The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The relationship between anthroposophy and philosophy has already been discussed, albeit only briefly. Today we want to talk about fairly elementary aspects of so-called formal logic. Despite the elementary nature of our deliberations today, it may not be without use to delve into a philosophical chapter between our forays into higher worlds. It is not meant that such a lecture could directly offer anything for penetrating into the higher worlds. A logical consideration can do this no more than formal logic can enrich experience in the sensory realm. For example, someone who has never seen a whale cannot be convinced that they exist. He must make the observation himself. But it is precisely the knowledge of borderline areas that will be useful to anthroposophy, just as logic was useful to scholastics. The philosophers of the Middle Ages, who today are somewhat contemptuously grouped together under the name of scholastics, did not regard logic as an end in itself either; it did not serve to learn anything substantial. The subject-matter of teaching was either the observation of the senses or revelation, which is obtained through divine grace. But although, in the opinion of the scholastics, logic was quite powerless to enrich experience, they nevertheless regarded it as an important instrument of defense. So it should be an instrument of defense for us as well.

A distinction is made between material and formal logic. Logic as such cannot grasp anything material or substantial as its object. Concepts such as time, number, and God give a content that does not arise through logical conclusions. On the other hand, the form of thinking is the task of logic; it brings order to thoughts, it teaches how we must connect concepts that lead to correct conclusions. It is fair to say that logic was more highly valued in the past than it is today. In grammar schools, philosophy, logic and psychology used to be taught together. The aim of the teaching was to lead young people to disciplined, orderly thinking; propaedeutics means preparation. Today, however, people are trying to eliminate this kind of preparation and incorporate it into the study of silence because logic is no longer sufficiently respected. Thinking, they say, is innate in man; so why teach thinking in a special subject? But it is precisely in our time that it is very necessary to reflect on ourselves and to devote more attention to formal logic.

Aristotle is considered the founder of formal logic. And what Aristotle has done for logic has always been recognized, even by Kant, who says that formal logic has not progressed much since Aristotle. More recent thinkers have sought to add to it. We do not want to examine today whether or not such additions were necessary and justified. We just have to recognize the scope of logic here.

Anthroposophists are often reproached for not being logical. This is very often because the person making the reproach does not know what logical thinking is and what the laws of logical thinking are. Logic is the science of the correct, harmonious connection of our concepts. It comprises the laws by which we must regulate our thoughts in order to have within us a mirror reflecting the right relationships of reality.

We must first realize what a concept is. The fact that people are so little aware of what a concept is is due to the lack of study of logic on the part of the learned. When we encounter an object, the first thing that happens is sensation. We notice a color, a taste or a smell, and this fact, which takes place between man and object, we must first consider as characterized by sensation. What is in the statement: something is warm, cold and so on, is a sensation. But we actually do not have this pure sensation in ordinary life. When we look at a red rose, we not only perceive the red color; when we interact with objects, we always perceive a group of sensations at once. We call the combination of sensations “red, scent, extension, form” a “rose.” We do not actually perceive individual sensations, only groups of sensations. Such a group can be called a “perception”.

In formal logic, one must clearly distinguish between perception and sensation. Perception and sensation are two entirely different things. Perception is the first thing we encounter; it must first be dissected in order to have a sensation. However, that which gives us a mental image is not the only thing. The rose, for example, makes an impression on us: red, scent, shape, expanse. When we turn away from the rose, we retain something in our soul, such as a faded remnant of the red, the scent, the expanse, and so on. This faded remnant is the idea. One should not confuse perception and idea. The idea of a thing is where the thing is no longer present. The idea is already a memory image of the perception.

But we still have not come to the concept. We get the idea by exposing ourselves to the impressions of the outside world. We then retain the idea as an image. Most people do not get beyond the idea in the course of their lives, they do not penetrate to the actual concept. What a concept is and how it relates to the idea is best shown by an example from mathematics. Take the circle. If we take a boat out to sea, until we finally see nothing but the sea and the sky, we can perceive the horizon as a circle when it is very calm. If we then close our eyes, we retain the idea of the circle from this perception as a memory image. To arrive at the concept of the circle, we have to take a different path. We must not seek an external cause for the idea, but we construct in our minds all the points of a surface that are equidistant from a certain fixed point; if we repeat this countless times and connect these points with a line in our minds, the image of a circle is built up in our minds. We can also illustrate this mental image with chalk on the blackboard. If we now visualize this image of the circle, which has been created not by external impressions but by internal construction, and compare it with the image of the sea surface and the horizon that presented itself to our external perception, we can find that the internally constructed circle corresponds exactly to the image of external perception.

If people really think logically, in the strict logical sense, they do something other than perceive externally and then visualize what they have perceived; this is only an idea. In logical thinking, however, every thought must be constructed inwardly, it must be created similarly to what I have just explained using the example of the circle. Only then does man approach external reality with this inner mental image and find harmony between the inner picture and external reality. The representation is connected with external perception, the concept has been created by inner construction. Men who really thought logically have always constructed inwardly in this way. Thus Kepler, when he formulated his laws, constructed them inwardly, and then found them in harmony with external reality.

The concept is therefore nothing other than a mental image; it has its genesis, its origin in thought. An external illustration is only a crutch, an aid to make the concept clear. The concept is not gained through external perception; it initially lives only in pure inwardness.

In its thinking, our present-day intellectual culture has not yet gone beyond mere imagining, except in mathematics. For the spiritual researcher, it is sometimes grotesque to see how little people have progressed beyond mere imagining. Most people believe that the concept comes from the imagination and is only paler, less substantial than the latter. They believe, for example, that they can arrive at the concept of a horse by successively seeing large, small, brown, white and black horses appear in their perception; and now I take - so people continue - from the perception of these different horses, what is common to all horses and omit what is separate, and so I gain the concept of the horse. But one only gets an abstract idea, and one never arrives at the concept of the horse in the strict sense of the word. Nor does one arrive at a concept of the triangle by taking all kinds of triangles, taking what is common to them and omitting what separates them. One only arrives at a concept of the triangle by inwardly constructing the figure of three intersecting lines. With this inwardly constructed concept we approach the outer triangle and find it harmonizing with the inwardly constructed image.

Only in relation to mathematical things can people in today's culture rise to the concept. For example, one proves by inner construction that the sum of the angles in the triangle is equal to one hundred and eighty degrees. But if someone starts to construct concepts of other things inwardly, a large proportion of our philosophers do not recognize it at all. Goethe created the concepts of the “primordial plant” and the “primordial animal” by inward construction; not only was the different left out, the same was retained - as stated earlier in the example of the horse. The primordial plant and the primordial animal are such inward mental constructions. But how few recognize this today. Only when one can build up the concept of the horse, the plant, the triangle, and so on, through inner construction, and when this coincides with outer perception, only then does one arrive at the concept of a thing. Most people today hardly know what is meant when one speaks of conceptual thinking.

Let us not take mathematical concepts, and let us not take Goethe's Organik, where he created concepts in a truly magnificent way, but let us take the concept of virtue. One can indeed have a pale general idea of virtue. But if you want to arrive at a concept of virtue, then you have to construct it inwardly, and you have to take the concept of individuality to help you. You have to construct the concept of virtue as you construct the concept of a circle. It takes some effort to do this, and various elements have to be brought together, but it is just as possible as constructing mathematical concepts. Moral philosophers have always tried to give a sensuality-free concept of virtue. Some time ago, there was a philosopher who could not imagine a sensuality-free concept of virtue and thought those who claimed such a thing were fantasists. He explained that when he thinks of virtue, he imagines virtue as a beautiful woman. Thus, he still introduced sensuality into the non-sensual concept. And because he could not imagine a sensuality-free concept of virtue, he also denied this to others.

If you delve into Herbart's ethics, you will find that for him, “goodwill” and “freedom”, these ethical concepts, are not formed by taking what is common and omitting what is separate. Instead, he says, for example, that goodwill encompasses the relationship between one's own will impulses and the imagined will impulses of another person. He thus gives a pure definition. In this way, one could construct the whole of morality through pure concepts, as in mathematics, and as Goethe attempted with his organic system. The general idea of virtue must not be confused with the concept of virtue. People arrive at the concept only gradually, through an inner process.

By setting the concept of the concept before us, we distance ourselves from all arbitrariness of imagining. To do this, we must first consider the pure course of imagining and the pure course of conceptualizing. I need not say that when a person imagines a triangle, he can only imagine this or that triangle. We must now take into account the way in which mere perceptions are connected and the way in which pure concepts are connected. What governs our perceptual life? When we have the perception of a rose, the perception of a person who has given us a rose can arise quite spontaneously. This may be followed by the perception of a blue dress that the person in question was wearing, and so on. Such connections are called: association of perceptions. But this is only one way in which people link ideas together. It occurs most purely where the human being completely abandons himself to the life of ideas. But it is also possible to string ideas together according to other laws. This can be shown by an example: a boy sits in the forest under tall trees. A person comes along and admires the good-quality timber. “Good morning, carpenter,” says the bright boy. Another comes along and admires the bark. “Good morning, tanner,” says the bright lad. A third passes by and marvels at the magnificent growth of the trees. “Good morning, painter,” says the boy. So here three people see the same thing – the trees – and each of these three people has different ideas, but these are different for the carpenter, the tanner and the painter. They are different combinations of ideas, not mere associations. This is because, according to his inner element, his soul structure, man connects this or that external idea with another, not only externally surrendering himself to the ideas. Here man allows the power that rises from his inner being to work. This is called: apperception is at work in him. Apperception and association are the forces that link mere ideas through external or subjective inner motives. Both apperception and association work in the mere life of ideas. It is quite different in the life of concepts. Where would people end up if they only relied on the subject's apperception and random association in the life of concepts? Here, people have to follow very specific laws that are independent of the association of ideas and the apperception of the subject. If we look at the mere external connection, we do not find the inner belonging of the concepts. There is an inner belonging of the concepts, and we find the lawfulness for this in formal logic.

First of all, we now have to look at the connection between two concepts. We connect the concept of the horse and that of running when we say: The horse is running. - We call such a connection of concepts a “judgment.” The point now is that the connection of concepts is carried out in such a way that only correct judgments can arise. Here we have, first of all, only a connection of two concepts, quite independently of association and apperception. When we connect two ideas through their content, we form a judgment. An association is not a judgment, because, for example, you could also connect bull and horse with each other through an association. But the connection of ideas can also happen in more complicated ways. We can add judgment to judgment and thus come to a “conclusion.” A famous old example of this is the following: All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore, Caius is mortal. - Two judgments are correct in these sentences, so the third one “Caius is mortal” that follows from them is also correct. A judgment is the combination of two terms, a subject with the predicate. If two judgments are combined and a third follows from them, that is an inference. We can now develop a general scheme for this: If “Caius” is the subject \(S\) and “mortal” the predicate \(P\), then in the judgment “Caius is mortal” we have the connection of the subject \(S\) with the predicate \(P: S = P\). According to this scheme, we can form thousands of judgments. But to come to a conclusion, we still need a middle term \(M\), in our example “human”, “all humans”. So we can set up the scheme for a conclusion:

\(M = P\) All humans are mortal
\(S = M\) Caius is a human
\(S = P\) Therefore Caius is mortal.

If this conclusion is to be correct, the concepts must be connected in exactly this way; nothing must be transposed. If, for example, we form the sequence of judgments: The portrait resembles a person – The portrait is a work of art – we must not conclude: Therefore the work of art resembles a person. This latter conclusion would be false. But what is the error here? We have the schema:

\(M = P\) The portrait resembles a person
\(M = S\) The portrait is a work of art
But \(S\) is not equal to \(P\):
The work of art does not resemble a person.

We have turned the universally valid schema upside down here. It depends, then, on the form of the schema, on the manner of linking, to know: the first figure of conclusion is correct, the second is false. It is immaterial how the linking of concepts otherwise proceeds in our thoughts; it must be like the first formula in order to be correct.

We shall now see how one comes to know a certain legitimate connection in order to be able to find a number of such figures. Correct thinking proceeds according to quite definite such figures of inference; otherwise it is just wrong thinking. But things are not always as easy as in this example. Merely from the fact that the conclusions are wrong, one could often find out today, from even the most learned books, that what has been said cannot be true. Thus there are inner laws of thinking like the laws of mathematics; one could say an arithmetic of thinking. Now you can imagine the ideal of correct thinking: all concepts must be formed according to the laws of formal logic. However, formal logic has certain limits. These limits must be applied to the human mind. This would lead to correct insights and recognize the nature of fallacies. By all rules of logic, it would conform to the laws of logic if we said:

All Cretans are liars \(M = P\)
This one is a Cretan \(S = M\)
Therefore he is a liar, therefore \(S = P\)

Now the ancient logicians had already noticed that this is true for all cases, except for the case in which a Cretan himself says it. In this case, the conclusion is certainly false. For if a Cretan says, “All Cretans lie, therefore I am a liar,” it would not be true that Cretans are liars, and so he would be telling the truth; and so on.

It is similar with all fallacies, for example with the so-called crocodile conclusion: An Egyptian woman saw how her child playing by the Nile was seized by a crocodile. At the mother's request, the crocodile promises to return the child if the mother guesses what it will do now. The mother now utters: You will not give me back my child. - The crocodile replies: You may have spoken the truth or a lie, but I do not have to give the child back. Because if your speech is true, you will not get it back according to your own saying. But if it is false, then I do not return it according to our agreement. - The mother: I may have spoken the truth or spoken falsely, but you must give me back my child. Because if my speech is true, then you must give it to me according to our agreement; but if it is false, then the opposite must be true. You will give me back my child. The same applies to the conclusion that affected a teacher and a student. The teacher has taught the pupil the art of jurisprudence. The pupil is to pay the last half of the fee only after he has won his first case. After the teaching is completed, the pupil delays the beginning of the practice of law and therefore also the payment. Finally, the teacher sues him, saying to him: “Foolish youth! In any case, you must now pay. For if I win the lawsuit, you must pay according to the judgment; if you win, you must pay according to the contract, for you have won your first lawsuit. But the student: Wise teacher! Under no circumstances do I have to pay. For if the judges rule in my favor, I have nothing to pay according to the judgment; but if they rule against me, I pay nothing according to our contract.

There are countless such fallacies, which are formally quite correct. The problem is that logic can be applied to everything except itself. The moment we refer back to the subject itself, formal logic breaks down. This is a reflection of something else: when we move from the three bodies of man to the ego, everything changes. The self is the setting for logic, which, however, may only be applied to other things, not to itself. No experience can ever be made through logic, but logic can only be used to bring order to experiences.

My dear friends! The point of today's talk is to clarify some things that you must allow to live firmly in your soul, and on the other hand, to identify a kind of central authority, at least in principle, even if the personal cannot be resolved today. I would like to emphasize first of all that today such things as the [oath] I am talking about here are usually misunderstood. They are understood as if it were a vow that one makes to anyone. Such views have come about particularly through the Catholic Church and the Masonic orders, which have always misunderstood these things and have misunderstood them all the more as time has progressed and different conditions have arisen for the whole being of man than was the case in earlier times. Today it is only possible to understand such things [as the swearing-in ceremony], which I have to give here in a formula, as a kind of examination of oneself, as something that one writes into one's soul when one takes on such an important mission as you want to take on. It will be necessary for those who take on this mission to actually proclaim it before those who are walking with them, so that everyone who walks with them knows with whom they belong. And so it is important that this kind of vow, which one makes to oneself, contains the things that are necessary for the spiritual world today.

The first thing is that it must contain what one should make clear to oneself as one's sense of belonging to the spiritual world. And here it is important that for someone who wants to work as you do, this work must be spiritually linked to the figure of Christ and to the event of Golgotha, in such a way that the spiritual nature of and that one's entire activity is developed as an implementer of that which has been introduced into the order of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. One must come to recognize the present and future meaning of earthly evolution as coming from the Mystery of Golgotha.

But now something else is important. It is important not to understand such a matter only in a personal sense or in a narrow human sense, but to understand it as something that one professes before the whole world, and thus also before the higher hierarchies, and to accept the real consequences, that is, to fully recognize in a spiritual way what the Catholic Church, albeit in an externalized way, does recognize. She has indeed externalized everything and only retained the external forms for everything, but at least the external forms are recognized by the Church, even if not by the individual priest. This is shown, for example, by the fact that anyone who leaves the priesthood of the Catholic Church has the skin scraped off his fingers with which he has touched the consecrated host.

Then, of course, it is necessary to keep the most important moral qualities alive in oneself through constant practice, because only under the influence of these moral qualities is it possible to achieve real work from the spiritual world.

This is what the formula that I have to present to you says. It expresses it in the form in which, I would say, the cult of the spiritual world can really be expressed in human words. I would like to make it clear that the way I feel about this movement is entirely consistent with my presentation of this formula. How you then activate it, that is, how you then make such a vow in common - but in such a way that the others are present - that will then depend on you. It must be clearly understood that I shall always maintain the attitude towards this movement which I have defined at the outset, that I can therefore be of service in an advisory capacity for the external organization, but that what is to be done must come from your own ranks. This is not because I want to reject a sense of responsibility, because such a sense is also connected with the advice I give; but because it is really a matter of, once this movement has been established, keeping it independent, so that it can most certainly have the most intimate relationship with the anthroposophical movement, but nevertheless must stand on its own and should not be something like a branch or twig of the anthroposophical movement. And the anthroposophical movement, too, must, because it must remain a movement of knowledge by its very nature, refrain from founding a religion and in turn maintain its independence from this religious movement. The relationships can be the most intimate, everything can be carried and exchanged with each other, but this distinction must be made in certain ways.

So, first of all, I will read this oath of office to you. You can then comment on it yourself if anything in it is not clear to you, but I will not be able to recommend any significant changes.

“I want to direct my I in active yearning for work out of the spiritual world.”

In Christ and in the event of Golgotha I want to recognize how a supreme spiritual lives in the facts of life on earth.

In the recognition of this interweaving I will find the meaning of my activity.

Thus I will fit myself into the human order.

My self shall only feel meaningful in such an integration.

I will acknowledge that to stray from this path means the decay of my ego to the evil powers of the world.

I will always fight the impulses that prepare the way for such aberrations.

of personal vanity and ambition
inner dishonesty of the soul
and impulses of anger, which alienate the soul from itself.
I will continually renew within myself the awareness that I walk before God's gaze in everything I do.
To recognize and cultivate this as the content of my consciousness, I promise
before the Father-God, who is in me
before the Son of God who creates in me
before the Spirit God, who enlightens me."

This contains everything that, if you keep bringing it to your attention, indicates the direction you must set for yourself if you understand yourself correctly in order to find your way into the movement you want. Naturally, the way in which you carry this out depends on you. Before we proceed, I would like to say that I have given the matter a great deal of thought and that I think that, given the circumstances, it would be best if the remaining board of directors were to make its own additions. At the beginning of such a direction, everything that happens should actually be done in full agreement with all the individuals. Nothing should be done that the individual does not agree with. But on the other hand, it cannot be a matter of voting, but only of ensuring that there is a natural agreement, that people simply know what they want in this direction. For voting is often nothing more than something highly forced, while what is, so to speak, copied from the soul of another can actually lead to the right result. Again, I must leave it to you to decide what you will do with this advice.

Now there is a little more to be said. The point is that a certain wall should also be created to prevent someone who has once been accepted into the circle of your soul shepherds from leaving this circle again without further ado. It is really the case that in such a community there can be no flourishing if people enter and leave again. Therefore, in the times before liberalism enslaved spiritual life, all such communities had the means to exercise jurisdiction over those who had become apostates. We can no longer apply the older forms, which were felt somewhat differently, and therefore, since this whole rationale is something new, a new form must be found for it. This form can hardly consist of anything other than the fact that, when the central executive committee is formed, this central executive committee is given the special pledge that in the event of one resigning, one morally recognizes under all circumstances what the executive committee or a wider circle has decreed regarding the resignation.

In this context, the question of how we ourselves shape the hierarchy should of course be decided right at the beginning of our work. Since there are not very many of you so far, it would of course be quite possible for the board of three to exercise full central power. But perhaps that is not what can be considered right under all circumstances. It would perhaps be good to start with a hierarchy right from the beginning. Later on it will have to be the case that there is a considerable difference between those who have been working for some time and those who have only just begun to work, who have only just entered your circle. And there will have to be some kind of advancement. It will even be necessary to give certain names to the individual degrees to which those concerned ascend. The choice of names is a very difficult matter in general. We have already discussed how the older Latin names, which are not suitable in Protestant areas, can be replaced by German ones. The difficulty here is that separate names will have to be created for each language area into which your movement expands. But that must be accepted. It is difficult, however, because the power to create languages for such things has diminished considerably throughout the civilized world since the 15th century, and has now ceased altogether, so that if one wants to find an adequate word for the matter today, it is not that easy.

For example, I would not be able to find a different word for the Mass than “Human Consecration Ritual”, whereby perhaps “Consecration Ritual” could then be used as an abbreviation. What has been suggested – “sacrifice celebration” – would not really capture the inner meaning of the Mass. You can see that from the fact that the word 'Meß-Opfer' (sacrifice of the Mass) is possible; but if you say 'sacrifice ceremony', it would be a celebration of the sacrifice; but that is not what it is. The point is that through the sacrifice of the Mass, the human soul is brought into connection with the higher world. So the Mass itself can be called a sacrifice, but then something must be added. It is not a mere sacrifice, but one that is further defined by the word “Mass.” But everything that the Mass is can be found, at least to a very high degree, in the words “Human Consecration Ritual.” These words also include the concept that is necessarily associated with the Mass: that it is a congregational matter and that it is done at a gathering. The essence lies in the coming together, in the uniting. Of course, one could object that in Catholicism there are “silent” masses in which the priest, who as a Catholic priest is obliged to say mass every day, simply says mass in some corner of his church and there is actually no congregation; and in a monastery where the monks are priests, each one says his mass at an altar and there is actually no congregation either. But that is not really true. From some of what you have encountered in the texts for worship, you will be able to see that for the real Christian there is no distinction made between the living and the dead. Whether the dead, who are embodied in the body, inhabit the Mass or, as one has to assume when a so-called silent Mass is read, the dead, that is no difference in principle for the real Christian. If one were to see a fundamental difference in this, then one would not take the spiritual world in its full reality. You can also see this from a formula that occurs within the mass ritual itself. So one can say that if it were claimed that there are 'silent' masses, this is actually not true; it contradicts the spirit of Christianity. There are no 'silent' masses, but parish masses, and the coming together is part of the mass. This also belongs to those masses that have now become the opposite of a sacred act, to the fairground masses; the fairground mass also presupposes that people come together.

Coming together is part of the Mass, and that is precisely expressed in the words “Human Consecration Ritual”. But it is a ritual of consecration; the word “consecration” has been retained as a German word for the old word “initiation”. “Consecration” is related to ‘immersion’, to immersing oneself in something; and it has become common to have the feeling that one is immersed in the spirit of the original revelation when speaking of consecration, just as it is designated by the term ‘initiation’, which is of course much more appropriate. Both consecration and initiation lead man back to his divine beginning, to his divine origin. This is what the word “Human Consecration Ritual” may make clear. But it has many syllables, and that is something that can naturally be a stumbling block. In everyday speech, it can be abbreviated to “Weihehandlung”; but “consecration” alone cannot be said, because there are various consecrations, not only consecration of man, but also consecration of priests and even the consecration of utensils. We will manage in the next few days with the other words.

However, I would very much appreciate it if you would express your views on what I have just said. Of course, later on, differences of opinion within your group should not lead to revolutions at every opportunity – although different opinions are perfectly acceptable. But at the beginning, it is possible that consultations may lead to modifications of what is to be created or what was proposed first. So perhaps it would be possible for you to express yourselves at this point, so that we can move forward and arrive at something more definite as soon as possible.

Emil Bock: Perhaps there is already a strong willingness to do this this very afternoon, because after the words that Dr. Steiner spoke to us yesterday, we have prepared ourselves to close our circle with such an inner connection to the matter.

Rudolf Steiner: It was no exception?

Emil Bock: No, no exception has become known. It would only be our task now to find the form for the moment in which we can express this as the content of our souls.

Rudolf Steiner: For the form, it would be necessary to bring a picture of Christ. Therefore, I would think it would be better to start tomorrow. We then bring a picture of Christ that can be taken to this action.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: Is there no possibility of doing it in front of the Christ figure in the studio?

Rudolf Steiner: That is not really possible because for that it would have to be finished first. It does not depend on which form of Christ it is, it just has to be a Christ form.

Emil Bock suggests a time: tomorrow, Sunday morning. Rudolf Steiner agrees, as Sunday is also the most suitable day.

Emil Bock suggests asking further questions about things that are still unclear.

One participant would like to hear more about the special vow, and then also about whether the reading of the mass, for example, should also take place daily or how that would be handled.

Rudolf Steiner: As soon as you have been constituted, these things will arise from the matter itself. Daily reading of the fair, at least in meditative form, is something that seems necessary to me. The other, the special vow, refers to the exit. The exit must be made more difficult in a certain way. This is only possible if the formula is applied to this withdrawal, which of course can still be agreed upon at the beginning, but which must later be recognized by anyone who wants to join. It must be included in the formula that the leadership has to decide how to define the step that someone takes when withdrawing, and that he recognizes this from the outset. So you don't just generally acknowledge what it means, but what the person leaving thinks about himself in the individual case, but what the leadership thinks about him. Each individual would recognize this from the outset in the event of leaving. Of course, in today's democratic times, this seems a little harsh, but you really won't get anywhere in spiritual life if you don't create such a wall.

The other thing I would ask you to consider is this: first create a central power of three, and around these three create four others who simply replace the length of time in office with the quality you attach to them; in this way you arrive at an original seven and call the three “upper leaders” and the four others “leaders”. For the others, a word would still have to be found for the old term 'priest', which did not seem right to you either; but I don't have one yet. “Leader” and ‘senior leader’ would initially be terms that could be used. We avoid terms such as ‘bishop’, ‘deacon’ and so on. So originally the top ladder would be the three senior leaders and the four leaders; we do not need a further hierarchy. The rest would be designated by the word that is used for the term ‘priest’. I would also have to advise this.

Emil Bock believes that there are no objections to this.

Wilhelm Kelber asks whether the appointment as a leader and senior leader is limited to a certain time.

Rudolf Steiner: This can only be for a limited time until a leader becomes a senior leader, so it can only be a position that is granted for life because it is connected to the whole being of the person.

