the thirteen nights which are the darkest of the year's course on earth and which go from the day of Christ's birth to the day of Epiphany on January 6th.

These old legends dealing with the thirteen holy nights are not based on superstition. For it is indeed a fact that there are two seasons of the year which are cosmically like opposite poles in relation to the soul-life of man living in his physical body. The festival around St. John's day, which, is celebrated in the summer, is specially suited to draw out into the cosmos, through the forces of the sun which then reach their greatest strength, all the passionate impulses of the human soul, so that it becomes united with the cosmos: In ancient times, when people forgot themselves and lost themselves in the strong physical forces outside in the cosmos, the festival of St. John was called upon to pour into the human souls the divine-spiritual forces surging through the cosmos. But the spiritual forces which are also active in the darkness unfold their greatest strength in the middle of the winter, when the sun's forces reach the lowest point of their physical unfolding. And one may rightly say that it is in accordance with cosmic laws that the festival of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth should be celebrated in the winter season. When the external physical world is darkest of all, then the soul that unites with the forces spiritually pervading the aura of the earth, may have the strongest experiences. It is during these days that Olaf Asteson sleeps and sleeps and experiences everything connected with what we call Kamaloka, also what we designate as the Soul-World, and finally what we call the Spirit-land. The Norwegian legend relates that when Olaf Asteson woke up again after thirteen nights, he could describe what he had experienced and what souls he had met in the Soul-world and in the Spirit-land. These are pictures corresponding to an imaginative knowledge, but they indicate living realities which are accessible to human souls when they transcend the body during these days of physical darkness, which are, however, days of spiritual enlightenment,—when the human soul lives in forces that surge and weave through the aura of the earth. And the end of the legend describes the forces of the Christ-Impulse which strongly take hold of Olaf Asteson, but of his sub-conscious understanding.

These legends speak, as it were, of natural initiations which could still be attained in ancient times; they speak of the spiritual world into which one could still look in the darkest season of the year. The earth's aura then truly acquires forces which it does not have when it is flooded and illuminated by the physical forces of the sun. And because Christ is united with the aura of the earth ever since the Mystery of Golgotha, also the forces of the Christ-Impulse can in those days particularly influence human souls, if only they are open to receive them.

I might therefore say that before investigating anything historically, one should take for granted that the Christ-Impulse must have worked subconsciously for thirteen days also in the soul of a character such as the Maid of Orleans; she too must have experienced, as it were, what Olaf Asteson experienced in a sleeping condition during those thirteen days and nights; her sub-conscious soul-forces must, as it were, have been enlightened by the Christ-Impulse. In that case, the Maid of Orleans must once have been in a kind of sleeping condition during the thirteen days which lie between December 25th and January 6th, and on January 6th the Christ-Impulse must have taken hold of her soul, after a sleep-like state of existence.

What we may thus take for granted, really exists in a strange way, but during a special period, when the human being lives in a kind of sleep. Before he draws his first breath in earthly life, before he leaves his mother's body and is able to receive the first earthly-physical ray of light, he passes through a state of development which is really a sleeping state of experience. When we are within our mother's body, we live in a dreamlike sleep, a state of existence into which we enter at night when we fall asleep, and the last days of existence within our mother's body are those which are, so to speak, most accessible to the unconscious influences coming from the spiritual world.

In the Maid of Orleans these must have been the days chosen to implant the Christ-Impulse into her being, the days before she opened her physical eyes to the physical sunlight and before she drew her first breath outside her mother's body. This was indeed the case, for the Maid of Orleans was born on January 6th. On that day something occurred which caused a stir in her whole village; there was something undefined in its aura. This is a historical fact. The villagers did not know what had happened; they did not know that the Maid of Orleans had been born.

A great deal lies concealed in such facts. Only when these mysterious things are seen in their true light will it be possible to understand what is really taking place below the surface of the external physical world. The divine forces seek many different ways of entering human souls. Of course, the Karma of the Maid of Orleans had to be suited to these events. Because her Karma brought about the fact that she was born on January 6th, it provided the historical basis which enabled the Christ-Impulse to influence history in a special way through the Maid of Orleans. This fact gave Europe a completely new form.

When history is studied with a little more understanding it is possible to investigate such happenings. A spiritual way of looking at the world will in future enable us to refer to such facts, for by that time the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture will really have extracted from human souls all their latent forces of knowledge. Human souls will then experience more and more consciously the existence of the Christ-Impulse, but only if mankind will cease to look upon spiritual science as an abstract theory and will instead feel it livingly, experience it inwardly. Spiritual science will then be able to fulfill its true mission in the development of humanity.

We must be conscious, especially in a time such as the present one, that it is necessary to bridge the chasm between the human souls living here on earth in a physical body and those that have already gone through the portal of death. In a materialistic age this chasm widens. We shall more and more learn to consider as part of mankind as a whole not only the souls that live in a physical existence between birth and death, but also the souls that live between death and a new birth. The consciousness that throughout the earth's round we are united, also united with the souls that have passed on before us into the super-sensible worlds and that these souls are working in our midst, only with different forces than those of the souls still living in physical bodies,—this consciousness will gradually grow and become more intensive. It calls for an understanding of spiritually active forces and that we should learn to consider earthly phenomena in the new light which spiritual science alone can shed upon them.

Because spiritual science, my dear friends, should be something that stirs our hearts while our souls advance in knowledge, I want to speak to you of a recent occurrence here in Dornach throwing light upon the path which at the same time leads to many things that have occupied us during these last weeks and that belong to the wider compass of our spiritual-scientific stream of knowledge. I might also choose other cases, but the following are so immediately connected with our Karma that I am again able to speak of them to-day. What I shall tell you now, may then be extended also to other souls inside and outside our spiritual-scientific movement and related to it by destiny and by the way in which death occurred in it.

Last autumn we experienced a deeply moving case here in Dornach, in the surroundings of our Building. Dear friends had moved to Dornach with their children and had settled down as gardeners near the Building. Their eldest child, a boy of seven, spiritually wide-awake and with unique heart-qualities, was a veritable Sun-child. One felt deeply attracted by the child's soul, even if one only met the boy, now and then, for brief moments. When his father had to enlist, to do his duty on the battlefield as a German citizen, the boy of seven stood, I might say, whole-heartedly in the midst of this situation and he made a special effort to replace his father as best as he could by helping his mother with all kinds of small services. He went to town by train and did the shopping quite alone, although he was only seven. One evening he did not come home. There was a lecture that evening. At about ten o'clock a friend came along and told us that the boy was missing. There was no doubt that his disappearance had to be connected with a furniture-van which had overturned. This had happened near the Building, at a place where no van had ever passed before and where no van was likely to pass again for a long time. It had fallen down a small slope and capsized in the adjoining field. The drivers had given up the attempt of lifting it that same evening and had left the van there, after unharnessing the horses, for which they were very anxious. They wanted to lift the heavy van the next day, for they were sure that it would imply a whole day's work. It was now ten p.m. The child's disappearance had to be connected with that furniture-van. All kinds of tools were fetched and everyone able to work helped. In two hours the van was standing. At midnight the boy was discovered under the van—dead.

If we consider the external facts and the whole sequence of events leading up to the circumstance that the boy, who always came home by a way which would have led him past the right side of the furniture-van, on that day choose a path which led him past its left side at the very moment when the van capsized on top of him, if we consider moreover that on the way home he was held up in a friendly way by people, so that he was a quarter of an hour late (he had gone to the so-called Canteen, to fetch something for supper)—if we bear in mind that in this accident it was a question of just a few minutes which caused the boy to be on that spot at the very moment when the van capsized and that no one had noticed the accident (people were standing not far off, and although they had seen the van toppling over, no one had seen the boy)—the external facts as such will appear to us as an outstanding example of how easily we may fall a prey to a logical illusion. I have often spoken to you about this and shown you how easily we may delude ourselves in external life and mix up cause and effect. Once I described to you the following case: In the distance you see a man walking along the bank of a river. Suddenly you see him swaying and falling into the water. Soon after he is drawn out dead. The external circumstances could justify the assumption that he fell into the river and was drowned. And you will remain by this verdict if you do not investigate things further. But in the above case you could change your view simply by drawing in an external aid, although you were strengthened in it by the fact that a stone was found on the spot where the man fell into the water. But on dissecting the corpse it will appear that the man had had a stroke; consequently he had fallen into the river because he was dead; he did not die because he had fallen into the river. Here cause and effect are reversed. People with insight into such things will frequently come across such illusions—particularly in the scientific field.

In regard to the boy's death we must therefore say: The boy's Karma had ordered the van to be there; it was his Karma that had brought it to that spot. It is wrong to think that this was accidental. For in his present incarnation the boy was not to live beyond his seventh year of age. I might say that everything was arranged accordingly. We must get accustomed to see cause and effect differently than is ordinarily the case. When we look clairvoyantly upon the boy's life, upon the life of his soul, we discover a significant fact which moves us deeply, but at the same time it can throw light upon the divine-spiritual mysteries of the universe. Soon after the boy's death, the whole aura of the Dornach Building changed. In telling you this I am relating [to] you something connected with my own experience. When one has to work for the Dornach Building of the Anthroposophical Society, when one has to arrange what should take place within it, then one knows how much one owes to the helping forces that stream into one's soul from such an aura. After the boy's death, his still unused etheric body became united, really united with the aura of the Goetheanum Building. For the etheric body is something that man discards. The individuality consisting of the Ego and of the astral body continues—this is something quite different—but the etheric body put aside at such a tender age contains forces which might have sustained the physical body and physical life for many decades. These forces have gone through the portal of death unused. After a few days they are discarded. These very forces are now active in the aura of the Building and work with it. Consequently we cannot say that the soul of this individuality works in the aura, but only his unused etheric body. Nothing is lost, even in the spiritual world. That no physical forces are ever dispersed is a fact well known to physicists; these forces only undergo a change. Also in the spiritual world we must look for transformed forces; they are the unused etheric forces of men that have died young and these forces rise up to the spiritual world. We approach such things by studying concrete examples. It is for this reason that I am describing them to you.¹

You see, the essential thing is not only to absorb thoughts and ideas concerning the spiritual worlds, but we should learn a certain way of living and penetrate into it. As human beings of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch of culture we should envisage the 6th and 7th epochs. It is essential to bridge the abyss separating the living from the so-called dead; it is essential that mankind should become more and more united, not only when men are incarnated in a physical body, but also when they take on forms of existence through which they have to pass between death and a new birth. Spiritual science exists not only for the purpose of bringing new possibilities to mankind, but in the life which awaits the earth for the remainder of its post-Atlantean development spiritual science is a first, I might say, stammering, attempt: all that spiritual science is now able to give, is really a stammering, when compared with everything that future human races will experience through spiritual science.

With this description, attempting to convey through the heart's forces certain ideas on the conditions of life and death, I want to point out to you an element of spiritual science which considers life itself, so that an understanding which is not that of the head may rise up within you, the understanding of the heart. This we should seek in a living way through spiritual-scientific immersion, for this kind of understanding is the task of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch of culture. It will be followed by the 6th and 7th epochs. But we fully grasp all that the Central-European civilisation must uphold, when we feel that the civilisation of Central Europe above all, is intimately connected with the goals that must be reached during the 5th epoch of culture. This may lead to something which I have mentioned at the beginning of to-day's lecture: to a deepened insight into things which lie concealed within our times so heavily fraught with destiny.

In the East, a soul-life is preparing which will be very significant in the future. In this connection, read what I have explained in the lectures I once gave at Christiania on the mission of the Folk-souls. The soul-character of the inhabitants of Eastern Europe is fundamentally different from that of Central Europe, not to mention that of the distant Orient. It is fundamentally different. All that spiritual science means to us should enable us to have an open spiritual eye for such things. We have often heard the legend that the Russian-Slav populations called in the Varangians and said to them: “We have a fine country, but no order. Come and make order for tip, Arrange a kind of government for us.” This, tale, born out of feeling and relating to the origins of Russian history, is a legend without any historical background, for these events have never occurred. In reality, the Varangians went out as conquerors and were never invited by the Russians! Yet these legends in history have a meaning far deeper than any historical reality behind them,—they have a prophetic meaning, a truly prophetic meaning, for they indicate something that has not yet occurred, but that will occur in the future. What will unfold in the East, will have to unfold in such a way that the capacities, of the Easterners will be used to absorb what has been developed in the civilisation of the West and to elaborate it further, so that the gifts existing in the East may be fructified by what has been produced in the West. This will one day be the task of the Eastern populations. We may, as it were, briefly characterize the nature of, the Russians of Eastern Europe by saying: If we consider the Russians, not that hypocritical community which now governs it, but the people, we must realise that the Russian soul contains a whole store of gifts; it is, so to speak, gifted in every direction, but just when it unfolds its mission within the development of the world and of mankind it will appear that within it lives something which may be called talent without any productive force. These talents will grow and increase more and more. But what preeminently characterizes the Central-European, the spiritual forces that pervade his gifts and the mood of “Constantly striving”, of living, as it were, intimately united with the Spirit of his nation, the striving to grasp what he produces—a striving that appears so, sublimely in Fichte's philosophy, where he speaks of the Ego that must constantly create itself in order to understand itself (indeed, future epochs will grasp the greatness of Fichte's philosophy!):—these very qualities which characterize Central Europe are the very opposite of what exists in Russia, in the East of Europe. The Russian souls are absolutely receptive; their greatest gift consists in absorbing things, but if anyone says that they are productive, this is an illusion. They are called upon to develop gifts which have no productive force. This idea is difficult in itself, because such things have never existed in human development, yet they must gradually unfold. In future the East will call out to the West: We have a beautiful country, but no order, (disorder will increase), come and make order.—Central Europe is called upon to bring to the East the productiveness of the Spirit. And what is happening now is an unreasonable rebellion against things which must take place in [the] future. People try to tread down things which must be reached, for in future they will say: Come to us and bring us order! In the history of mankind's development we find that what we most long for and strive after, is the very thing we reject most strongly.

The greatest misfortune that could befall us is that Russia, the East, should win in this process. It would be the greatest misfortune, not only for Central Europe, but, for Russia itself—the very greatest misfortune from an inner standpoint, because this victory would have to be reverted. Its effects could not remain. We are thus facing a tragic moment in the history of mankind's development, when the East will rebel against something which in future it will long for with all its might. For it would be doomed to decay if it refused to be fructified by the spiritual life of the peoples living on its western boundary. In the further course of civilisation the West must produce a living spiritual life, not only in the form of idealism, but a 1iving spiritual life. It will be like a spiritual sun moving from West to East, in the opposite direction of the sun's ordinary course. And in the external world the Russians will more and more realise how little they are able to do through their own forces and that they must really set themselves into the whole process of human development; also that they would commit the greatest sin by laying hands on the civilisation of the West, of the peoples of western Europe. Indeed, we may see strange, foreboding flashes of light! Did not something rise up in the East which would have been impossible in the West, the so-called, “Barefooted” world-conception, This is a kind of philosophy going out from the Barefooted Brothers, which quickly spread and took hold of many circles, although a few years ago it did not exist at all. The conception of the Barefooted! It is a conception adopted by men who make a philosophy out of their own absolute lack of faith in man, and humanity, who think that man is nothing but a poor wretch wandering about between birth and death, wandering in terror—hint pain, so that the words, freedom, brotherliness, compassion, pity, love, are empty phrases. Their only wisdom consists in roaming through the world as barefooted pilgrims who look upon the whole civilisation as a great illusion—the whole foul civilisation of western Europe, to use the words of these barefooted pilgrims—who only see the World in the ragged clothes, the stuffy room and the wide road—the world through which man roams when he has reached world-conception of the Barefooted Brothers. Indeed, it affects us, strangely when a poet gives to this “barefooted” conception in significant words spoken by one of his characters, it must affect us strangely, inasmuch as our Central-European world-conception always makes us strive to discover something which may kindle for mankind the light of the future. How does it affect us when a poet lets, one of his characters utter words that appear to sum up the world-conception and the philosophy of the Barefooted Brothers?