Then something about the technical side of the matter. The point is that the original inaugurators of the whole movement, in formulating the plan, have already shown an act that has a significance, and on this basis it would be advisable to make, so to speak, original proposals for the questions that have now been raised. These initial proposals, in my opinion, based on how I have seen the matter develop, could be made by Dr. Rittelmeyer, Mr. Bock, Ms. Spörri and Mr. Klein. I think that this very inner circle should come together and make initial proposals to the others after very serious consideration, so that the fact, which is a fact, is taken into account: the original initiation. Then these proposals would have to be presented to the wider circle, which should do with them as it wishes. When one makes such proposals, it is the case that the smaller the circle, the greater the sense of responsibility with which they are made. Therefore it would be good to make them initially only as advice. In this way it can best be determined what is wanted. It would be good if all this could be worked out before we meet tomorrow at 10 o'clock.

Friedrich Rittelmeyer: We have actually agreed that we want to carry out the whole constitution in consultation with you. We would very much appreciate advice on how to proceed in some form before we ask the group.

Rudolf Steiner: Very well, then we shall proceed in that way. We can undertake the action we have spoken of at ten o'clock, and what you have proposed in the closest circle we can then begin tomorrow after the action.

Emil Bock suggests that, in order to reach a conclusion more quickly, the results of the meeting should be communicated to Dr. Steiner that same day, which he agrees to.

Today I would like to talk about an important concept in esoteric science, the connection between microcosm and macrocosm. Within esoteric science, there are various fundamental concepts that run like leitmotifs through the entire esoteric movement. One of these is the concept of rhythmic number, another is that of microcosm and macrocosm. The mystery of number is expressed in the fact that certain phenomena succeed each other in such a way that the seventh repetition can be designated as the conclusion of an event, the eighth as the beginning of a new event. This fact is reflected in the physical world in the relationship between the octave and the fundamental. For those who seek to penetrate into occult worlds, this principle becomes the basis for a comprehensive world view. Not only are the tones arranged according to the law of number, but so are the events in time. The events of the spiritual world are arranged in such a way that a relationship is found as in the rhythm of the tone.

Even more important is the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. We find the sensory image of this at every turn. If we look at the relationship between the whole plant and the germ, we see a macrocosm in the whole plant and a microcosm in the germ. In a sense, the forces that are distributed throughout the whole plant are concentrated in the germ as if at a single point. In a similar way, we can understand the development of the individual human being from childhood to old age as a microcosm, and the development of a nation as a macrocosm. Every nation has a childhood in which it absorbs important cultural elements. The ancient Romans, for example, absorbed Greek culture. A nation grows and draws the forces for its further development from within itself. It is therefore important that the members of a nation go through what the whole nation goes through. They are to their nation as the germ is to the plant. The relationship between microcosm and macrocosm is found to the highest degree in man, as he appears to us in the sense world, and the cosmos. Just as he stands before us in the sense world, he has drawn together the forces of the universe within himself, just as the forces of the whole plant are drawn together in the germ.

We can now ask ourselves: Are these forces in man also distributed in some way throughout the macrocosm, just as the forces of the plant germ are distributed throughout the whole plant? Only esoteric science can give us an answer to this, because within earthly life, man only gets to know himself as a microcosm. But he does not only live in the microcosm, he also has a life in the universe.

At first this seems to be no more than an assertion, that in the experience of waking and sleeping, man alternates between a life in the microcosm and a life in the macrocosm. When he sinks into sleep, consciousness ceases to function, affects cease to be there for him. An external science will seek in vain to find within the sleeping person what constitutes his soul life in the waking state. But it is logically impossible to think that when a person falls asleep, his soul life is destroyed and that it comes out of nowhere when he wakes up. In the not too distant future, external science will admit that one can no more recognize the soul life from external material facts than one can know the lungs by knowing the laws of oxygen. To do this, we study the lungs in their organic functions. Thus we also recognize that in the external laws there is nothing of the physical life that we inhale when we awaken and exhale when we fall asleep. For the occultist, falling asleep and waking up is nothing other than breathing. With every morning, man takes in spiritual-soul substance through breathing and exhales it again when he falls asleep. Where is this spiritual-soul substance when man is in a state of sleep, corresponding to the air in the room that he has exhaled? Occult science shows us that it is enveloped by the atmosphere of the spiritual world, just as we are enveloped by the atmosphere of air, only that the latter extends only a few miles, while the former fills the universe.

If we consider the amount of air that a person has inhaled into their body, we can compare it to the entire atmosphere: the same amount that is in the human body after inhalation is part of the atmosphere after exhalation. In the sense of occultism, we can say that after inhalation it is in the microcosm and after exhalation it is in the macrocosm. Likewise, the soul-spiritual life that is active within our body, from waking to sleeping in the microcosm, from sleeping to waking in the macrocosm. Just as external physical science teaches us the existence of the physical atmosphere, so occult science speaks of the spiritual macrocosm that receives our soul during sleep.

Spiritual science is acquired through spiritual methods: initiation. The life of our soul within the microcosm is shown to us by daily experience; we get to know the life within the spiritual-soul macrocosm through initiation. This science must be spoken of first if the transition from microcosm to macrocosm is to be understood. This science takes on a special significance because in it we enter the spiritual world after death. Crossing the threshold of death only means that the soul leaves the body for good. The method of initiation teaches the soul intimate exercises. Just as we act on our physical environment in our daily lives, we must enable our soul to act spiritually and soulfully on the macrocosm and to receive impressions from it. We must seek to free our spiritual and soul forces that are bound to our physical life. In our ordinary lives, three soul forces are connected to the body, and these are released through initiation. The first soul force is the power of thought. In our ordinary lives, we use this to form thoughts and to imagine the things around us. Let us try to put ourselves in the shoes of this power of thought. What happens when we think and imagine? Even physical science will admit that every time we think of something sensual, a process of destruction takes place in our brain. We have to destroy fine structures of the brain, and fatigue shows this sufficiently. What is destroyed by everyday thinking is restored during sleep.

Through the method of initiation, we attain a state in which we free the power of thought from the physical brain: then nothing is destroyed. We achieve this in meditation, concentration, contemplation. These are certain processes in our soul that differ from ordinary soul life. The images and soul processes that fill us in our ordinary life are not very suitable for creating meditation in our soul; we have to choose others for this. To speak in concrete terms, an example will be given. Imagine two glasses, one empty, the other half full. Then imagine that we are pouring water from the half-filled glass into the empty one, and now imagine that the half-filled glass is becoming fuller and fuller. The materialist finds such a thing foolish. But in a meditation suitable for meditation, it is not about something in the physical sense of the word, but about something that forms soul perceptions. Precisely because such a perception does not refer to anything real, it distracts our minds from the real. But it can be a symbol, namely for the soul process that is linked to the secret of love. In the process of love, it is like a half-filled glass from which one pours into an empty one, and which thereby becomes fuller. The soul does not become emptier, it becomes fuller to the extent that it gives. This symbol can have such a meaning.

When we treat such an idea by turning all the powers of our soul towards it, then this is meditation. We must forget everything else, including ourselves, when we are dealing with such an idea. Our entire soul life must be directed towards it for a long time, about a quarter of an hour. It is not enough to do such an exercise once or a few times; it must always be repeated. Depending on the disposition of the individual, it will become apparent that the soul life changes in the process. We notice that we develop a kind of thinking power that does not destroy the brain. Anyone who undergoes such a development will recognize that meditation does not cause fatigue and does not destroy the brain. It may seem contradictory that beginners fall asleep during meditation. But this is because in the beginning we are still attached to the external world and have not yet freed our thoughts from the brain. Once we have freed our thoughts from the brain through repeated efforts, we have achieved meditation without fatigue, and then a transformation occurs in our entire human life. Just as we were unconsciously outside the body during sleep, so now we are consciously outside the body. And just as we think of our ego in our skin during our daily lives, so after meditation we experience ourselves outside our body. The body becomes an object that we look at. But now we get to know it differently than in sleep. We get to know it like magnetic forces that chain us to our body. It is something we want to plunge into. And we recognize that these are the same forces that draw us to our physical body every morning, that we have drawn out of the spiritual world before birth, and that have caused us to seek out the currents of inheritance to find a new body. We thereby experience why we feel drawn to our parents and ancestors.

We can exclude one idea, one soul experience, which is different from those we have when we pass from the microcosm to the macrocosm. When we look at the body from the macrocosm, we say of all experiences: This is outside of us. But if we have awakened the Paul experience in us, then we have developed a soul element that is already outside of us. When we are out of the body, we feel the Christ-experience as an inner one. This can be called the first encounter with the Christ impulse in the macrocosm. Now we have to discuss a second kind of initiation forces. Just as we can detach the power of thinking, we can also detach the power we use for linguistic expression. Materialistic science says that the motor speech organs have their center in the so-called Broca's area. But it was not Broca's organ that formed language, but language that formed Broca's organ.

The power of thought has a destructive effect, while language, which comes from our social environment, has a constructive effect. Now we can detach this power that Broca's organ builds up. We achieve this by permeating our meditation with emotional values. If I meditate: In the light shines wisdom - this too does not reflect an external truth, but it does have a deep meaning, a deep significance. If we imbue it with our feeling: We want to live with all the light that wisdom radiates - then we feel how we grasp the power that is otherwise expressed in the word and that now lives in our soul. When one speaks of golden silence, it refers to this: we have a power in our soul that creates the word. We can grasp it like the power of thought. Then we overcome time, just as we overcome space by grasping the power of thought. What is a remembering for everyday life up to childhood then extends to prenatal life. This is the way to gain experience about life from the last death until our present birth, and at the same time the way to understand the evolution of humanity. We understand the forces that guide the evolution of human history.

And we recognize life from birth to death. When we develop the power of the silent word, we recognize the spiritual foundation of life on earth. Here again we come across a historical event, the Mystery of Golgotha. For this is the way in which we find the ascending and descending evolution of humanity and the point where Christ incarnates. He is recognized as he is in his very own power. Just as we connect with the Christ through the liberation of thought, as he was on earth, so we connect with the Mystery of Golgotha through the liberation of the word. A special light thus falls on the first line of the Gospel of John.

Then a third power becomes independent through meditation. It takes hold not only of the brain and larynx, but also of the blood circulation and the heart. When it is working in a weak form, we feel it when we blush or turn pale. Then something soul-like takes hold of the pulsation of the blood and goes up to the heart. This soul power can be drawn out of the pulsation of the blood and become an independent soul power. This happens through meditation, where the will connects with meditation. We meditate: In the light shines wisdom. But we make the decision to connect our will with it in such a way that we want to go with this radiant wisdom in the evolution of humanity. When we arrive at this kind of will-meditation, we achieve an inflow of willpower into the soul. These forces can be grasped and drawn from the blood – although they cannot be drawn out completely – and then they form a clairvoyant power through which we can transcend our Earth. We learn to recognize our Earth as a re-embodied planet that will re-embody itself and we human beings with it. Thus we grow through the spiritual and soul world into the macrocosm. In a sense, we experience how life between death and birth must be opposite to life in an incarnation. For what man experiences after 'death', freed from the body, that is what the initiate experiences. Let us take the main characteristic of what was presented to us in the body-free state. It is the same experience as in the life after death. Living in the microcosm, we perceive through the physical organ of the senses. After death, we look at the body like the initiate. One cannot perceive what the sense organs perceive. The initiate can recognize the life between death and new birth because he has already found the transition from microcosm to macrocosm here.

In the ordinary language of man, one cannot talk to the dead. But when we have liberated the power of speech, we can see how we are with the dead. By liberating the power of thought, we can talk to those who are between death and rebirth.

Let me give you an example: a seer was able to talk to a deceased person. He had been an excellent man, but he had only taken care of his family in a material sense. He had no religious or anthroposophical ideas. The seer was able to learn the following from the man: “I know that I lived with my family, with my loved ones, and they were my sunshine. They still live now, I know that, but I only see them up to the point when I left the earth. No connection can be established with them. The circumstances are complicated after death. The seer was able to see the following: The woman still showed something of the effects of her husband's influence in her nature. The man could see these effects, but not as one sees a person, but as in a mirror: there is indeed seeing, but it is as if one were only seeing an image in a mirror. This seems gruesome because one cannot really see the person as he is. Just as we see the physical in the life of the senses, so must we be able to see the soul afterwards. But just as we cannot see a candle in a dark room if it is not lit, so here too is the recognition subdued, darkened. Yet a connection is still possible between the dead person and the person on earth if the latter imbues himself with spiritual life. This is the basis for the benefit we can do for the dead. Someone has passed through the gate of death, with whom we have common interests: we can read to him. We imagine that he is in front of us, we read to him quietly, and we can also send him thoughts. But he will only receive an impression if we send him ideas and concepts with spiritual life. The task of anthroposophy will be understood when we understand that we have to remove the abyss that separates us from the dead.

Even a soul that was opposed to anthroposophy can feel a benefit from such reading aloud. In our soul life, two sides can be distinguished: what we consciously experience and the soul's undercurrents, which, like the depths of the sea, only express themselves in the waves on the surface. Thus we can experience that, for example, one of two brothers becomes an anthroposophist and the other an opponent of anthroposophy. This can only be a fact of the external world. The inner process is as follows: there is a deep longing for something religious, and the only way to numb oneself to this is to reject anthroposophy. The conscious idea is only an opiate to forget what is going on in the depths. Death removes all this and we then hunger precisely for what we unconsciously long for. That is why reading anthroposophical writings aloud is such a blessing for us. Gradually, we become aware of our connection with the dead. But even before we have this feeling, we risk nothing more than the dead person not listening to us when we read to him. Thus we see that through the living comprehension of the anthroposophical teaching, the dead and the living, microcosm and macrocosm, come into connection.

This also happens in another area. When the seer observes the sleeping, he sees: souls pass through the gate of sleep that never have spiritual interests, and others that absorb spiritual thoughts during the day. — There is a difference: the sleeping souls are like germs in the field. Famine would occur in the spiritual world if no spiritual thoughts were taken across. The dead feed on the spiritual and anthroposophical ideas that the dying bring with them. If we do not carry spiritual concepts with us when we fall asleep, we deprive the dead of nourishment. By reading to them, we give them spiritual stimulation; with the spiritual ideas that we carry with us when we fall asleep, we give the dead nourishment.

Through what a person creates in his soul, he becomes a bridge from the microcosm to the macrocosm. What we acquire is like a seed. I would like to describe the living, not just the theoretical mission of anthroposophy as follows: Theory is transformed into elixir of life, immortality becomes an experience. Just as the seed guarantees the germination of another seed, we develop spiritual and soul forces that guarantee our return in a subsequent earthly life. We not only comprehend, we experience immortality within us. From the moment our hair turns grey, we experience that which passes through the gate of death. In this sense, anthroposophy will become the elixir of life, just as blood courses through our physical body. Only then will anthroposophy be what it is meant to be. When we learn to recognize this and want to summarize it in a basic feeling, in the basic feeling that the human soul is connected to the spiritual world as our physical body is to the physical world, then the human being experiences:

The following speaks to the human mind:
The beings in the expanse of space,
They change over the course of time.
The human soul, experiencing,
From the expanse of space, unlimited
And unperturbed by the passage of time,
Into the realm of eternity.

Today we will deal with the initiation steps of the so-called Rosicrucian, Occidental occult training. Everything that is presented here is by no means to be understood as general rules for life, but can only be the task of the one who voluntarily submits to this training and thus initially stands out from the general human race in order to later be able to pass on what he has achieved. Once he has decided to become a disciple, there should be no possibility for him to criticize this training, the way it is conducted, or the behavior of the occult teacher. He must put himself into the hands of the teacher's experience. If this is impossible, and if he entertains any trace of mistrust or dissatisfaction towards his teacher, then it is better to sever the tie between himself and the teacher. For only an affection based on trust and recognizing the teacher's authority can establish the right relationship between the student and the teacher, which should be beneficial for the student. The student is always free to leave the occult training. But if one wants to undergo it, one must also be clear about the fact that the rules in question are given out of a firmly established truth in the sense of the most advanced individualities, those whom we have to regard as the great teachers of mankind, and that one can only progress if one obeys the rules. It must also be clear that this path with its instructions has already been tried and tested by many hundreds and has been successful.

In the three paths that we have now discussed, the relationship between the student and the teacher is different. In the Indian yoga training, the relationship between student and guru is very strict: absolute, complete submission to the guru is an absolute requirement. Since the student is not yet familiar with the higher worlds when following the Indian path, it is necessary that he is guided by his personal guru.

The relation is different in the case of the Christian training. There the teacher is the guide to the great Guru, Christ Jesus. A personal connection, a personal relationship of mind to Christ Jesus, is absolutely necessary for the disciple. If he cannot believe with all the power of his soul in Christ Jesus and in what He has done and exemplified for humanity, he cannot follow the Christian Path.

In the Rosicrucian training, the relationship is the freest and easiest. The teacher is the faithful friend, the guide within the narrower limits of his student's occult experience. He is not concerned with the student's daily activities, he trusts him and allows him full freedom. There is no compulsion or command anywhere, only advice is given. But there must be a friendly relationship of trust between teacher and student. Without this, the training would remain in the realm of the manasic, without it, Budhi could not be implanted at all. The power generated by the relationship of trust is necessary for occult training. Without it, the dormant powers in the student cannot be awakened.

Since the Rose Cross Way indicates study as the first step, it might be thought that this training is not for everyone. However, this is not correct; it is there for everyone, even for the simplest person. Because this study is understood to mean popular Theosophy, everything that you hear and read here in these lectures and in my or other spiritual scientific writings; that is already such a study. It is the elementary occult teaching given to man. Through it he is to become free from the prejudices of life, from the suggestion of science, which completely dominates the modern man and has already caused much mischief, blocking his unbiased view of the world, the way to impartiality, which he must find in order to have a clear judgment. In the Occident, free thinking is no longer common; instead, everything is suggestion, established dogma through power and authority. Even in the simplest concepts we have this suggestive influence: the suggestion of scholars, the suggestion of science, the suggestion that emanates from the individual. Our modern life is dominated by the family, by the relationship between the sexes. The theosophist, however, should penetrate more deeply into preparatory, logical, and sense-free thinking. He should immerse himself in such trains of thought as far as possible. For this purpose, to train such a way of thinking, I have written the two books 'Truth and Science' and 'Philosophy of Freedom', so that one can immerse oneself in such trains of thought. It is less important to understand the content in question than to live in these trains of thought. Free, sharp, rational thinking is necessary because it gives the student a certain independence, but this thinking is also a sure guide to the higher worlds. We encounter new and different things in the various worlds; but what remains the same in all worlds is thinking. Everywhere there are different perceptions, different experiences, but logic is the same in all worlds. This only changes on the Budhiplan. A remarkable change now occurs in the student. His thoughts expand to embrace other worlds. The thoughts that a person usually has here are not mental, they relate only to the physical plane. They are only the shadow images of mental reality. Now he is approaching its reality.

Next to study, the second faculty we have is imagination. Everyone must go through it at some time. Man gradually frees himself from the dry sensual contemplation of things. He tries to see in them only the expression of something that stands behind them and begins to look at the world in the Goethean sense according to the word: “Everything that is transitory is only a parable.” The pupil must carry out this deepened way of thinking systematically. Things must become parables, symbols, to him. When we look at the rose, it is a symbol for a certain form of beauty; the autumn crocus is the image of a fine, melancholy inwardness.

And so every thing has a meaning at its basis. Things are in fact parables in reality. The whole sensual world is an illusion; the spiritual world is the real one. There must be and be achieved an interaction between people and the spiritual world. We must keep our thoughts and our soul life fluid; we must not form rigid forms. It has already been pointed out in Lucifer-Gnosis that through a continuous, loving contemplation, the qualities are released from things and then flow through space. Thus, for example, something like a flame formation seems to rise from a plant; behind this is the spiritual. In these flowing, flooding sensations of color and taste, which have no correlate here on the physical plane, the human being must now find his way, and then he is ready for the teaching of occult writing to begin.

The third thing to learn is how to read the occult writing. This helps us to correctly line up the manifold phenomena like pearls on a string. The occult writing is not arbitrarily conceived, but represents the currents that flow through the world. Something that plays a major role in spiritual reality is two spirals rolled into one another, forming a vortex. At the root of the nose is the predisposition for the two-petalled lotus flower, which will develop into a higher organ of perception in the future. The sign of the vortex corresponds to this etheric organ. It is similar to the sign of Cancer, in which the Sun was at the dawn of the Atlantean race. We still have this and the other signs of the constellations in the calendar. A very important occult symbol is the staff of Mercury with the snake coiled around it. It is the archetypal form of the letter S. Those who know the occult language can evoke the relevant signs as thought-forms; in certain cases they then have power over others. In John's Gospel 8:3-11, there is an account of Christ and the adulteress: Christ wrote signs of the occult writing on the ground with his finger to create the right thought forms in the accusing crowd and to prompt them to the right action at the right moment. “Let him who is without guilt throw the first stone at her.” He hands over her guilt to karma, to the law of equal return. Christ wanted to say: every deed carries its reward within itself. “Go and sin no more.” Moses received instruction in the seeing of these occult signs in his conversation with God (Exodus 3 and 4). There Moses learned to know the occult writing and was endowed with the power to enable him to fulfill his task. That he had to throw a rod, which became a snake, means that he learned the occult writing.

If we imagine a vortex and think of its two parts in red and blue, we see the two etheric currents that underlie the red and blue blood.

A fourth is the rhythm of life. All higher life is based on it. Nature and the cosmos know nothing but rhythmic laws. The orbits of the stars, every flower, even the intimate life of animals know an exact rhythm. Could you imagine a violet blooming in August instead of March? Rhythm is everywhere present in nature. But the closer we get to the human being, the more the rhythm changes into chaos. The weekly timetable of our schoolchildren is still a true blessing. A person should bring a certain rhythm into themselves, create a new cosmos. This happens through daily repetitive actions, meditation at a certain time of day, and also through regulating the breathing process.

The fifth is the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. When a person finds something within himself that corresponds to a fact in the macrocosm, he first really gets to know himself. How can a person know when the sun was separated from the earth? He can find out by looking into the inside of his eye. Another point in time is when man began to say “I” to himself. This happened in Atlantis, at the time of the Primitive Semites, when a certain point in the physical head coincided with another in the etheric head. The earth was still covered with dense fog, and certain conditions outside and inside man corresponded. An important exercise is for the student to concentrate on a certain point between the eyebrows and to allow himself to be guided by an idea given to him by his teacher.

In the sixth stage, contemplation, the student goes out of himself and expands his consciousness to include the whole world. The higher self is outside of us, we must seek it in all beings, for we are all one. This also speaks from Jupiter and Venus. There are Theosophists who only want to seek the divine within themselves. But in truth, it is the lower personality that speaks from them. One such person once went around saying, “I am Atman, I am Atman.” That was the only thing he knew. Brooding within oneself leads nowhere. We are everything, and we must immerse ourselves in all beings. Immersing oneself in one's own inner being is only a detour to doing so.

When you have come so far as to be able to empathize with all beings, then you have reached the seventh stage, that of divinity. The whole nature of the world takes on a spiritual physiognomy. Everything that man sees around him becomes an expression of something higher. Just as tears are not just salty drops with a certain chemical composition, but an expression of the soul, so the plant cover of the earth is an expression of the earth soul, which is a reality. Some flowers appear to us as joyful eyes, others as tears of the earth spirit, which it weeps over the sadness that prevails in the cosmos. It is true what Goethe has the earth spirit say:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth
birth and grave,
an eternal sea,
a changing weaving,
a glowing life:
So I create at the whirring loom of time
And work the living garment of divinity.

This is how we got to know the skeleton of the Rosicrucian schooling.

Which training you undergo is not crucial. You can develop your soul powers and gain insights into the supersensible world through all three paths. Of course, it is good to consider which path you choose based on where you are at the foot of the mountain you are climbing.

What does the disciple achieve when the initiation has taken him to the summit up there? A very real thing. Remember the description of the human being. At the time of Christ Jesus, the majority of people had developed part of the astral body and part of the etheric body. It was different for the initiates. When the chela had passed the necessary stages, he was admitted to the initiation. He had to have worked through his entire astral body. There was nothing left in his astral body that he did not control. In general, passions rule over man, not man over passions. Man must be master of his desires and passions if he wants to become a disciple. Then he must work on his etheric body, he must transform the qualities of his temperament and bring it to the point where he can consciously change his movements, his gait, his writing. So it is not only about becoming moral, but one must become a completely different person.

When the entire astral body has been worked through by the I, it has become manas, the spiritual self, and is transformed into it. The transformation of the etheric body is called Budhi; he has become the spirit of life. When the initiate seizes the physical body for transformation, he then influences the planet and makes himself the center of cosmic forces; then he develops in himself Atman, the Father, the spiritual man.

At first it is an unconscious work that man does on his etheric body and his astral body. This takes place in the general process of human development. The chela begins to consciously take this work into his own hands. With unceasing practice, a certain moment is reached where the entire astral body is transformed. Then everything in the astral body can imprint itself into the etheric body. Only then may this happen, not before, because otherwise bad qualities would be imprinted. What has been acquired then goes through all incarnations with the causal body. The immortalization, the vitalization of all that the astral body contains, is an extremely important process. The astral body cannot discard this in any Kamaloka, it carries this with it forever. Therefore, the previous purification is very necessary.

The impressing of what the astral body contains into the etheric body was carried out in the old initiation by placing the disciple in a crypt and laying him in a kind of coffin. Sometimes he was also tied to a kind of cross and placed in a lethargic state, in which the etheric body emerged from the physical body at the same time as the astral body. Something similar, namely the emergence of a part of the etheric body, occurs when a limb falls asleep; one can then see the affected part of the etheric body hanging out of the body. The initiation itself was performed by a particularly high initiate. Much else was done according to prescribed rules. Such a sleep was different from an ordinary sleep. Only the physical body remained behind in the so-called coffin, and the etheric and astral bodies went out; so it was a kind of death. This was necessary to free the etheric body, because only then could the astral body imprint itself on the etheric body. This state lasted three and a half days. When the initiate was then directed by the initiator back to the physical body, one last formula was impressed upon him, with which he woke up. These were the words: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!” that is, “My God, my God, how hast Thou glorified me!” At the same time, a certain star, Sirius in the Egyptian initiation, shone towards him. Now he had become a new man. There was a very specific reason why the completely spiritualized astral body was given a very special name: it was called the “virgin,” the “Virgin Sophia.” And the etheric body, which absorbs what the Virgin Sophia carried within herself, was called the “Holy Spirit.” And that which arose from both was the “Son of Man”. The proclamation and birth of Jesus of Nazareth are based on these mystery teachings.