“Indeed, what can man mean to you?—He takes you by the scruff of the neck, he squashes you like a flea with his finger-nail! Pity him if you can! Show him how foolish you are! In return for your pity he will torture you, wind your intestines round his hand, tear every vein out of your body, an inch an hour. You fool ... pity? Pray God that they may whip you pitilessly, and there's an end to it! Pity? ... Fie!”

Gorki, of whom you will already have heard many things, comments these, words with: “Cruel, but true”, by rendering not only the world-conception of a poet in a poet's words, but his own world-conception, resulting from his own observation of the world. This is the conception of a Barefooted Brother, and it may be discussed like, any other world-conception. Yet it is one that has lost the possibility of transcending itself, of reaching something greater than itself and of sending light into life; before it can fulfill its mission in the evolution of mankind, it will have to wait until it is fructified by the light. At present, however, it is rebelling against the very things it should accomplish. Many empty words have been uttered in the world, but one of the most tragic experiences I can relate is connected with the phrases uttered by the different political parties at the war-assembly of the Russian Duma in August 1914; they surpass everything in emptiness! Such empty words can only be uttered when every living productive force of the soul is exhausted. The East is really standing upon the threshold of things to come, and it is now unfolding forces which are opposed to, those which will one day be the source of its greatness. And we in Central Europe must say to ourselves: In spite of all, the East is waiting; for the spiritual wisdom which must rise up from Central Europe.

My dear friends, try to transform into feeling what I have indicated in words fraught with heavy feelings. I have shown you what spiritual science may become if we intensify feeling and penetrate with it into spiritual science, in order to grasp the true necessity, indeed the historical necessity of a spiritual-scientific world-conception. We shall then be pervaded by thoughts filled with understanding, that rise up from our souls into the world's spaces, thoughts that will meet the forces which will soon send down their influences from the spiritual worlds, when peace will once more reign over the earthly spheres.

To-day I have shown you the influence of the etheric bodies which sever themselves from the human souls before their forces have been used up, of etheric bodies that might still have worked for many years and decades within physical bodies here on earth, and on behalf of physical life. We cannot help thinking of the many unused parts of etheric bodies rising up to the spiritual world, in addition to all other influences rising up from the individualities of men passing through the portal of death on the battlefields. These etheric bodies will form a great complex of forces, of spiritual forces, that will cooperate from spiritual regions in the formation of a spiritual world-conception which will gradually take hold of mankind. But in order that the forces proceeding from the unused etheric bodies may send flown their influence from spiritual spheres, they mum be net by the thoughts of human beings on earth, by thoughts filled with understanding for the secret working of the spiritual world which is interwoven with the forces of these unused etheric, bodies. This should be a real encouragement inducing us to fill ourselves with the great truths of spiritual science. For they will stimulate within us thoughts which will go on working in other people. The burdensome, fateful content of the life now unfolding within and around us will be followed by days of peace, when the truths which we have implanted into our souls through spiritual science will rise up before us and meet the forces gathered by the etheric forces of those who have passed through the portal of death upon the battlefields of present-day events, forces which stream down to the earth. And the result; will be something which I want to recapitulate in a few words, a result that reveals itself to spiritual, scientific research. If the fruits of spiritual science can be rightly included in the development of the times, the result will be something I want to express in the following words:

Aus dem Mut der Kämpfer,
Aus dem Blut der Schlachten,
Aus dem Leid Verlass'ner,
Aus des Volkes Opfertaten,
Wird erwachsen Geistesfrucht—
Lenken Seelen geistbewußt
Ihren Sinn ins Geisterreich.

(From the courage of the, fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the abandoned,
From the nation's deeds of sacrifice,
Shall spring forth a fruit of the Spirit,
If souls, spirit-consciously
Direct their mind and soul towards the Spirit-realm.)

• 1. The description of the other concrete cases is contained in “Rudolf Steiner und unsere Toten”. They are too intimate for publication in the News Sheet.

This is the 1st of 15 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Dornach in 1920. The series of lectures is entitled: Physiological Therapy Based on Spiritual Science. Another name of this lecture is: Health Care as a Social Issue.

It is never doubted that the Social Question is one of the problems that is looming largest in the thought of the present age. Wherever there is any understanding at all of the events that occur in the course of the evolution of human history, of the sinister or incipiently fruitful impulses for the future—all these matters are included under the “Social Question.” It must, however, be said that the point of view from which these social problems are regarded and the way in which they are handled at the present time, suffers from the basic evil inherent in so many spheres of our mental and moral life—I mean the intellectualism obtaining in our age. For these problems are indeed so often limited by the angle of intellectualistic study. No matter whether the social question is approached from the “left” or “right” wing, the purely intellectualistic nature of the different conceptions is revealed in the fact that people start from certain theories: this or that ought to be done, this or that ought to be stamped out.

Little account is taken of the human being himself. Human beings are treated just as if there were one generality—“Man.” No attention is paid to the personal and distinctive qualities of individual human beings. And this is why our whole conception of the social question has become abstract, so seldom grasping the social feelings and sentiments playing between man and man. This lack of social observation becomes most clearly evident when we turn to a special domain like that of hygiene—a domain which possibly is more prone than many others to be the subject of sociological study, inasmuch as it is a public affair, concerning not the individual human being alone but the whole of society.

True, there is no lack of advice on the subject of hygiene, no lack of treatises and writings on the subject of the care of health as a public concern. Yet one cannot help asking: What is the real attitude of social life to all these injunctions and regulations about hygiene? And the answer is, that when the conclusions reached by medical or physiological science on this matter are made public either by the written or by the spoken word, it is the trust reposed by man in a “profession,” the inner nature of which he is not able to put to the test, which is supposed to be the basis upon which such precepts may be accepted. Wide circles of people whose concern it is—as indeed it is the concern of everyone—accept simply on authority all that finds its way on the subject of hygiene, from medical laboratories to the outside world. But those who are convinced that in the course of modern history during the last four centuries a longing has arisen among mankind for a democratic ordering of affairs, find themselves faced with the entirely undemocratic nature of this “trust in authority” that is demanded in the sphere of hygiene. In short, this undemocratic attitude confronts the longing for democracy which has reached its height to-day, although frequently in a highly contradictory form.

I know that what I have just said may seem paradoxical, for people do not place the unquestioning acceptance of everything related to the care of health side by side with the democratic demand that affairs of public interest concerning every mature man and woman shall be arbitrated by the people in general, either directly or indirectly through their representatives. True, it may be impossible to apply essentially democratic principles in the sphere of public hygiene, because these things depend on the judgment of specialists. But on the other hand one cannot help asking: ought not an attempt be made to apply such democratic principles as are possible in modern conditions to a sphere like that of public health which so intimately concerns both the individual and the community?

A great deal is said to-day about the necessity for proper air, light, nourishment, sanitation, and so forth, but the regulations laid down in regard to these things cannot, as a rule, be tested by those to whom they apply. Now please do not misunderstand me. I do not want to be accused in this lecture of taking any particular side. I have no desire to uphold ancient superstitions of devils and demons passing in and out of human beings in the form of disease, nor to support the modern superstitions that bacilli and bacteria cause the different diseases. We need not consider to-day whether we are really faced with the results of the spiritualistic superstitions of earlier times, or with the superstitions of materialism. I want rather to consider something that permeates the whole culture of our age, especially in so far as this culture is determined by the convictions of modern science. We are assured to-day that the materialism of the middle and last third of the nineteenth century has been overcome, but this statement does not pass muster with those who really know the nature of materialism and of its opposite. The most one can say is that materialism has been overcome by a few people here and there. These people realise that the facts of modern science no longer justify the general explanation that everything in existence is merely a mechanical, physical or chemical process taking place in matter. But the fact that a few people here or there have come to this conclusion does not mean that materialism has been overcome, for it is equally true that when it is a question of concrete explanation or concrete thought, even these people—and the others as a matter of course--still reveal a materialistic tendency. True, it is said that atoms and molecules are only convenient units of calculation (and here what is implied is that atoms and molecules are made of the substance of thought)—but the mode of observation is nevertheless atomistic and molecular in character. When we are explaining world-phenomena from the behaviour and relations of atomic and molecular processes, the point is not whether we conceive any thought, feeling or activity to be inseparable from material processes in atoms or molecules. The point is the orientation of the attitude of our soul and Spirit when our explanation is based upon the atomic theory—the theory of smallest entities. The point is not whether verbally or mentally a man is convinced that there is something more than the material action of atoms, but whether his mind and spirit can give explanations other than the atomic basis of phenomena. In short, the essential thing is not what we believe, but how we explain—in a word, our attitude of soul. And here it must be said that only a true Anthroposophical Spiritual Science can help to get rid of the evil of which I have spoken.

I want to prove concretely that this is so. There is hardly anything more confusing than the distinctions which are so often emphasised to-day between man's bodily nature and his nature of soul and Spirit, between physical diseases and so-called psychical or mental diseases. The concrete distinctions and relations between such facts of human life as a diseased body and an apparently diseased soul, suffer from the materialistic, atomistic mode of thought. For what is the real essence of the materialism that has gradually come to be the world-conception of so many modern men, and that far from being overcome, is to-day in its prime? The essence of this materialism is not that people observe the material processes in the body and reverently study the marvellous structure and functions of the nerves and other organs, but that the Spirit has departed from the study of these material processes. People look into the world of matter and see only matter and material processes.

What Spiritual Science must emphasise, however, is briefly this: Wherever material processes are presented to the senses—and these are the only processes which modern science will admit as valid and exact—they are but the outer manifestation, the outer revelation of active spiritual forces lying behind and within them. Now it is not typical of Spiritual Science to observe a human being and say: “There is his physical body—a sum-total of material processes—but he does not consist of this alone. Independently of this he has an immortal soul.” It is far from being characteristic of a spiritual conception of the world to speak like this and then build up all manner of abstract, mystical theories about this immortal soul that is independent of the body.

We can only be spiritual scientists in the true sense when we realise that this material body, with its material processes, is a creation of the Spirit and soul. We must learn to understand in every detail the way in which the soul and Spirit—which were there before birth, or rather, before conception—are fashioning and moulding the structure and the “material” processes of the human body. We must be able to perceive the immediate unity of the body and the soul-and-Spirit, and realise that through the working of these principles the body as such is gradually destroyed. The body undergoes a partial death with every moment that passes, but it is only at actual death that there is a radical expression of what has been happening to the body all the time, as a result of the working of the soul-and-Spirit. We are not spiritual scientists in the true sense until we have concrete realisation of this living interplay, this living interaction between the soul and every single part of the body, and are able to say: The soul and Spirit descend into concrete processes, into the functions of liver, breathing, the action of heart, brain and so forth. In short, when we are describing the material part of man, we must know how to portray the body as the direct offspring of Spirit. Spiritual Science is able to place a true value on matter because, in the different concrete processes, it does not merely observe what is there before the eye or conjectured by the abstract concepts of modern science, but because it shows how the Spirit works in matter, and it looks with reverence at the material workings of the Spirit.

That is one essential point. The other is that such a conception guards man against all the abstract tittle-tattle about a soul independent of the bodily nature—for so far as the life between birth and death is concerned, man can only spin fantasies about this. Between birth and death (with the exception of the time of sleep), the being of soul and Spirit is so utterly given up to the bodily activities that it lives in them, manifests in them. We must be able to observe the being of soul and Spirit outside the range of earthly life, realising that existence between birth and death is but the outcome of the soul and Spirit. Then we can behold the actual unity of the soul and Spirit with the physical elements of the body. This is Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, for we know in very truth that the human being as we perceive him with all his organs and structures has been created by the soul and Spirit. Mystical and theosophical ideas may evolve all manner of high-sounding theories about a spirituality that is free of the body, but such ideas can never serve the concrete sciences of life. They can only pander to an intellectualistic or psychic craving which would like to be rid of outer life and then weave fantasies about the soul and Spirit in order to induce a state of inner satisfaction.

In this Anthroposophical Movement of ours it behoves us to work earnestly and sincerely to develop a Spiritual Science which will be able to bring life into physics, mathematics, chemistry, physiology, biology, anthropology. No purpose is served by making statements in a religious or philosophical sense to the effect that man bears an immortal soul within him, and then working in the different branches of science just as if we were concerned merely with material processes. Knowledge of the soul and Spirit must be applied to the very details of life, to the marvellous structure of the body itself. You will come across many mystics and theosophists who love to chatter about man being composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. And yet they have no idea what a wonderful manifestation of soul-life it is when one blows one's nose! The point is that we must see in matter a manifestation of the Spiritual. Then we have healthy ideas of the Spirit—ideas that are full of content, and with them a Spiritual Science that may be fruitful for all the ordinary sciences of life.

This again will make it possible to overcome elements which, on account of the materialistic trend of scientific knowledge, have led to specialisation in the various branches of science. Now I have no desire whatever to deliver a philippic against specialisation, for I am well aware of its usefulness. Certain domains of life must be dealt with by specialists simply because they need a specialised technique. The point I would make is that a man who holds fast to the material can never reach a conception of the world applicable to the practical details of life when he becomes a specialist in the ordinary sense. For the range of material processes is infinite, both outside in Nature and within the human being. We may devote a long time—as long at any rate as professional people devote to their training to the study of the nervous system in man, for instance, but if material processes are all that we see in the working of the nervous system—processes which are then described according to the abstract concepts of modern science—we shall never be led to any universal principle or to anything upon which a conception of the world can be based. Directly we begin to study the nervous system in the sense of Spiritual Science we shall inevitably find that the Spirit we see active there, leads us to the soul and Spirit underlying the systems of muscles, bones and senses and so forth. For the Spirit does not “separate off” into single parts as does the material. Very briefly expressed, the Spirit unfolds like an organism. Just as we cannot truly study a human being if we merely look at his five fingers and cover the rest of him up, so in Spiritual Science we cannot observe a single detail without being led by the soul and Spirit within this detail, to a Whole. If we should happen to become brain or nerve specialists, we should then still be able, in observing the single part, to form a picture of the human being as a whole. We should reach a universal principle able to form part of a conception of the world, and then we could begin to speak of specialised subjects in a way intelligible to every healthy-minded, reasonable human being.

This is the great difference between the way in which Spiritual Science is able to speak about the human being and the way in which materialistic science is bound, by its very nature, to speak. If as men and women who in the ordinary course of things do not know very much about the nervous system, you try to read a scientific text-book on the subject, you will probably soon lay it aside. At all events you will not learn much that will help you to realise the worth and dignity of the being of man. If, however, you listen to what Spiritual Science has to say about the nervous system you are everywhere led to the whole being of man. Such illumination is cast on the nature of man that the idea arising within you suggests the worth, the essence and the dignity of the human being.

We realise the truth of this not so much when we are observing merely a single part of the healthy human being, but when we are observing the man who is ill—where there are so many deviations from the so-called normal condition. Now if we can observe the whole human being under the influence of some disease, all that Nature reveals to us in the sick man leads us deeply into cosmic connections. We understand the particular constitution of this human being, how the atmospheric and extra-earthly influences are working on him as the result of his particular constitution, and we are then able to relate his organisation to the various substances of Nature that will have a remedial effect. When we add to our understanding of the healthy man all we learn from observation of the sick man, profound insight into the deeper connections and meaning of life will arise.

And such insight becomes in turn the foundation for a knowledge of man that is intelligible to everyone. True, we have not as yet accomplished very much in this direction, for Spiritual Science as we intend it, has only been in existence for a short time. The lectures given here therefore must only be thought of as a beginning.¹ But, by its very nature, Spiritual Science is able to work upon and develop what is contained in the several sciences in such a way that a knowledge which everyone ought to possess of the being of man, can really be offered to the world.