This inner experience was also depicted in the image of the Holy Ghost as a dove hovering over the chalice. This is the moment described in the Gospel of John 1:32: “And John bore witness, saying, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on Him’.” Imagine this happening on the astral plane, and you have a real event. The one who was allowed to experience these great things outside of the mysteries in the physical world was allowed to initiate others as an initiator. John's Gospel 11, 1-45: the resurrection of Lazarus is nothing more than an initiation performed on Lazarus.

We cannot take the gospel of John deeply enough. Even the giving of names is something extremely important. The names that appear in the Bible are taken from the inner being of man. An example of this are the names of the twelve apostles. They point to the relationship between them and the Lord, the Christ, who is the head and has as a sign the ram or the lamb. John means the one who proclaims the Budhi. You can divide the human being into twelve parts; the whole human being is a twelve-fold being. The human being as he is now gradually came into being. Each time the sun entered a new constellation, a new organ developed in the human being. For example, when the sun was in the sign of Leo, the heart developed. As the human being ascends, he incorporates a group soul. The twelve parts of the human being can be found in the names of the twelve apostles, where they are incorporated. What the twelve constituent parts are in an ordinary body, that is what the twelve apostles signify in the collective body of Christ. The part that represents the ego, in which selfishness rules and brings about the death of Christ, is called Judas Iscariot. In this naming, it was added that he had the bag, the money, the lower principle of greed.

The significance of this naming can also be seen from the fact that the one who, in the great plan of the world, is the spiritual representative of the development of mankind, is given the name “the Son of Man”. His father is the “Holy Spirit” and his mother “the Virgin Sophia”. You can find this again in the Gospel of John 19:25-27, in the scene under the cross: “Woman, behold, your son!” “Behold, your mother!” The writer of the Gospel of John, the disciple whom Christ Himself initiated, took the wisdom and wrote the Gospel of John, which contains the wisdom of Christianity.

We must not forget that these things are facts, but as such they are the expression of profound spiritual realities.

Today, we want to take a look at the world of medieval legends from the point of view of the theosophical worldview. Two important legends are characteristic of the intellectual development of Europe in the Middle Ages, the two legends that are grouped around the Holy Grail.

In earlier times, the knowledgeable expressed themselves to the people about the deepest truths through legends and myths. If the people who lived where Northern and Central Europe is today had been taught such concepts as we now get in the theosophical world view, the people of yore would not have understood them. The sages spoke to each people and age as that people and age could understand. They always based their teachings on the law of reincarnation.

The sages who told the secrets of the world to the peoples of Northern and Central Europe were the Druids. “Druid” means “oak”. When it is said that the Germans celebrated their religious services “under oaks”, it does not only mean that they really celebrated their services under natural oaks, but it also means that they were under the guidance of the Druids. And when it is said that Boniface “fell the oak,” it means that the old Druidic service was overcome by Christianity. A true fact was given in the form of the saga. The Druid introduced the true facts into the sagas. The Druid priest was already speaking to all the souls that are today absorbing our worldview. He spoke to them in a way that was appropriate for that time. All of us who have adopted the theosophical worldview have heard the same things before in myths and fairy tales, otherwise we would not be able to understand them today. This is the secret of the great masters: they live fully in the awareness that they are among people who are repeatedly embodied.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the basic truths of Germanic-Central European culture lived in a great saga. If we get to know this saga, we understand what was present in the Middle Ages. The Druid priests nourished the awareness that once upon a time there was a high culture far to the west. This culture was in a land called Nifelheim or Nibelungenheim. This Nifelheim was the old Atlantis. It used to be a foggy place because of its peculiar atmospheric conditions, which were very different from ours.

The Germanic tribal saga thus truly reflects the truth. It points to an ancient land that once existed between Europe and America, where the Atlantic Ocean is now. This ancient land of Atlantis perished, along with the treasures of power and wisdom. These treasures were referred to as gold, and their demise is told in the saga as the sinking of the gold of the Nibelungen hoard. The treasure of the Nibelungs is to be raised in a new way, more in the East, in Europe. First Wotan, then Siegfried are the initiates who have the task of bringing the old treasure back to today's Europe, of making the Nibelung hoard fruitful again for newer culture in a certain way. The fact that the saga presents us with a secret initiate, Wotan, helps us to gain a deep insight into another ancient culture. The letters W and B correspond to each other. Wotan, Wodan is the same as Bodha Buddha. Wotan is actually the Germanic form of the word Buddha. We come across a common origin of the European Wotan religion and the Asian Buddha religion. The Buddha religion did not spread so much in India, but among those peoples of Asia who still had something of the Atlantean culture in them. The Wotan peoples also brought their views from the Atlantean culture. Their further development was expressed in the legends that the Druid priests had taught them. The saving of the hoard of the Nibelungs - the Atlantean culture - by Wotan and Siegfried is particularly beautifully expressed in these sagas.

A tragically prophetic thread runs through these sagas, which can be found from Russia via Germany to France and England, and can be found everywhere where druid priests taught. They taught prophetically: a twilight of the gods will come. We are the remnants of Atlantean culture. We must die to make way for something better. Our initiates are prophets of what is to come. A certain tragedy is expressed in all those who are initiated in the manner of Siegfried. The Song of the Nibelungs contains an ancient form of initiation: the distress of the Nibelungs, the lament of the Nibelungs. The very intimate disciples were taught that another would come who would bring the spiritual life. The mood of the Götterdämmerung was spread everywhere. All lived in the feeling and the intimate disciples in the certainty: One will come who will be very different from our initiates. - This is expressed in the saga through Siegfried.

In Scandinavia and Russia, the Drotten mysteries were analogous to the Druid mysteries. “Drotte” is another form of Druid. Throughout the ancient mysteries, Sig is the name of the original, great initiate. All names composed with “Sig” lead back to Sig, for example Sigurd, Sigmund, Sieglinde and so on. Siegfried was the initiate who had found peace in initiation. “Peace” means that which leads the human being beyond all doubt; it is the satisfaction of desire, the desire for knowledge, for power. Siegfried is depicted in all pictures as invulnerable. Achilles, the Greek initiate, remained vulnerable at one point, at the heel. Siegfried, after overcoming the dragon, became invulnerable except for one point, the point between the shoulder blades. This is where the cross is to be carried. This symbol played a profound role in the ancient mysteries. There it was said: You are all vulnerable at the point where one will have the cross. The one who will cover this place with the cross, the cross-bearer, will be the great initiate who is no longer vulnerable. This is what gives the Nordic saga its great appeal. This wisdom was an apocalyptic wisdom.

All occultists know that this wisdom emanates from a central oracle of twelve initiates, the so-called “White Lodge”. From there, the wisdom is carried out into the world. Nowhere is this different from the fact that the individual knows himself to be connected to the others. Everywhere there were twelve members of the lodge. Such are also the twelve apostles. The consciousness of those who intuitively perceive and the wisdom of those who know leads back to the Round Table of King Arthur. This is nothing other than the Great White Lodge, which in the Siegfried initiation made clear to the nations what it had to say to the world. Great initiates were members of the Round Table, which existed in Wales until the time of Queen Elizabeth of England. Then it was abolished for political reasons.

Two very specific political currents were traced back to these primeval times by medieval popular consciousness. In the Frankish people, who were so fortunate as to conquer the West of Europe, there was a dynasty that actually traced its origins back to the times of Atlantis. They were called the “Wibelungen” or “Nibelungen” — from which the word “Ghibellines” later emerged. There was an old consciousness of a ruling dynasty rising among the Franks, rooted in the old Nibelungen land, combining secular and priestly power. That is why Charlemagne tried to have the royal crown placed on him in Rome, to add a spiritual element to the secular one.

Originally, all the power that was assumed was derived from what had come over from Atlantis. The fact that people thought and sensed that a twilight of the gods was coming also connected a certain tragic trait to the ruling dynasty. It was said: Those who want to know can well become initiates, but they must be replaced by something else. This sentiment was first expressed in the well-known Barbarossa saga; then something was added that was not in the usual saga. Barbarossa was correctly thought of as a continuation of the old Franconian rulers. The Hohenstaufen were the Ghibellines, Waiblingen, Wibelungen, Nibelungen, in contrast to the Guelphs, the Guelfs. The more intimate version adds to the well-known Barbarossa saga that Barbarossa brought the Holy Grail from Asia to Europe. He himself perished as a physical personality and now waits for his time to come. This expresses the whole mood of the Middle Ages towards ancient paganism and the new Christianity.

People began to look at their own national soul and said: We brought our culture over from ancient Atlantis. But it is destined to perish; Christianity must take its place. But it will rise again, purified, cleansed, elevated by Christianity. — A beginning was made to create a transition from the end of the descent to the beginning of the ascent. A beginning was made to imagine the course of the lower German spiritual culture in such a way that the clairvoyant, Atlantean consciousness was replaced by something that had yet to come. Natural bravery, piety, virtue had to be reclaimed in a different, new way. There were three conceptions, conceptions of three definite powers: Wotan is the intuitive power as represented by the initiate; Wili is the will itself; We is the mind, with a tragic trait where it becomes apocalyptic. Now another time was to come. Now, through the Christian teaching, the point of passage was to be gained, and one was to ascend again to what was before the twilight of the gods.

That Barbarossa sits in the mountain means that he is an initiate. The “mountain” is the place of initiation. Christ went with his disciples “on the mountain” - into the mystery. The ravens signify an initiation of Barbarossa. In the Persian initiation ritual, there are seven stages of initiation. The “ravens” signify the first stage of personal initiation. They denote the still existing connection of the initiate with the environment. Think of the ravens of Elijah. We also find ravens with Wotan. They mediate his communication with the environment. Thus, Barbarossa, the initiate, also had the ravens around him, which still kept him connected to the world.

Barbarossa had brought the Holy Grail from the Orient. This Holy Grail had been kept on the Mons salvationis, the mountain of salvation. It is now surrounded by the successors of King Arthur's Round Table, the twelve knights who added the Christian initiation to the old pagan initiation. The Grail is the symbol of the Christian initiation. Those who wanted to be initiated into the secrets of the Holy Grail became Christian initiates. One becomes a Christian initiate by first going through all doubts and then getting a firm hold in the connection with Christ Himself. One thing is necessary for this: direct trust in the figure of Christ. The first disciples placed particular emphasis on the fact that Christ was there. They say: We want to bear witness that we were with Him. We have laid our hands in His wounds. What we have seen and heard ourselves, that we proclaim. Paul is an apostle because he has truly seen the Risen One in spirit. It depends on the direct experience, which one acquires not through wisdom and logic, but directly.

It is clear to us what Parzival is meant to achieve on his wanderings. Parzival's mother is called Herzeleide. If you read Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, who was a thoroughly initiated man, deeply, between the lines and words, you will find that the name of Parzival's mother, Herzeleide, is a reflection of the tragic trait that lay in the German soul. Those who do not follow the Parzival path carry sorrow in their hearts; they have to gain peace for themselves. Wolfram von Eschenbach knew how to clothe the saga in a beautiful form. With the one fact, he meant a profound symbol - the female personality always signifies consciousness: Herzeleide is the state of consciousness from which Parzival starts. At first he has a tragic consciousness. He struggles through everything that worldly knighthood can offer, with a naive, simple consciousness, in order to come to the secret of the Holy Grail.

We must keep this together with the Barbarossa saga. Barbarossa went to Asia to seek the secrets of the Holy Grail, the initiation of Christianity. But he perished on the way to the Holy Grail. He has to wait “in the mountains” until Christianity can find the connection to the earlier initiation. Barbarossa brought Christianity, but has not yet achieved the deeper initiation of Christianity.

Parzival is the new Christian initiate, the great symbol that replaces the Siegfried initiation. Siegfried has overcome the lower nature, the lindworm, the snake. Parzival becomes the initiate of the Holy Grail, who gets to know the one who is invulnerable where Siegfried was still vulnerable. In Parzival, the original idea of Christianity is expressed. It no longer knows the idea of reincarnation. One regards the one life between birth and death as the only one. The valuable thing is the one incarnation. One no longer looks up to Manas, Budhi, Atma. The Parzival initiation was only to come to the awareness of the connection with Christ, to consider the one incarnation in which man comes to knowledge through compassion and not through knowledge to compassion, as it happens through theosophy. Theosophy teaches us to recognize how we are one with all people. Through it, one knows that one is responsible for what our brother does. Theosophy leads through knowledge to compassion. But humanity had to go through a period of development for a while, where it was to come to knowledge through compassion. It had to descend into the depths of compassion, because one can also come to knowledge there. It had to be so, in order that people might get to know this earthly world in all its importance. Christianity was to educate humanity, so that the earthly might also be grasped in its significance. Therefore, man first had to be directed, steered downwards, in the moral sense, towards physical life. Only then could he arrive at the great achievements that begin with city culture.

The progress of the Middle Ages is described in the saga in the transition from the Parzival saga to the Lohengrin saga. This saga emerges at a time when cities are being founded all over Europe, primarily serving the emerging bourgeoisie, which is no longer based on the spiritual life but on the material life. All material achievements are prepared in the cities, for example, the art of printing. Without the culture of the cities, modern science would not have been able to develop in this way. The universities are also a consequence of this culture. A Copernicus, a Kepler, a Newton and so on would not have been possible without it. Dante's “Divine Comedy” and the painters of the Renaissance can also be traced back to the culture of the cities.

The saga of the connection between Parzival, the father, and Lohengrin, the son, points to the importance of urban culture. Elsa of Brabant represents the cities, the urban consciousness. In all mysticism, that which works against the physical world is presented as something feminine. Goethe speaks of the “eternal feminine”; in Egypt, Isis was worshipped in this sense.

Let us consider the stages of the chela's initiation. The chela must first overcome three stages. The first step is that of the homeless man, where man is torn out of the physical world, where he becomes objective towards the physical world. He must unlearn to be partial, he must learn to love everything equally; he does not love less, but he transfers his love to everything that deserves love, not just to his homeland and so on. The second step is where the chela builds huts. He finds a new home. The disciples on the mountain have reached this stage. They are beyond space and time, they see Elijah and Moses. That is why they say: “Let us build huts.” The third stage is that of the swan. A swan is the chela who has come so far that all things speak to him, even those who have their consciousness on higher planes. On the physical plane, only man has the ego. The animal has consciousness on the astral plane, the plant on the mental plane (rupa plane), the mineral on the higher mental plane (arupa plane). One must rise to higher worlds to find the I, the names of other beings; there things speak their own names to the chela. The world then becomes resounding and sounding for him everywhere. In view of this fact, Goethe says:

The sun resounds in the ancient manner In the spheres of the brothers' song, And its prescribed journey it completes With a thunderclap.

He repeats this reference from the prologue in heaven where he leads Faust over into the higher worlds:

The new day is already born for the ears of the spirit. Rock gates creak and rattle, Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter, What a roar brings the light! It trumpets, it trompets, the eye blinks and the ear is amazed, Unheard-of things are heard.

It is not a matter of indifference that the Prologue in Heaven in the first part of “Faust” and the second part begin in this way. Goethe was pointing to something very specific: it is the third degree of chelaship, where the world around us becomes resounding and all things tell us their name. Jesus had reached such a degree when he was to receive Christ. This degree was designated in the White Lodge as the swan. Swans were those who were no longer allowed to speak their name, but to whom the whole world revealed its names.

Lohengrin, the son of Parzival, is the initiate who founded city culture, who was sent by the great Grail lodge to fertilize the consciousness of medieval humanity. Elsa of Brabant characterizes the striving human consciousness, which is fertilized by the environment, the masculine. The urban consciousness represented by Elsa is to be fertilized by Lohengrin, by the Holy Grail. The connection between Lohengrin and Elsa of Brabant is the connection between material culture and the spiritual task of the fifth sub-race. The swan is the man initiated in the third degree, who brings in the Master from the Great Lodge. Man must let the Master work upon him without asking about His nature. Elsa of Brabant must accept what He gives her as her due. The moment she asks out of curiosity, the initiate disappears. All this is expressed in the Lohengrin saga.

The Templars had brought the initiation wisdom of the Holy Grail from the Orient to the Mountain of Salvation, mons salvationis, the place of initiation of Christianity. An initiation ceremony pointed directly to the future of the whole human race. It was said: a time will come when Christianity will experience a new phase. The progress of human spiritual culture has always been consciously referred to as the progress of the sun. Before 800 BC, the sun passed through the constellation of Taurus for about 2200 years. Over in Asia, the bull was worshipped as the divine. Even before that, the twins were worshipped in Persia for the same reason: good and evil, duality. Around 800 BC, the Sun entered the sign of Aries or the Lamb. This is indicated by the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece. Christ calls Himself the Lamb of God because He appeared under this sign. [Today the Sun is in the sign of Pisces.] The Knights Templar point to the next constellation; the Sun will then enter the constellation of Aquarius. There Christianity will truly arise for the first time, paganism united with Christianity. This culture will resurrect a new John. This moment will occur when the sun is in the sign of Aquarius. John means 'water bearer'; he will be the herald of a new era of Christianity. It is said that the Knights Templar pointed to John the Baptist, not to Christ. But the John of whom they speak is the Aquarius.

The last phase of Christianity, which originated with the initiate Lohengrin, has brought about the period of usefulness, which has now reached its peak. The theosophical movement wants to be the successor of such movements, as the Parzival movement was and as the one that originated with the initiate Lohengrin. Modern materialism also owes its origin to great initiates, but it must be replaced by a new phase, by a new cycle. This is what Theosophy wants to bring about. But it is always the initiates who speak when a new cultural impact is to be given.

Primal force and primal substance are one unity. From this unity all that is revealed emerges. It was the consciousness of this primal power and primal substance that drove it to manifestation, just as it is the consciousness of man that drives him into physical incarnations. This consciousness also rests in the primordial cause; but it comes to expression through the emergence from this primordial cause. In order for it to emerge, it needs a part of the primordial force, of life, and of the primordial substance, of being. Thus the consciousness, the thought of God, emerged at the beginning, based on the other parts of the divine unity, on the power and the substance or the life and the being. The consciousness is the spirit, the life is the son, the will is the father. The consciousness is the willed, the force is the willing; the life carries out the will of the primordial force.

To survey itself, the consciousness of the primordial power lifted itself out of that primordial power on the waves of life. Thus the consciousness emerged like the rays of light from the inside of a luminous body. It was carried out by the rhythm of the life springing from the inside. The carrier of consciousness remains hidden, just as the core of a luminous body remains hidden. We do not see the center of the shining sun, the center, the core of a flame remains dark; the power of human manifestation within man, which radiates the aura, appears even to the eye of the seer like the dark core of a flame.

The consciousness of the elemental force is the infinite space, and the thoughts of the elemental force meet us in this space as the figures. While we see in the forms the highest expression of the consciousness of the elemental force, we behold in the change of appearance the expression of the life of the elemental force; but the highest force itself rests in the unity from which the multiplicity emerges. There are two poles of the primeval force in the world; where force and substance appear as one, as undivided in themselves, is one pole; and the other pole is where both force and substance appear as many particulars, in physical manifestation. But since primordial force and primordial substance in this highest division also attain the highest degree of consciousness, this highest division of force and substance also forms a part of the perfection of the divine being. The perfection of the consciousness side of the divine lies in the possibility of consciously beholding itself through the divided cosmos. The greatness of power lies in unity, the greatness of consciousness in diversity, the greatness of life lies in the constant maintenance of the interrelation between primordial power and manifestation.

In the One, force and substance are together in eternal rest; in life, force and substance are in motion, in rhythm; in consciousness, force and substance face each other. Consciousness confronts that which has come to expression through itself. There first enters the objectivity of the world, opposite the subjectivity of consciousness.

Consciousness rises from the unified original substance and the original power through life. Now in that which has become it beholds the two poles, force and substance; but in that which is becoming, life, it recognizes their union, and thereby it also recognizes their original unity. Thus the trinity of all being joins together.

There is a law that the effect of a force decreases in the same proportion as the squares of the distance from it increase. In the physical cosmos we see the manifestation of the Godhead, the outworking of its consciousness. In this shaping of the divine consciousness, in the strongest emergence of the thoughts of God, we also see the greatest distance from the elemental force. Therefore, in the outer, visible world, the diversity of the thoughts arising from the elemental force can be recognized best for us, but the greatness of the force appears least to us there, because the force has given itself there by appearing in many individual phenomena. It is the outline of the elemental force that we recognize in the physical world, that we recognize in the figures. Only then we can recognize the meaning of the physical world, which appears to us in the space, if we regard the space as the consciousness of the Godhead, the figures in it as the thoughts of the Godhead. Everything that is around us in space are thoughts in the consciousness of the eternal, divine primeval power. While the primeval power and primeval substance is one and fills and encompasses everything that is and lives, it forms its thoughts in space, and communicates to them a part of its power, a part of its substance, as with the mineral; in addition to this, a part of its life, as with the plant; and in addition to this, a part of its consciousness, as with the animal and human kingdoms. To this it gave to man still the power of freedom, that is, to become self-aware. Through man, the Godhead beholds itself. And thereby it communicated to man the power to recognize the Godhead; [to recognize that men are both - like all created things - the become thoughts of God and that they receive their life from the Godhead and their power, their will rests in the will of the Godhead.]

Each individual embodied God-thought is a reflection of the original Unity. The greatest objectivity in the world is the reflection of the greatest subjectivity. From the One, through the life emanating from it, many individual forms emerged, and all these individual forms express a part of the powers of the One. Every form in the world is perfect when it expresses that part of the primordial power which it is intended to express, to which this primordial power has destined it.

The mineral world is to express above all the primordial being, the primordial substance in many individual beings. The plant world is to express the one life in many living forms; the animal kingdom is to express the sentience in many individual beings. Man is to become a reflection of the whole primordial power, and for this purpose he was given the possibility of self-consciousness and liberation. He became a child of the Godhead, gifted with all divine powers in such a way that he can develop in freedom to God-likeness. All physical beings are God-thought, but man is such a God-thought that turns back into the life of the Godhead and the will of the Godhead. Emerged from the will and the life of the Godhead as a thought, he turns back in the thought into the life and the will again, and thus he closes the cycle of the God-power, thus he leads the emerged, articulated God-power back again into its one original ground.

In the physical world of forms we recognize the highest division of the Godhead according to the side of the force as well as according to that of the substance, because force and substance are basically always connected. The close connection of the individual particles in all mineral forms is only a deception. Just as the individual shapes are recognizable for our senses only by the fact that they are separated, also the individual particles of the shaped in the mineral world are recognizable for us only by the fact that there are spaces between all atoms. Just as light and shadow came into being through the separation of the individual shapes, so that they thereby became visible to the physical eye, so also all mineral substances are visible to the physical eye because they cause light and shadow through separation of the atoms. If all mineral substances were an undifferentiated unity and we were likewise undifferentiated in this unity, then we could recognize nothing objectively in the environment. Then there would be no separation, but also no light and shadow, no external physical perception by the physical senses. So that the objects could emerge - as single ones -, separation had to occur, it had to become light between us and the objects. What has happened with the formation of the thoughts of God, which come to us as special individual beings, has also happened in the whole substance; the individual atoms came apart. We could not cut a body if its substance formed a continuous mass. Water cannot be cut through, air cannot be cut through, because the particles of water and air are more closely connected than the particles of solid substances. But one can separate nevertheless water and air particles by solid substances which are pushed in continuously. We know, however, that both the water and the air particles have the tendency to flow together again and again. We find something similar with some solid substances, for example with magnetic iron, that they also have the tendency to flow together. The finer and less perceptible to our physical senses a substance is, the more intimate is its connection, the less we can separate the individual particles from each other, the faster the gaps fill in, the greater is the force that holds the individual particles together. The original substance cannot be divided by any other force, it is in itself one, undifferentiated; and where there is any gap in the other substances which proceed from it, it fills it up by itself, or by the substances divided out of itself. Thus everything is permanently filled with the fullness of the Godhead.

As it descends, the primordial substance becomes less and less dense. Solid matter is actually the least dense, because it is the least continuous, the most changeful, the most irregular, the expression of the highest separateness and the strongest antipole of the one primordial substance. The primordial substance, in which substance and force are completely one, is the origin of all life. Life is the interaction of force and substance. There emerges from the unmoved a movement which runs rhythmically. By the will of the divine primal ground this movement arises, and all life emerges from this movement. The two poles are formed out of the divine One, substance and force; what holds them together is life. In life, substance and force are united. Life is stretched like a string from the pole of force to that of substance; and like a string it vibrates rhythmically between these two poles, thus bringing everything that is into rhythmic movement. This rhythmic movement, which is both substance and force, which occurs in the tension between substance and force, is that which expresses itself in all living things. The stronger the tension, the stronger the life; the less strong the tension, the less life there is. But only in the less strong tension can life express itself. In the case of the string that is stretched tightly, we hardly notice the vibrations at all. In the case of the less tightly stretched string, we can see the oscillations more clearly. The movement of the infinitely taut string cannot be seen at all, because it is too fast and the rhythm is so continuous that it is like immobility. Life can become perceptible to us only where it occurs in the lesser tension between force and substance. The least tension is there in the physical, there we see the movement of life in the passing and arising of the forms. These are the slowest vibrations, the greatest waves of life, but they also have the least force, which emerge the most, but also flow away the farthest. The stronger tension of life concentrates life in itself; it does not emerge so strongly and therefore does not flood off so strongly. It remains more within itself, although the power and the speed of the rhythm is significantly greater there. The greatest rapidity coincides with the greatest calmness, the greatest power lies in being completely closed, [in] not stepping out of oneself.

So we recognize in the external existence the division of the divine consciousness into individual thoughts; and the greatest waves of the divine life in the appearances flowing up and down. Only in the fact that the individual forms stand before us, objectively, and in the fact that life flows up and down, we recognize the divine will. In building up and destroying the divine will makes itself known. There is the power, which lets the life flow up and down, and the power, which lets formations arise from the sea of life. That everything comes into being and passes away again is the divine expression of will. The will of God itself is always one, eternal, imperishable, completely undifferentiated, but its reflection is the succession of life and death. That which called the figures into life also calls them back out of life, just as the ego of man drives him into incarnation and pulls him back out of it again. The consciousness of man is expressed in the thought, the consciousness of God in the figures. That which shapes them, which gives them growth, that is the divine life. But that the consciousness shapes itself vividly, that proceeds from the divine will.

In the whole world we see the formed thoughts of the Godhead. That the thoughts of the Godhead could become visible externally, is possible by the sacrifice of the life into the mineral kingdom. There the life has given itself to bring the thought to the expression. There the life steps back completely behind the expression of the thought. Our thoughts are to become just as purely from all remainder, which mixes itself with it, as the crystal unclouded and uniformly, in itself united and eagerly expresses a God-thought. The crystal is the perfect expression of a God-thought. The substance has arranged itself there according to the lines of the thought sent out by the divine consciousness. The crystals are an expression of the forms of the archetypes of life, but not imbued with life. If the life rhythms of the Godhead are streamed into such pure thoughts of God, then they arise alive before our eyes. The plant world appears before us as living thoughts of God. It expresses the pure rhythm of life. Also the plant is still desireless. It is thought and life, but without passion, without will of its own.

Now, if a part of God's will flows into the living forms, a realm of passion arises, as we see it in the animal kingdom and in the lower human nature. There is nothing rooted in the whole anymore. It separates itself from the whole as something special. In its external movement it becomes independent of the whole. This is brought about by the divine will that appears in it. It represents the own will separated from the God-consciousness. Passion, too, is a power of the Godhead, which brought forth independence in the created forms. The desire is first the expression of the independence won in this way. Now, however, the divine will sank into man in such a way that the divine life and the divine consciousness could also become his own possession, and through the divine consciousness he recognized himself as a part of the Godhead, as having emerged from the Godhead. He could unite himself anew with the Godhead first through the consciousness; thereby the separation was overcome. Then he had to become one with Him also in the realm from which his life was taken, and then in the realm which drove him into existence, in the realm of the will of God, the Father-power.

The realm of thought is like the periphery; the realm of will like the center; the realm of life like the rhythmic movement between center and periphery. In the realm of thought man becomes independent; through the rhythm of life he lets himself be carried back into the primordial ground from which he emerged. In the realm of individual phenomena he forms himself into an individuality, into the I; by flowing back into the realm of life on the waves of life together with other individualities, he finds the way back to the Father-power.

According to the law, which is even more strongly expressed in the higher worlds than in the physical, that there can be no emptiness, according to the law the being of man renews itself in the measure in which he surrenders himself to the higher life. The more he surrenders, the stronger the higher life flows to him. He must die in order to become. The more he dies, the more he becomes, until at last he enters life, where there is no longer any distinction at all between becoming and passing away, where becoming takes place so rapidly from passing away that everything is one continuous life.

As we recognize in the mineral kingdom the kingdom of God's thoughts, so we recognize in the plant kingdom the kingdom of life. It is the intermediate kingdom between the elaboration of the divine thought and the divine will in the individual beings. The plant kingdom mediates the life currents in the world. Without the oxygen that the plant kingdom provides, the animal and human kingdoms could not live, and everything plant serves to build up the animal and human bodies. The mineral kingdom does not contain life, man cannot maintain his life from it; in the animal kingdom we see life in stasis; that which man uses for food from the animal kingdom also does not promote life in him, but the stasis of life, passion. The plant kingdom is the one in which man breathes and which also forms his natural food that promotes his life development. Thus, on the one hand, the mineral kingdom is built up from the dead plant kingdom, and on the other hand, the animal and human kingdoms are kept alive from the living plant kingdom. According to the substance, the kingdom of life thus serves for the continued building up of the mineral kingdom, and according to the power, it serves for the continued development of the animal and human kingdom. There also the two poles of substance and power meet us in the life and weaving of the plant kingdom, the actual kingdom of life.

This also represents the institution of the Lord's Supper. In the life of the world both are contained, substance and power. In the bread is symbolized the dead plant which builds up the mineral in the world and also the body of man; in the wine is symbolized the life force which the world life infuses into the substance. As long as man still dwells in the mineral existence, he must take substance from the kingdom of life in order to build himself up, and take strength in order to live. When he himself passes from the realm of the mineral world, of becoming and passing away, into the realm of life, then he finds substance and strength in himself as the two poles of his being between which his life runs. Then he no longer needs to build himself up minerally, but he gains form in the higher worlds, in life itself. Form and life are then united in him, and he then leads the whole earth permanently over into the eternal rhythm of life.

In order for man to reach this stage of development, he must allow the forces at work in the mineral and plant kingdoms to arise in him. The desireless, mineral ideal forms of the crystals represent for him what is to become his thought. The crystal is the expression of the pure, chaste, divine thought. As the plant gives up its whole life to express the divine will, without its own desire, without its own passion, so also man is to live and grow in the world only as an expression of the divine power which the Godhead has sunk into him.

What it leads to, if he lives a life of passion, he recognizes in the animal kingdom. There he sees how passion brings suffering because it distracts beings from the light of wisdom. The animal kingdom is the expression of passion, the realm of joy and pain. The unpurified power expresses itself in the animal kingdom. Through the unpurified power, man is also driven into joy and pain. But by purification of the power he grows beyond joy and pain. For how he should purify the force, the calmness and unity of the mineral kingdom and the desireless life of the plant kingdom are a model for him. His thoughts must become as concentrated as the forms of a crystal; his life must be as rhythmic as the life of the plant, then he will stamp the divinity in his being. Then the power in him will no longer be expressed as passion, but as supreme blessedness and as an expression of blissful resting in the will of the Godhead, and what substance there is in him will then serve him only for the shaping of a sublime expression of the power of God.

I

[ 1 ] The life of an age finds its most intimate expression in poetry. What the spirit of an epoch has to say to the heart of the individual is expressed in his songs. No art speaks such an intimate language as lyrical poetry. Through it we become aware of how intimately interwoven the human soul is with the greatest and the smallest processes of the universe. The mighty genius who walks on the heights of humanity becomes the friend of the simplest mind through his song. How man is drawn to man is revealed with perfect clarity in poetry. For we feel that we have no less claim to the spiritual gifts of our fellow men than to their lyrical creations. What the spirit achieves in other fields seems to belong to all mankind from the outset, and they believe they have a right to share in its enjoyment. The song is a voluntary gift whose communication springs from the selfless need not to possess the secrets of the soul for oneself alone. This basic trait of lyrical art may explain why it is the most beautiful means of reconciliation between the most diverse attitudes of people. The religious mind and the atheistic free spirit will meet sympathetically when the latter sings of his God and the latter sings of freedom. And poetry is also the field in which today the bearers of old, mature artistic ideals and the spirits of a nascent, nascent world view communicate most easily.

[ 2 ] The German sense of art in the second third of our century presents itself as an after-effect of the classical and romantic intellectual currents. The relationship that Goethe, Herder, Schiller and their successors had with nature and art was regarded as exemplary. They set high standards for themselves, but first asked their predecessors whether these standards were the right ones. This way of thinking continues to this day. Gradually, it became second nature to the creative spirits. They were under its spell without being aware of it.

[ 3 ] One such spirit is Theodor Storm. A naive view of nature, a simple, healthy sense are combined with a highly developed feeling for artistic form. Storm owes this feeling to the fact that his youth began soon after Goethe's death. The intellectual atmosphere of his age instilled in him a sense for perfect art forms as if it were innate. Storm poured the atmospheric Iyrian views into these forms, which his sense of nature and his deep feelings brought him.

[ 4 ] The classical sense of art bore different fruit from that of the North German Storm in two Swiss poets, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Gottfried Keller. Natures like Meyer can only flourish in times that were preceded by cultural peaks. They have inherited the need for the highest goals in life and at the same time an artistic seriousness that is not easily satisfied by their own achievements. Meyer wants to experience everything he experiences with dignity. His ideals are so distant that he is in constant fear of never reaching them. He wants to constantly indulge in festive feelings that others only allow themselves at certain times. What he has achieved always falls short of what he desires, so that an incessant alternation of longing and renunciation pervades his soul. He sees pathetic symbols in natural phenomena. He passes by the obvious relationships between things; instead he searches for rare, hidden connections between beings and phenomena. He becomes aware of the strongest contrasts everywhere, because his whole perception strives for the great line.

[ 5 ] Gottfried Keller is an essentially different personality. For him, the attainable is the standard he applies to everything. His whole outlook on life has something bourgeois and unaffected about it. A sound, simple mind and free, receptive senses alone determine his existence. He does not love his homeland out of an ethical instinct, but because he feels most comfortable in his homeland. He strongly emphasizes all the good things about his homeland and benevolently overlooks the unpleasant. He enjoys things as they are and never worries about whether something could be different. His description of nature reflects things as they are; he is not interested in symbols and parables such as those created by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. It is not in his nature to spiritualize feelings and sensations. For him, love always has a sensual trait. But this sensuality is a chaste, coarse and healthy one. He does not love the soul alone, he also loves the mouth; but his love remains childishly naïve.

[ 6 ] The southern German poet Johann Georg Fischer is of a similar nature. He is extremely content with life and its pleasures. He loves his existence so much and knows how to derive so much bliss from it that he only desires the hereafter if it is as beautiful and good as this life. He always feels his healthy strength and is never in doubt that it will lead him safely through life. He also knows how to find something pleasant in the shadows of life. His description of nature is not as simple as Keller's; it has something meaningful and pictorial about it. When he sings of female beauty, we admire the purity of soul that lies in his tones.

[ 7 ] In stark contrast to these southern German poetic natures is the austere beauty of Theodor Fontane's poetry. Meyer, Keller and Fischer never hold back how they feel about things. Fontane meaningfully juxtaposes the impressions that arouse his feelings. He conceals what is going on inside him and leaves us alone with our hearts. He is a brittle person who likes to hide his own ego. Our soul trembles at his descriptions; he never tells us that his soul trembles too. The images his imagination creates have something monumental about them. The seriousness, the majesty of life speak to us from his poems. He sings of significant situations, strong contrasts, proud human characters.

[ 8 ] The poetry of Paul Heyse is post-classical in the truest sense of the word. He has everything from his predecessors: the purest sense of form, the ennobled view, the cheerful artistic spirit directed towards the eternal harmony of existence. Everywhere he dissolves the seriousness of life into the serenity of art. It is his conviction that art should lead man beyond the burdens and oppressiveness of reality. Without doubt, such a view is that of a true artist. But there is a huge difference between a person who has fought his way through the hardships of life, through the dissonances of existence, to the view of harmony that underlies the world, and one who simply accepts this view as tradition. The artist's serenity is only uplifting in the highest sense if it has its roots in the seriousness of life. Goethe, at the time of his perfection, looked at the world with the blissful calm of a sage, having acquired this calm in fierce battles; Heyse jumped unprepared into the field of balanced beauty. He is an epigone through and through. He has a sure eye for the genuine beauties of nature; but his eye has been trained to Goethe's way of looking at things. Heyse knows how to follow the most marvelous paths and make the most wonderful observations; but one always has the feeling that he is following paths blazed by others, and that he is rediscovering what someone else has already found.

[ 9 ] The lyrical poems of Martin Greif are born out of a tender soul, in which the finest impulses of nature and the human soul tremble nobly. He is not moved by the whole of an impression, but only by the soulfulness of it. A pious, devout spirit passes over to us from Greif's creations. Greif brings to life the quiet, modest melodies that rest in things as if enchanted. When we give ourselves over to his poetry, it is as if all the loud, demanding sounds of the world fall silent and a quiet music of the spheres enters our ears. The pious calm of the soul that Goethe loved so much has found a singer in Martin Greif.

[ 10 ] The Viennese Jakob Julius David is a poet whose entire oeuvre is like a single cry for this blessed peace, combined with the painful feeling that the gates to it are closed to him. His imagination paints gloomy pictures that speak vividly of the bitter suffering of a proud soul. The passionate desire, the ardent longing is abruptly replaced by wistful renunciation. As a strong nature, David cannot unlearn desire. A note of displeasure runs through all his poems, which abruptly stands out from the beauty of form that is characteristic of them. He is the representative of those contemporary poets who may have modeled their art on the great role models, but who are not at the same time able to wrestle their way through to the harmonious world view of these role models. David knows that disharmony is not the deepest meaning of life, but harmony does not reveal itself to him. That is why he cannot sing of joy and pleasure, but at best of oblivion and resignation. He is not able to lift anyone up from their suffering, but only to comfort them and exhort them to surrender.

[ 11 ] We see another Viennese poet in a steadily ascending development: Ferdinand von Saar. He is not a distinct personality who shows himself direction and goal out of inner strength. He found himself relatively late in life. By appropriating the unfamiliar, through wise self-education, he reached the point where genius sets in. In the "Nachklänge", which appeared recently, noble artistry and wise contemplation of the world emerge in equal measure. Pictures of noble beauty convey a profound view of nature and people. But nowhere do they bear the stamp of the inspiration of a brilliant imagination; they have gradually matured in a life that has tirelessly striven towards perfection. It is not rapturous enthusiasm that compels Saar's creations, but serious reverence. Saar is one of those artists who have the strongest effect on us when they do not reveal to us the individuality of their own heart, but when they make themselves the spokesperson for what moves all of humanity.

[ 12 ] The same is probably true of another contemporary poet, even if he is as far removed from Saar as possible in many respects: Emil Prinz von Schoenaich-Carolath. Schoenaich-Carolath must be conceded a certain degree of originality; but there is no doubt that he could only reach the artistic heights to which he attained in an epoch in which aesthetic education had reached such a level as in his own. Spirits such as his are only possible within the late culture of a people that had allowed great things to develop from it shortly before. They give back in a refined form what they have received. Schoenaich-Carolath has tones for all human feelings, for all processes of nature. His vision penetrates deep behind the phenomena. He has battles to fight in life, but one notices that during the struggle he never doubts his ultimate victory. If one has called him a Byronic nature, one should not have overlooked the fact that his Byronic restlessness is mixed with a happy confidence.

[ 13 ] In the truest sense of the word, Ernst von Wildenbruch is an afterbloom of classical German art. When he speaks to us, we always hear a great predecessor speaking along with him. It is fair to say that he learned to write poetry, certainly learned it very well. He is more a chosen one than a called one. And that can be said of many today. For this time it can only be applied to Alberta von Puttkammer. She is able, perhaps with just a little too many words, to paint moods of nature with unspeakable beauty. Life seems to her like a blissful elegy. Existence has thorns for her too; but she never lets us forget that the thorns are in rose gardens.

II

[ 14 ] A young generation of poets came onto the scene in Germany at the beginning of the 1980s. It included spirits who were as different as possible in terms of outlook on life and talent. However, they were united in the conviction that a revolution in artistic feeling and creativity was necessary. The rebellion against the prevailing taste of the time, in which Julius Wolff and Rudolf Baumbach were regarded as serious artists, was justified. The principle: "Life is serious, art is cheerful" had been distorted into a caricature in shallow minds. Virtuoso poetic 'dalliance' was no longer distinguished from the noble, beautiful form born from the depths of the soul. The time was struggling for a new world view that wanted to reckon with the great scientific results of the nineteenth century and for a social design that would give those left behind in the struggle for happiness their rightful place. The leading poets knew nothing of such upheavals. This realization brought forth the words of anger in the brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart, with which they declared war on contemporary taste in their "Kritische Waffengänge" in 1882. The poets who came together in 1884 to form the collection "Moderne Dichtercharaktere" were inspired by the same sentiment. And this initial rush was followed by the founding of journals and the publication of almanacs, in which disgust at outdated ideas found just as strong an expression as the boldest hopes for the future. Such sentiments gave rise to the recognition that for the past decade and a half has been increasingly accorded to a poet who, unlike many others, does not deliberately follow modern paths, but who naively embraces the circle of emotions that excite contemporary man with a vivid imagination: Detlev von Liliencron. He is a man full of life, who walks through life as a carefree enjoyer and is able to describe all its charms with vivid power. He is capable of all tones, from the most exuberant exuberance to the most fervent adoration of sublime works of nature. He is able to sing hymns of joy to frivolity and carelessness like a child of the world, and he can become pious like a priest when the heath spreads out its silent beauty before him. Liliencron is not a poet who looks at life from one point of view. You will search in vain for a unified world view that could be expressed in clear ideas. At every moment, he is completely absorbed in the impressions to which he has given himself. He does not worry or think about what lies beyond the things of the world. Instead, like a true bon vivant, he savors everything that lies within things. And he always finds the characteristic tone and the most perfect form to express the wealth of perceptions that impose themselves on his senses, which thirst for the whole breadth of reality. He has no need to distinguish between the valuable and the insignificant in this reality, for he is able to draw from the sight of an "old, discarded, torn, half-rotten, abandoned boot" a sentiment whose expression is worthy of a mood that the poet arouses in us. Liliencron draws natural scenes and experiences with rough, masculine lines; he juxtaposes sharp, telling contrasts of color. The strength of his personality is particularly evident in his song lyrics. No intimacy of feeling, no bitter pain is capable of alienating his secure sense of self from himself even for a moment.

[ 15 ] Under Liliencron's influence stands Otto Julius Bierbaum. However, he lacks a secure sense of self; he is a soft, dependent nature that always loses itself in the impressions of the outside world. Nowhere in his work is there any sign of a world view, of a conception that penetrates into the depths of beings. But while Liliencron's sharply defined personality physiognomy compensates for the same lack, Bierbaum's creations are devoid of higher interest. His amiable powers of observation know how to see little meaning in things. His mind is not burdened with the slightest urge for knowledge; what he copies from nature with a careless glance, he depicts in graceful, but sometimes rather uncharacteristic colors. He succeeds in creating charming images of nature; he is able to depict the small impulses of the heart in a magnificent way. Where he aims higher, he becomes unnatural. The big words, the powerful tones to which he often stoops, sound hollow because they have nothing shocking or exciting to communicate. Bierbaum appears like a walker who would like to play a hiker. When he pretends to be boldly and exuberantly pilgrimaging through life, it can't be particularly interesting because he avoids the abysses and dangers.

[ 16 ] Another poet dependent on Liliencron, Gustav Falke, arouses almost opposite feelings. He seeks out life in its mysterious depths, where it raises doubts and poses riddles. He is characterized by a highly developed artistic conscience. In his imagination, the events of the world are transformed into beautiful images. He searches in a serious way for harmony between desires and duties. He strives for the pleasures of existence; but he only wants them if his own merit wins them for him. Victory after a hard struggle is to his liking; he cannot particularly appreciate an easier one. Many an anxious question to fate springs from his serious spirit; a firm belief that man can be content if he adapts himself to the conditions of life leads him out of doubts and puzzles. There is something heavy in Falke's poetry; but this is only a consequence of his conception, which searches for the weighty qualities of things.

[ 17 ] Through serious artistic endeavor, Otto Ernst has worked his way up from a sentimental patheticist to a poet worthy of respect. Although his expression lacks immediacy and independence and his sensibility lacks moderation, there is much in his collections and among his poems published in magazines that reveals a true poetic personality. Especially where he remains in the modest circle of domestic happiness, of everyday events, Otto Ernst succeeds in creating atmospheric creations of a coherent art form. He becomes highly attractive when he lets his humor prevail, which has nothing worldly, but rather something philistine and mischievous, but which hits the nail on the head for those who are able to take the things in question seriously enough. One often has the feeling that Otto Ernst would accomplish far more if he naively abandoned himself to his original feelings and ideas and did not almost always do violence to them through the strict view he has of the tasks of art; he destroys many a charming feeling, many a meaningful image through an added, clever comparison, through a doctrinaire twist, through a philosophical observation that is supposed to say a lot but is usually only trivial.

[ 18 ] Poets of less distinctive character are Arthur von Wallpach, Wilhelm von Scholz and Hugo Salus. Wallpach's feeling for nature and his trust in life are reminiscent of Liliencron. Enchanting mood painting, sometimes in briskly applied, sometimes in intimately graded tones, is characteristic of him. Wilhelm von Scholz is one of those poets in whom every feeling, every idea is distorted when it is to be transformed by the imagination into an image. The word always strives to transcend that which the emotion encompasses. If it has a beautiful image in mind, it spoils it by emphasizing the content twice. His imagination is not content to say what is necessary; it overwhelms us with all the accidental ideas that come to it apart from what is necessary. Hugo Salus sometimes expresses the simple in too strange a way. Anyone who knows how to draw as much pleasure from nature as he does is surprised when he illustrates this pleasure with ideas that are often quite far-fetched. Salus does not focus his eye directly on things, as it were, but seeks out an altered reflection of them.

[ 19 ] The lyrical poems of Otto Erich Hartleben are born of a pure sense of beauty and highly developed taste. His style is characterized by a rare plastic power. Transparent clarity and perfect vividness is a basic trait of his imagination. This is the case despite the fact that his imagination is only slightly fertilized by images taken from external nature. It almost exclusively shapes the inner experiences of his own personality. This poet, who as a novelist and dramatist seeks out the contradictions of reality as objectively as possible and mercilessly reveals the humor inherent in the processes of life, holds a dialogue with his soul in his poetry, making intimate confessions to himself. One has the feeling that these are the most important, the most meaningful moments of his soul's life in which he expresses himself as a lyricist. He is then completely alone with himself and with little that is dear to him in the world. His most beautiful poems were written at turning points in his life, at moments when decisive events were taking place in his heart. And they speak of their creator's sense of calm, simple beauty, style and artistic harmony. Otto Erich Hartleben is more of a contemplative than an active nature. There is nothing impetuous in his nature. He is less a creative than a creative spirit. He prefers to let the content come to him, and then he takes pleasure in shaping it; that is where his productivity unfolds. He lacks Liliencron's verve, but he possesses the quiet grandeur that Goethe claims in his "Winckelmann" is the hallmark of true beauty. In the midst of the Sturm und Drang of the present, Otto Erich Hartleben, the lyricist, can be described as one of those who approach classical artistic ideals. His entire personality is attuned to an aesthetic-artistic view of the world. He only understands the problems of life to the extent that mature taste is called upon to decide them. Philosophy only exists for him insofar as he has a personal relationship to its questions. He can strike soft, intimate tones, but only those that are compatible with a proud, self-assured nature. All pathos is as alien to him as possible.

[ 20 ] Ferdinand Avenarius knows how to harmonize a certain classical-academic form and conception with modern sensibilities. His poetry has grown up on the foundation of theoretical ideas. His feelings do not emerge directly, but allow the ideas of reason to shine through everywhere. He has created a poem "Live!" in which he does not communicate his feelings, but an objective personality communicates his own. This kind of objective poetry will never be cultivated by a completely original spirit. It requires artistic conviction to serve as a support for the artistic imagination.

III

[ 21 ] What we so sorely lack in many of our most important contemporary poets, the prospect of a great, free world view, we encounter in the most beautiful sense in Ludwig Jacobowski. With his recently published collection "Leuchtende Tage", he has placed himself at the forefront of contemporary poets. In this book, the entire scope of human spiritual life is laid out before us as if in a mirror. The sublimity and perfection of the world as a whole, the relationship of the soul to the world, human nature in its most diverse forms, the sufferings and joys of love, the pains and bliss of the cognitive instinct, the mysterious paths of fate, social conditions and their repercussions on the human mind: all these elements of the great organism of life find their poetic expression in this book. Every single thing that this poet encounters, he grasps with receptive senses and with fertile imagination; but again and again he also finds access to the essence of the world that lies behind the flow of individual phenomena. The title of his book "Shining Days" seems to us like a symbol of his whole way of thinking. Like "eternal stars", the "shining days" of life console him for all the suffering and hardship with which the path to our life's goal is covered. Jacobowski formed this sunny world view out of hard struggles. It gives his creations a liberating undertone. His feelings are driven by the highest interests of life with a warmth and intimacy that are personal and immediate in the most beautiful sense. Just as the philosopher's reason distracts him from the individual experience and points him to those bright regions where the transience of everyday life is only a parable for the eternal powers of nature, so his immediate feelings push this poet in the same direction. He is an inventor of the world, just as the philosopher is a thinker of the world. He sees things with childlike, lively senses in their full, fresh tones of color; and he shapes them in the sense of harmony, without the contemplation of which the more deeply inclined person cannot live. Whoever possesses such poetic power, the highest wisdom works like the most loving naivety. The three most monumental forms of the life of the soul are revealed by Jacobowski in their innermost relationship: the childlike, the artistic and the philosophical. Weiler unites these three forms in himself in an original way and succeeds in striking poetic sparks from life everywhere. Unlike so many contemporary poets, he does not need to search for shells in order to extract precious pearls from them; the seed he reaches out for is enough for him. Jacobowski is far removed from anything artificial or elaborate. He uses the closest, simplest, clearest means. Just as the folk song always finds the simplest expression for the deepest emotional content, so does this poet. He has a feeling for the broad, simple lines of the world's context. He is understood by the naive mind, and he has the same effect on the philosopher who struggles with the eternal riddles of existence. Whether he speaks to us of the experiences of his own soul or describes the fate of a person who is transplanted from the country to the big city to be crushed by life, it will affect us to the same extent. In Jacobowski's nature, there is tenderness alongside substance. He has a firm trust in the direction of his soul. He spurns all the buzzwords of the time, all the favorite ideas of individual currents of the present. What flows from the strength of his personality is the only thing that determines him. In him, we encounter none of the abstruse oddities of those who today turn away from the healthy hustle and bustle of the world and search for all kinds of aesthetic and philosophical-mystical quirks in lonely corners of existence; he can hear the noise of the day because he feels the security within himself to find his way.

[ 22 ] A lyricist whose greatest power lies in the design, in the plastic rounding of the image, is Carl Busse. Within the framework of this image there is rarely anything significant in terms of content, but usually a meaningful mood. This poet is characterized by a fine sense of style for the appearance of form. He knows how to let the basic feeling of a poem come to life in the turns of language, in the harmony of expression. He is not concerned with the deepening of a feeling, but with its vivid, colorful imprint. When Busse paints us a mood, we will not miss a color tone that makes it a rounded whole, nor will we be easily disturbed by a foreign tone. The effervescence of emotion, the urge of passion never appears directly in his work, but is always subdued by artistic moderation. When he speaks of nature, he keeps himself in the middle between the naïve and the pathetic; when he communicates his own emotions to us, they do not come at us in a storm, but in measured steps. Buss's similes and symbols are not meaningful, but concise; his ideas move freely and swiftly from thing to thing; but the poet always knows how to firmly delimit the perimeter within which they are allowed to unfold. Thus Busse's poetry will satisfy those in particular who value external form above all else in poetry; the deeper natures who seek the great, the meaningful content, will not receive any strong impressions from his creations.

[ 23 ] In a most amiable manner, Martin Boelitz finds the expression for the most intimate moods of nature. Transient phenomena, which demand a careful eye if their fleeting, delicate beauty is to be captured, are his domain. His images of nature do not become vivid, but meaningful parables. And he clothes abstract ideas in a sensual garment, so that we may not be able to grasp them, but we believe we can feel them. Thus he lets "all wishes stand still" and "dream the day away"; thus he personifies "longing" and "loneliness". He sings less about the soul that lies in things than about the soul that spreads like a delicate fragrance between things and above them in an ethereal way. When he speaks of himself, he does so in a tone of spirited, serious cheerfulness. His view of life is a cheerful one; but it does not spring from deep thinking, but from a naïve carelessness. He does not overcome the difficulties of life; he takes his paths where there are none. It is not in the possession of strength that he feels happy, but in dreaming of such strength.