And now think what it will mean if Spiritual Science succeeds in transforming science in this way—succeeds in developing forms of knowledge relating to men in health and disease that are accessible to ordinary human consciousness. If Spiritual Science succeeds in this, how different will be the relations of one human being to another in social life! There will be far greater understanding in the relation of human beings to each other than there is to-day when men pass each other by without either having the slightest understanding of the individuality of the other. The social question will be lifted away from its intellectualistic character when the several branches of life are based upon objective knowledge and concrete experience. This applies very specially to the domain of health and the care of health. Think of the effect which a true understanding of health and disease in our fellow-men would have in social life. Think what it would mean if the care of health were taken in hand by the whole of humanity with understanding! Of course there must be no scientific or medical dilettantism—most emphatically not. But if understanding for the health and ill-health of our fellow-beings can be awakened—understanding that grows from a true conception of man think of the effect it would have in social life. Then indeed it would be realised that social reform and reconstruction must proceed in their different branches from real knowledge and not from Marxian theories and the like. Such theories lose sight of the human being as such, and want to organise the world on the basis of purely abstract concepts. Healing can never spring from abstract concepts, but only from a true knowledge of the different spheres of life. And hygiene, the care of health, is a very important domain, for it leads us immediately to all the joy that falls to the lot of our fellow-men when their mode of life is healthy and to their sufferings and limitations when the elements of disease lie within them.

When those who are concerned in developing a knowledge of man in health and disease, and those who actually become doctors, have this attitude towards social life, they will be able to shed light on its problems, for they will have true understanding. The position of the doctor nowadays is that those who are not his personal friends or relatives go to his surgery to fetch him when someone is in pain or has broken a leg. When men have knowledge of the kind I have described, the doctor will be a teacher who is continually giving instruction and indicating means for prophylactic hygiene. The doctor will not only be called in to heal when disease has reached a point where men realise they are ill, but he will always be working to keep them healthy—so far as this is possible. In short there will be a living, social relationship between the doctors and the rest of the community. And, moreover, this healthy influence will make itself felt in the domain of Medicine itself.

For the very reason that materialism has also spread into the medical conception of life, we have developed extraordinary ideas about illness. On the one side we are faced with all the physical diseases. They are investigated by observing the different organs, or the various processes which are thought to be of a physical nature and are to be found within the confines of the human skin. Then the goal is to seek to rectify what is wrong. In this case, thought about the body of men in its normal and abnormal conditions is wholly materialistic.

Then there are so-called psychical or mental diseases. As a result of materialistic thinking these are considered to be diseases of the brain or nervous system, although efforts have been made to find the causes in other organic systems of the human being. But because people are quite ignorant of the way in which the Spirit and soul work in the healthy body, they are unable to connect these diseases of the Spirit and soul in a rational way with what is actually taking place in the human organism.

Spiritual Science is able to show in every detail how all so-called mental and psychical disease has its source in disturbances of the organs, in enlargements and contractions of the organs in man. A so-called mental or psychical disease is always the result of some irregularity in an organ, in the heart, the liver, the lungs and so on. A Spiritual Science that has developed to the point of knowing how the Spirit acts in a normal heart, is also able to discover in the deterioration or irregularity of the heart, the cause of a diseased life of Spirit or soul.

The greatest fault of materialism is not that it denies the existence of the Spirit. Religion can see to it that due recognition is paid to the Spirit. The greatest sin of materialism is that it gives us no knowledge of matter because, in effect, it only observes the outer side of matter. What is lacking in materialism is that it has no insight into matter! Take, for instance, psycho-analytical treatments, where attention is wholly directed to something that has taken place in the soul and is described as a “complex”—a pure abstraction. Whereas the right way to proceed is to study how certain impressions which have been made on the soul of the human being at some period of his life and which are normally bound up with a healthy organism, have come into contact with defective organs, with a diseased instead of a healthy liver, for example. And it must be remembered that this may have happened a very long time before the moment when the defect becomes organically perceptible.

There is no need for Spiritual Science to be afraid of showing how so-called mental or psychical disease is invariably connected with some organic phenomenon or other in the body of man. Spiritual Science must show with all emphasis that when a “soul-complex”—a deviation from the so-called “normal life of soul”—is studied, the most that can be achieved is a one-sided diagnosis. Psycho-analysis, therefore, can never lead to anything more than a diagnosis, never to a real therapy in this domain. In mental or spiritual diseases therapy must proceed to administer a cure for the body and for this reason there must be exact knowledge of the ramifications of the Spiritual in the material. We must know where to take hold of the material body (which is permeated with Spirit) in order to cure the disease of which abnormal conditions of soul are but the symptoms. Again and again it must be emphasised by Spiritual Science that the root of so-called mental or psychical diseases lies in the organic system of the human being. But it is only possible to understand abnormal organology when the Spirit can be traced in the most minute parts of matter.

And again: phenomena of life which seemingly affect or function in the element of soul, all that is expressed in the different temperaments, for instance, and the activity of the temperaments in the human being, in the way in which the tiny child acts, plays, walks—all this is to-day merely studied from a “psychological” point of view, but it also has its bodily aspect. Faulty education of the child may come to expression in later life in the form of some familiar physical disease. In certain cases of mental trouble we must often study the bodily constitution and look for the cause there, and again in certain cases of physical diseases, we must study the Spiritual before we can find the cause. The whole essence of Spiritual Science is that it does not speak in abstractions of a nebulous Spirit, like people of a mystical or theosophical turn of mind, but traces the Spirit right down into its material workings. Spiritual Science never conceives of the material in the sense of modern science but always presses on to the Spirit, and so it realises that an abnormal soul-life must inevitably express itself in an abnormal bodily life, although the abnormality may, to begin with, be hidden from external observation. On all sides to-day people form entirely false ideas of true Anthroposophical Spiritual Science and there may be a certain justification for this when they listen to speeches of those who do not seriously penetrate to the heart of the teaching but give utterance to abstract theories—man consists of such and such, there are repeated earthly lives, and so forth. All these things are of course full of significance and beauty, but the point is that we must penetrate to the heart of the particular subjects and the various spheres of life of which we speak.

In the very widest sense, the Spiritual-Scientific mode of thinking leads to a social, communal consciousness among men. For when people are able to perceive, on the one hand, how a soul that is sick sends its impulses into the organism, when they really understand the connection between the organism and the soul that is sick, and when they know how the general ordering of life affects the health of human beings—then the position of each individual in the community will be quite different. A true understanding of his fellow-creatures will arise in man and he will treat them quite differently. He will make allowances for the particular characters of those around him, knowing that the one possesses certain qualities and the other quite different qualities. He will learn how to respond to all the variations, how to make the best use of the different temperaments in human society and above all how to unfold and develop them in the true sense.

One domain of life in particular will be healthily influenced by such a knowledge of human nature—I refer to the domain of education. Without a comprehensive knowledge of the human being we simply cannot, for instance, measure the consequences of allowing our children to sit in school with bent backs so that they never breathe properly, or never teaching them to utter the vowel and consonant sounds clearly and definitely. As a matter of fact, the whole of later life depends on whether the child at school breathes in the right way and whether it is taught to articulate clearly and consciously. This is merely said by way of example, for the same thing applies in other domains. It is, however, an illustration of the application of general hygienic principles in the sphere of education. The whole social significance of hygiene is revealed in this example.

It is also apparent that instead of further specialisation, life is calling out for the specialised branches of knowledge to be brought together to form a comprehensive conception of life. We need something more than educational rules according to which the teacher is supposed to instruct the child. We need something that makes the teacher realise what it means if he helps the child to speak articulately and clearly, or the consequences that will ensue if he allows the child to catch its breath after only half a sentence or line has been spoken, and does not see to it that all the air is used up while the sentence is being uttered.

There are of course many such principles. A right appreciation and practice of them will only develop when we are able to measure their full significance for human life and social health—for only then will they give rise to a social impulse.

We need teachers who are able to educate children on the basis of a conception of the world that understands the true being of man. This was the thought underlying the Course I gave to the teachers when the Waldorf School at Stuttgart was founded. All the principles of the art of education as expounded in that Course strive in the direction of making men and women out of the children who are being educated—men and women in whom lungs, liver, heart, stomach, will be healthy in later life because, in childhood, they were helped to develop their life-functions in the right way, because, in effect, the soul worked in the right way. This conception of the world will never give a materialistic interpretation of the old saying, Mens sana in corpore sano. Interpreted in the materialistic sense this means: If the body is healthy, if it has been made healthy by all kinds of physical methods, then it will of itself be the bearer of a healthy soul. Now this is pure nonsense. The only real meaning of the phrase is this: a healthy body bears witness to the fact that the force of healthy soul has built it up, moulded it, made it healthy. A healthy body proves that a healthy soul has worked within it. That is the right interpretation of the phrase—and only in this sense can it be a principle of true hygiene.

In other words: it is not enough to have, as well as the school teachers who are working merely from an abstract science of education, a school doctor who turns up perhaps once a fortnight, goes through the school and has no idea how really to help. No, what we need is a living connection between medical science and the art of education. We need an art of education that teaches and instructs the children in a way conducive to real health. This is the element that makes hygiene a social question. For the social question is essentially an educational question, and this in turn a medical question—but only in the sense of a medicine, of a hygiene permeated with Spiritual Science.

These things lead us on to something else of extraordinary significance in our theme. For when we really enter Spiritual Science, when it becomes concrete in us, we know that we receive from it something more than the intellectualism of natural science, history or jurisprudence. (All sciences to-day are intellectualistic; even if they claim to be based on practical experience this simply means that they interpret intellectually the results of the experiences of the senses.) Now the content of Spiritual Science differs essentially from these intellectualistic results of natural science and other branches of modern culture. We should be in a sorry plight if all that lives in our intellectualistic culture were not merely a picture but an actual power working deeply into human beings. Intellectualism remains merely on the surface of man's being—and I use this phrase in its comprehensive sense. There are people who only study Spiritual Science intellectually, who make mental notes—there is a physical body, etheric body, astral body, Ego, reincarnation, karma and the like. They put it all into pigeon holes as is the custom in modern natural or social science but they are not sincerely devoting themselves to Spiritual Science when they think like this. They are simply carrying over their ordinary mode of thought to what they find in Spiritual Science. The essential thing about Spiritual Science is that it must be conceived, felt and experienced not in an intellectualistic way, but quite differently. It is for this reason that by its very nature Spiritual Science has a living, vital relation to the human being in health and disease, but a relation altogether different from what is often imagined.

People must by now have realised to their cost the powerlessness of purely intellectual culture to deal with those who are suffering from so-called mental disease. The sufferer will tell you, for instance, that he hears voices speaking to him. No matter what intellectual reasoning you use with him—it is all useless, for he will know how to make all manner of objections. You may be sure of that! Even this might be an indication that in such a case one has to do, not with a disease of the conscious or unconscious life of soul but with a disease of the organism. Spiritual Science teaches, moreover, that one cannot get to grips with these so-called mental and psychical diseases by the kinds of methods that have recourse, for instance, to hypnotism, suggestion and the like, but that one must approach mental disease by “physical” means—by healing the organs of man, and this is exactly where a spiritual knowledge of the human being is all-essential, Spiritual knowledge recognises that so-called mental diseases cannot be affected by methods that are of a “spiritual” or “psychical” nature, because, in effect, this kind of illness arises from the fact that the spiritual member of man's being has been pressed outwards (as is otherwise the case only in sleep). As a consequence, the spiritual member is weak and we must proceed to cure the bodily organ in order that the soul and Spirit may be received into it again in a healthy way.

Now Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition which proceed, not from the intellect alone but from the whole being of man as the outcome of Spiritual Science—penetrate into the whole organism. In short, true Spiritual Science penetrates with health-bringing force into the physical organisation of man.

The fact that certain dreamy people feel ill or showsigns of the reverse of health in their spiritual-scientificactivities is no proof that this statement is false. There are so many who are not really spiritual scientists at all but who simply amass with their intellects collectionsof notes upon the results of Spiritual Science. The promulgation of the real substance of Spiritual Science is in itself a social hygiene, for it works upon the whole being of man and regularises his organic functions when they show signs of deviating from the normal either to the side of morbid dreaming or the reverse. Here we have the essential difference between the content of Spiritual Science and that of merely intellectualistic science. The concepts arising in the domain of intellectualism are muchtoo “bloodless”—because they are merely analogies to get to grips with the being of man and work healthily upon him. The concepts of Spiritual Science, on the other hand, have themselves arisen from a knowledge of the whole being of man. Lungs, heart, liver the whole being and not the brain alone—have collaborated in the building up of spiritual-scientific concepts. Inherentwithin them, penetrating them with a plastic formativeforce, are elements which proceed from the whole beingof man. And this is the sense in which Spiritual Sciencecan enter and give direction to hygiene as a social concern.

In many other ways too—for I can only indicate certain examples—Spiritual Science will be able, when it gains a firm footing in the world, to lay down guiding lines for the life of humanity in the sphere of health.

Let me here give just one brief indication. The great difference between the human organisation in waking and sleeping life is one of the subjects to which Spiritual Science has again and again to return. Howthe Spirit and soul act in waking life, how and when they permeate each other in the body, soul and Spirit of man—how they act when they are temporarily separated fromeach other in sleep—all these things are conscientiously studied by Spiritual Science. Here I can do no more than refer to a certain principle, but it is nevertheless a well-founded deduction of Spiritual Science.

Certain epidemics appear in life—illnesses that affect whole masses of the population and are therefore essentially a social concern. Ordinary materialistic science studies these illnesses by examining the physical organism of man. It knows nothing of the tremendous effect which the abnormal attitude of human beings to waking and sleeping life has upon epidemics and the susceptibility to epidemic diseases. Certain things take place in the organism during sleep and if they run to excess, they strongly predispose the human being to so-called epidemic diseases. Men and women who set organic processes in action as the result of too much sleep—I mean processes that ought not to take place, because waking life must not be broken up by such lengthy periods of sleep—these people have a much stronger predisposition to epidemic diseases and are less able to resist them.

Now you can well realise what it would mean to explain the right proportions of sleeping and waking life. These things cannot be dictated. You can of course tell people that they must not send children with scarlatina to school, but you cannot tell them in the same way that they ought to get, say, seven hours of sleep. And yet it is much more important than any prescription, that people who need it should have seven hours of sleep and others for whom this is not necessary, should sleep much less—and so forth.

These matters, which are so intimately connected with the personal life of human beings, have a very great bearing and effect upon social life. How the social effects come about, whether a larger or smaller number of people are obliged owing to illness to be absent from their work, whether or not a whole region is affected—all these things depend upon the most intimate details of man's life. Hygiene here plays an immeasurably important part in social life. No matter what people may think about infection or non-infection—this element is none the less a factor in epidemics. And here external regulations are of no avail; the only thing that will avail is to educate, within human society, men and women who are able to meet the doctors who are trying to explain prophylactic measures, with understanding. This can give rise to an active co-operation for the preservation of health between the doctors who understand the technique of their profession, and the laity who understand the nature of the human being. ... It is, of course, not the laity nor the amateurs who will do the healing, but reasonable human beings will bring understanding to meet the professional medical men who tell them this or that. If he understands the human being—and this understanding can be developed in social life in collaboration with the doctor—the layman can form an intelligent idea of technical science and then, in democratic Parliaments he can say “Aye” with a certain understanding and not because of the pressure of authority. The sphere of hygiene can become a social concern in the true sense if it is made fruitful by a science of medicine enriched by Spiritual Science. In short, hygiene can become in the real sense, and to a high degree, an affair of the people, of the democracy.

• 1. Dr. Steiner is referring to a number of lectures given by various scientists during the Medical Course at the Goetheanum.