[ 24 ] Paul Remer draws on two sources: subtle thinking and a symbolically effective imagination. He is always based on a sentence, a thought; but he knows how to weave it into a symbolic process in such a way that we forget the mystery and are led to believe that he has extracted the symbolic from the process. Whether he depicts the experiences of the human soul symbolically in this way, whether he speaks of natural phenomena or of human actions: he is equally attractive. As he says in a poem about a blind woman: she listens to "the secret confidences of things", so he does it himself. He does not tell us what effects things have on each other, but what their souls have to say to each other. Remer does not describe the bright colors or the loud sounds of nature, but rather the deeper meaning of the colors and sounds.

[ 25 ] The poetry of Kurt Geuckes has sharp, characteristic lines. He does not offer us a unique, individual world of feeling. Thousands felt and feel like him. He is animated by an idealism that is universally human. But he possesses a rare poetic power to express this idealism. Strictly closed, artistic forms do not express an original, but a solid world view. The poet's fiery imagination depicts the darker sides of life in deep, poignant images. However, hope always spreads above the suffering and pain, appearing in a form that can only emerge from the conviction of a true idealist. He also reaches for the symbol when he wants to depict the meaningful in nature, and the symbols always have something masculine about them. But he is also no stranger to the mystical mood, and he always finds a healthy pathos to express it. His mind is turned towards the beautiful and great in the world, for the sake of which he gladly endures the small, ugly and depressing.

[ 26 ] A noble sense of nature and a soul in need of freedom speak from the poems of Fritz Lienhard. But these two traits of his personality are not very pleasing due to the one-sidedness with which they appear. The poet repeats in a rather monotonous way the healthy nature of simple, rural conditions and the depravity of the big city. The magnificent Wasgau forest and the "Venusberg" of Berlin: his love and his hate are enclosed in these two images. His enthusiasm for the fresh country also corresponds to a naive technique that works with the simplest of means.

[ 27 ] Whoever wants to calculate the driving forces of cultural development in recent decades will undoubtedly have to put a high figure on the proportion of women in public life. But perhaps in no other field is this share as clear as in poetry. For while in other fields women appear as fighters and wrestlers, here they are givers and communicators. Otherwise she tells us what she wants to be; here she expresses what she is. This has given us great insights into the female soul. Because the woman felt compelled to shape her inner life artistically, she herself has first become clearly aware of it. Books such as Gabriele Reuter's "Aus guter Familie", Helene Böhlau's "Halbtier" or Rosa Mayreder's "Idole" appear to men like insights into a new world.

[ 28 ] It is understandable that the most intimate art, poetry, also reveals to us the deepest secrets of a woman's heart. The most striking characteristic of modern women's poetry is its frankness about the nature of women. The present age, which has made unreserved truth a requirement of genuine art, has also opened women's mouths. What she once carefully guarded as the sanctuary of the heart, she now entrusts to art. She has gained faith, confidence in her own being, and while the important women of earlier times unconsciously pursued the ideals and goals of men when they wanted to form a view of life, today's women are building one of their own accord.

[ 29 ] The poetic creations of Ricarda Huch show us how clear and inwardly stable such a view of life can be. She has conquered a high, free point of view from which she surveys the phenomena of the world. Although she is not able to see this world in the sun's glare from her height, but only to resign herself to the nothingness of existence, she nevertheless finds in this resignation the inner freedom that an independently inclined person needs in order to find their way in life. Even if she finds the ship of life hurtling towards death, towards annihilation, she draws satisfaction from the awareness that she is allowed to set her sights firmly on the goal. It is not surprising that the female Faustian nature does not know how to create satisfaction for her striving in the first rush, since the male nature has hardly progressed beyond doubtfulness despite thousands of years of struggle. How could a female Nietzsche today elevate the life-affirming "Überweib" to an ideal, since we have experienced Schopenhauer's enthusiasm for nirvana in this century and Novalis' view that death is the true, higher purpose of life?

[ 30 ] The lyrical creations of Anna Ritter are not born out of the great questions of existence, not out of deep doubts and torments, but also out of a genuinely feminine feeling. Something graceful and musical is poured over her poetry. Nowhere does she struggle with form, but she sometimes achieves a perfection in this direction that must silence any critical doubts. Her talent for rhythm and the euphony of language seems so natural that the originality of many a praised nature poet looks like stiltedness in comparison. Love appears in the light that only the true, open-hearted woman can lend it. Sensuality speaks tenderly and chastely from Anna Ritter's songs; feminine desire expresses itself warmly and intimately. The poetry of the mother appears in graceful magic; the life of nature does not emerge powerfully, but all the more sweetly from this poet's soul. Her genuinely feminine disposition comes to the fore in the "Storm Songs". It is not the great male storm that rages in them, but the mysteriousness of the female soul. They are storms that are not overcome by the eternal, but by a happy, spirited optimism of life.

[ 31 ] Marie Stona is gifted with a clear awareness of the nature of women and their relationship to men. The contrast of the sexes and the effect of this contrast on the nature of the feeling of love: these are the ideas that tremble through her soul. Does the man give as much to the woman as she gives to him, that is an anxious question for her. And must not woman give man more than he can return, if she is to increase his strength and not destroy it? How can woman preserve her pride, her self-confidence, and yet sacrifice her self on the altar of love? These are the eternal cultural questions of woman that this poet explores and which she seeks to shape from a mind that is as rich as it is deep.

[ 32 ] The poems of Thekla Lingen express the moods to which the woman of the present day succumbs, who, because of a highly developed sense of freedom and personality, finds the social position offered to her by traditional views uncomfortable. They contain none of the thoughts and tendencies that come to light in modern women's issues. Thekla Lingen only expresses what she thinks and feels individually. But it is precisely this individuality that appears as the elementary content of the cultural struggle of women, which only comes to light in an intellectual way in the emancipation efforts.

IV

[ 33 ] Modern intellectual culture does not make it easy for people with a deep soul to find their way in life. The natural science reformed by Charles Darwin has brought us a new world view. It has shown us that living beings in nature, from the simplest forms up to the most perfect forms, have developed according to eternal, iron laws, and that man has no higher, purer origin than his animal fellow creatures. Furthermore, our intellect cannot close itself to this conviction. But our heart, our emotional life, cannot follow the intellect quickly enough. We still have within us the feeling that thousands of years of education have implanted in the human race: that this natural kingdom, this earthly world, which according to the new view has brought forth from its mother's womb like all other creatures, including man, has a lower existence than what we call "ideal", "divine". We would like to feel like children of a higher world order. It is a burning question of our spiritual development to follow the truth recognized by reason with our hearts. We can only return to peace when we no longer find the natural contemptible, but are able to revere it as the source of all being and becoming. Few of our contemporaries feel this as deeply as Friedrich Nietzsche did. For him, the confrontation with the modern and scientific world view became a matter of the heart that shook his entire emotional life. He began by studying the ancient Greeks and Richard Wagner's philosophical world of thought. And in Schopenhauer he found an "educator". This man of fine mind felt the suffering at the bottom of every human soul to a special degree. And he believed that the ancient Greeks up to Socrates, with their drives and instincts not yet faded by intellectual culture, were particularly afflicted with this suffering. In his view, art had only served them to create an illusion of life within which they could forget the pain that raged within them. Wagner's art, with its high, idealistic impetus, seemed to him to be the means to similarly lead us moderns beyond the deepest suffering of life. For the basic mood of every true human being is tragic. And only the artistic imagination can make the world bearable. Nietzsche had found the tragic human being described in Schopenhauer's philosophy. It corresponded to what he had gained from his studies of the world view in the "tragic age of the Greeks". He approached modern natural science with such attitudes. And it made a great demand on him. It teaches that nature has created the sequence of stages of living beings through development. It has placed man at the pinnacle of development. Should this development stop with man? No, man must continue to develop. He has gone from animal to man without his intervention; he must become superhuman through his intervention. This requires strength, the fresh, unbroken power of instincts and drives. And now Nietzsche became an admirer of everything strong, everything powerful that leads man beyond himself to the superman. He could no longer reach for artistic illusion to deceive himself about life; he wanted to implant as much health, as much strength into life itself as was necessary to achieve a superhuman goal. All idealism, he now believed, sucks this strength out of man, for it leads him away from nature and presents him with an unreal world. Nietzsche now makes war on all idealism. He worships healthy nature. He had tried to absorb the conviction of natural science into his mind. But he absorbed it into a weak, sick organism. His own personality was no carrier, no nursery for the superman. And so, although he could present it to mankind as an ideal, he could speak of it in enthusiastic tones, but he felt the glaring contrast when he compared himself with this ideal. The dream of the superman is his philosophy; his real life of the soul, with its deep dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of his own existence in the face of all superhumanity, generated the moods from which his Iyrian creations sprang. With Nietzsche there is not only a dichotomy between intellect and mind; no, the rift runs right through the life of the mind itself. Everything great comes from strength: that was his confession. A confession that not only his reason recognized, but to which he clung with all his feelings. And the strong man seemed to him like the opposite of himself. The unspeakable pain that overcame him when he looked at himself in relation to his world of ideas, he expressed it in his poems. A soul divided within itself is expressed in them. You have to feel the deep tragedy of Nietzsche's soul if you want to let his poems have an effect on you. One then understands the gloom in them, which cannot come from the joy of life for which he found such beautiful words as a philosopher. Because Nietzsche made the modern world view of natural science his personal cause, he also personally experienced nameless suffering under its influence. He, the thinker of the affirmation of life, who exultantly proclaims that we do not live our lives only once, that all things experience an "eternal return": he became the lyricist of the dying life. He saw the sun setting on his own existence, he saw the weak organism rushing towards a terrible end, and he had to preach the joy of life from within this organism. For him, life meant enduring suffering. And even if existence returns countless times, it can bring him nothing but a never-ending repetition of the same torments.

[ 34 ] The career of Hermann Conradi as a poet began promisingly. A youthful poetry is all he created in the short span of time he was granted to live. It looks like the dawn before a day that is as rich in stormy, exciting events as it is in sublime and beautiful ones. Two things weigh heavily on the bottom of his soul, which thirsts for all pleasures and knowledge. One is the realization of the painful fate of all mankind, whose gaze wanders out to the most distant stars and which would like to embrace the whole world with its life, and yet is condemned to see its existence bound to a small star, to a speck of dust in the universe. The other is the feeling that his own self is too weak to make his own possession of the little that is allotted to man in his limited existence. Man must lag far behind what his mind's eye sees as a distant goal; but I cannot even reach the near goals of mankind: this idea speaks from his poetry. It stirs up feelings in his mind that correspond to the eternal longing of all mankind, and also those that give deeper expression to his personal destiny. These feelings storm through his soul with demonic force. The urge to reach the heights of existence creates in Conradi a boundless desire; but this boundlessness never occurs without a serious longing for harmony of thought and will. The poet's world of thought strives towards the regions of the "great understanding of the world". But again and again he feels himself transported back to banal, worthless life and has to give in to dull resignation. Meagre symbols of the future paint themselves in the soul when it is seized by an ardent urge for satisfaction in the present. Such a change of moods is only possible in a spirit in which the high side of human nature dwells, and yet which also courageously admits to itself that it is not free from the low side of this nature. Conradi had a boundless sincerity towards the instincts in his personality that drew him down from the noble and beautiful. He wanted to bring his own self with all its sins up from the abysses of his inner self. The greatness that lies in the confession of his own misguided feelings and emotions is characteristic of him. Neither the memory of the past nor hope for the future can satisfy him. The former evokes an agonizing feeling of lost innocence and lust for life, the latter becomes a dreamlike nebulous image that dissolves into nothing when he tries to grasp it. And Conradii knows how to speak of all these feelings in his soul in bold and at the same time beautiful poetic forms. He has an extraordinary command of expression. He combines the power of feeling with true artistry. He has an extensive imagination that knows how to fetch ideas from everywhere in order to portray an inner life that wants to traverse all the spaces of the world.

[ 35 ] Richard Dehmel's poetry has its origins in a similar school of thought. He too wants to encompass the whole wide world with his feelings. He wants to penetrate the secrets that rest in the depths of beings like enchanted creatures, and at the same time he longs for the pleasures that are bestowed upon us by the things of everyday life. He is actually a philosophical nature, a thinker who refuses to walk the paths of reason, of the ideal world, because he hopes to pick better fruit in the field of poetry, of the sensual, figurative life of the imagination. And the fruits he finds there are indeed often exquisite ones, even though one notices that they were gathered by someone who would have found others more suited to his nature even easier. He could have the thought in its purest, most transparent form, but he does not want it. He strives for contemplation, for the image. That is why his poetry appears like a symbolic philosophy. It is not the images that reveal to him the essence, the harmony of things, but his thinking that reveals them to him. And then the images spring up around the thought, like the substances in the formation of a crystal in a liquid. But we can seldom stop at these images, at these views, for they are not there for their own sake, but for the sake of the thought. As images, they have something vague about them. We are happy when we see through the image to the thought. Dehmel appears at his most outstanding when he expresses his ideas directly in the meaningful manner of expression that is characteristic of him, and does not first struggle for visualizations. Where he presents ideas in their pure, thought-like form, they appear large and weighty. He also succeeds at times in expressing his ideas in splendid symbols, but only when he puts together in the simplest form a few characteristic ideas of the senses; as soon as he reaches for a richer abundance of such ideas, the strangeness of his imagination, the unpictorial nature of his intuition leaps to the eye. But what reconciles us with him even then is the great seriousness of his will, the depth of his emotional world and the proud height of his points of view. His paths always lead to interesting, captivating destinations. One is happy to follow him even if one is already convinced at the beginning of the journey that it is a wrong path. Dehmel the man always shows himself to be greater than the poet. His grand gestures may often be distracting, indeed they can sometimes seem like posturing, but there can never be any doubt that there is a powerful feeling behind the loud tone.

[ 36 ] A pithy nature is Michael Georg Conrad. The wholesome and folksy lives in his work. He combines strength with naivety. He succeeds in the simple song in a perfect way. He can speak to the heart in a powerful way. A noble enthusiasm for the truly sublime and beautiful can be heard in his creations. His real significance, however, lies in the field of the novel and in the powerful impulses he was able to give to German intellectual life when it was in danger of becoming bogged down in traditional forms. The future historian of our literature, who will not only look at phenomena according to their completed manifestation, but who will also trace the causes at work, must give Conrad a wide berth.

[ 37 ] A poet whose sensations swirl around the world like an uncertain factor is Ludwig Scharf. He knows how to strike warm, touching notes; one must respect the impulses of his wandering soul; but one cannot escape the feeling that he himself is at ease in the labyrinths, that he likes to wander in the labyrinth and does not want the saving thread to lead him out. Scharf is an eccentric of the emotional life. He feels lonely; but his creations lack what could justify his loneliness: the greatness of a personality founded in himself.

[ 38 ] Christian Morgenstern strives for the high points of view, from which all small peculiarities of things disappear and only the meaningful features are visible. His imagination seeks meaningful images, expressive content and saturated tones. Where the world speaks of its dignity, where man feels his self elevated by uplifting sensations: that is where this imagination likes to dwell. Morgenstern searches for the sharp, impressive characterization of feeling. You rarely find simplicity in his work; he needs resounding words to say what he wants.

[ 39 ] The poetic physiognomies of Franz Evers', Hans Benzmanns and Max Bruns' are less pronounced. Franz Evers still lacks his own content and form. It is clear from many of his creations that he strives for the depths of existence and for a proud, self-confident freedom of personality. Yet everything remains nebulous and unclear. But he feels himself to be a seeker and a struggler, and he carries within him the conviction that the riddles of the world can only be solved by those who approach them with holy devotion. Max Bruns is still stuck in the imitation of foreign forms. That is why his sensuous poems, which bear witness to a beautiful feeling for nature, cannot make a significant impression for the time being, but they arouse the best hopes in many quarters. Hans Benzmann is not an independent individuality, but a pleaser who likes to surround the simple with all kinds of colorful decoration, and who seeks the poetic not in the straightforward, the simple, but in the cumbersome. He succeeds in creating many a beautiful image, but he is almost never able to express himself without the superfluous and trivial.

V

[ 40 ] John Henry Mackay is called the "first singer of anarchy" with the publication of his poems "Tempest" in 1888. In the book in which, in 1891, he described the cultural currents of our time with a clear view and from a deep knowledge, he emphasized in "The Anarchists" that he was proud of this name. This lyrical collection is one of the most independent books ever written. The Anarchist view of life, much maligned but little known, has found in Mackay a poet whose powerful feeling is fully equal to its great ideas. "In no field of social life" - he himself says in the "Anarchists" - "is there today a more hopeless confusion, a more naive superficiality, a more dangerous ignorance than in that of anarchism. The very utterance of the word is like the waving of a red scarf - most people rush at it in blind rage, without allowing themselves time for calm examination and reflection." The view of the true anarchist is that one man cannot rule over the actions of another, but that only a state of social life is fruitful in which each individual sets for himself the aim and direction of his actions. Everyone usually believes he knows what is equally pious for all people. Forms of community life - our states - are thought to be justified, which seek their task in supervising and guiding the ways of men. Religion, state, laws, duty, justice and so on are concepts that have arisen under the influence of the view that one should determine the goals of the other. Concern for one's "neighbor" extends to everything; only one thing remains completely unconsidered, namely, that if one person prescribes the ways to another's happiness, he deprives the latter of the possibility of providing for his own happiness. It is this one thing that anarchism regards as its goal. Nothing should be binding on the individual but what he imposes on himself as an obligation. It is sad that the name of the noblest of world views is misused to designate the conduct of the most learned disciples of violent domination, those fellows who believe they are realizing social ideals when they cultivate the so-called "propaganda of action". The follower of this school of thought stands on exactly the same ground as those who try to make their fellow human beings understand what they have to do by means of inquisition, the cannon and the penitentiary. The true anarchist fights against the "propaganda of action" for the same reason that he fights against communal orders based on violent intervention in the circle of the individual. The free, anarchist mode of imagination lives as a personal need in Mackay's emotional life. This need emanates as a mood from his lyrical creations. Mackay's noble feeling is rooted in the basic feeling that the personality has a great responsibility towards itself. Humble, devoted natures search for a deity, for an ideal that they can worship, adore. They cannot give themselves their value and therefore want to receive it from outside. Proud natures only recognize in themselves what they have made of themselves. Self-esteem is a fundamental trait of noble natures. They only want to contribute to the general value of the world by increasing their value as individuals. They are therefore sensitive to any foreign interference in their lives. Their own ego wants to be a world unto itself so that it can develop unhindered. Only from this sanctification of one's own person can the appreciation of another's self emerge. He who claims complete freedom for himself cannot even think of interfering in the world of another. One may therefore assert that this anarchism is the way of thinking that necessarily flows from the nature of the noble soul. He who appreciates the world must, if he understands himself, also appreciate that part of existence in which he directly intervenes in the world, his own self. Mackay is a noble, self-assured nature. And anyone who descends into the abysses of his own soul with such seriousness as he does awakens passions and desires in him of which the unfree have no idea. From the solitary point of view of the free soul, man's view of the world expands. "There the soul rises from brooding dreams to wander the paths of the world as the chosen one." When the gaze penetrates deep within, it also has the gift of wandering over the infinite spaces, and the human being enters the mood that Mackay expresses in his poem "Weltgang der Seele" ("The Soul's World Walk") in the words that the soul's "trembling wings were waved by courage for flight in the eternal spaces".

[ 41 ] How deeply Mackay is able to feel with every human personality is demonstrated by his poignant poem "Helene". The love of a man for a fallen girl is portrayed here by a poet whose feeling and imagination have given him the warmth of expression that can only have its origin in the perfect freedom of the soul. If one pursues the human ego into such abysses, then one also gains the certainty of finding it on the heights.

[ 42 ] Mackay has been called a tendentious poet. Those who do so show that they neither judge the nature of tendency poetry correctly nor know the relationship of the poet Mackay to the world view he represents. His ideals of freedom form the basic mood of his soul in such a way that they appear as an individual expression of his inner self, just as the sounds of love or the glorification of the beauties of nature do for others. And it is certainly no less poetic to give words to man's deepest thoughts than to his inclination towards women or his joy in the green forest and birdsong. To the eulogists of so-called "unintentional creativity", who are quick with their doctrinaire objections when they sense something like a thought in poetry, it should be borne in mind that man's most precious asset, freedom, does not arise in the dullness of the unconscious, but on the bright heights of developed consciousness.

[ 43 ] About fifteen years ago, Karl Henckell turned the great question of contemporary life, the social question, into the basic motif of his poetry out of the stormy fire of an idealistic soul. He wanted to counter the poems of the 1970s, which comfortably proclaimed inherited ideas in new ways, with a "morning wake-up call of the victorious and liberating future". A hopeful idealism shines out of the gloomy feelings that compassion for the longings, aspirations and struggles of his time formed in Henckell. He did not want to serve the mendacious "old beauty", but the new truth, which creates an image of the suffering of the struggling contemporary human being. Plasticity of expression and harmony of tone cannot be the character of this poetry, which oscillates between indignation at the social experiences of the present and vague expectations of the future. The exaggerated hyperbole takes the place of the calmly beautiful metaphor. A stinging glow sprays from the verses, not soothing warmth. Freedom in all its forms becomes the idol to which the poet pays homage. He incorporates science, which allows the spiritual to emerge from the material, into his way of imagining so that it can free him from the bonds of religious bondage, the mythological way of looking at things. But the idea of freedom can also become a tyranny. If it shapes sharply defined life goals, it kills the truly independent life of nature. A heart that constantly cries out for freedom can perhaps mean nothing other than new shackles instead of the old ones. It is a higher development in Henckell's individuality that he also wanted to free himself from freedom again. He found the way to the inner freedom that says: "Let schools and parties teach and shout, you can only flourish as an artist and free yourself alone." The "Tambour", who wanted to serve the free spirit with a loud drumbeat, has transformed himself into the violinist who has found beauty and sings of it. And thus Henckell has also been granted the happiness that can be enjoyed by natures that are strong enough to create a purpose in life from within that meets the stormy desire, the longed-for ideals. It is not the trivial happiness that nourishes a fleeting existence from the superficial pleasures of life; it is the harsh happiness that rises like a proud castle above the steep rock of painful experiences, the happiness that Goethe meant when he had Tasso say: "And when man falls silent in his agony, a god gave me to say what I suffer." Bruno Wille called his Iyrian collection, published in 1897, "Einsiedelkunst aus der Kiefernheide". With this title, he made a significant reference to the basic character of his personality. He sought what his soul thirsted for in people: happiness and perfection. But he could not find them there. That is why he returned to where he had come from, to the hermitage of his soul, and chose nature as his companion, which keeps the loyalty that people talk so much about but do not know how to keep to one another. What he has striven for in vain in alliance with men is granted to him through the friendship of nature. It is not an innate trait of Wille's mind that drove him to hermitage. His soul would not have called out to him from the outset like Nietzsche's: "Flee into your solitude! You live too close to the small and wretched. Flee from their invisible revenge! Against you they are nothing but revenge." Although a rich inner life and a developed sense of nature were always present in Wille and he had developed a certain self-sufficiency in himself, he threw himself into the hustle and bustle of social community life. What in Nietzsche stems from the hypersensitivity of the organism, from its peculiarity of smelling the many impurities in the souls of people, as it were, was brought about in Wille through rich experience within the hustle and bustle of the "flies of the market". This experience gave rise to a desire that appears in Nietzsche like a prejudice: "Worthy know the forest and the rock to be silent with you. Resemble again the tree you love, the broad-headed one: silent and listening, it hangs over the sea." And Bruno Wille not only knows how to be silent with the forest and the rock, but also how to hold an intimate conversation with them. He knows how to loosen nature's tongue. The silent plants, the mystical blowing of the wind, they reveal to him the intimate secrets of nature, and the distant stars entrust him with great revelations. His gaze rises to the red Mars, whose surface is covered not by naïve popular belief but by serious science with its legendary inhabitants, to spy out where the poor, imperfect children of the earth can find redemption from the old woe. The longing of his soul sucks in the sublime sounds of eternal nature in order to live together with the universe, to weave his own self into the infinite soul of the world. "Endless hosts of worlds shall you, the soul, travel..." And this own self is not the empty, insubstantial self of the enthusiast who seeks outside what he cannot find within himself; it is the full self that longs for a fulfillment that brings him just such riches as it holds within itself. The poor self gives itself away because it is needy; the rich self pours out its abundance into its surroundings. A poetic pantheism speaks to us from Wille's poetry. What Goethe desires and expresses in "Künstlers Abendlied": "How I long for you, nature, to feel you faithful and dear!.... You will cheer up all my powers in my mind, and extend this narrow existence to eternity", that lives as the keynote in Wille's poetry.

[ 44 ] In Julius Hart's soul too, as in Bruno Wilde's, the individual spirit marries with the All-Spirit. But this All-Spirit is not the natural spirit resting blissfully in itself; it is a world spirit ravaged by all the storms of human passion. Its feelings float back and forth between drunken enjoyment, proud joy in eternal becoming and dull renunciation. Birth and death, which nature only shows in its outer shell, which revolves around the deep, eternal, never dying life: we encounter them again and again in Hart's poetry. In this poet we find a sense of nature that does not bring up the noble harmony of the gods from the depths of things, but instead sees its own soul moods embodied in the processes of the outside world. What is going on in his heart is proclaimed to him by nature in large-scale symbolism. And the rhythms with which he sings of this symbolism are captivating. The primordial in the human being, the great, gigantic destiny that does not act from the outside, but which from the abysses of the soul drives individuality demoniacally onwards through good and evil, through truth and error, through joys and pains: Hart finds words for this that resound fully and weigh heavily on our souls. Understandably, such a poet also had to find tones for the feeling that comes from the region of the soul that is most developed in modern man, the social one. This social feeling has awakened feelings in his own heart, as they appear in his poem "On the Journey to Berlin", which provides a reflex image of the unsparing, great world events of the present from a strong, deeply excitable soul. There is a philosophical streak in Hart's personality. It lends his poems seriousness and depth. And this trait is thoroughly Iyrical. Even where he could be philosophical, Hart becomes lyrical. This can be seen in his book "The New God", in which he sets out his world view. What he has in mind as such is not laid out in thought, but sounds out of a lyrical mood.

[ 45 ] Clara Müller has earned the right to be counted among the social poets with her collection "Mit roten Kressen". The appealing thing about these poems is that the social imagination and thinking is thoroughly personal. The poet's own suffering and renunciations have opened her eyes to those of others. And how rich her life was in instructive experiences is also beautifully attested to by the poetry, which appears in form with noble simplicity.

[ 46 ] Gustav Renner and Paul Bornstein may be mentioned when speaking of the personalities on whom one places hopes for the future. The simple, natural tones of the former and the pathos of the latter, which seems to be truthful. The simple, natural tones of the former and the warmth of the latter, which seems like truth, certainly arouse such hopes.

[ 47 ] In his first poems, we encounter more maturity in Emanuel von Bodman. His style evokes an impression reminiscent of Rembrandt's paintings. He loves to juxtapose significant perceptions that form sharp contrasts, so that together they have great expressive power. The epigrammatic brevity that is characteristic of him is heightened in its effect by such juxtapositions.

VI

[ 48 ] "In a truly beautiful work of art the content should do nothing, but the form everything; for through the form alone the whole of man is acted upon, while through the content only individual forces are acted upon. The content, however sublime and far-reaching it may be, therefore always has a restrictive effect on the spirit, and true aesthetic freedom can only be expected from the form. This, then, is the real secret of the master's art, that he extinguishes the material through the form; and the more imposing, presumptuous, seductive the material is in itself, the more arbitrarily it pushes itself forward with its effect, or the more the viewer is inclined to engage directly with the material, the more triumphant is the art that forces it back and asserts its dominion over it." With these words, Schiller described an artistic goal in his letters "On the Aesthetic Education of Man", as envisioned by the poet Stefan George. The sensation, the feeling, the image that tremble in the artist's soul must first be shaped and formed if they are to have artistic value. Every fiber of these primal elements of the soul's life must have been seized by the creative power and made into something other than its natural state. For this only excites man, it is no concern of the artist. He is not concerned with the individual colors, the individual sounds, the individual ideas, but with the way in which they are put together in the work that we enjoy aesthetically. Schiller evidently saw an ideal in this cult of form, but felt that it could easily fall into loneliness, and therefore added that the more imposing and powerful the content, the material, and the more powerful the form that has to cope with it, the more valuable the form is. The more captivating what one has to say is, the greater the skill required to say it in a way that is pleasing as such. In poetry, the artist has to deal with his own soul; his feelings, his emotions are the material. The art will not lie in the fact that these sentiments and feelings have greatness, but that greatness appears in how these emotions of the soul are expressed. Whoever remains within Schiller's mode of conception will, however, have to admit that the more significant the content that is expressed, the more highly the mode of expression, however artful it may be, is to be valued. In poetry, it is the artist's own soul that provides this 'content, the personality. The greater the personality we see through the lyrical work of art, the more valuable it will appear to us. Robert Zimmermann, who as an aesthete radically carried out the view that it is form alone that arouses artistic pleasure, said in order to make this clear: one and the same thing, for example a statue, is a stone to the naturalist, especially the mineralogist, and a demigod to the aesthete. The former is merely concerned with the material, the latter with what has been artistically made from the material. With regard to poetry, one would have to say in the sense of this view: the emotions of the soul of another may be attractive or repulsive to man, they may cause his participation or his antipathy; to the aesthete they can only be harmonious or inharmonious, rhythmic or unrhythmic.

[ 49 ] Stefan George now lives entirely in the element of artistic expression, of form. When the vibrations of his soul emerge, they should no longer cling to anything that merely interests the human being; they should be completely absorbed in the artistic element of form. The world only gains value for this personality insofar as it is rhythmically moving, harmoniously shaped, insofar as it is beautiful. And if others see beauty in the fact that the eternal, the elemental forces of existence appear to us in the transient, Stefan George denies the eternal entities any value if they are not beautiful. His three collections of poems: "Hymns, Pilgrimages, Algabal" - "Books of Pastoral and Prize Poems, of Sagas and Songs of the Hanging Gardens" - the "Year of the Soul", they are the world as rhythm and harmony. The world is my rhythm and my harmony, and what does not flow into this golden realm, I leave behind in the chaos of the worthless: that is George's basic mood.

[ 50 ] One might call this mood drunk with beauty. And Hugo von Hofmannsthal is also drunk with beauty. But if one can say of Stefan George: he forces beauty to come to him, then one must say of Hofmannsthal: this beauty forces him to himself. Like a bee, he flies through the world; and there he stops, where there is the honey of the spirit, the beauty, to collect. And just as honey is not the blossom and fruit itself, but only the juice from it, so Hofmannsthal's art is not a revelation of the eternal secrets of the world, but only a part of this whole. One gladly accepts this part and enjoys it in solitary hours, just as the bee feeds on the collected honey in winter. The Viennese poet's art is as sweet as honey. But the power that gigantically creates the things of the world and animates them is missing in this art. It is not stormed by the power and passion of the elements; it blows in it and weaves a harmony of the spheres that resounds at the bottom of the world's soul. And it must become quite still and silent around us, the storm of world events must cease, the wild will must die for a moment if we want to hear the quiet music of this poet. The strange similes of this lyric poet, his peculiar paraphrases and word combinations only impose themselves on the mind that seeks exquisite beauty. Those who seek the eternal forces of nature in their characteristic manifestations will pass these beauties by. For they are like the revelations of the eternal in the luxury of nature. And yet, even in Hofmannsthal's oddities, one senses the necessity of world phenomena. One will not be able to fend off the accusation of a philistine mode of imagination if one rejects this luxurious art; but it must be conceded that few human creations are such seducers of philistinism as the poems of Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

[ 51 ] The mood of devotion, standing in adoration before the eternal riddles of nature, resounds to us from the lyrical poems of Johannes Schlaf. So great, so lofty, so mysterious are the riddles before him that he can only look at them with half-open eyes because he is afraid to allow the fullness of existence to penetrate him. The anticipation pours into his soul enough of the blissful delight of the glories of the world; he wants to avoid full vision, the brightness of perception. He, too, resorts to rare imaginings in order to clothe the imagined in words; but not as a spirit drunk with beauty, but because of his passionate devotion to the truth, whose majesty he does not want to bring too close to the sober senses through the garb of everyday life. This poet, who is one of the prophets of radical naturalism in the field of drama: as a lyric poet, he has made himself a singer of the eternal essences that are hidden deep within things.

[ 52 ] Arno Holz took a different path of development. He turned away from the beautiful, naturalistic poetry to which he was devoted at the beginning of his career. The naturalistic doctrine has gained the upper hand over naturalness. For it is natural that feeling in art rises above direct experience. The style that gives a higher form to perceptions: it springs from a natural longing. From that which feels most satisfied when man finds means of art which stand without precedent in life, which are the soul's own free creation and yet revelations of the eternal elemental forces. Goethe describes this satisfaction by characterizing the impression of music. "The dignity of art is perhaps most eminent in music, because it has no substance that needs to be accounted for. It is entirely form and content and elevates and ennobles everything it expresses." For every inner experience, when it emerges from the depths of the soul, should, in Holz's opinion, bring its own individual form into the world; and only this form, born simultaneously with the content, should be the natural one. Holz does not want to accept the path from the experience to the completed artistic form. It is not, as Schiller says, in the conquest of the material by the form that the true artistic secret of the master lies; rather, the master is the one who is able to eavesdrop on the form lying within the material. In this way, Holz has turned from the inspiring singer, who was moved when he expressed the fate of misery, the longing for a better future, into the careful recorder of immediate impressions, which only give satisfaction to the aesthetic feeling when they are accidentally artistic. However, they very often are, because the poetic spirit lives in wood despite its theory, which is hostile to poetic art in the higher sense.

[ 53 ] The poems of Cäsar Flaischlen are effective due to the deep, cozy personality that expresses itself in them. He is a personality who is not able to take life lightly. He has to fight against the passionate strivings of the soul. It thirsts for satisfaction. Pride wants to conquer it, which keeps it away from its goals. But in the end, it is not unlimited power that she trusts, but a bit of modesty that sets herself manly goals when she sees that the distant ones are unattainable. For Flaischlen would rather be a full man within the narrower circle than half a man within the wider one. To be whole in accordance with his own soul fund, inwardly harmonious and based on himself: that is the basic character of his personality. The things of the world pass before his eyes with dignified simplicity, and his verses and his particularly charming poems in prose flow just as simply, often all too unpretentiously.

[ 54 ] Richard Schaukal has a gift for observation that focuses on the expressive in the world. Things and events are stylized for his gaze. He transforms the sublime into the sublime, and the beautiful into the simply beautiful. For his eye, the slender expands completely into a straight line; the transitions from one thing to another cease, and contrast abruptly replaces contrast. But all this in such a way that we have the impression that in his art things clarify themselves through sharp contours and contrasts; they make their indeterminacy disappear and emphasize their characteristic features. A colorful language is on a par with this way of looking at things. He is able to say meaningfully what he has seen meaningfully. He is at the beginning of his artistic career. It seems to be a meaningful beginning.

[ 55 ] The imagination of Rainer Maria Rilke is wonderfully sensitive to the intimate relationships of natural beings and human experiences. And he has an accuracy of expression that is able to present all the subtle relationships between the things that the poet discovers to us with full, rich tones. This is not the accuracy of the great characterizer, this is that of the nature-loving wanderer who loves the things he encounters on his wanderings and to whom they tell many of their quiet secrets because they too love him and have gained his trust.

[ 56 ] Hans Bethge has sonorous colors of expression and a great capacity for impressing the solemn tones of the outside world. However, neither evokes the feeling that it comes from the poet's very own soul, but appears as an expression of what is felt. This impression is heightened by the coquetry with which this poetry approaches us. It is likely, however, that this strangeness in the poet's personality is only a precursor to his own beautiful achievements, the forerunners of which can be heard in his current creations.

The situation of someone who wants to say something about the nature of the soul on a spiritual scientific basis, insofar as it can be described as immortal, is perhaps characterized for a very long time by the fact that I am talking about the publication of a book as an introduction. This book is entitled “Athanasia or the Reasons for the Immortality of the Soul”.

I would like to make it clear, so as not to be misunderstood, that today's spiritual research cannot consider this book as written in the spirit of this spiritual research. Spiritual research in the modern sense did not yet exist at that time, as I was able to sufficiently demonstrate in many lectures that I have given here. However, I would like to say that, in view of the fate that has befallen all those long-standing disputes that push towards what today wants to develop into spiritual science, I believe that what happened with the publication of this book is not without significance. So in 1827 a book entitled 'Athanasia or the Reasons for the Immortality of the Soul' was published. The person who published this book wrote a remarkable introduction to it, a remarkable preface, as they say. He writes that he was with a dying person and found the manuscript of this book at his bedside, that he then took over this manuscript with the consent of the dying man, that it could no longer be said to him exactly how the dying man came by this book, which apparently had a great, profound significance for his soul in the last days of his life. Then the person who publishes the book waited because the content seemed so significant to him, seemed to contain such important information about the soul's life after the detachment of the physical body that he could not imagine that this book would not be destined to make its content accessible to wider circles. But since he had waited long enough and had not seen the content published anywhere, he decided to publish the book himself.

What can legitimate research into the origin of this book tell us? There is the strange fact that the person who published this book, with this preface in which he recounts the book's remarkable fate, wrote this book himself, from beginning to end and published it without his name; that he only found it necessary, if one may say so – it is meant in the very best sense of the word – to invent a fairy tale about the book, as it has just been mentioned. It becomes somewhat more understandable why the writer of this book resorted to this fairy tale when one knows that he was a well-known personality in the broadest philosophical circles of his time, a philosopher who dealt with the most profound questions of philosophical thought : the Prague philosopher Bernard Bolzano, who had a large number of students, students who worked for many decades at Austrian universities, who always confessed what a profound influence they had drawn from Bolzano's teachings. So, a famous, influential philosopher, Bernard Bolzano, publishes a book in which he discusses the reasons for the immortality of the human soul, and in this book he has to present himself to the public in the manner described. Why did he do this? Well, the reasons are very obvious. In this book it is not merely stated, as it is so often the case in philosophical writings, that the human soul is immortal for these or those reasons that are derived from human logic. Rather, this book speaks of how man finds within himself a being that can perfect itself between birth and death, perfecting itself in terms of its thinking, perfecting itself in terms of its feeling , perfects itself in relation to its volitions; how this being, when it is rightly grasped by man, shows, however, that it not only bears within itself the powers that lead to its perfection up to death, but that it bears within itself powers that further perfect this soul-being, further develop it, that can be further filled with content even after the human being has passed through the gate of death. This book then explains how one must imagine, when one grasps the human soul, that the human soul must live in a certain environment when it has passed through the gate of death. It also indicates how this human soul, after its death, associates with other spiritual entities, which cannot be perceived as long as the human being dwells in the body. It is hinted at what relationship the human soul, after passing through the gate of death, can have with the relatives and friends left behind, with the souls attached to it in love. As already mentioned, all these details of the soul that has passed through the gate of death are not spoken of from the standpoint of today's spiritual science, but with fine, delicate reasons that a philosopher has developed who not only philosophizes with abstract concepts, but who is involved with his whole soul, with his whole human being, when he develops thoughts, especially the thoughts about that weaving and being in the human being himself, which we call the soul. But Bolzano knew only too well that as long as one remains a logician and discusses how one concept is linked to another, what logical reasons there are for the truth or probability of a judgment, as long as one discusses how attention in the human soul, possibly even the reasons for memory and for the will; in short, as long as one expresses everything that the soul performs while it dwells in the body, one can have the reputation of a scientific philosopher. But if one speaks about the human soul as Bolzano did in his Athanasia, then one's reputation as a philosopher is ruined. Then one is an unscientific person. Then you are a person who talks nonsense and can no longer be taken seriously by those who understand how to think scientifically. Even those who have not learned to think scientifically but swear by the authority of those whom they have heard of or of whom it has been publicly stated that they can think scientifically believe that they can thoroughly dispute the scientific value of such a personality. If Bolzano wanted to save his reputation as a philosopher, he had to resort to the maneuver described above, and then leave it to later researchers to recognize that the book was written by him. And no Bolzano expert today doubts, for the very best reasons that can be proven scientifically and historically, that the book in question is by Bolzano himself. This shows something that was true then and is true today: if you want to openly and frankly advocate something that does not belong to the physical-sensory world or cannot be said about the physical-sensory world, you have to expose yourself to being seen as a completely unscientific person. And as a rule, the 'fact' does not apply either, that one could recognize from the way such things are spoken about, that the person speaking is not an unscientific person.

And yet, just as spiritual science has to speak about the question of immortality today, so this speaking, as I have often emphasized here, is in the fullest sense a continuation of that human spiritual work which, especially in the field of natural science, has led to such great results of human life and striving, which are fully recognized by spiritual science.

Therefore, today I would like to begin by hinting at some of the things that can show how the study of immortality is approached from the point of view of spiritual research, so that everything that can be called spiritual research in this sense today is in fact the direct, immediate continuation of what scientific thinking has contributed to a world view in the course of the nineteenth century and up to the present.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” you will find a chapter entitled “The World as Illusion”. This chapter is not intended to show that the world as it presents itself to the outer senses and to human thinking, which is connected to the brain, should be seen as an illusion, but it does show how many thinkers of the nineteenth century have come to the conclusion that everything perceived by the senses, and also what thinking has to say about the perceptions of the senses, does not flow into the human soul from the outside, but is, as it were, first constructed within the human soul. As far as it can be done in a popular way, I would like to touch on these thoughts in my introduction, even though they may be far removed from many of the esteemed listeners.

We see with our eyes, we hear with our ears, we perceive the world with our sense organs in general. Now, someone who is grounded in the latest natural science and physiological research says that what the senses perceive actually arises only through an interaction of the senses with something completely unknown in the external world. The researcher says: When the eye perceives a color, when the eye receives some impression of light, one must consider that what acts on the eye from the outside remains completely unknown to perception. With his soul, the human being experiences only the effect that the external world has on his soul. That is why, when we go through the world in our ordinary lives, we see things in color, as an expression of their light effects. But if, for example, we strike the eye, we may also have an impression of light in the eye, even if it is vague. Or if we can somehow otherwise evoke that which can occur internally in the eye, say, somehow with an electrical device, then we also get a light impression. That is to say, the eye responds to everything that acts on it from the outside with a light impression. So whatever happens out there, if it somehow acts on the eye, a light impression arises in the eye. The eye creates the impression of light from the effect of a completely unknown external world. It is the same with the ear. It is the same with the other senses. Therefore, for example, the philosopher Lotze, an outstanding philosopher of the nineteenth century, is in complete agreement with Schopenhauer when he says: Everything that we perceive as the effect of light, as color, has actually only come into being in our eye through the effect of an unknown world. What we hear as sounds is created by the effect of an unknown world in the ear. If there were no people with eyes and ears, the world would be dark and silent, and one could never say that something similar to what eyes see and ears hear prevails in this dark and silent, unknown world.

In other words: In the nineteenth century, under the influence of Kant's philosophy, it was concluded that in order for man to gain knowledge and perceptions of this environment, he must engage in an inner activity, and that only through this inner activity does that which he calls his environment come into being in his mind. In reality, one can say that for these people, who are genuine thinkers grounded in natural science, the world is like an illusion. For if out there, where we see pillars and all kinds of pictures on the walls, there is something completely unknown that affects the eye and from which the eye creates colors and shapes, then one can only say that what appears to us as our environment is an image created out of man's own being. And what is behind it can only be constructed by hypothesis, as modern physics does, which assumes all kinds of vibrations in the ether and the like behind our perceptions. So that man, as he goes through the world, in interaction with an unknown external world, simply by the nature of his being, builds up what he calls his world.

Taken as it has just been explained, there is absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing to be said against this line of thought. This train of thought is completely in line with everything that scientific research has delivered in the nineteenth century. One can say: Such a statement as that made by Hermann Helmholtz, the famous physiologist and physicist, is perfectly understandable: by perceiving an external world, man does not perceive what is, what is really happening, but only perceives signs. Not even images, says Helmholtz, are perceived of what really is, but only signs. For what our eyes and ears create of the external world are only signs for the external world. As I said, there is nothing to be said against the seriousness and logic of this line of thought. Taken directly, as they present themselves, that is so.

You have to go much, much deeper into the nature of man if you want to know what is actually behind this train of thought. I have tried to show the philosophical world what is behind this train of thought and how it offers the possibility of finding one's way with it in relation to the human concept of reality. I have attempted to show the way to do this in a lecture I gave at the last philosophers' congress. But these arguments today only lead to general misunderstandings, if not to something much worse. The one who has the task of finding his way in the train of thought just outlined must indeed advance to spiritual science. And then it certainly becomes apparent that one can truly say: The human soul creates by perceiving through the senses that which it must initially call its world. It creates this. It really does create it. But why does it create it, despite the fact that creation prevails in the real? Well, it creates it for the reason that the human soul, that which is the human soul, is not connected to the human being in such a way that one can say: There is the human body, and in this human body the immortal soul dwells within, just as any person dwells in his dwelling and influences the outside world in some way from his dwelling or looks at the outside world through windows. The connection of the human soul with the human body must be imagined quite differently. It must be imagined in such a way that the body itself, as it were, holds the soul in itself through a process of knowledge. In the sense that colors and light, like sounds, are outside of us, in the same sense the human soul itself is outside of the body, and in that the reality carries colors and sounds in through the senses, in the same sense the contents of the soul live, as it were, on the wings of sensory perception. The soul must not be imagined as just a finer physical being that dwells in the coarser outer body, but as a being that is so connected to the body that the body exercises the same activity that we otherwise exercise in cognition when holding on to the soul. Only when we understand how, in a certain sense, that which we call our ego, the bearer of our self-awareness, is outside the body in the same way as sound or color, only then do we understand the relationship between the human soul and the human body. By pronouncing “I”, the human being, as a bodily human being, perceives this “I” from the same side of reality from which it perceives colors and sounds. And the nature of the body consists in being able to perceive precisely this I, that is, the soul's own nature. In order to fully experience the reality of what has just been said, it is necessary for the human being to carry out the exercises that have often been discussed here, that is, to perform inner acts with his soul.

Today, too, I will not repeat what I have said so often, since everyone can read it in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” “Occult Science,” or in the brief sketch at the end of “Theosophy.” Today, too, I shall not describe these inner soul-searchings in detail, but rather I should like to give again certain points of view which can show what man arrives at when he, in the sense often described here and in the books concerned, undertakes inner work with his soul , so that what otherwise takes place in the soul as thinking, feeling and willing develops further through inner impulses given by the soul in the meditative life; that it becomes something other than what is in the ordinary life of the body.

When a person undertakes the mental processes – this too has already been discussed in the last lectures – that lead thinking beyond the kind of thought life that one has to have in ordinary life and also in ordinary science, then one comes to think, that is, to perform the inner activity of thinking, but no longer to have a specific thought. Meditation consists in the fact that, while one otherwise thinks, as it were, under the influence of the external world and reflects on things, one evokes thinking as an inner arbitrary activity of the soul, that one does not direct one's attention to what is being thought, but to the activity of thinking, to that fine activity of the will that is exercised in thinking. I have already described this in the last lecture. In a sense, one thinks with a thought-content that one has moved into one's consciousness, into one's soul, through one's own will. One thinks so intensely, so strongly, so powerfully inwardly that one really achieves what one does not want to achieve at first, but what is achieved under the influence of such inner thought-work: thoughts fall away and one lives only in the inner weaving and working of an - well, let the expression be used - an ethereal world. The word “ethereal” is used here in a different way than modern physics uses the term. One lives in a weaving, in a pulsating, and one knows, if one has pursued this experience long enough: What one has discovered in one's thinking, what one has detached from one's thinking, just as the chemist separates hydrogen from water so that he can show the properties of hydrogen that cannot be shown while the hydrogen is still in the water, - one knows, when one has detached the activity of thinking from thinking, that one is now really in an experience outside the body. By continuing such inner soul work, one must then become clearer and clearer about what the experience actually is that one has evoked in this way in the soul. When we perceive colors and sounds in our ordinary life — as I said, this can already be considered a result of natural science — then we know through natural science: an unconscious activity is carried out in our human being; because the fact that the world of color and sound is evoked through the eye and the ear is an unconscious activity. An unconscious activity is carried out through which something that is outside speaks into the soul and reveals itself to the soul. What one experiences in the inner grasping of thinking when one does the corresponding soul exercises is not experienced in the same way as if it were rising up from our muscles, from our blood, but it is experienced as if it were coming in from the whole surrounding cosmic space , as if it were a spirit-being entering us and having a certain attraction to our body, so that it recognizes our body as the vehicle through which it wants to reveal itself to the sensory world. By meditating as described, one steps into the external world itself. One immerses oneself in this external world, from which colors and sounds come to us. That is to say, one frees one's experience from the body. This freedom of experience from the body must be inwardly experienced, must be lived. Through soul exercises, the human being must come to know that he is living and pulsating in an element that is not bound to his body as an instrument. But will, inner arbitrariness, is now present in everything, which thus leads the human being to freedom from the body – inner activity, but inner activity on a higher level. Let us just consider for a moment what it would mean for the human being: suppose – assuming the truth of what I have presented to you as a result of more recent physiology, of more recent natural science – the human being were aware: there must be something unknown, a silent, dark world. I stand in it, I open my eyes. Through my eyes I create color, through my ears I create sound. I place the sounds and the colors into the world. What would a person have to say? He would say: Well, then the whole world is a dream, of course it is a dream. Then nothing of what I see and hear is real. Only because this inner activity, which is there, remains unconscious, because one does not know that one does it — evoke colors through the eye, evoke sounds through the ear — only because of that, one is at all undisturbed in one's outer experience. For if human beings were always aware that they do what recent natural science ascribes to them, then they would certainly speak about the whole world of the senses in exactly the same way as they now speak about what way, and what human thinking, trained in this way, experiences through a world that is just as real as the sense world, but which must be voluntarily placed before ourselves through the effort of free will born of thinking. One might say that it is good for most people that they are blessed with not knowing how they create colors and sounds for themselves, otherwise they would already be able to speak about this colored and sounding world exactly as they speak about the world that the spiritual researcher presents to them. For that is indeed the characteristic of the world that the spiritual researcher presents to the soul: that one now exercises the activity, which one otherwise performs unconsciously for the sensual world, consciously, fully consciously, on this higher level of the act of will, which is detached from thinking. Otherwise, however, there is no difference at all in relation to the sense world. But people are not strong enough to hold to that, to have confidence in that which they must first call into existence inwardly. One would like to say that it is good that a kind God has withheld from people the knowledge that they create the light of the sun for themselves, otherwise they would deny it, as they deny the essence of the spiritual world. People depend on the outside world, on the authority of the outside world, to dictate what is, what is inherent in being. If they are to do something to allow this being to come to the fore, then they are not strong enough, not trusting enough in this inner activity of theirs to allow what they now have to co-create themselves to be recognized as a reality, as a truth.

When, through the indicated exercises of thinking, one has truly grasped the will in thinking, that reality which does not express itself in thoughts of a sense world, then at first – and this too has often been hinted at from a different point of view – — one does not have a spiritual reality before one, but one has only an experience that consists of a weaving and being and becoming; one has, so to speak, an expanded self before one, a self that now knows itself connected to the whole world, from which sounds and colors otherwise reveal themselves to it. But one weaves and lives in this becoming. One only knows that the way one lives in this becoming is reality, spiritual reality, spiritual reality free from the body.