To-day I want to speak of the spiritual powers and beings that live in man's environment. They are super-sensible powers and beings we cannot perceive them with our senses; nevertheless they are there, and they play their part in our earthly existence. The things that take place among such spiritual beings, the dealings they have with one another, are of course altogether different from the actions and deeds of man during his earthly life; it is therefore difficult to tell in human language, which has been created expressly for human conditions and human relationships, about the nature and activities of these super-sensible Intelligences, these super-sensible beings. Since, however, it is important that these things should in our age, be brought to man's knowledge, we must speak of them in the only way that is possible,—namely, in pictures. This will mean that I shall frequently describe things as if I were referring to human conditions and relationships. The things that are told in this way will be quite true and correct; only, since the language has to be borrowed from human relationships, the truth will be presented in a picture.

We have around us, to begin with, the world of Nature in her various kingdoms, mineral, plant and animal,—and we may also add to these the human kingdom, in so far as man's physical being is concerned. Behind Nature lies a kind of second Nature,—a spiritual, super-sensible Nature. The first, the Nature to which we are accustomed, man perceives with his senses. The super-sensible Nature that is behind, he does not perceive. It has, for all that, a great influence upon him.

And then we have to recognise that we human beings have something of physical Nature also within us. When we look within, we perceive this physical nature in our instincts and our passions. These are of course astral, but they rise up from the physical Nature. And this physical Nature that we have within us and that we perceive in our instincts and urges and passions, has again—this time we have to say beneath it, a kingdom of beings, who are intimately connected with man, but are really sub-human.

Thus, looking around us with the help of our senses, we behold the surface of Nature, her external appearance; and behind it we have to divine the presence of a super-sensible nature. When on the other hand we look within and perceive ourselves in our instincts and passions, then we have to divine beneath these the presence of a subsensible Nature.

The super-sensible Nature that is around us can be understood and appreciated only by one who is equipped with spiritual insight, and who is not always focusing attention, as Natural Science does to-day, on the strict laws of Nature and on what takes place within their framework. For Natural Science, as we know, is concerned with the investigation of what takes place in accordance with firm laws of Nature. The super-sensible that is behind external Nature will never reveal itself to these researches. It will however become manifest when we have learned to look with keen and discerning spiritual vision upon things which are not to be explained by natural law, but are generally regarded as subject to chance.

Of this character are the phenomena of the weather, all the irregularities of the atmosphere throughout, the four seasons of the year. If you stop to consider, for example, in detail how a London fog [There was an unusual thick fog in London during Dr. Steiner's visit at this time.] takes its course, you will perhaps find that in its main events you can trace the working of certain laws. You will not however be able to do this for all its continual changes and movements. When it comes to the particular single phenomena of wind and weather, there we are inclined to say that we are at the mercy of chance. You can of course read in the newspapers a description of what kind of weather we are likely to have in the near future, but you will not build upon it with certainty with which you rely on the sun rising tomorrow morning. Phenomena which show the working of natural law are in quite another category from the phenomena of wind and weather, which are more or less generally ascribed to the working of chance. People can and do acquire a certain prophetic gift in regard to these phenomena, but this prophetic gift cannot be given to place within the framework of natural law, it has more the character of inspiration or intuition.

As a matter of fact, beings live in all the various manifestations of wind and weather,—beings who are only not seen because they lack a body that is visible to the senses. They are present and alive, notwithstanding. The beings who live in wind and weather have a body that consists of air and warmth, a body that has in it no water—no fluidity, that is, of any kind—and no solid earth; it consists of nothing but air and warmth. And this body is continually undergoing sudden changes. At one moment it will assume form and shape, then again it will dissolve and pass away. The changing cloud formations that we observe in the sky, the play of the currents of the wind,—these are not the body, which remains more hidden, they are but the outer expression, the deeds, of the beings of whom I speak. When therefore we look out into the atmosphere which surrounds our Earth, and within which we ourselves are living, we have there around us a world of beings, who are composed merely of air and warmth. They are of the same kind as the beings whom I have called in my books and frequently spoken of in lectures as the Luciferic beings.

Now these beings have a specific end in view in regard to man. Notwithstanding the fact that they inhabit an element which we often find far from agreeable and pleasant—living, as we have said, in the weather!—these beings attach great value to the moral element in the human social order. So highly do they prize it, that in their opinion it would be best for man not to have a physical body at all—not, at any rate, a body that partakes of the watery or earthly elements. If they could have formed man in their own way, they would have made of him a moral being, pure and simple. Man would not of course in that case have had freedom, he would have been moral without being inwardly free. As it is these beings wage a fearful battle in the course of the year, struggling to wrest man away from the Earth and draw him into their own sphere. They would like him to be cut off from the Earth,—a complete stranger to it. On this account they are particularly dangerous for people who are inclined to any kind of visionary idealism or vague mysticism. Such persons readily fall a prey to these beings who seek to entice man away from the Earth and endow him with a kind of angel nature, so that under no circumstances shall he find himself tempted to be otherwise than purely moral.

Strange therefore and paradoxical as it may sound, dear friends,—inhabiting the forces that pulsate through the encircling air in all the vagaries of wind and weather, are beings who, abhorring human freedom and desiring nothing better than its complete annihilation, want to make man a moral automaton, want to make of him indeed a kind of good angel. And they fight hard to attain their end; to use an earthly expression, they wage war to the teeth.

In addition to these beings who build, as it were, their strongholds in the air—do not cavil at the word, I told you. I am obliged to speak in pictures—there are also beings of a contrary nature, to whom I alluded in my last lecture in another connection. And this latter class of beings has to do with all that comes to expression in man's instinctive urges and impulses, in his desires and passions. You must not however think of them as belonging first and foremost to man. In man we can see the results of their activity. But they have their home, so to speak, right on the Earth. Only we cannot see them, for these beings too have not a body that is formed in such a way as to be visible to us. They have, in fact, a body that lives entirely in the elements of earth and water. And their deeds are to be seen in the ebb and flow of the tides, in volcanic eruptions and in earthquakes. Natural Science, as is well-known, can find no satisfactory explanation for these phenomena. One who has keen spiritual perception can however see behind them a world of sub-human beings, who are under the control of the powers to which I have always given the name of the Ahrimanic powers.

Now, these Ahrimanic powers also cherish a particular aim as regards man. With the help of their various sub-spirits, which inhabit the earth and water elements of our Earth and can, for example, be recognised even in the kobolds or brownies of fairy lore—aided by these, the Ahrimanic powers have set themselves to carry out another and a different project.

If one considers these Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings by themselves, just as they are, one cannot, you know, be angry with them. Why be angry with the Luciferic beings, for instance? They want to make man into a being who is moral entirely as a matter of course. What could be better? Man would, it is true, never under their influence be free, he would be an automaton; but what they seek and desire for him can nevertheless be truthfully described as good.

Now let us see what is the aim of these other beings, who build their strongholds immediately below the surface of the Earth, and whose activities rise up into man’s metabolism,—for the phenomena we observe in the tides and less frequently in volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are always present also in the ebb and flow in man's metabolism. Whilst the Luciferic spirits build, as we said, their strongholds in the air, in order to fight for the moral—as against the earthly—element in man, the Ahrimanic beings struggle to harden man; they want to make him like themselves. Were they to be successful, man would become extremely clever in the material realm—incredibly clever and intelligent. They cannot achieve their end directly, but they aim at doing so indirectly. And their efforts, which have actually been going on for thousands of years, have in fact succeeded in producing a whole race of sub-human beings. Their method is as follows.

Suppose a man has strong and rude instincts. These beings will clutch at his instinctive nature and seize hold of it. The man then falls victim to the Ahrimanic powers. He is completely given up to his passions and leads a wild and dissolute life. When a man has in this way become a prey, during his earthly life, to the Ahrimanic powers, then these powers will be able to hold on to his instinctive nature and tear it out of him after death. There exists already on the Earth a whole population of beings who have arisen in this way. They are there, in the elements of earth and water, a sub-human race. And then what is it the Ahrimanic powers intend with this sub-human race? As we have seen, they draw out of a human being his instinctive nature and make of it an earth-and-water being. These earth-water beings inhabit the strata immediately below the surface of the Earth; and those who go down into mines, if they are able to look with spiritual vision, are quite familiar with them. They are beings that have been snatched out of man in the moment of death. And with what ultimate aim? Ahriman is waiting. The Ahrimanic powers are waiting for the time when men will descend to incarnation and, on account of a karma that their instincts and passions have prepared for them, feel particularly drawn to certain of these beings and say to themselves: “I will not go back to the spiritual world; when I have left my physical body”—out of which, as you know, man generally goes forth to a super-sensible life—“I will incorporate myself in a subsensible being of this kind. And that will mean, I shall be able to stay on the Earth. I shall not die any more, but be permanently united with the Earth. Yes, I will choose to be a subsensible being.”

It may sound incredible—and indeed it is astonishing, considering how extraordinary clever they are,—but it is a fact that the Ahrimanic beings persist in believing they will ultimately be able in this way to entice such a vast number of human beings into their own race that the Earth will one day be peopled entirely with such Ahrimanic sub-human beings. By this means they hope to make the Earth itself immortal, so that the hour may never come for it to perish and be dispersed in cosmic space.

We have thus around us in our earthly environment two hosts of beings; one in the air, that wants to make man moral but to lift him away from the Earth, and then we have also, immediately below the surface of the Earth, the Ahrimanic beings who want to draw man down and fasten him permanently to the Earth.

When we come to consider the relation in which these two classes of beings stand to one another, we find that in the mineral kingdom, in the plant kingdom, in the animal kingdom, and even in the human kingdom as it is by nature before man’s passions and desires begin to get the better of him, the two classes of beings have perforce to agree, they must bear with one another. In a remote primeval past the Godhead who is called in the Christian religion the Father God, established peace in this respect. Peace was established by the Father God for minerals, plants and animals, and also for man in his animal nature, in so far as he does not allow himself to be perverted and contaminated by passion and desire.

Take up in your hand a crystal, or any other mineral, or again a plant; you will not find that in that crystal or plant any conflict is taking place between these two classes of beings. But the moment you direct your observation to a man whose body is permeated and suffused with soul, you will at once discern signs of their conflict. The Luciferic beings are saying to Ahriman: “We promised the Father God that we would not fight nor do battle for the minerals, the plants, the animals, nor for man so long as he remained an unconscious being as in olden times and had not acquired the power of reflection, but lived more like an animal; but as for men who have acquired self-consciousness—for them we will fight to the teeth.” And it is so: a fearful war is waged all the time between the air-fire beings and the earth-water beings; they fight to get possession of man. And it is important that man should be aware of this war that is perpetually being waged for him; he must not be blind to it. In our day we have advanced far in our knowledge of external Nature. Here, as we have seen, the conditions are quite different; here the Luciferic beings live at peace with the Ahrimanic. But man's knowledge does not reach to that which lies behind the world of the senses, does not reach to super-sensible Nature, nor has he any knowledge of sub-human Nature. And these two realms harbour beings who carry on, as I have said, a terrible warfare, fighting for the possession of man.

*

The Being who in the Old Testament is called Jahve, has his seat—I need not remind you of what I said at the beginning of the lecture about the use of such expressions—has his seat in the Moon. That is to say, Jahve is that spiritual Being in the Cosmos who finds expression in the physical phenomena of the Moon. And in the whole ordering of the world this Being has the following task to perform.

When man is descending from the divine spiritual world in order that he may clothe himself in a body, then it is Jahve who leads him down to Earth. Nor does the Jahve Being lose all part in man's life when man has already come to Earth; he takes in hand the ordering of everything that is connected with generation. The Jahve Being, who has his seat in the Moon and who leads man down to Earth, claims control in man over all that has to do with the instincts and impulses of generation.

The process of generation cannot however be regular or regulated by itself, for it is connected with the other instincts and impulses. Consequently, the Jahve Being needs helpers, he needs beings who will, for instance, regulate the instincts connected with eating and drinking, and bring these into harmony with the instincts of generation. He needs helpers who will in fact see to the ordering of the whole instinctive life of man. And Jahve—the Moon God, if we may call him so—finds such helpers in Mercury and Venus.

A kind of compact has been made in the spiritual universe between the Moon,—that is, the Jahve Being and the beings that dwell with him in the Moon—and Mercury and Venus, And it is the will and concern of the beings who have joined together in this way, to control, from Moon, Mercury and Venus, the whole flesh-and-blood nature of man. Man is by no means merely an earthly being; influences play into him from the whole great Universe.

Turning now again to the beings whom I called Ahrimanic and who have their stronghold just below the surface of the Earth—the earth-water beings—how do these compare with Jahve and the Mercury and Venus beings? What place is assigned to them in the world order? They are not ripe to take up their abode in a heavenly body, in the way that Jahve has his abode in the Moon, and his helpers in Mercury and Venus. No, these Ahrimanic beings are doomed to look for a dwelling place just below the surface of the Earth, You will accordingly not be surprised to find that it is not with the air-fire beings alone that these earth-water beings feel themselves in opposition, but particularly also with Jahve and with the powers of Venus and Mercury. And this, notwithstanding the fact that they are themselves devoid of morality. (Man's instinctive nature, being regulated by Jahve from outside and beyond the Earth, is thereby subject to another rulership than that of the aforesaid ‘moral’ beings, but it would not under this rulership become immoral). The Ahrimanic beings wage war continually on Jahve and on the Venus and Mercury powers, and are determined to usurp from Jahve his rightful sovereignty. For it is owing to the rightful sovereignty of Jahve that the human race as we know it has come into existence on the Earth; it needed the powers of Moon and also of Mercury and Venus for this to be accomplished.

In a spirit of retaliation, the Ahrimanic beings are founding—over against the Jahve race, which is mankind—this other race of which I have been telling you. And a prime means for them to attain their end is the device I explained in our last lecture. You will remember I told you how they approach man in his sleep and say to him: “Good is evil; evil is good,” Man hearkens to this all too easily when he is asleep, and then he brings it back with him into his physical and his ether-body. The Ahrimanic beings are confident they will be able to achieve their end by means of these vicious whisperings.

Man should, you see, depend entirely—in his lower nature—on the Moon, Venus and Mercury powers. The lower nature of man is not in itself evil or degenerate; it is so only because powers that are antagonistic to Jahve insinuate themselves into it in the manner I have described. What Jahve would desire is that these earth-water beings should express themselves merely in the ebb and flow of the tides, in volcanic eruptions, in earthquakes. But they strain every nerve to establish themselves also in man, to make their presence felt in man too; and not content with attacking there the air-fire beings, they launch their attacks with particular force against Jahve and his helpers.

Man therefore finds himself placed right in the very midst of a conflict. On one side are ranged Jahve and his hosts, who are fighting for righteousness; on the other side the hosts of Ahriman, who, in respect of cleverness, far outstrip man, and whose concern it is utterly to repudiate man’s moral nature and make him into a sheer automaton of cleverness.

Such then are the influences that stream up from earth and water, and work in man. For man is obliged to eat of the products of earth and water; he cannot nourish himself on air, nor live on warmth alone!

In the other direction are the beings who incorporate themselves in air and warmth. These also, like the enemies of Jahve, are immature. And the corresponding mature beings are in their case beings who dwell on Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And so we find these air-fire beings making sallies from their strongholds not only upon the Ahrimanic powers, but upon the influences that should be continually reaching man from Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Now, the influences of these more distant planets,—or rather, of their spiritual beings—are to be found particularly in the eyes, in the ears,—in short, in the sense organs of man. So that, whilst Moon and Venus exercise their influence in the interior organs of man's body, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars work on man's exterior, work in his sense organs. The influences, for example, of Saturn are to be met with primarily in the human eye.

These beings,—Saturn beings, Jupiter beings and Mars beings—have it as their special concern to make man a real Earth man; that is to say, they want first to give him senses that are properly inserted into the human organism and that remain at its surface, and then to supply him with nerves that run from the senses and extend inwards into the organism. Saturn gives the senses, Jupiter gives their continuation in the nerves, and Mars exerts the kind of control that endows man, for example, with the faculty of speech. The whole aim and purpose of these beings is to furnish man with all that is on the surface of his body. For the senses, and the nerves too, have come about through a ‘turning outside in’ of the human skin.

Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars are however resisted in their activities by the air-fire beings of whom we were speaking. Here again, a furious fight goes on all the time. The air-fire beings sit fast, so to speak, in their airy strongholds and display their power and might in the fiery flashes of the lightning. They would like to make the whole of man what he should properly be on the surface only, so that the entire physical being of man should partake of the nature that is actually assigned only to eye and ear and nose. They would like to pour the surface of man's organism right through him, to make him all surface, so that he would do nothing but see and hear,—never eat nor drink, but only see and hear, be in fact a kind of angel being.

The Mars, Jupiter and Saturn beings, who work as we have seen in man's senses, acquit themselves most praise-worthily—if I may employ the expression in speaking of such sublime beings—in the world of external nature. For they permeate what to our eyes appears mere Nature, with morality. In this manner they bring morality to man; for it is actually so, morality enters into us through the senses. When therefore the air-fire beings seek to permeate man through and through with his sense nature, it is with the intention that man, seeing nothing but what is moral, may become a moral automaton.

If we look out on the world of Nature, we can know that whatever manifests as forces in that world comes from the Mars beings, whatever manifests as natural law from the Jupiter beings, and whatever manifests as colour and sound from the Saturn beings. And the air-fire beings would have man become nothing but force, law (that is to say, thought), colour and sound. They want man not to have a physical body at all, but to be insubstantial, rarefied; they would like him to be, as we said, an angel being.

And so you see, whilst in external nature. Moon, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn live at peace with one another and are held in balance by the Sun, they wage a double fight for the possession of man. First of all, there is the conflict that goes on between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic beings; and then we have on the one hand, the fight that is put up by the Luciferic beings against the planetary forces beyond the Sun,—the Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn influences—whilst on the other hand the Ahrimanic forces are waging war on the influences that proceed from Moon, Venus and Mercury.

Behind Nature and within man the hard-fought battle goes on; and it is with this conflict raging all around him that man has to press forward in his development and win his freedom. In an older time man had the teaching of the Mysteries to aid him on his path; now he must turn to what spiritual investigation can tell him concerning what lies behind Nature and below man. For ignorance on these matters would inevitably lead to the deterioration and ruin of mankind.

You will have seen, my dear friends, from the descriptions I have given you, that the beings we are accustomed to call Luciferic and Ahrimanic, are particularly highly developed in respect of certain qualities—the Luciferic beings, namely, in morality, and the Ahrimanic in cleverness and intelligence. And yet both these classes of beings never relinquish the belief that they will one day achieve their ends, and they are therefore always ready to begin the fight over again. For, time after time, when they think they are on their way to success, they experience frustration and disappointment. So that when a modern initiate encounters such beings behind Nature or below man, he sees how on the one hand they will not be deterred, but press forward again and again to their goal with renewed confidence in ultimate victory, and then how, on the other hand, they are perpetually being frustrated. This kind of being may indeed be said to live in a mood that oscillates between jubilation and triumph on the one side and constantly recurring disappointment on the other.

I will show you how this can be observed in particular instances. Let us see, in the first place, how the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings suffer disillusionment through what happens with the physical part of man's being. One can form a very good impression of the disappointments that await Lucifer and Ahriman in this connection, when one pays a visit to one of our hospitals or asylums. Sickness, whether in mind or body, means disappointment for Lucifer or Ahriman. These beings are, you see, fighting a battle to get possession of the nature of man. But it does not help them at all, if within man's nature one of them gains a victory over the other. The situation is different if Ahriman gains a victory over the Moon Godhead; or again, if the air-fire beings gain a victory over Jupiter, Mars and Saturn. Such victories are, however, always incomplete. They can only become complete if reinforced by some success that the Luciferic or Ahrimanic beings achieve in their own mutual conflict. But, as a matter of fact, by far the greater number of these successes are only apparent; hence the disillusion that ensues. Let us suppose for a moment that the Ahrimanic powers were victorious in the physical body of some person, victorious, that is, over the Luciferic powers who try to permeate man throughout with what should by rights be only on the surface, only in the senses. The result would be that the person would succumb to illnesses producing tumours or carcinoma, or else to illnesses of the metabolism, such as diabetes. Whenever an illness of this description shows itself in a man's physical nature, it means that Ahriman has won a victory over Lucifer. Since however, as a result, that physical nature is temporarily ruined, it is of course of no use to Ahriman; he cannot possibly pull up out of it the man's instincts and impulses in order to create from these a race of his own.

We have in this way arrived at a perhaps paradoxical, but nevertheless correct picture of illness. Illness is in very many cases the sole means left to the good Powers, to rescue man from the fangs of Ahriman.

If on the other hand Lucifer gains a victory in a man's physical nature over the Ahrimanic powers, who would like to harden man and drag him down into their race of earth-water beings,—if Lucifer gains a victory over these powers, then the person concerned succumbs to illnesses of a catarrhal nature, or else to insanity. Once again, for Lucifer this time, the victory turns out to be quite indecisive.

The Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers, who work unceasingly with all their might for the attainment of their ends, are thus compelled to turn away sad and disappointed from beds of sickness, from hospitals and from mental asylums. These show them all too clearly that though they may continue to carry on their fight, they cannot ever be really victorious.

And now, if you are able to look with real insight into man's etheric nature,—not merely into his physical, but into his etheric nature—you will find there too, occasion for disappointment to the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. For when the Luciferic powers are victorious over the Ahrimanic in the ether-body, then the person becomes a liar, he becomes an habitual liar. In that case he is obviously not moral; and so he falls out of the world within which Lucifer would like to secure him. Instead of making him a moral automaton, Lucifer has turned him into a liar. And, strange as it may seem, the fact that the person becomes addicted to lying is a weapon in the hands of the good Powers, to aid them in rescuing him from Lucifer. For when someone turns liar,—well, that can be ameliorated in the further course of karma; whereas if Lucifer were really to gain the victory he seeks, the Earth would lose that human soul, it would soar right away above the Earth. If, on the other hand, Ahriman were to conquer, or come near to conquering, in the ether body, then the person would become possessed—possessed by his own cleverness. And since he is inwardly possessed by it, the cleverness must needs remain within him. It has hold of him; his ether-body is absolutely charged with it. And so there is no possibility for Ahriman to draw out the instincts and impulses; they are stuck fast in the ether-body, because the person is possessed by his cleverness. Here too, then, will be plenty of opportunity for Lucifer and Ahriman to experience bitter frustration and disappointment, when addiction to lying, or on the other hand, obsession follows as a consequence of their apparent victories.

Let us now see what can happen with the astral body. Suppose the Ahrimanic powers come near to being victorious in the astral body. The person in question will in this case tend to become an out-and-out egoist. But that will mean that he, as an egoist, keeps fast hold of his instincts, and there will be no chance for Ahriman to snatch them away. So once more, Ahriman's prize escapes him. Suppose on the other hand, Lucifer nearly gains a victory. Then the person is liable to turn into a dreamer in the astral body, to become an ego-less dreamer, who is, as one says, “not in his right mind.” Such things happen; it can well be that people succumb, if only for a time, to such a condition. The Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers are thus subject to disillusionment on earth in many directions.

But do you see in what a critical situation man stands to-day? In olden times it was different. Let us look back and see how things were for man in the past. The first great teachers in the Mysteries were messengers of the Father God. They had disciples, the Gurus; and then there were the Chelas who were disciples of a second grade, for they were disciples of the Gurus. The highest Gurus however received their instruction direct from the messengers of the Father God, And these messengers of the Father God were able to find remedies with which to heal man. Illnesses are, as we have seen, the occasion of deep disappointment and frustration to Ahriman and Lucifer, so much so that they leave these beings quite benumbed and bewildered. For, outstandingly clever and moral as the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings are, just because their consciousness is so particularly keen and wide-awake, they are all the more liable to suffer a clouding of it; and so the messengers of the Father God were on this account able to approach the sick person undisturbed by Lucifer and Ahriman, and could then find the remedy for the illness. I told you last time, you will remember, how an illness due to Saturn influence could be cured with a remedy taken from the Moon, and so on. This, then, is how things were in the time of the ancient Mysteries. The messengers of the Father God were able to intervene directly and extricate man from the confusion in which he finds himself owing to the fight which is going on, as, I have explained to you, all the time, behind Nature and below man.

My dear friends, the confusion that reigns within man to-day is no whit less than it was in olden times. That man is unaware of it makes no difference, the confusion is there, just the same. Man is perpetually being torn and tossed, this way and that, while the powers behind Nature and below himself fight to get possession of him. And when one crosses the Threshold and, looking consciously into the spiritual world, observes this terrific battle that is going on, this complicated game that is being played with man as the prize, then one may look now in vain for the messengers of God who in an earlier age would come forward with the staff of Mercury, for example, and with other symbols of that nature, ready to give them into the hands of the Mystery doctors, who could then use them to bring healing to man. At the present time, when you cross the Threshold, you find yourself only in the midst of the terrific conflict of which we have spoken, between beings of the upper planets who have remained behind in their evolution,—immature Mars, Jupiter and Saturn beings—and beings of the lower planets who have remained behind,—immature Moon, Mercury and Venus beings. Like two armed encampments they stand facing one another; on one side, the air-fire beings,—Saturn, Jupiter and Mars beings that have failed and fallen out of their true evolution; and on the other side, facing them, the earth-water beings,—Moon, Mercury and Venus beings who have also failed and fallen behind. And there, beyond the Threshold, the fight goes on with such fury that the Sun becomes first of all fiery and aflame, and then grows darker and darker, until at last it shows like a terrible black disk. It was not so for the initiates of long ago. They saw right through the black disk; and from the direction of the black disk itself came towards them the messengers of God, of the Father God, who were also in those times the bearers of the knowledge of healing. But for us, when we cross the Threshold and see before us the terrific battle and behold how the Sun becomes fiery red and then black,—for us, the Sun remains black, it remains a black disk. And we are rebuffed, we are turned back; for if we men of modern times are to find our way amid all this confusing and perplexing conflict, it is on the Earth that we must look for help.

And then, my dear friends, then we are guided to turn our eyes to the Christ. Christ stands before us, the Spirit Being who, through the Mystery of Golgotha, united Himself with the Earth. And He says to us: Be not dismayed that the Sun has become black; it is black because I, the God of the Sun, am no longer in it; for I have come down and united myself with the Earth.

And if, with inner devotion, and with quick and sensitive recognition of all that a knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha can bring, we draw near to Christ, and then the Sun does not, it is true, become bright again, it remains the black disk that it was, but the Sun begins to make audible for us what Christ is saying to us. And this experience reveals to us the relationship of Christ with the Sun. Yes, the Sun, although still a black disk, becomes a being who enables us to listen to the Christ, if we are duly prepared and approach Him in the right mood and attitude of soul.

And it is the Christ who provides now for man the means of reconciliation so that in man too the upper then the lower powers may be reconciled,—the powers that are above the black Sun disk and that make themselves known around our Earth as air-fire beings, and the powers that manifest as lower beings. And we can receive guidance, we men, for the healing of diseases, and for the true understanding of all the other evils that are constantly leaving Lucifer and Ahriman disappointed. Through the power of Christ and through the power of the Mystery of Golgotha we then become able to speak to these beings, and what we say to them is wonderful enough. “Ye creatures of Lucifer and Ahriman,” we say, “the disappointment and great frustration that you meet with, time and again, are due to evils of your own making, evils that are bound to arise on Earth in consequence of your own partial victories. And that must go on; for you will not cease from making people sick and ill and obsessed, nor from turning people into liars and self-seekers and ego-less dreamers. And so you have no choice but to continue this restless alternation between triumphant joy and the grief of acute disappointment.”

But as for man, if he can find the right relation to the Christ, then it will be given him not to despair, even in face of the despair of higher beings than himself,—beings however whose will it is to go another way than the way of the Gods to whom man belongs and to whom he should remain true throughout the further course of the Earth. At the centre of these sublime God Beings is the Christ Being, who spoke to the initiates of old through the Sun disk and who speaks also to us—but now from the Earth with the help of the Sun.

When therefore we speak of Christ to-day, we are speaking of One who can be at our side here on Earth as our Leader, guiding us out of the terrible conflict that the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers are waging,—with one another and with the worlds of the Upper and Lower Gods.

In my next lecture, on Sunday at 7:o'clock, I will say more of this.

Good morning, gentlemen! Do you have anything special in mind today?

Mr. Müller: Yes, a small request. The other day, the doctor talked about arsenic and about fat children. Years ago, I always saw fat children at the fair. I noticed afterwards that the children shown at the fair were no older than eight, twelve or sixteen years old. The children who were artificially raised for this purpose sometimes came from Hungary. And after what the doctor said about how easily arsenic can be found in the rocks there, I would like to ask how old such children can become, who were artificially raised with arsenic to make them fat? Would it not be possible to take legal action against

people who raise children with arsenic, and to have the law forbid it? Or is it only used in secret as a commercial source?

The doctor mentioned that people who stopped at a certain stage came down again with arsenic. This was not the case with these children; they were children who weighed almost two hundred kilograms, even though they were only about sixteen years old. Are these children not heading for a bad period after all?

Then the doctor talked about alcohol, how we also produce alcohol in our bodies, and about the different effects of alcohol. One person is terribly upset, making a fuss and so on, and the other is completely calm. It affects the next person's eyes, as it does mine. After one, two, three drinks, I have hard grains in my eyes the next morning that you can hardly crush with your fingers, as the effect of alcohol.

Then the doctor said that you could, to a certain extent, tell all of a person's illnesses by looking at their eyes. Now there are also various people who, if they only see the urine, think that they want to recognize all illnesses. They have one like that in Basel too; I wonder if that's right? I can't believe it.

Then I would like to ask whether there is anything to it when people somewhere get a medicine and they have a firm belief in it, whether that contributes to the healing?

Then I would like to talk about the penultimate statement by Dr. Steiner about fresh water. There is a pond near Darmstadt where the chemical industry is constantly discharging hot water – it even steams – and there are thousands and thousands of goldfish in this pond, and they are all completely dark red. How come? They are completely dark red.

Dr. Steiner: So the first concerns the obese children. The matter is as you rightly suspected, that these children, who are simply shown in all sorts of fairground booths as special curiosities, are artificially fattened by arsenic or similar substances (not true, many substances are similar to arsenic). They are, after all, as one could easily check, not particularly strong, but they are actually just fat, thick.

Now you see, this is something much more complicated than what I told you the other day about the consumption of arsenic by adults. What I said then applies only to adults. The adult comes into the conditions I spoke of then through the influence of arsenic. In the case of these children, however, in whom a kind of crime is actually being committed – that cannot be denied – the effect of arsenic or similar substances is based on something else. These children have to be treated in this criminal way at roughly the age that I have always indicated to you as an important stage in life: the age between changing teeth, that is, the seventh or eighth year, and sexual maturity, that is, the fourteenth or fifteenth year. And, isn't it true, at this age the child is not just sent to school, to the ordinary elementary school, because that is where he can best learn through human development, but at this age something completely different is taking place.

Do you remember, gentlemen, I told you that man does not only consist of this physical body that you can see with your eyes and touch with your hands, but that man also consists of supersensible, soul and spiritual elements. Now there is a fine body of man, which I have called the etheric body of man. In human development, one must look at this etheric body just as one looks at the physical body. If I am to draw it schematically for you, we have the human being (see drawing) according to his physical body; but around this physical body and also within it is this fine body, the etheric body. And further, in addition to this physical body and etheric body (of which the etheric body cannot be seen with the naked eye), we have the astral body in humans, which is able to feel. Plants also have an etheric body, which enables them to grow; this comes from the etheric body. Humans and animals have an astral body; they can sense and feel. Plants cannot do this. I told you that some people believe that plants can feel; they just can't!

You see, gentlemen, for every substance that has an effect on a person, you have to ask yourself: on which of these limbs does the substance in question act? Now arsenic has a particularly strong effect on the astral body and on breathing. Breathing is precisely dependent on the astral body. So when you give someone arsenic, all the consequences that arise from arsenic come about indirectly through the astral body.

When a person goes through the first years of their life, from birth, let's say until the change of teeth in the seventh or eighth year of life, the physical human body develops primarily. You can see how this physical human body develops. Look at a very young child who has just been born; you won't be able to tell whether it looks like the father or the mother. When a child is born, the aunts and uncles come, don't they? One says: Oh, it looks just like its mother — especially the feet! — the other comes and says: But it looks just like its father! — It is just like that: the little child is still undecidedly developed in relation to its physical body, and only later can you see who it will resemble. Just consider a child's nose, for example, which is such an expressive organ. A small child's nose can look quite different from what it will become later. For some children, it comes later, of course, but as a rule, by the time the teeth change, the nose, which is the last to develop into its proper shape and form, is already in its proper shape and form.

Later, after the seventh or eighth year, the physical body only grows larger and stronger in the muscles, but its actual form and shape is already established by the age of seven. So it is that between the ages of one and seven, the physical body in particular expresses itself. And between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, between the ages of seven or eight and fourteen or fifteen, the etheric body, in which the forces of nutrition and growth are found, develops primarily. And the astral body only develops between the fourteenth, fifteenth and twentieth, twenty-first years. Only then does the astral body really develop. Not that it was not there before – the human being has it from birth – but the actual formation of the astral body only occurs after the fourteenth, fifteenth year.

If an adult who has passed the fourteenth or fifteenth year is given arsenic, then they have developed their astral body. Arsenic still works in him, but the organism can still defend itself against it to some extent. However, if a child between the ages of seven and fifteen takes arsenic, the astral body is not yet formed, and arsenic takes full effect on the child. There is no counteraction at all in the human organism. And the consequence of this is that the effect of arsenic, which mainly causes the fat masses to accumulate in the human body, causing everything to become fat, causes everything to become spherical, to become wider between the seventh and fourteenth, fifteenth year.

You must bear in mind that the things I am telling you are of tremendous importance for life! Isn't it true that each of you can say: Well, you are telling us that arsenic, when given to a child between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen, has a great significance, makes the child fat, round; but I know people who, even without being given extra arsenic, became terribly fat from childhood on! Yes, gentlemen, you must only consider that the substances that exist in nature are present everywhere, at least in small quantities. And it can be said that a person cannot nourish himself at all, or a child cannot nourish himself either, without taking something that contains arsenic. Arsenic is also found in food.

Now you know that children have different tastes, different appetites; one child likes this, the other that. And now there are children who particularly love those foods that contain arsenic. In later life, it also happens that you get fat from what you like. If you eat stuff that you don't like, you'll get spindly. If you eat stuff that you like and also have time to indulge in, you will become stout and fat. However, this is especially the case with children; and it is especially the case with children between the ages of seven and fourteen or fifteen. So if children have such a taste for food that contains arsenic, they will become stout and fat. But in the case of those children who are exhibited in fairground booths, at trade fairs and the like – as the questioner has mentioned – the arsenic is artificially introduced, just as it is in the Alpine countries, and in Hungary, where arsenic is found in the rocks of the mountains. So these children are taught about arsenic, and the main thing is that the child acquires a taste for arsenic at precisely this age. It is horrible, but it is true: the child gradually begins to crave this arsenic as if it were sugar, and consumes it, and as a result, before the astral body is properly formed, the child becomes fat and plump. Such children can be shown because they are abnormal and gain an awful lot of weight. And then people think it is something strange. People always want to see something unusual, and what is not done to please people! There are many other things that are intended to please people. For example, there is something else that can be done with boys at the same age!

You know, at this age of sexual maturity, around the age of fourteen or fifteen, the human voice also changes. This shows that sexual maturity is connected to the human voice. In boys, it changes; in girls, it transitions more to the development of the breasts and so on. But in boys, the voice changes. Now there is the nonsense – and it was practiced in Rome with great skill – that in order to keep the voice boyish, to get a really high voice, they castrate the boys, that is, they cut out their sexual organs. This is how you get the famous choirboys with their incredibly high voices. Now, you see, that is even greater nonsense. But it is done under the guise of holiness. I don't know if you know him or not? Isn't it true that these things also exist, and one must be quite clear about the fact that there has been something like this in the world, and that people will do anything to exploit even human nature for show.

If we now consider the consequences of something like this, it is indeed the case that if a person has been taught this arsenic at a young age and then, after he has grown thick and fat, he is supposed to develop his astral body, it is now much too small for the thick body! It is much too small and weak. And the consequence of this is that when the astral body is supposed to begin to develop with sexual maturity, this astral body is indeed much too small and weak for the thick, fat body. And such children, who have been fed with arsenic in this way and dragged around to sideshows, then have an astral body that is too small. And the consequence of this is that certain organs cannot develop at all. The organs then become flabby, quite flabby. And in particular the lungs become flabby in such children. This is sometimes a terrible pity, because these children reach a state where they are actually no longer able to breathe by the age of twenty, or even earlier. This is not only because the lungs become clogged with fat, but also because the lungs become flabby and lose their strength. And then the time comes when something very special happens to the lungs. You see, gentlemen, the lungs are not just a respiratory organ, the lungs are also an important organ for nutrition, and the lungs must be properly nourished if a person is to live in the right way. Most lung diseases are not even based on the fact that breathing is not healthy, but rather they are based on the fact that the lungs are not properly nourished.

Now, in these children, from the age of seventeen or eighteen onwards, the lungs are no longer properly nourished at all, because the fatty degeneration of all organs prevents the nutrients from reaching the lungs at all. They reach the lungs last, so to speak, even though it is the lungs that need nourishing. As I have already explained, the nutrients undergo all kinds of transformations in the human body. They undergo six to seven transformations. And the lungs need these seven times transformed nutrients, the noblest things. But with these children it no longer comes to this transformation. Therefore, such children die at least in their early twenties. And one can definitely say that such children, who are exhibited in this way, must die at an age in their early twenties. They either die of exhaustion or they get lung disease. They usually die of lung disease. This is related to what you said about the fact that you no longer see such people later because they die earlier.

Of course, it is difficult to take legal action against such things. People should ensure that it stops, and in general they should do more to contribute to a proper social life than just shout for the law. It is not right to just shout for the law. But I am also convinced that very few people know what I have just told you, for example. Very few people know how much more harmful arsenic is at the age at which it is administered to these children than, for example, at a later age. And I still believe that if people are educated about these things, things will improve even without laws, without coercion, without the threat of a truncheon. But how can things get better if you can't educate people!

You say: Well, we have learned little, we cannot know that; the university professors will know. Yes, but they don't know either. They just don't know. And that is why such things are not spread. And it is important that such things are really understood in the widest circles. Such things must be known at all costs.

Now, something similar, but yet again quite different, is the case with alcohol. We have already spoken about alcohol. But, in the case of arsenic poisoning, which consists of fatty degeneration, it is of course the case that children are taught it by others, and when an adult teaches themselves arsenic, they actually do so consciously. And it has to be said: education would have an enormous effect here. For example, one could say that someone who simply teaches himself about arsenic out of vanity, as I have told you, could be educated; he would probably refrain from doing so if he knew the consequences very well. With alcohol, on the other hand, the problem is that education is not particularly useful if it does not lead to a person not drinking alcohol at all. Because when he starts drinking one or two glasses, he reaches a state where education loses its effectiveness, and then he continues drinking. That is why it is so extraordinarily difficult with alcohol to achieve much through education. It should also be effective through education, and the fact that so much is resorted to by law is actually a sad fact for the strength of humanity. There are already countries today – just think of North America – where bans on alcohol imports are being enacted so that people will remain reasonable. Yes, if it comes to that with humanity, that humanity will only remain reasonable, will remain useful at all, if every single thing is prescribed by law, then humanity on earth is actually no longer worth much.

It is like this with alcohol: I have already told you that man produces alcohol in his body. This is because man needs alcohol for his preservation. And you can be sure, gentlemen, that you will never get drunk on the alcohol you produce in yourselves! It has just the right amount that you need to preserve the food in you, to permanently maintain everything that man needs permanently. You can imagine, can't you, what you need alcohol for that you produce yourself. You will also have seen here or there that if you want to preserve a dead animal or some human limb, you cannot put it in the air, but you put it in spirit, in alcohol. So alcohol preserves the dead living thing in its form. This is a very important law of nature. If you leave the dead living thing to ordinary nature, what happens to it? The human body perishes the moment it is left to the earth, it is dissolved. And so it is with all living things. The moment the etheric body is out of the living being, the living being is destroyed; only not if a substance like alcohol is used. Alcohol therefore has the power to hold together the other forces that hold a living limb together.

From this you can see that alcohol is not of this earth. Yes, but you can also see from something else that alcohol is not really of this earth at all. The human body and the animal body and the plant body are destroyed by what is of this earth; but alcohol, as they say, preserves them, keeps them, protects them from destruction.

But how is alcohol produced? Well, you just have to look at the vine. Alcohol is produced precisely where the sun can best shine on the vine. And you know that no wines thrive in northern Germany because it is already too cold there, because the sun no longer has the appropriate strength there. If you draw a line parallel to the equator at Grünberg in Silesia, very few people get drunk on the Grünberger, because it is as dry as it can possibly be! Only where the sun's power reaches the plants can wine be created. So wine is produced not by the earthly, but precisely by the extraterrestrial, the solar, by that which is outside the earth. Man must be very careful indeed when he takes into himself that which is outside the earth.

How does it come about when a person produces alcohol in himself? This comes about in the following way, and I will tell you something that will probably be of particular interest to you, but you have to pay a little attention to understand it. Do you see where there is solar power, gentlemen? Yes, solar power is everywhere where the sun shines. But solar power is not only where the sun shines; it can also be there in another way. Let's make it quite clear: on a really hot summer's day, I put the chair out there in the burning sun, leave it out there for a few hours, and then I invite you to sit on the chair. You sit on it. Gosh, you think, it's gotten warm! Well, it's not that the sun is shining on the relevant organ and warming you. If you had stood in the corresponding position for so long, it would have become as warm for you at the corresponding organ as it has become for the chair; then you would have experienced it on your own body. But that is not the case; the chair has become warm. So you see, there is a very ordinary inanimate body that has absorbed the warmth of the sun and then gives it off to you.

With coal, it is much more complicated. Thousands and thousands of years ago, the coal was a palm tree or some other tree. How did it become that? Well, there was the earth (see drawing), there was the palm tree or a palm-like tree, which was illuminated by the sun. Afterwards it perished and went into the earth. But just as the warmth of the sun remains in the chair, so the warmth of the sun remains in the palm tree, going down into the earth.

The palm tree carbonizes; the heat of the sun remains inside. And after millennia, you dig the coal out of the earth, put it in your oven, and the heat of the sun comes back to you. Today you heat with the heat of the sun that shone on the earth thousands of years ago. You often don't think about that. When you sit on a chair and it warms your backside, you are still aware of the fact that the sun has left behind some of its energy. With coal, you no longer notice it. So you have to say: wherever there is coal in the earth, there is very old solar energy. Very old solar energy is present everywhere in the coal deposits.

Yes, gentlemen, you eat plants. You take the plants into yourself. Your own organism works faster than the earth; there, coal endowed with life is transformed very quickly from the plants, and you actually get carbonic acid with a high carbon content in your own body. This carbonic acid that you have inside you, it just doesn't carbonize like the hard coal in the earth, but remains carbonic acid. Now, in carbonic acid, you have carbon, which you carry within you, and oxygen, which comes from the air and also from food. It is called carbon and oxygen. But in the human body you also have hydrogen in it, for example, when you drink water. This hydrogen combines with the carbon and the oxygen. And you only have to think of what is in the human body and what, under certain conditions, starts to get smelly. You only need to think of what is in the animal body as eggs - we talked about it recently - that gets smelly. That is the nitrogen. Only it does not stink in the air because it is connected with other substances in the appropriate way.

Now, you see, gentlemen, you go around, need oxygen, carbon, nitrogen for your life, and form alcohol inside your organism. Alcohol is formed in the human organism so that we do not always disintegrate internally. The body would dissolve, as it does as a corpse, if alcohol and alcohol-like substances were not developed. That is natural. But now we must ask: on which of these bodies does alcohol actually have an effect? You see, alcohol has an extremely beneficial effect on the physical body at first, if it is drunk in moderation, because then, if a person produces too little alcohol himself, he can take a good preservative with him in the alcohol, and alcohol does not actually harm the physical body at all. Alcohol does not have a particularly bad effect on the physical body. If alcohol were to harm the physical body – people do not consider this enough – then the vine would be in a bad way, because the vine also has a physical body. The vine is now completely drunk – it is, because it has nothing but alcohol in it – but its physical body does not suffer at all. Well, but the etheric body does not suffer from alcohol either. It is only the astral body that suffers from alcohol in adults. In the case of children, it is so harmful, as I will mention in a moment, because something else happens. But in adults, alcohol in turn affects the astral body, just like arsenic, and in particular the I itself. And the I lives in the blood circulation. So that alcohol has an extremely strong effect on the blood circulation.

It is especially bad for children because alcohol already contains an astral body. Plants have only an etheric body, but the alcohol in the grapevine already has an astral body. It has the same effect as what is seething in the blood. Can't you understand that? Yes, you can understand that: it has the same effect as what is seething in the blood. And that is why a child who drinks alcohol early on actually acquires an astral body, which it is not supposed to have fully developed until the age of fourteen or fifteen; and it does not have it under its control. This is why alcohol is particularly harmful for a child, because the child immediately acquires an astral body under the influence of alcohol.

From this you can see that alcohol actually has a real effect on the soul and spirit of a person. That is where it works. There it destroys breathing and blood circulation, which of course emanate from the soul and spirit. That is where alcohol has an effect.

Now you don't have to imagine it as if the head were an organ in itself and the chest were an organ in itself, but although the human being is tripartite, everything goes into each other again. Not only the lower part of the human body needs to be nourished, but the head of the human being needs to be nourished in a very special way. And if a person drinks alcohol and has such an abdomen that the alcohol is processed particularly well in the abdomen, let's say a person is one who can tolerate two or three glasses of alcohol quite well. I don't know if Mr. Müller wanted to say that about himself? But you can probably tolerate a small amount of alcohol quite well?

Mr. Müller denies this by saying that the first glass of beer made his eyes water the next morning.

So then it is actually the opposite for you; you can't actually tolerate any alcohol at all?

Confirmed by Mr. Müller.

Well, then you are an example of those who do not tolerate alcohol very well. Now, if someone does not tolerate alcohol well, does not actually digest alcohol very well, then the alcohol comes undigested into the head, then also affects the eyes and causes the mucus masses to push up into the head. In the same way that a good alcohol drinker's blood starts to boil, the mucous masses start to boil in the person who can't tolerate it well, and they solidify on the outside, becoming grainy. These are mucous masses that have become dense. This is how it can be for someone who can't really tolerate alcohol, even with the first glass. But let us assume that someone can tolerate it well. Then it also happens that the matter goes into the head, but then it goes into the blood; and then not these granules come, but then the whole blood circulation of the head is stimulated, and the whole blood circulation of the head secretes substances that are harmful. Then comes the general daze, the general hangover, and the person just comes to the state where he just keeps drinking. So that's the one where you can distinguish the effect of alcohol on one person or another.

One might be tempted to say that these distinctions should not be necessary, because in all circumstances, when an especially abnormal effect of alcohol occurs, one should actually drink less alcohol. It is not good to have any effect of alcohol at all and then continue drinking.