One cannot be careful enough in describing such things, because it can, of course, be objected lightly by someone who believes they are allowed to think they are very scientific: So the spiritual researcher claims that he is immersed in the world through the result of this one exercise; he must actually know everything when he lives in that weaving element. Now, what works from within instead of approaching the person from the outside does not have to reveal all the secrets it contains. One can say that it can be compared to the fact that a person also eats and drinks and yet truly does not know the processes that take place in his body. One gets to know another world in its nature and essence, but naturally one does not get to know all the secrets of that world, which in turn must first be explored in detail, a research that requires exactly the same care and seriousness as the exploration of the physical-sensual world, yes, more. But this experience of living in a weaving world can be compared to when a physical person in the body has acquired the ability to grasp all kinds of things, but cannot grasp anything when he reaches out. In that case, one would know that one has organs to grasp, to make grasping movements, but one does not grasp anything. One would be in this situation if one only had the practice results that have just been described. One would live and weave inwardly in the spiritual element, but one would feel as if one were stretching out the spiritual organs in all directions, and it would be certain: you have grasped yourself in the spirit — but one would still perceive nothing of a spiritual environment. It would only be a general living and weaving and becoming of one's own self in the spirit. A tremendous loneliness, even a sense of apprehension, could seize a person if he only came to these conclusions. Therefore, the exercises that the soul performs when they are taken from true spiritual research are designed not only to develop the life of the mind, leading to such experiences as have been described, but also to develop the life of the will. And this training of the life of the will is something that arises in the most natural way from the ordinary life of the will in man. You can find more details in the books mentioned. But I will again characterize the effect, the results of the exercises of the will, which are already interwoven into meditation in proper meditation, from a certain point of view. Exercises of the will lead a person to the point where he can observe his own volition. Ordinary self-observation, even that which is called self-observation in trivial mysticism, does not yet lead to the point where one really observes the content of one's own volition as one otherwise observes external natural phenomena. It certainly does not lead to the point where one could, as it were, become one's own spectator. But the real exercises that spiritual research can indicate allow the human being to see what otherwise takes place as will in his life and flows into actions or even just lives in desires as otherwise things and processes around us can be observed; that man can truly put himself outside of himself, that he observes himself by wanting this or that, by setting goals in life. One only acquires this ability – and this, of course, cannot fill the whole life, but only claim very short, snatched moments of meditation on life – by so directing one's volition – and every true meditator already directs the volition by doing the right meditations – by so directing one's volition that one does not merely will as one wills in ordinary life. In ordinary life some desire arises. It is prompted by some inner bodily disposition, or it is prompted by an external impression, or the will performs this or that action, and thereby something is brought about in the external world. This volition that lives there can indeed be observed, but observation is made easier if one tries to will that – and as I said, it is willed in meditation – which advances the soul itself; if one makes oneself, so to speak, the object of one's volition, if one want something so that, through what one does in the soul, one gradually becomes a different person; that the soul is organized more finely, that the soul becomes more receptive when one carries out acts of will in such a way that one develops, that one consciously advances in life. Anyone who does meditation exercises knows how, after years of doing meditation exercises, the whole way he thinks about the world becomes different from what it used to be. He knows how he connects passion with desires, and these in turn with thoughts, and so on. He knows that he has become a different being, albeit in a more subtle way, and that this must be perceived. Otherwise, the I is always the center of will. The rays of will emanate from the I, as it were, and pour into the feelings and into the actions. In this kind of willing, the person effectively places himself outside of his ego and advances the ego itself through willing. Therefore, true meditation is particularly suitable for becoming the spectator of one's own willing, for knowing how to place oneself outside of one's own will and, just as one learns to observe natural processes, to observe one's own willing with composure. Otherwise, one is completely absorbed in one's desires, with all one's passions, all one's wishes, all one's emotions. One overcomes this for certain moments in life, and one learns to become a spectator of one's desires.

Let us just consider: when we want something else, we are present in what we want, we are so immersed in it that we instinctively defend it, at least inwardly, as our own. In any case, we do not look at wanting in the same way as we look at, say, the formation of a rainbow. But this is the path that the soul can follow: to observe the activity of the will, as one observes the formation of a rainbow or the rising of the sun; to become so objective, so calm. At first, one strives out of oneself in thought – for at first it is a mental striving out of oneself – in order to become a spectator.

But then one makes a discovery that one must take into account if one wants to become immersed in the reality of these things. One makes the remarkable discovery that although one must strive for what one strives for, one achieves something completely different. And with that I characterize an essential aspect of the spiritual research path in general. On the path of spiritual research, one must, if I may say so, set out on the path. One sets out on the path with the first exercises that I have described by meditating, by putting thoughts into the soul. But if one were to believe that holding on to these thoughts, drilling oneself into these thoughts, is also the goal, then that would be wrong. For the goal consists precisely in overcoming what one has initially undertaken: that thoughts cease to be thoughts in the strict sense, that the activity of thinking, free of the thought, now takes hold of us in becoming and weaving. That is the characteristic of the spiritual research path: that something must be undertaken and something else comes out. And precisely because something is undertaken, something else comes out.

And so it is with this second one I have to describe. You make an effort in the way described—but as I said, you can find details in the books mentioned—you make an effort to become your own spectator, that is, to step out of yourself in your imagination and watch your own volition as you would watch external natural phenomena. But the result of these exercises is different from what it would be if you were to follow a straight line. One might think that one would now become such a being by making a being out of oneself that looks at its currents of will. This is not the case. Rather, the result is that the more one goes out of oneself in this way, the more that which goes out disappears within oneself. In the development of thinking, one becomes more and more inwardly absorbed. The self expands, becomes more intense, more powerful. In the process I have just described, one does not enter into oneself, but one's own self is, in a sense, laid aside. Instead, however, a will remains in the spiritual field of vision, an act of the will. And as it were, out of the plane of these acts of the will, rising up from below, through the acts of the will, there rises a real being, which is a higher human being in the human being. That which one has always carried within oneself through one's whole life, but has not carried in consciousness, that rises through the will, that breaks through it. Just as the depths of the sea would appear if they were to break over the surface, so now a being appears, a conscious being, a being of higher consciousness, which is an objective spectator of all our acts of will, a real being that always lives in us and that breaks through the will in this way. And this being, which one discovers in the currents of will, this being connects with what one has made out of thinking. These two beings, which one has found in oneself, unite with each other. And through this one is now not only in a working and weaving, but in a real spiritual world with real spiritual entities and facts. In it now stands one's own being, which is also born out of the will - but in the company of other spiritual beings - and which goes through birth and death. The human being who, through birth or conception, has connected himself with what materially descends from father and mother, the human being who sustains himself when he steps through the portal of death, is discovered in such a way that what lives and works in us is brought to life in himself from two sides.

In the thinking that one gradually develops, the main thing is that in this thinking we really develop something different from what lives in our ordinary soul, and that is precisely what is difficult. Man is so attached to the habits that he has acquired in his soul through his dealings with the sensual world. Therefore, all these qualities that he acquires through this spiritual path, as it has been described, actually initially unsettle him. A sense of apprehension, loneliness, and restlessness can come over him. If everything is done correctly, as indicated by true spiritual science, this does not happen. I spoke about this a few weeks ago in the lecture I mentioned, 'A Healthy Soul Life and Spirit Research'. But everyone knows that when you enter into the spiritual world in the way I have described, a certain restlessness can arise, a certain inner anxiety, and even distinct feelings of fear towards the spiritual world that want to overwhelm you. And to avoid this, there are already enough clues in true meditation. But if someone expects that what his soul then does in these newly evoked abilities is directly similar to what the soul does in relation to the external physical world, which it must have around it all day, then he is subject to the most severe deceptions and also disappointments. Then he becomes restless because he says to himself: “I am living in something indefinite and unfamiliar. I have always thought in a different way. My thinking was so secure in the other way; it clung to a certain being that was given to me. Now my thinking is supposed to live in a becoming and not, so to speak, forget itself.

But in the true spiritual path this is avoided by the fact that this true spiritual path brings with it — it brings it with it quite naturally when it is followed in the right way — that what we can call interest, inner soul interest, manifests itself for the human being in a completely different way than the soul interest usually manifests itself in the physical world. It is really true: one acquires a new interest, a quite new kind of interest, when one leads a meditative life. It must be emphasized again and again: one does not want success for the inner life alone. Those spiritual exercises are of no value from the start and must be decidedly rejected, which make man unfit for the outer life. A person who practises true spiritual exercises remains as firmly rooted in the outer life as he was before. No, he will become even more firmly rooted in this outer life. If he has to pursue a particular occupation wherever fate has placed him, he will fulfil this occupation no worse than before if he has true spiritual science. And one can be sure – forgive the trivial expression – that the person who gets all kinds of raisins into his head by going through spiritual exercises, and then thinks he is too good for what he was before, is most certainly on the wrong track. But through that in the soul which is the actual spiritual research activity, one acquires new interests, which take the soul in a different direction, in addition to the old interests, which become even more intense for the outer world.

I will give an example of what it is like for someone who is a philosopher. Perhaps it is useful to give this example for the very reason that most philosophers believe from the outset – well, that they can judge everything from spiritual science much better than the spiritual researcher himself. But those who are not philosophers themselves become restless when faced with the many philosophies that exist. Isn't it true that one should just take a look at all the “ians” (Kantian, Hegelian, Schopenhauerian, Hartmannian) just once, all of them, and then one will see, even if one adds others to that, that one should not allow oneself to be unsettled: Well, everyone thought differently, but I want something certain in my thinking! This tendency will then take on a different expression in the philosopher. The philosopher who wants to be a “ianer” himself now develops a certain train of thought; he then swears by it, and the others are of course all fools, whom he can refute, or at least people who are going astray. But the person who has developed his thinking in the way described, who has included the process of thinking in thinking, reads Hartmann with the same interest as Schopenhauer, as Hegel, as Schelling, as Heraclitus. He does not even get around to refuting one and becoming a follower of the other, because he takes a certain interest in the movement of thinking, in being inside thinking itself, because he takes a certain joy, a certain pleasure simply in the act of thinking and because he knows that this thinking does not lead to reality in such a way as is usually believed — that thoughts can simply be reflections of reality — but that one only comes into a life and weaving in the work of thinking. Yes, when one can do this, then one can take the standpoint: Certainly, the one philosopher has viewed the world from one point of view, the other from another! And the philosophical world view that one then gets cannot be seen any differently than a tree that has been photographed from different sides, where one also does not say: I declare the one photograph to be wrong, that is not at all true with the other, that is a completely different tree! Because it is only a different tree because it has been photographed from a different side. If you look at the activity of photographing, and not at the abstract reproduction, then you will see for yourself what is right. And so it is with thinking. You become interested in the mobility of thinking, and you know that you live in spiritual reality when you live and move in thinking itself. And there is something else that is introduced into your development through the exercises of the will, and this goes much deeper. It can disturb many people, and would even appear very disturbing if you were not sufficiently prepared, as is the case in every true schooling of the spirit. I would like to say again: for ordinary life, people are familiar with the fact that what lies within their will actually only appears to them in such a way that when they have done something they call good, they rub their hands together; then they are very satisfied with themselves. If they have done something they call bad in some way, they reproach themselves. But it remains with these inner soul processes. Man oscillates back and forth between rubbing his hands together out of satisfaction with what he has done and blaming himself. But when the volition is trained in such a way that the inner spectator emerges, then a greater seriousness permeates the matter. Then it is no longer just reproaches or inner satisfaction that arise, but you get to know a very real being in what permeates the will as a spectator and shoots up through its surface. You get to know: That which otherwise appears to you as reproach and as inner satisfaction is a real power. This real power is there in the world, it will continue to have an effect. In the further course one learns to recognize how this power develops into a further destiny and influences the next life on earth as a fact, after one has passed through the life between birth and death. What one experiences there as will, would follow the one who is not well prepared like a shadow, like something one always drags along, like one's shadow, like a real being. Everything depends on whether one also learns to understand the full significance of these things; that one learns, for example, to recognize: what follows one around as a shadow need not lead one to hypochondria, but one must look at it calmly. For it is not at all what has significance for the present life, but what passes through the gate of death with us, what is among the forces that will help determine the configuration, the nature, of our next life.

In short, the interests associated with these developed inner soul activities are different from the interests of the outer life, but they do not detract from these interests of the outer life at all. They merely put everything in its proper place, so to speak. When someone comes to an awareness of what goes through birth and death, what is immortal about the soul, as I have described it, then he will not become less interested in the external physical facts that directly surround him, but rather he will come to the conclusion that there is a spiritual world. In this spiritual world there are just as many concrete spiritual processes and entities as there are in the physical world, and he can see them. But that which exists as a physical world can only be seen in the physical world. What surrounds us as a physical world naturally ceases to exist after death. Only because we carry an immortal being within us, which is a reality in itself and belongs to a reality that goes beyond the physical, do we carry something through the gate of death, enter into a spiritual world, into a world that we live through between death and a new birth, and then enter into yet another earthly life.

Especially when one knows, not in the abstract but in a living sense – and it is only through spiritual research that one really gets to know this – that one can only get to know this sensual world in its full inner essence through one's senses and through the mind that is connected to the brain – then, under this life-filled self-development — not through some theory, but through what life absorbs, under the influence of the exercises that awaken our lively interest in everything that is obvious; the interest for the smallest details in the world is increased. Only one particular interest, and this we must take with us, grows ever smaller and smaller: the interest in that which is already able to appear in the sense world as so-called 'spiritual' and to reveal spiritual reality in and out of the phenomenon itself. It is known that spiritual things can be grasped when the organs, the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, are developed first, to use Goethe's expression. It is known that one must rise to the spiritual world, and it is known that in the world of the senses, this world of the senses must be grasped out of itself, that it stands as that which must be grasped through the world of the senses. Therefore one loses interest in all those events that seek the spiritual out of the world of the senses itself. And while interest in everything that takes place in the spiritual world increases, especially in true spiritual research, interest in the sense in which it exists for many in the spiritual world is purely sensational and all kinds of superstitions and belief in miracles disappears completely. Interest, let us say, in spiritualistic events, in mediumistic performances, completely fades away. The spiritual researcher is not interested because he knows that only something abnormal can come to light in these things, which is indeed based in the sense world, but which cannot lead beyond the sense world into the true spiritual world. Of course, he can take an interest in it, as one takes an interest in some theatrical performance, in some experiment that otherwise appears in the world. Nothing should be said against such events, provided, of course, that they are not frauds, in that they allow a variety of otherwise inexpressible natural connections to be expressed. But they are natural phenomena, and we know that we do not live in these things in any other way than we live and move with our ordinary senses, however abnormal it may seem. For everything that belongs to this area, which I have just touched upon, interest wanes, as I said. It becomes a mere witnessing — well, of all sorts of events. And it is the duty of every true spiritual researcher not to allow superstition to grow in him, but to uproot superstition completely.

It would be very easy to believe – and because it is possible, it must be emphasized – that a person who experiences spiritually what I have indicated, and who basically experiences nothing less than what he can call his immortal soul, and that he is actually experiencing life after death; that he is already experiencing what will be experienced after death. In this abstract form it is not the case, and one must think very carefully about these things if one wants to get an idea of them. What the soul experiences after death, or let us say, from death until birth, is experienced in much the same way as a plant would consciously experience everything that is in its germ, which represents all the forces for the new plant. One experiences everything that must necessarily be gone through in the spiritual world after death in order to prepare one's entire life with the new body and the new experiences as a new destiny in the coming earthly existence. It is the germinal being in us that is suited to experience in the spiritual world between death and new birth that which then prepares a new life on earth, so that we then have the body that we need to have the abilities that we have previously prepared within us, so that we put ourselves in the position in which we need to be when our destiny is to be fulfilled according to our previous life on earth. That this potential lies within us, we experience that. But to have this experience before us, to have the spiritual world before our own soul, for that it is necessary, of course, to go through the experiences ourselves between death and a new birth, which one can at most look at and develop in knowledge, but in a living knowledge that is an inner reality, while the knowledge of the external world, of the physical external world, is only mental images.

You see, I would of course need a great deal of time to discuss in more detail what I have only touched upon. This will be possible in the coming lectures. But, as you can see, there is a certain path that can be described as the path of spiritual research, which leads to the development of a life that is inwardly different from the life of the soul in the external, sensual reality. And in this experience, the soul takes hold of itself in such a way that it lives and breathes in the inner power that passes through the gate of death.

Fichte only sensed the truth when he said: Immortality is not only there when we have passed through the gate of death, but it is there when we are still living in the body. For the being that passes through death can be attained by human knowledge while it is still alive in the body. How is it attained? In a remarkable way, we have to form ideas ourselves from spiritual science as to how it is attained.

You may well ask how can a person achieve all that has been described as a result of soul exercises? How can soul exercises lead to something like this? You see, people very often complain – especially when they have a keen cognitive drive – that you can't really see through reality, that there are limits to knowledge. How often have I pointed out in these lectures the famous Ignorabimus of Da Bois-Reymond, where it is said that man can indeed come to an observation of the processes of the world and their limits, but cannot penetrate into the interior of matter; that he cannot, as it were, submerge himself in the interior of matter with his thinking. It is said of all knowledge that all these powers of knowledge are actually insufficient to fully penetrate nature.

When one begins to strengthen the soul inwardly as it has been described, one notices something very definite. One notices how tremendously good it is that there are such limits to external knowledge. For if the powers that one has for external knowledge were to make one see through all nature through themselves, these powers would prevent one from attaining spiritual knowledge. Only because one cannot use everything that is in the soul for external knowledge is something left that can be developed in the way I have explained it. Only because the full, immortal soul does not enter into bodily life, but still retains something, whereby not everything is transparent in the outer bodily life, are inner forces preserved, which can then be developed in the way described. By connecting ourselves with the physical material given by our ancestors through birth or, let us say, through conception, we retain so much of the immortal soul that, on the one hand, we are prevented from seeing through the full nature in the bodily life, and have to make hypotheses and all sorts of things about what lives in nature. But as a result we have in the background of our being forces that we can develop within us and that allow us to enter into a spiritual world in a spiritual way. The immortal soul lives in man. In order for it to live, some things must be taken away from man in a sensual way. This, in turn, is such an important connection that one must look at it.

There is therefore a spiritual research that introduces us directly to the immortal being of man. This spiritual research is different from the external research. In the external research, one can remain as one is. That is exactly what suits people. The same abilities that they have acquired once, they retain when they go into the laboratory, when they do experiments, and can learn something about the external nature. And then these people also demand that the spirit should be explored in the same way, by retaining the same abilities. One cannot approach the spirit without first making oneself spiritual, that is, seeking out that which is in every human soul but which must first be raised to consciousness in the manner described. But there is much, much that, I might say, still thwarts people's paths to spiritual science in the present time. That is why the chapter 'immortality question and spiritual research' is still so little recognized today, one that people are so reluctant to get involved in.

You can already see from what I have said that it is necessary for man to learn to think and live in a subtle inner way. That is to say, when he becomes a spiritual researcher, he must not become a lesser thinker than those who believe, let us say, that they have mastered thinking, who claim that they stand on the firm ground of external natural science, which is not to be challenged in the slightest. They do not love that in the present. In the present, one loves to develop, I might say, that very tangible thinking that does not even broach the subject of the finer things that live and move in the world.

I do not like to do this: to make personal references. Those of you who have been to these lectures often will know that I actually avoid going into all the opposition from the outside world and all the misunderstandings regarding what I am presenting here as spiritual science. I would prefer to ignore it and not talk about it at all. But when things keep coming up that do have an effect and are believed, they do harm to the cause. Personally I would prefer not to talk about these things at all, but harm is done to the cause because printed paper still has tremendous authority today, because it still has a tremendous effect. And so, for the sake of the cause, one must sometimes, when occasion is offered by some topic, go into what stands in opposition to spiritual science. If coarse thinking is opposed to it, which, because it cannot engage in the finer weaving in the life of thought, can see nothing but fantasy, nothing but a form of madness in what spiritual science indicates as the right path for spiritual research. Let me give you an example. And, as I said, please excuse me if it is a personal example, but I only mention it in so far as it is opposed to spiritual science, which is expressed in it as a typical phenomenon.

I gave a lecture in a certain city about the relationships that prevail in the nature of the individual European peoples, relationships that, as many listeners know, I had already presented long before this war gave rise to talk about them; insights that were found quite independently of this war, but which, as they are presented, should actually be obvious. For when it is said in the course of the lectures, which are now often combined with the lectures on spiritual science, that the peoples of the West, the peoples of the European center, the peoples of the East differ in this or that, one should believe that no reasonable person could actually be led to say anything other than: Well, yes, he may be mistaken about individual characteristics, but there really are differences. There really are different character traits, different ones in the Germans, different ones in the Russians. To deny this can only arise from the crudest thinking. And yet, as I said, I also gave a lecture on this in a certain city. In a daily paper of the town in question, this was discussed and said in the most derogatory way, that these differences were constructed only out of the war, as it were. But one could ignore that, following the example I gave recently, for what is being achieved in this area. But now think, that was not enough for one man, but the man even turned to a magazine, and in a magazine what appeared in the newspaper at the time was printed, and the following nice comment was attached to it: “The accusation of the speaker” - that is, the critic of the Tagblatt of the city in question - “of having reconstructed opposing cultures from the current constellation of powers, rightly applies to Steiner. With the best will in the world, I am unable to perceive, as Steiner does, a difference in essence between Central European and Western and Eastern European culture. In my opinion, European culture is completely the same in essence.” And so it continues. This appeared in a Central European journal. You can see from it what a crude thinking is confronted with spiritual science as such. For what I have read to you here is further developed in a detailed article that extends over several issues. The thought — well, I need only hint at it, then you will see how crude such a person's thinking is: “Intellectual life, too, has developed in this direction and is absorbed in this pursuit. The wild greed of the European cultured man for the possession of earthly goods would degenerate into a predatory struggle of all against all, were individuals not forced into iron state forms.” So this crude thinking does not even notice how these ‘iron state forms’ are initially more involved in what is happening in this war. It is thinking like this that one has to deal with. Such thinking is in contrast to what must be demanded in the light of an understanding of such a question, and so also of the question of the immortality of the soul. And such a thing does not appear in a materialistic magazine, but in a magazine - it even bears the heading “42nd year” - that calls itself “Psychical Studies”. That I am not speaking out of personal resentment, I can prove to you from the magazine itself. You know, or at least many people know, that I have dealt with the main ideas which this gentleman here attacks in such a way in a small pamphlet. This pamphlet is called “Thoughts During the Time of War”. In this pamphlet, though perhaps in a popular way, are exactly the same thoughts, written at least from the same spirit, from the same attitude. In the same issue as the article from which I have just read the characteristic passages, there is a review of this work, “Thoughts During the Time of War”. In this review, the work is highly praised and it is shown how meritorious it is to express such thoughts. It goes without saying that I am just as indifferent to being praised as I am to being criticized. But I must characterize what already lives in the formation of the times, so that it is not believed again and again when diatribes appear here and there, simply through the suggestive power of what is daubed with printing ink on dirty paper, since that always forms a kind of obstacle for those who might otherwise find their way to spiritual research. One must point out the grotesque nature of the experience that can be had in our time in such a way. And it is only for this reason that spiritual science must be kept free, so to speak, in the context in which it is found, in the light in which it must appear as true, genuine, honest spiritual science. In order to keep it free in this light, I must also touch on other matters.

I have already pointed out in the lecture before last, where I spoke about misunderstandings regarding spiritual science, also in the lecture “Healthy Soul Life and Spiritual Research”, that spiritual research is not only opposed by what comes from the more or less materialistically minded side. On this side it is extremely difficult to achieve something for the reason that the things that are put forward from this side are so terribly plausible. When I have to characterize something, such as this magazine, I do it reluctantly. When I seriously oppose something, I turn to those whom I actually hold in high esteem. So I also hold in high esteem the actual father, I might say, of modern materialism, Lamettrie. He is an astute man, and his reasons are plausible. But one can acknowledge the plausibility of these reasons, one can assert them and one should still, when the spiritual research path is asserted alongside them, acknowledge the significance and essence of this spiritual research path alongside the validity of what comes from the materialistic side. Lamettrie is, as I said, an astute man, and in his book 'Man a Machine' he has put together everything that can prove how man is dependent on his physicality. Now it might seem as if spiritual science would have every reason to contradict such things. No, it agrees with everything, as I even proved in my last lecture, in a more forceful sense than materialism itself. For it is indeed easy to understand and irrefutable when Lamettrie points out how man's mental state depends on what he is. Of course it is very easy to prove, because it is so terribly obvious that man depends on whether he likes something or whether something agrees with him. Think of the mood of the soul that results from it. Lamettrie describes all this, and in doing so, he basically anticipated everything that can be said about this matter. Isn't it extremely interesting – especially in this day and age – to read what Lamettrie said in his book 'Man a Machine', because if you read it somewhere else, it would not make a good impression. But here in Central Europe, this passage can perhaps be read with greater composure than in Western Europe. Lamettrie wants to prove what man actually is - really prove how man, in terms of his mental state, indeed in terms of his character, in terms of what lives in him in terms of soul, depends on what he eats, what his food is. And there Lamettrie says – but as I said, it was more than a century ago since it was said – in his book 'Man a Machine', Lamettrie says: 'Raw meat makes animals wild; humans would become wild from the same food. How true this is,” says Lamettrie, the Frenchman, ”can be seen from the fact that the English nation, who eat meat less cooked than we do, eat it entirely raw and bloody, and show a wildness that is partly brought about by these foods, but partly also by other causes, which only education can suppress. This savagery engenders in the soul arrogance, hatred, contempt for other nations, unruliness and other feelings that corrupt the character, just as coarse food produces a heavy and clumsy mind, whose main characteristics are laziness and dullness.” It is perhaps not uninteresting, especially in Central Europe, to hear the judgment of a Frenchman, even if it is more than a hundred years old, about the English, so that one can see how circumstances change and how people have not always felt and thought in the same way from one place to another and from there to there. This same Lamettrie also says other things that are quite natural, for example, he says - and he believes that this is enough to refute everything that can be said from the spirit about the spirit - he says, for example: “A small fiber would have made two fools out of Erasmus and Fontenelle.” One can, of course, admit this and still stand on the ground of spiritual science, as it has been characterized today. For there is much more that can be admitted and that will not shake spiritual research. Let us assume, for example, that if only a small fiber were different in the case of Erasmus, then, from the point of view of pure materialism, this would mean that his life would perhaps have become that of a drip instead of that of a genius. But now, if it had happened that the mother, before he was born, had been murdered by a bandit and Erasmus had been killed before he was born, what would have become of Erasmus' soul? Only a true spiritual researcher is able to see through such things. For it seems even more compelling that man is dependent on matter; for it would only have been necessary for him to have died as a small boy, then he would not have been there.

That spiritual research has anything to deny that comes from this side should not be believed by those who, with their blunt considerations, want to stand in the way of spiritual research. But even today, on this ground, one still sees much that is unclear and imprecise. The characterized coarse thinking is primarily to blame for this; but there is more to it than that: spiritual science has to suffer not only from those who oppose it, but it also has to suffer from those who often want to be seen as adherents of a certain spiritual-scientific direction and who, in turn, are connected with all kinds of strange social elements of the present day. And as a result, spiritual science is lumped together with all kinds of stuff by those who do not know how to distinguish — I have already pointed this out, but I have to go into it in more detail today with reference to something else. Spiritual science does not build — as you can see from a characteristic of my lectures, which is often criticized, namely that they are too difficult — spiritual science does not build on the gullible crowd, does not build on those who, in a comfortable frame of mind, want to gain some kind of conviction, does not build on those people who, as if in a 'dream, go through life and believe everything that is conveyed to them through their certainly subjective power of persuasion. Spiritual science does not build on that which lives in the world of superstition, and because certain things are rightly discussed in public on the materialistic side as nonsense, a sharp line must also be drawn in spiritual science itself between honest, true spiritual research, which follows only the truth, and that which so often likes to its coattails and what comes from a side where one counts on the superstition of mankind, which is present as well as insisting on one's own judgment; where one pretends to people all sorts of things, because even today one finds enough people who believe everything possible, if it is only proclaimed to them from an alleged spiritual world - unknown whence. What can be confused with spiritual science from this side – as I said, it must be pointed out in order to shake it off – true science, and that is spiritual science, has little to do with it.