But as I said, alcohol affects the astral body and the ego today. The ego feels stimulated. People like the taste of alcohol, and that is why they feel that alcohol gives them something that elevates them above the earthly. This feeling is actually very interesting, because I had to tell you: alcohol does not come from the earthly, but from the non-earthly. That is why a person feels elevated above the earthly. Alcohol breaks down worry, doesn't it. So a person actually comes out of himself a little through alcohol, and it does the person an extraordinary amount of good when he comes out of himself a little. And that is what now also leads to alcohol-related mischief in the broadest sense.

Now there is still one question that we have to deal with. It is this: Mr. Müller said that near Darmstadt, if I understood you correctly, there is a pond and that warm industrial wastewater runs through it? From what I have already said, you can see what it is about. The time before last I already tried to make it clear to you that when I say that the fish in the sea do not have the direct sun, you must of course not believe that these fish have no solar effect at all; but just as the coal still has the solar effect in the earth after thousands and thousands of years, so the water still has the solar effect in it. And there, it must be said, the fish must be organized differently than the animals that live on land. Now, you can see that the fish are organized differently. If the fish had lungs like the other animals and humans, they could not live in the water, of course. You know that the higher animals and humans, if they live in water all the time, will simply drown. So they cannot live in it. Fish can live in it because they have gills instead of lungs; this enables them to absorb the air that is in the water and which still contains the solar forces.

Now you know how to breed goldfish. You can't breed goldfish in ordinary water, you simply won't get any goldfish. In the shade, you can at most reproduce goldfish, but not breed them. In the shade, you can only reproduce the offspring of the old goldfish, but not raise them. The children of the old goldfish take on their vivid color if you want to raise them without sun; but you will notice that if you keep the goldfish in sunless water, they will turn completely pale after three to four months. The goldfish get their vibrant color when they get direct sun in the water. That makes a difference. It is not the same if I have a pond or even just a small basin here, and the sun shines into it (see drawing), as it is for the fish in the same place as in a different place: in this case, it has to use old solar forces that have been in the water for longer; here it gets new solar forces that have been in the water for a shorter time.

Now, at the Darmstadt factory, where the warm water flows into the pond, there is something very special. You will admit that something that has lived under a certain constraint for a long time struggles and develops particularly strongly when it comes to a free life. Just think what it would be like if you had tied a person up for a long time. They cannot move a limb when they are locked up. When they are free again, they enjoy their life and savor it all the more. And now think of the water that flows from the Darmstadt factory into the pond. This water has received its solar effect in a very special way. This Darmstadt factory is initially also powered by coal, it all goes back to the coal. The warmth that is there comes from the coal. The coal has stored solar forces that are thousands and thousands of years old. These solar forces now flow into the pond as warm water. And it is indeed the case that these solar forces, which are released again from the coal after they have been imprisoned in the coal for thousands of years, are particularly effective. So you can't do better than to let these effective solar forces flow into the pond with the warm water. Yes, you could even develop this artificially. You could develop it artificially by pouring warmed water into the basins in which you raise the goldfish. And especially when you let it flow, when the solar forces are set in motion, they have a particularly stimulating effect on the goldfish, giving them the most vibrant color.

You can do the following experiment. Imagine taking a large basin; first, let warm water flow in slowly at the bottom, standing still, and then the usual water over it; and then put goldfish in it. Then take a second basin, let warm water into it, but let a stream of water flow into it all the time, and then see which fish have a more vibrant golden color: not those in the still water, but those that have the constantly flowing warm water, because that keeps the powers alive.

All this works independently in the industrial enterprise, because new warm water is always flowing in. So it is not at all surprising that the goldfish thrive there particularly well. Such are the natural effects. Only if one really understands these things correctly can one discover these natural effects.

You will now ask yourselves: Yes, but what is it actually that works in the sun's rays? — Yes, gentlemen, that is precisely the aether that also works in our own etheric body! What works in the sun's rays is the aether. And just as the aether first stimulates the astral in us, so it is also out there in nature.

The vine itself has an etheric body within it; but through its contact with the warmth of the sun, something astral, something actually extraterrestrial, is formed in the vine, and this works as alcohol. And so one can only come to an understanding of things by taking into account both the human being within and the human being without, in nature.

And now I come to a completely different matter, a small addition that I want to give you at the last moment in relation to Mr. Burle's question about clothing. You see, I have already told you a great deal about clothing, but it is interesting that clothing really did come about through human instinct in such a way that it corresponds to the whole being of the human being, to the whole nature of the human being. The human being already has three parts as a physical human being. He has his head, his chest organs, where breathing and blood circulation are primarily, and thus inner movement, and he has outer movement in the limbs. So, even in his physical body, the human being consists of three parts: the head, the chest system – I always call it the rhythmic system because everything moves in rhythm – and the outer movement of the organs, the outer movement organization.

Now, you see, the etheric body is particularly effective in the head, in the chest, in the blood circulation and in the breathing of the astral body and in the arbitrary movements of the I. If you look at all the clothes, with the exception of the somewhat too simple clothes of wild people - not true, of the very wild ones - you can always see what kind of frippery is made on it, essentially all clothing consists of three pieces, somehow of three pieces. Of course, it is somewhat different everywhere; you just have to bear in mind that in the course of the historical development of mankind it has changed tremendously, frippery has been added, wischiwaschi has been added, but actually every piece of clothing consists of three parts. One part is what originally developed from the apron skin – and the men of ancient Egypt essentially only wore apron skins. What is this clothing for in humans? For the limbs. By covering the feet, man expressed that he can walk with his feet. The power of the feet, the way they move, was to be expressed with the apron skin.

It is interesting that such things are inherited and that Freemasons wear the apron as a special distinction at their meetings. This is an old Egyptian inheritance. Just as people today know why they pin medals on, they know just as little why they put on the apron. The apron is put on as a sign that one is supposed to make a particularly strong impression with one's limbs. And the apron gave rise to everything that in any way concerns the limbs, for example our trousers, although they have been so greatly modified that they tend to hinder rather than promote our gait. So this relates to the limbs. The Egyptians developed the apron fur particularly artificially, making it fit particularly snugly around the limbs; they then stuck their arms into it, and so the apron fur was created, which goes up, gets a bib, sleeves, so that the upper limbs are also enclosed in it.

The second thing, gentlemen, is that man expresses the chest system in clothing. And this chest system is best expressed in everything that is shirt-like and pulled over the head. This was particularly developed by the ancient Assyrians. They developed the shirt-like garment that you slip through at the top and which then goes down smoothly. This is the expression for the chest system, for the inner movement. That is why the folds are made that way. The Greeks then adopted this from Asia and added this artificial fold that was supposed to even imitate the blood vessels in their most important course. It was designed to imitate the most important blood circulation and the flow inside.

The third is the cloak, the cloak that is thrown over. Now, the cloak that is thrown over was originally not only thrown over the shoulders, but also over the head. You can see that in certain parts of the country, where it is still done in the same way. The cloak is thrown over the head so that it also covers the head. In the throwing of the cloak, the idea of everything that comes from the head is expressed; in the throwing of the skin, more the will that lives in the limbs; in the shirt-like garment that we have – not true, there is only a little left in our vest, but in the priestly garment, in the garment of Catholic priests, you can still find it very well developed – that is still present in female clothing, there is the chest garment. And the head clothing is the mantle. Only of course it has undergone changes. Imagine the mantle that is thrown over the shoulders and also over the head, thrown over there (see drawing), it originally covered the head. If it is a red mantle, it is very beautiful. The red color is such that one does not even try to disfigure it. Then the time has come, of which I spoke the last time, when people are no longer attentive to colors. So they also made a black coat or a blue one, and what did they do? They cut off the coat here and made the headgear separately! That's what the hat became. Of course, you can't tell that from it anymore. But I still have to say: when I see a person wearing a tailcoat and a top hat, I always say to myself: Gosh, how you've changed! – because originally the tailcoat and top hat were a coat. Then the coat was cut down, took on its terrible shape from the tailcoat, and the top remained as a top hat to cover the head. You can still see it originally. Just see a top hat with a tailcoat together, and then try to cut the top hat apart at the front so that you can throw the whole thing over your head. So you have to go back to the old clothes to find out what the clothes are made of, although I don't think that Mr. Burle wears so many tailcoats and top hats that he asked why they are worn. (Laughter.) But it does look as if the heads of the people have been cut off when they walk around in tails and top hats. Next Wednesday at nine o'clock in the morning, the continuation.

This is the 8th of 17 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities, in 1911. The title of this series of lectures is: The Mission of the New Spiritual Revelation. This address was given following a Concert at the Berlin Group of the Anthroposophical Society, at which Mendelssohn's Overture of the Hebrides had been played).

Through the tones and harmonies of this Overture we have been led in spirit to the shores of Scotland, and in our souls, we have thus followed again a path of travel which, during the course of human evolution, has been deeply influenced by the secrets of karma. For, from entirely different parts of the western hemisphere of our earth, as if through a karmic current of migration, various peoples were once transplanted into that region, and its vicinity, to which these tones now lead us. And many strange destinies are made known to us. We are told, both by what Occultism relates as well as by outer historical documents, of what these peoples experienced in very ancient times on this particular part of the earth.

A memory of the mysterious destinies of these peoples arose again, as if newly awakened, when about 1772 the cave on the Island of Staffa belonging to the Hebrides, known as Fingal's Cave, was rediscovered. Those who beheld it were reminded of mysterious ancient destinies when they saw how Nature herself seemed to have constructed something which may be likened to a wonderful cathedral. It is constructed with great symmetry in long aisles of countless pillars towering aloft: above there arches a ceiling of the same stonework, while below the bases of the pillars are washed by the inrushing foaming waves of the sea which ceaselessly beat and resound with a music which is like thunder within this mighty temple. Dropping water drips steadily from strange stone formations upon the stalactites beneath, making melodious magical music.

A spectacle of this kind actually exists there. And those who, upon discovering it, had a sense for the mysterious things which once took place in this region, must have been reminded of the hero who once upon a time, as one of the most famous individualities of the West, guided destiny here in such a strange way, and whose fame was sung by his son, the blind Ossian, who is like a western Homer—a blind singer.

If we look back and see how deeply people were impressed by what they heard about this place, we shall be able to understand how it was that Macpherson's revival of this ancient song in the 18^th Century made such a mighty impression upon Europe. There is nothing which may be compared with the impression made by this poem. Goethe, Herder, Napoleon harkened to it—and all believed to discern in its rhythms and sounds something of the magic of primeval days. Here we must understand that a spiritual world such as still existed at that time, arose within their hearts, and felt itself drawn to what sounded forth out of this song! And what was it that thus sounded forth?

We must now turn our gaze to those times which fall together with the first impulses of Christianity and the few centuries which followed. What happened up there in the vicinity of the Hebrides, in Ireland and Scotland—in ancient Erin, which included all the neighboring islands between Ireland and Scotland, as well as the northern part of Scotland itself. Here we must seek for the kernel of those peoples, of Celtic origin, who had most of all preserved the ancient Atlantian clairvoyance in its full purity. The others who had wandered farther to the East had developed further, and so no longer remained in connection with the ancient gods. The western peoples, however, had preserved for themselves the possibility of experiencing an ancient clairvoyance now entirely immersed in the personality, in the individuality. And they were led to this particular part of the earth, as if for a special mission, where a structure confronted them which mirrored their own music's inner depths and was itself architecturally formed entirely out of the spiritual world, a structure which I have just tried to characterize with a few words—Fingal's Cave. We shall imagine these events rightly if we realize that the cave acted as a focus point, mirroring what lived in the souls of these human beings who, through their karma, were sent hither as to a temple erected by the gods themselves. Here those human beings were prepared who should later receive the Christ Impulse with their full human being and were here to undergo something extremely strange by way of preparation.

Again we shall be able to imagine all this if we realize that here particularly those ancient folk customs were preserved whereby the tribe was divided into smaller groups based upon family. Those who were related by blood felt themselves closely connected, while all others were looked upon as strangers, as belong[ing] to another Group Ego. During the migrations from Atlantis toward the East, all that the Druid priests, who remained behind here in the West, were able to give to the people poured itself out over these individual groups as a harmonizing influence. And what they were able to give still lived on in the bards. We shall only rightly understand what worked through these bards, however, if we make clear to ourselves that here the most elemental passions met together with the ancient powers of sight into the spiritual world, and that those who, with powerful life forces, sometimes with rage and passion, fought as representatives of their clan against other clans, perceived at the same time impulses working out of the spiritual world which directed them in battle.

Such an active connection between the physical and the soul realms cannot be conceived of today. When a hero raised his sword he believed that a spirit out of the air guided it, and in the spirit he beheld an ancestor who had fought upon this same battlefield in former times and who had gone up yonder to help now from over there. In their battle ranks they felt their ancestors actively aiding them, their ancestors on both sides—and they did not only feel them ... they heard them clairaudiently! It was a wonderful conception which lived in these peoples, that the heroes had to fight upon the battlefields and to shed their blood, but that after death they ascended into the spiritual world, and that their spirits then vibrated as tone—sounding through the air as a spiritual reality.

Those who had proven themselves in battle, but had trained themselves at the same time so that they could listen to what sounded out of the winds as the voice of the past, who were blind for the physical world, who could no longer see the flashing of the swords but were blind for the physical plane—these were highly honoured! And one of these was Ossian. When the heroes swung their swords, they were conscious that their deeds would resound further into the spiritual world and that bards would appear who would preserve all this in their songs. This was perceived in living reality by these peoples.

But all this creates an altogether different conception of humanity. It creates the conception that the human being is united with spiritual powers which sound forth out of the whole of Nature. For he cannot look upon a storm or a flash of lightning, he cannot hear the thunder or the surging of the sea without sensing that out of all the activities of Nature spirits work who are connected with the souls of the past, with the souls of his own ancestors. Thus the activity of Nature was at that time something altogether different than for us today. And it is for this reason that the rhythms and sounds of this song are so important, which, after being handed down for centuries through tradition only, were revived by the Scotsman Macpherson so that they create for us again a consciousness of the connection of the human being with the souls of his ancestors and with the phenomena of Nature.

We can understand how this Scotsman had in a certain sense a congenial feeling when he described how a line of battle stormed into the field, sweeping darkness before it, even as did the spirits who took part in the battle. This song is in reality something which was able to make a great impression upon spiritual Europe. The whole character of the description, even though given in a rather free poetical form, awakes in us a feeling for the kind of perception which lived in these ancient peoples. There was active in them a living knowledge, a living wisdom, concerning their connection with the spiritual world and the world of Nature in which the spiritual world works.

Out of such wisdom the finest sons from the different tribes—that is, those who had the strongest connection with the spirits of the past, who more than others allowed these spirits of the past to live in their deeds—were chosen as a picked band. And those who had the strongest clairvoyant forces were placed at its head. This band had to defend the kernel of the Celtic peoples against the peoples of the surrounding world. And one of these leaders was the clairvoyant hero, who has come down to us under the name of Fingal. How Fingal was active in the defense of the ancient gods against those who wished to endanger them—all this was handed down in ancient songs, heard out of the spiritual world—the ancient songs of the bard Ossian, Fingal's son, so that it remained alive even into the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. What Fingal achieved, what his son Ossian heard when Fingal had ascended into the spiritual realm, what their descendants heard in the rhythms and sounds of Ossian's songs with which they ever and again ensouled their deeds, this it was which worked on so mightily even into the 18^th Century. And we shall win a conception of this if we realize how Ossian allowed the voice of his father, Fingal, to sound forth in his songs.

We are told how the heroes find themselves in a difficult position. They are almost overthrown ... when new life fills the band: “The king stood by the stone of Lubar. Thrice he reared his terrible voice. The deer started from the fountains of Cromia. The rocks shook on all their hills. Like the noise of a hundred mountain streams, that burst, and roar, and foam! Like the clouds, that gather to a tempest on the blue face of the sky! So met the sons of the desert round the terrible voice of Fingal. Pleasant was the voice of the king of Morven to the warriors of his land. Often had he led them to battle; often returned with the spoils of the foe.”

“‘Come to battle,’ said the king, ‘ye children of echoing Selma! Come to the death of thousands. Comhal's son will see the fight. My sword shall wave on the hill, the defense of my people in war. But never may you need it, warriors; while the son of Morni fights, the chief of mighty men! He shall lead my battle, that his fame may rise in song! O ye ghosts of heroes dead! Ye riders of the storm of Cromia! Receive my falling people with joy, and bear them to your hills. And may the blast of Lena carry them over my seas, that they may come to my silent dreams, and delight my soul in rest’ ...”

“Now like a dark and stormy cloud, edges round with the red lightning of heaven, flying westward from the morning's beam, the king of Selma removed. Terrible is the light of his armor; two spears are in his hand. His gray hair falls on the wind. He often looks back on the war. Three bards attend the son of fame, to bear his words to the chiefs. High on Cromia's side he sat, waving the lightning of his sword, and as he waved we moved ...”

“Fingal at once arose in arms. Thrice he reared his dreadful voice. Cromia answered around. The sons of the desert stood still. They bent their blushing faces to earth, ashamed at the presence of the king. He came like a cloud of rain in the day of the sun, when slow it rolls on the hill, and fields expect the shower. Silence attends its slow progress aloft: but the tempest is soon to arise. Swaran beheld the terrible kings of Morven. He stopped in the midst of his course. Dark he leaned on his spear, rolling his red eyes around. Silent and tall he seemed, as an oak on the banks of Lubar, which had its branches blasted of old by the lightning of heaven. It bends over the stream: the grey moss whistles in the wind: so stood the king. Then slowly he retired to the rising heath of Lena. His thousands pour around the hero. Darkness gathers on the hill!”

“Fingal, like a beam from heaven, shone in the midst of his people. His heroes gather around him. He sends forth the voice of his power: ‘Raise my standards on high, spread them on Lena's wind, like the flames of an hundred hills! Let them sound on the winds of Erin, and remind us of the fight. Ye sons of the roaring streams, that pour from a thousand hills, be near the king of Morven! Attend to the words of his power! Gaul, strongest arm of death! O! Oscar of the future fights! Connal, son of the blue shields of Sora! Dermid, of the dark brown hair! Ossian, king of many songs!—Be near your father's arm!’ We reared the sunbeam of battle; the standard of the king! Each hero exulted with joy, as, waving, it flew in the wind. It was studded with gold above, as the blue wide shell of the nightly sky. Each hero had his standard, too, and each his gloomy mien!”

Thus Fingal stormed into battle, thus he is described by his son Ossian.

No wonder that this life, this consciousness of a connection with the spiritual world which sank deep into these peoples, into the souls of the ancient Celts, is the best preparation whereby they could spread the personal divine element throughout the West in their own way and from their own soil. For what they had experienced in the form of passion and desire, what they had heard sounding forth in the melodies of the spiritual world, prepared them for a later time when they brought into the world sons who revealed these passions in their souls in a purified and milder form. And thus we may say—it seems to us as if Erin's finest sons were to hear again the voices of their ancient bards singing of what they once heard out of the spiritual world as the deeds of their forefathers, but as if in Erin's finest sons the ancient battle cries had now been formed and clarified, and had become words which could express the greatest impulse of mankind.

All this sounded forth out of olden times in the songs about the deeds of the ancient Celts who fought out many things in mighty battles in order to prepare themselves for further deeds of spiritual life in later times, as we recognize them again today in that which the finest sons of the West have achieved. These were the impulses which flowed into the souls of human beings in the 18^th Century, when these ancient songs were revived. And it is this which was remembered by those who saw again the wonderful cathedral, built as if by Nature herself, and which caused them to say to themselves—“Here is a site, a gathering place, given to man by karma, in order that what the bards were able to sing about the deeds of their ancestors, about all that the heroes did to steel their forces, might sound back to them as in an echo out of this temple which they themselves did not have to build—out of their holy temple which was built for them by the spirits of Nature and which could be an instrument of enthusiasm for all who beheld it.”

So the tones and harmonies of this Overture which we have just heard offer an opportunity which allows us to sense, in our own way at least, something of the deep and mysterious events which do indeed reign in the history of mankind, events which occurred long before our present era on almost the same soil upon which they now continue to live. As we must deepen ourselves in all that lives within us, and as all that lives within us is only a further resounding of what was there in the past, so this feeling, this sense, for what once was and now works further in mankind is of great significance for occult life.

Yesterday we endeavored to explain man's being in so far as the three bodies and the nucleus of his being are concerned. Let us now consider man's ascent into the supersensible worlds. For this purpose we must cast a glance into what we call the three worlds and only when we have described the characteristics of these three worlds will it be possible to discuss the nature of the other members of man's being.

The first world is the physical world which we perceive through our senses: it is the one which man inhabits. We then have a second world, the astral world, and the third one, the spiritual world or Devachan. Deva means God in Chan means field or habitation. Devachan therefore means the spirit of God. In so far as man is a spiritual being, he participates in the spiritual world. The physical world need not be described, for it is clearly known to everybody. I will try to speak of the astral and devachanic worlds by keeping as far as possible to the descriptive form.

The first thing which we should bear in mind is that the outer worlds are not to be found in other places, but we are surrounded by them the same way in which we are surrounded by the physical world and they permeate the physical world. After death, man consequently does not travel to other places, but he simply changes his way of looking at things, his consciousness changes. When we die or become initiated, the same thing happens as in the case of a blind-person who suddenly acquires the power of sight; he too will not be transferred into another world, but he simply acquired a new sense. After death, we are not surrounded by a new, completely different world, but the senses for the perception of the physical world are eliminated and we perceive instead things which escaped our notice before, which had remained concealed to us until then.

Let us now consider the astral world: It is the world in which we live every night and to begin with also after death. If we no longer open our senses to the physical world, the senses of the astral world disclose themselves. When we become clairvoyant, we first live in the astral world and perceive what has been described as the etheric body and the astral body.

The astral world greatly differs from the physical world. Those who enter it, face a confusing mass of phenomena. What they first perceive, is so different from what they were used to seeing, that they must first grow accustomed to the sight. They will read things wrongly if they begin to read them as in the physical world. For in the astral world everything appears as a mirrored picture, upside down, or in the reverse order. In the astral world the number 365 would be 563. Especially in the beginning, this is very confusing. In the physical world, when dealing with circumstances connected with time, we reckon everything from the beginning to the end. In the astral world it is the very opposite. In the astral world, a human life, for example, is not traced from birth to death, but from the last moment of life backwards. Here in the physical world first see the egg and then the chicken that slips out of it; but in the astral world we first see the chicken and then the egg.

The most important thing to be borne in mind is however that in the astral world all the images of our moral qualities, such as pleasure and displeasure, pain and joy, hatred and love, appear as if they were rushing towards us. A clairvoyant sees as if they were rushing towards him. To an unexperienced person this is very confusing. He may see all kinds of animal-forms, even terrible human forms, and so forth, rushing towards him. There are people who tell us of such experiences. They are really to be pitied, when through some illness they attain such an abnormal vision of the astral world. But when we begin to meditate in a serious way, when we school ourselves, then the clairvoyant power develops in a normal, regular way, and then we know what is taking place in the astral world. But when people obtain an abnormal, irregular vision of the astral world through some illness of the brain or some other cause, they perceive terrible shapes rushing towards them and throwing themselves upon them. In reality these shapes are their own passions which go out from them and appear as a reflected mirror-image in the astral world. Then everything appears to be rushing towards them, because in the astral world everything is reversed and they cannot read its phenomena. Everything appears in the form of pictures and images. A bursting rage, for example, may appear in the form of a tiger that attacks them. This is how all these wild shape should be explained. Every lust, every passion, becomes a demon. And an untrained person is unable to cope with them and thinks that they are illusions, fantasies. Yet this is not true, for what he sees, is an image, a mirrored picture.

Why must some people pass through such experiences to-day? The cause for this must be sought in our materialistic age. Let us look back into the 13th or 14th century and picture to ourselves a German town of that time. There everything was formed out of the sense of beauty of that time. Each house, each lock, each key had its own characteristic quality: everything had its special character and was formed with love. Those who formed these objects were inspired by a feeling which still exercises an influence upon us even to-day. In the present time it is quite different. In a modern city the things we see no longer appeal to our feeling, nothing touches us; at the most the things in shop-windows, for example books, etc. may attract our attention. Nothing sacred, nothing having a religious character is now spread out before us in the external world. In the past, there were few books, but in those few books one could find something for the soul. But think of all the things that people read to-day: sensational things which excite the senses. ...

Although the soul no longer receives anything from outside, it nevertheless bears deep within it the yearning for religious things; this feeling lies deeply buried within it. Of course, this does not imply that we should long for the things which existed in the Middle Ages! The religious yearning may suddenly break out in people who no longer hear anything of the higher worlds, so that it appears as a religious passion in a mirrored picture, as indicated above. For everything which exists in the physical world as a so-called true reality, appears in the astral world in the form of a picture. In the astral world you do not perceive pain or joy in an immediate, direct way, but pain is perceived as a shape in dark colors, whereas joy appears as a kind shape in a light yellow color. Little by little you will have learnt to understand these images. There is nothing arbitrary or uncertain, for he was perceive that pain or joy of a certain kind always appears as pictures of certain time. The pupil therefore gradually learns to read on the astral plane and he learns to recognize the different pictures. Lightly-colored pictures always indicate something connected with the sympathetic side of life wereas darkly colored pictures always indicate things connected with the antipathetic side. Essential thing in the astral world is imaginative vision. Goethe, who undoubtedly had the astral power of vision very beautifully characterizes this quality of the astral world at the end of his “Faust”: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis”. (Everything transient is but a symbol.)

But the astral world does not only contain the mirrored pictures of the physical world; it also contains beings that we can never learn to know on the physical plane. Man's spirit descended as far as the physical world and clothed itself, so to speak, in flesh. But on the astral plane we also come across Beings that never clothed themselves in flesh. They continually hover to and fro among physical shapes, but they remain invisible to the ordinary power vision. But they are not inventions nor fairy-tale characters: Anyone who can look into the astral world may perceive them.

There are other beings besides, that surround man: namely his own thoughts. Just imagine the influence of a thought. For example, we first have in our soul the thought: “This man is a bad fellow.” In the astral world this thought takes on shape; each thought that goes out from us, takes on shape in the astral world. Upon the astral plane, thoughts are realities. Each thought which we set into the world takes on astral substance, even as the child in the mother's womb takes on physical substance. Whenever we have a thought, it clothes itself with natural substance and condenses itself into certain forms. There are Beings to whom man's thoughts offer a welcome occasion to incarnate themselves, to form themselves an astral body; these Beings have a real lust to materialize themselves astrally.

This important fact indicates our responsibility in life. Imagine a room where men sit around enjoying their evening-pint of beer or wine. What are their thoughts? They talk for the sake of talking, thoughts are quite worthless. For a clairvoyant, such a room is afterwards very strangely populated. The enjoyment of talking for the sake of gossiping, talk which is not born out of the intention of transmitting noble thoughts to others, affords certain very evil Beings occasion to incorporate themselves, and these Beings then do all manner of horrible things, just because they incorporate in such great numbers.

In occultism we say: Upon the physical plane a lie is a lie, but upon the astral plane it is a murder. Matters namely stand as follows: Whenever you relate something, you produced the corresponding thought-form; but also the fact which you relate rays out a thought-form. If your thought-form corresponds with it and agrees with it, then the two forms flow together upon the astral plane and strengthen each other. You thus strengthen the life of the being you are talking about. But in the case of an untruth the thought-form streaming out of your words does not correspond with that which goes out from the thing itself; the forms collide and destroy each other. An untruth, a lie, does have a life-destroying, killing effect on them. To speak of morality in the occult meaning, does not mean to preach morality, but to establish it by facts pertaining to the higher worlds. Schopenhauer rightly said: It is easy to preach morals, but is difficult to establish morals.

Man has a short sojourn in the astral world when he is asleep. What takes place with him when he is asleep? His physical and etheric body remain upon the bed, while his astral body and his Ego go out. A clairvoyant sees that at night the astral body is very active. During the day, man consumes his physical forces in work, etc. He grows tired, his forces must be restored. This is the work done by the astral body during the night. But what does he do during the day? He perceives the physical world. When he is asleep, the astral body goes out of the etheric and physical body and then we see and hear nothing—for we have perceptions through the astral body. Our eyes and ears, all our sense-organs, are merely instruments used by the astral body when it has perceptions. The astral body transforms all the vibrations of the air, etc. into sensations of sound. But in the night the astral body no longer needs to do this work; it can then produce new forces for the physical body and above all for the etheric body. In order to do this work of restoring the balance, it must go out of physical body. When we dream a lot, this work is so to speak, interrupted. Restless dreams are therefore bad for our health.

What changes take place in person during sleep when he gradually becomes clairvoyant? The night changes completely for such a person. Ordinary people lose consciousness when they fall asleep and regain it when they wake up; but they are unable to perceive what takes place astrally, because they do not have the organs enabling them to see this. But for a clairvoyant, the night is quite different. He does not lose consciousness like ordinary people. An untrained person experiences the astral world chaotically, in the form of dreams. But a trained person sees the astral world in regular forms. At first these will be transient realities surging up and down, but arising in a regular way.

Let us suppose a person falls asleep and sees a reddish-brown shape rising up before him, with a human face, but a distorted one, which gradually begins to resemble that of a friend. The dreamer wakes up and asks himself? What can this mean?—My friend—he thinks—is in New York, and he looks upon his draem as an illusion. After a time, he hears that his friend has been in great danger, that he passed unscathed through some accident. He investigates matters and discovers that the impression that night came at the very moment when his friend was in danger. This event had stood before his soul in the form of a picture.

Such experiences mark the beginning of clairvoyance; the regular forms that become more and more frequent and this new world takes on a more and more definite shape. To a clairvoyant a man's inner life is not concealed. When you acquire clairvoyance, you can see a person's aura, the image of his soul-life, which hovers around him. The souls of men lie open before your eyes. Even as you see the complexion and the hand of a person, you then see before you the pictures of his soul-life.

So far, I only spoke of pictures, of images. Do only images surge up and down? Is the astral world dumb? Indeed, at first it is dumb for the clairvoyant. The astral world is to begin with, silent. The time comes when these pictures begin to resound; voices from the spiritual world can be heard. Pythagoras spoke of the music of the spheres; this was not a fantastic invention, for the orbit of a star becomes a sound to a clairvoyant. Goethe also knew this. In “Faust” he says:

“Die Sonne ton't nach alter Weiss
in Bruders, haren Wettgesang,
und ihre vergescriebne Reise
vollendst sie mit Donnergang ...”

The sun resounds according to an old measure (or: in an accustomed way)
In the singing-match of the brother-spheres,
and its prescribed journey
it ends with thunder-step ,,,

and further

“Tönend wird für Geistesahren
schon der neue Tag geboren ...”

“To spiritual ears is born
resounding the new day ...”

Of course, learned men say that Goethe meant this symbolically. But after a certain development, the clairvoyant begins to hear sounds. Goethe spoke of the Sun's spiritual being. And when the men of ancient times designated the stars, the names which they gave them were intended for the Spirits of the Planets. The sun that we see, is but the physical body of the sun and Goethe knew quite well that there exists a Spirit of the Sun.

When a clairvoyant hears sounds after certain time, he is later on able to hear the “Inner Word”. The gift of hearing the “Inner Word” is called Inspiration, even as the gift of perceiving images in the Astral world is called Imagination. Imagination therefore enables one to see, whereas Inspiration enables one to hear. When Jakob Böhme and Paracelsus spoke of Imagination, they meant this gift.

In this meeting we can also say that the religious documents are inspired. Those who wrote them were inspired, that is to say, they were initiates who possessed the Inner Word. When a person develops the power of vision, the astral world opens out to him; the inner power of hearing discloses the Devachanic world, the spiritual world.