I will only point out a few things, because these things are now being discussed publicly on the materialistic side and, certainly under the influence of the serious and serious events of the times, there will be more and more discussion. I want to show how wrong those are who associate spiritual science with some form of ordinary or higher superstition, that higher superstition that pursues all kinds of goals in the world and actually only works in such a way that it first puts people into the world who are said to have higher abilities, a clairvoyant gift. True clairvoyance consists in what has often been described and is again described today. But what people call clairvoyance today is actually subconscious, but is often also just a fraud. But we are not reckoning with what is in the subconscious, but with the effect. Therefore, one must reckon with what the fraudulent clairvoyance is able to do with superstition. And there it is possible that all kinds of dishonest endeavors and currents arise, where one wants to achieve something completely different from what lies in the realm of truth. What people need to know, what is achieved by this, is that first of all — allow me to use a harsh expression — people are made stupid, befogged, by showing them all kinds of occultism, which has an effect on their superstition, and then, with the people made stupid, all kinds of things are carried out that do not belong in the realm of sincerity and honesty. Spiritual science has the same duty and necessity to point out these excesses of modern life as materialism does. And if it proves materialism right in its field in such cases, as I have shown with Lamettrie, then it may also prove it right when it turns against all excesses of an apparent spiritual experience, which is nothing more than life in blind superstition.

In 1912, an almanac was published, a yearbook, edited by a personality who is revered in a city in the West as a higher clairvoyant by many who are clouded in the way just described. This yearbook appeared in 1912 for 1913, in advance. In it, the following note appears about Austria: “The one who is destined to govern in Austria will not govern. A young man who has not yet been appointed to the government will govern.”

And with even greater clarity, the almanac for 1914, which was published in 1913, returns to this matter. There may be gullible people who believe nothing more and nothing less than that a great prophecy has been fulfilled, and it is impossible to make clear to them in their blind faith that dishonest currents living in the European world have been at work here, using superstition and all kinds of dark occultism to bring something into the world. How this is connected with all kinds of underground currents can be seen by considering that a Parisian newspaper, “Paris at Noon,” long, long before the current turmoil and at about the same time as the appearance of the aforementioned note in the aforementioned almanac of an alleged clairvoyant in – a Parisian newspaper that makes no claim to be occult in any way, but can be compared to other newspapers that appear at noon – that this newspaper also expressed its wish long months before that the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand would be murdered. One can see certain underground connections. And this same paper wrote at the time of the three-year anniversary of his term of office: “Among the very first to be murdered if mobilization occurs will be Jaurès.

The same personality who publishes this almanac travelled to Rome in the first days of August 1914 to influence certain people who are open to such influence, in a direction that I will not say is linked to the main causes of Italy's position, but which had already taken effect in this matter.

I only discuss these things because they are discussed by others, from a materialistic point of view. But they must be discussed so that it can be seen that true spiritual science has nothing to do with such things, with superstition in general that relies on the credulity of the masses, and with what is done under the guise of superstition, both in large and small matters. Spiritual science will only appear as a real science that can be placed alongside other sciences when it is kept free from everything that can still be easily confused with it today and that is often confused with it, not only under the influence of limited judgment, which simply cannot distinguish, but also out of ill will. And in the literature that is thrown at spiritual science, a lot of work is done precisely with the fact that what one has to lie about when one wants to characterize spiritual science is so lied about that spiritual science is thereby put on the same ground as those things that spiritual science must of course fight as fiercely as they are fought by materialistic science.

But just as we recognize such things, spiritual science will emerge ever more clearly in its purity in what it can be for the human soul. Does not the latest book by Ernst Haeckel, that is, by a serious researcher, “Thoughts on Eternity”, shows how utterly at a loss mere natural science is in the face of such great events that have such a profound impact on the development of humanity, since it knows of nothing better to say than this:

Not that such a time would provide the reasons for spiritual science, but one must recognize what spiritual science can become for human life in the spiritual realm: that which sustains the human being, which holds the human being, because it makes him acquainted with that with which no natural science makes him acquainted. Natural science can only make man acquainted with that through which his body is connected with the sensual universe. Spiritual science makes man familiar with this through the fact that it shows him, by means of research, that he has an immortal soul, so that one can know: This soul of man is connected with eternal becoming. Man is anchored in eternity through his soul and spirit, as he is anchored in temporality through his body.

If one asks whether man needs something like this, it must be said that there can be no proof for it, any more than there can be for the fact that he needs to eat and drink. But just as man experiences through hunger and thirst that he must eat and drink, so he experiences over and over again in his soul that he must know. And the more one demands knowledge and not mere belief, one will recognize that he must know about the immortality of his soul. One can deny that man demands this knowledge, but the denial is only a theoretical one. The time will come more and more – and we are already at its beginning – when, just as hunger asserts itself in the healthy human body, the thirst for knowledge of the spiritual world, for knowledge of the immortal character of the soul itself, will assert itself in the human being who lives beyond himself into the time that begins with the present. And it will be an unquenched thirst if there is no spiritual science. This will show in the effects. Theoretically it will be possible to deny it – but it will show in the effects. It will show in the fact that people will find themselves desolate in their souls, will not know what to do with their lives, that they will perform their external tasks but will not know what the meaning of life is, and that they will thirst for this unraveling of the meaning of life. Little by little it will extend to the intellect; little by little it will show how man's thinking becomes coarser and coarser. We have already found enough coarseness in one example today. In short, the development of man would experience a descent if it could not be fertilized by spiritual science.

May the times we are living through today, which call upon man to be earnest in so many fields, also be a sign that the time is beginning when people must have knowledge of immortality and that spiritual research is the way to achieve it. The spiritual researcher himself knows that he is in harmony with all those who, even if they have not yet done spiritual research, have nevertheless been living and breathing in the spiritual world through the very nature of their soul activity. The spiritual researcher knows himself to be in harmony with those who simply knew what it means to live in the spiritual world. When Goethe was asked why he wanted to recognize the plant through ideas, since ideas are something abstract, he said: “Then my ideas, which I believe I experience within myself, are direct reality, because I do see my ideas within reality.” Therefore it was Goethe who, even when he had not yet spiritual science, knew what to say in a poetic but accurate way about the character of the spiritual world, where he was spiritually and soulfully transported by the poetic genius.

Today we have to say: the person who, through the development of his thinking, lives into the spiritual world, lives and moves in the emerging soul entities. And when man is freed from the body, he is also a spiritual-soul entity that lives in the becoming. That which has become, that which is solid, exists only in the outer sensual world in which man lives as long as he is in the body and then only when he perceives through the body. As soon as man ascends to the spiritual being, he is seized by the becoming. Goethe knows this. He also knows that just as man, through his own feeling, lives into his inner well-being, he can also live into a feeling that may well be called love. That is the surprising thing and always will be when one comes to spiritual people, that they even know how to say the right thing with the right word from their life in the spiritual world. That is why Goethe also says: one lives in the becoming. And when one develops oneself into this becoming, then the thoughts live in this becoming itself. Not the ordinary thoughts — these must first be overcome, they can only be incorporated into the world of becoming as something lasting, something enduring. Only when that which can be grasped in the process of becoming is held fast in thought, can the thought become fixed and we can carry it with our immortal soul through the portal of death. That is why, towards the end of his prologue in Heaven, written at the height of his life, Goethe speaks the beautiful words with which I want to conclude these reflections today, because in them, in a time that lies before the development of spiritual research as we understand it today , a poet speaks of the spiritual world out of poetic genius in a way that one must speak of it out of realization, by first pointing, or having the Lord point, to that which man needs as long as he lives in the sensual body. So that he does not degenerate into comfort and convenience, the Lord points out to Mephisto those who are spirit beings. And when free of the body, the human being is such a spiritual being. Goethe points out the peculiarity of the spiritual world with words that are sure to hit the mark. For you will recognize in these words what I myself had to recognize in them. After I had developed everything that I have presented today, I was surprised by the wonderful correspondence of these Goethean words, which I had not recognized before, the wonderful correspondence of these few Goethean words with the fundamental character the world to which the immortal human soul belongs: “But you, the true sons of the gods” - spiritual beings are meant, just as man is a spiritual being as an immortal soul -,

“But you, the true sons of the gods,
Rejoice in the living, rich beauty!
Embrace with love's sweet barriers what is becoming, what lives and works eternally,
And what floats in a wavering appearance,
Secure with lasting thoughts.”

Attention is drawn to that which lives in the pure spirit as its very own, but which is recognized in the human soul as its immortal part. In these words, which are directly a characteristic of that which can be grasped in the human soul, even when it is still living in the body, as the immortal, and of which one can know that it passes through the gate of death, when it enters the realm of the developing and takes with it to the pure realm of the spirit that which it has experienced here in a fluctuating appearance, in order to transform it into thoughts that can then become permanent and be taken through the gate of death. And what lives in fluctuating appearance affirms the soul, which passes through the gate of death, as an immortal, as an eternal being, in lasting thoughts, which henceforth make up its life in the same way that the body makes up the soul's life in the physical world.

Dearly beloved! For many years now I have been privileged to give one or more lectures here every year on the subject of what I dare call the spiritual-scientific world view. The friends of our spiritual-scientific world view were of the opinion that even in our fateful times such a lecture should be given here in this city again.

You will understand, dear ladies and gentlemen, that from the point of view of the spiritual-scientific world view, a consideration of our time must direct our feelings and emotions to what moves us in our immediate present as its most fateful content. We see various nations of the earth fighting with each other. Above all, we see Central Europe, as if locked in a great, mighty fortress, struggling for the most sacred goods. Every human soul must then, even if it wants to turn its thoughts to the most important, perhaps the highest riddle questions of existence, take with it the feelings that come from the events, which undoubtedly carry something tremendously significant in their womb , demand confidence, strength, hope from us, and above all demand of us that we survey the facts with open eyes, that we also allow the forces to come before our soul with open eyes, which come into play in the present.

Now it is truly not my intention to add yet another reflection to the already overwhelming literature and the abundant lectures on our current events. Tonight's discussion will cover a number of other topics that have often been discussed in our present time. It has already been said, and not without good reason, that one should not allow one's clear and certain view of the conflicting interests at stake in the present to become clouded, to become obscured by all kinds of mysticism, all kinds of metaphysical, that one must be clear about the fact that the present struggle owes its existence to political causes, social causes and the interests of the peoples, and that one should certainly not speak of the fact that the spiritual life can somehow be called fruitful among the causes of the present events.

Now, of course, the spiritual scientist in particular has every reason, my dear audience, to be careful not to fall into all sorts of speculation about how the world spirits themselves came into conflict with each other or the like. But one thing must always be emphasized: Even in those ancient times, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, when our ancestors, our Germanic ancestors, the inhabitants of Central Europe, were confronted with the old Roman Empire, which was coming to an end, even then people could say: It is only a question of the spheres of interest , on the one hand the Germanic peoples of Central Europe, on the other the peoples of Southern Europe, and one should not let one's clear view be clouded by all kinds of considerations of intellectual currents or the like when considering the immediate issue.

Of course, for the immediate present, for the view that only looks at the immediate present, it is so, it is fully justified. Nevertheless, the following may perhaps be considered. One will be able to say: Yes, certainly, just as English and German interests, political interests, are correctly viewed as being opposed to each other and have led to war, so in those days Central European and Southern European interests were opposed to each other; but if one considers the whole history that followed those events, one will still have to say: Yes, Europe was shaped back then as it had to be shaped so that the entire cultural development with all its content that has since taken hold could take place. And everything that happened intellectually afterwards was already in the womb of events back then. The way in which Christianity took root in Europe depended on the validity that the Germanic peoples were able to establish for themselves at the time. All subsequent culture, in which we are only beginning to immerse ourselves, was shaped by what happened at that time.

It is incumbent upon people of the present day not to live their lives only instinctively in the same way as people of that time, for example. Times have moved forward, and now it is a matter of allowing what is happening before one's soul, even from a certain higher point of view – I do not want to say that it underlies the events, I would like to emphasize that – but what is expressed in the tremendous struggle that has never been seen before in human development, to be seen with open eyes, that is, with full consciousness, I want to emphasize that.

This is one thing. The other thing, however, my dear audience, is this: that anyone who considers the spiritual events of the present and the past, insofar as the present has developed out of this past, will see that not only at the present time, but basically for a long time already, a struggle, a wrestling of the peoples of the earth, of the people of the earth for spiritual goods is taking place, a wrestling that has often been neglected in its special nature, and perhaps especially in the last few decades. But what is happening today, what has to be fought for today in blood and death, must remind us to take a look at what is going on in souls and how in what souls strive for and want, there is also a field of battle on our earth.

It is not my responsibility to get involved in political matters. But I may touch on the fact that in the future all the declamations and sophistries that are practiced today about the causes of the war, about what one or the other did to bring about the war, that this will crystallize, especially when deeper and deeper into the future, which may not be so very far away, the situation will be understood, that it is a matter of a defense that the peoples of Central Europe, in particular the German people, have to lead against powerful nations that do not want to let it happen. It is also clear to the objective observer and will become ever clearer that the German people have to fight a defensive battle. I call attention to this for the reason that the word defensive struggle must also be applied to the spiritual goods that are to be given from the depths of the German national soul to the world, but which must be defended against attacks that no longer present themselves as attacks but which are nevertheless attacks in a spiritual sense, so to speak, on the stage of world events.

To illustrate what I actually mean, let me give an example that seems rather remote, but is only an example. For more than a century, our German intellectual culture has included a certain area of intellectual property, the tremendous value of which is unfortunately still not fully recognized. For a long time now, when speaking of a thorough-going Weltanschhauung in harmony with the present time, reference has been made to the idea of evolution. It is said that humanity has advanced to the point of realizing that individual forms of life do not stand side by side, but that individual forms develop side by side. With tremendous magnitude – to use this expression – in a spiritually appropriate way, Goethe, at the end of the eighteenth century, out of the depths of German thinking, of German intellectual research, placed this developmental idea into world development, into world culture. And it may be said that the way in which Goethe has placed the idea of development in the spiritual world culture is one of the greatest things that has emerged in the development of humanity, at least in the spiritual realm, even if one compares it with everything that Goethe achieved as a poet.

Now it must be said that not everything that Goethe gave to humanity has directly flowed into the great stream of spiritual progress. Basically, few have yet recognized the full value of Goethe's spiritual achievement. On the other hand, the idea of evolution has entered world culture through Darwinism, I would say in a purely external, more materialistic-utilitarian form, from a non-German ethnic group.

Of course, one cannot say that there is something like struggle and war when looking at things so externally and superficially. But if you look at them internally, it is clear that something greater has simply been pushed back by the intellectual and external power of a less significant, English-influenced Darwinian idea. That is one thing. But countless examples of this could be cited. Countless things could be cited – we need not concern ourselves here with the deeper reasons – that within German culture impulses have been given that are being oppressed as such, even waged against, that are to be replaced by those who have surrounded them. The intellectual encirclement began long ago. And it will be, one may say a world luck - if the word is not misunderstood - it will be a world luck, if that which we are now experiencing in such a hard way makes us aware that we also need spiritual weapons. The future will teach that we need spiritual weapons to protect the deeper against the less deep. For those who look a little deeper, what is happening today out of blood and death is only a beginning; a beginning of a struggle that will also take place on the spiritual scene.

Now many things can help to find the way in the confusion that has arisen in relation to spiritual currents - the word is of course itself challenged today, but it may still be used because it best describes the present situation. And today's reflection is intended to point the way.

Spiritual science is by no means something - as it is meant here - that is already recognized in wider circles today. Rather, spiritual science is something that is even regarded as folly, as fantasy or reverie in wider circles. But the spiritual scientist does not allow himself to be deterred by this. When Copernicus put forward the new natural scientific world view in relation to their first thoughts, when Copernicus and Galileo appeared, what they had to say to humanity was also seen as fantasy in the eyes of those who wanted to hold on to what corresponded to their habitual thinking. He who observes the way in which truth advances through the world knows that spiritual science today is in exactly the same position as natural science was several centuries ago. And he finds it understandable, indeed self-evident, that it is still regarded by the vast majority of people today as fantasy, as reverie or worse.

Now, in earlier lectures, I have had a variety of things to present here from the field of spiritual science, how the view should be directed to something else. Today I can only present, not prove, but only hint at, some basic ideas that may interest us today, the spiritual-scientific views.

Sometimes we speak of the soul of the nation. However, the soul of the nation is a concept that can, it is to be hoped, be placed in a new light by spiritual science. What is the soul of the nation in our more or less materialistically thinking times? Well, if one wants to raise oneself to the concept of the national soul at all, one says: one looks at the qualities that always emerge in a national community, that is, what a group of people, who are called a nation, have in common, and one then comes to an abstract concept and does not think of anything further, of anything real, when one speaks of the national soul.

The spiritual scientist, however, speaks of the soul of a nation as something very real, as something one can call personal reality, as something personally real. The spiritual scientist speaks from his spiritual scientific research that just as we are surrounded in the physical world by the realm of minerals, plants, animals and human beings, we are surrounded by higher realms of the soul and spirit, by beings of a supersensible world. He does not speak of these beings of a supersensible world as if they were abstract concepts, but he speaks of these entities as if they were real realities. Just as someone in ancient times who had no idea about the nature of the atmosphere could believe that there was nothing around where we live, while the modern person knows, of course, that he is surrounded by air, so the person who is familiar with spiritual science knows that, in relation to our soul and spirit, we are surrounded by spiritual beings everywhere. But not in the sense of pantheism, but in the sense of a spiritual world that is populated by spiritual beings everywhere. And we also count the folk soul among such spiritual beings, we count the individual folk souls of the various peoples. We speak of real and individual beings when we speak of the folk souls of the individual peoples. I can only hint at this briefly today because time is limited.

But what the national soul has as an entity can only be understood by considering the relationship of this national soul to the individual soul within such a nation. And here we immediately come to an area where all of today's psychology is quite inadequate in the face of spiritual research. With this consideration, especially with regard to the contemplation of the soul, one stands at the beginning of a completely new way of looking at things with spiritual science. The person who speaks of the soul in the usual way of soul science today speaks of the soul as if it were a simple thing in which will, feeling and thinking and so on surge up and down. For the spiritual researcher, this is just as if one were to speak of color in general or of light in general. Anyone who has heard a little about physics knows that we can get behind the nature of light by observing the rainbow band of the entire spectrum, by observing how light manifests itself in connection with the phenomena of the world, let us say in a sevenfold or, for the sake of simplicity, in a threefold way. On the one hand, light manifests itself in the spectrum in such a way that we have, so to speak, reddish yellow on the outside, green in the middle, and blue-violet on the other side. And it is precisely through this that we come to understand the way in which light works. This enables us to look at light in terms of the way it works and to know that light really does live in the seven colors of the spectrum.

Just as the physicist today takes this for granted, so too will the science of the soul one day take for granted, but also as a scientific necessity, a threefold mode of action of the soul. And there we call that in the field of spiritual science, which, as it were, expresses itself in the soul as reddish-yellow expresses itself in light; we call that in spiritual science, in relation to the soul, the sentient soul. And we call that which, as it were, constitutes the center of the soul, as green is the center of the band of colors, the mind or feeling soul. And we call that which, as it were, appears on the other side as the manifestation of the soul, as blue-violet appears in the band of colors, the consciousness soul. And spiritual science must stand on the standpoint that one recognizes the soul from this structure just as one recognizes the mode of action of light from the color band. And just as light expresses itself everywhere, in every link, in every nuance of the color band, so the threefold effect of the soul expresses itself through what we call our self, our actual I. Truly, there will come a time when there is a science of the soul, as scientific as today's physics is, when the spectrum of the soul will be characterized as the sentient soul, as the mind or feeling soul, as the consciousness soul.

And if we now look at the individual peoples of Europe, we find: What characterizes them – but now in a real way, not in the abstract way that it is characterized by the previous ethnology – what characterizes these peoples is how the folk soul, the real, real folk soul, relates to the individual soul, the soul of the individual human being who belongs to the community of peoples.

And here we find, first of all, that the whole nature of the Italian people can be understood in a luminous way through this – I cannot go into this in detail now, but if it were described in full, one would see how what was previously ethnology would would step forward in a radiant way. The Italian people are characterized by the fact that the folk soul, insofar as it belongs to their nationality, intervenes in the individual soul of the Italian people, insofar as it belongs to their nationality, in such a way that this intervention occurs primarily in the sentient soul. Everything that has emerged as Italian culture is, comparatively speaking, the expression of a dialogue between the Italian folk soul and the sentient soul of the individual members of the Italian people. And all the one-sidedness, but also all the greatness of the Italian development, is based on the fact that the link of the soul life, the nuance of the soul life, which we call the sentient soul, is inspired and impelled in a one-sided way by the forces of the Italian folk soul.

Now one might think that I am only talking about abstract concepts with all these things. This is absolutely not the case. For spiritual science further shows us that these three members of the life of the soul, which have been enumerated, are really connected with the whole being, the comprehensive being of the human soul. And from the research in spiritual science, we can say that what we call the sentient soul initially forms the expression of all passions, all impulsive aspects of human nature; that it is the expression of the sensations that well up from the center of the human soul. But at the same time, it is also the part of the human soul that, as elementary as it is, as much as it is initially at a childlike stage, so it is connected with that which passes through births and deaths of the human soul, which belongs to the eternal part of the human soul, which passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world after death. Much more than the other aspects of the soul's life is that which unfolds in the sentient soul, that which belongs to the eternal in the soul.

But it also belongs to the eternal that the sentient soul contains only that which is linked to the eternal in the temporal, so that the human being directly lives this eternal as elementary life. If I could expand on this further, which would take many hours, it would point out to us how, precisely through this dialogue and these interactions between the Italian folk soul and the individual soul as a sentient soul, great Italian painting came into being, Dante's poetry came into being, who, let us say, gave a picture of the eternal in his “Divine Comedy”. All these bearers of Italian culture have given these things in such a way that one must say: What they have given is the result of the interaction of the national soul with the sentient soul of the individual, through everything that is accessible to the sentient soul of the individual soul. These things will be characterized in more detail when we turn to other nations and compare their characteristics with those of the Italian people.

But now something very peculiar happens. Apart from the general facts that I have just mentioned, we must also bear in mind that each age, each historical epoch, is assigned, as it were, the effect on a particular part of the human soul as a special mission in the course of time. It cannot be said that the wisdom that rules in the development of the world is always the same in all ages, so that the sentient soul, the soul of understanding or mind, the consciousness soul can work in the same way. That which comes from the human soul must meet the demands of world culture. And now, a deeper consideration of the spiritual development of newer peoples and especially of Europe shows that the activity of the sentient soul was essentially concluded by the middle or end of the sixteenth century, and that therefore the greatness of a people that is based on the sentient soul must be concluded by the sixteenth century. This in turn explains why everything that has been formed within Italian culture since that time, up to the present day, gives the impression of being outdated, and this can be said quite objectively. When we refresh our soul – and this is deeply satisfying for everyone – by drawing on the essence of southern Europe, as so many artists, as Goethe and others have done, it is due to the greatness of the Italian national spirit, which in the sixteenth century; the other is all after-effects, and it could easily be shown how it is prepared in the depths of the historical impulses, that what has since been asserted as Italian greatness must sound so hollow and empty. These things can now only be hinted at, as I said.

Some things, because they have to be briefly mentioned, have to be stated somewhat radically; but if you follow the lines of thought that are presented here, you will see how much more easily they can penetrate into the understanding that we must seek in the present, the understanding of the interrelationships between the peoples of Europe.

If we now consider the French national soul, we have to look for the essential peculiarities in the fact that there is an interaction between the very real national soul and the intellectual or emotional soul.

And everything that French culture has ever achieved can be explained by this peculiar interaction between the national soul and the intellectual or emotional soul of the individuals who belong to the French nation. This also explains why the French are particularly predisposed to combining and assembling facts, and to applying even the most profound concepts only in a way that is convenient for this world. This explains why even in the poetry of the French people, even when it rises to the classical heights, there is still an effort to construct as systematically as possible, for example in drama, to proceed as far as possible according to certain rules; this is the peculiarity of the intellectual soul. This intellectual or emotional soul brings to manifestation in the soul that which, so to speak, half points to the eternal of the soul, but which, on the other hand, points to the completely transitory temporal, which the soul experiences only in the physical world, in connection with the physical between birth and death.

Recently, some psychological societies have once again been pondering why the French mind in particular is so materialistic, why, let us say, even the greatest philosopher of the French people, Descartes – or Cartesius – constructed a philosophy entirely according to the model of mathematics. This is for no other reason than that the whole culture of the French mind comes from the interaction between the soul of the people and the soul of the mind or soul. How often are we Germans quite peculiar when we try to establish harmony between meaning and form in poetry, when we try above all to allow the content to flow into the form in such a way that the content creates its form, how are we when we now look at the same thing in the artistic products of the intellectual or emotional soul of the French, where it is especially important to build rhythm and rhyme in a systematic way. The French have a completely different feeling for rhythm and rhyme than we Germans do. We Germans are quite capable – and Goethe showed this throughout many of his dramas – of creating rhyming rhythms without rhyme. The French, who want to be justifiably French poets, find this quite impossible. Everything that makes up the peculiar character of French poetry, that which makes up the peculiarity of French characters, comes from the interaction of the French national soul with the intellectual or emotional soul of the individual.

If we now turn to the English people, we find that the individual Briton who seeks his connection with the national soul in his nationality is subject above all to an interaction between this national soul and the consciousness soul. Now this consciousness soul is that which, in relation to the outer man, in relation to everything that man is in his dealings with the world of the senses, is the most highly developed part of the soul. But at the same time it is the only thing that is limited to the world we pass through between birth and death. We can, so to speak, look up to the loftiest expressions of the British spirit, we will find everywhere that its expressions come from the interaction of the British national soul with the consciousness soul of the individual British, which, so to speak, is directed into the physical world with its best powers.

This peculiarity of the British character will become even more apparent to us if we now immediately mention the peculiarity of the interaction between the German national soul and the soul of the individual German. There we see – and we shall understand this later through individual expressions of the German nature – there we see that just as light manifests itself in all color nuances, just as reddish yellow, green, blue violet are all expressions of light, so the soul as a whole is the expression of the self, of the I. And that which constitutes the substance of the German people is rooted entirely in the ego, in the self. And the interaction between what we call the German national soul and the individual German, insofar as he stands within his nationality, is the interaction between the national soul and the ego. Hence the peculiarity of the German soul, that it is not one-sidedly attuned to the revelations of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul or the mind soul or the consciousness soul, but that it expresses itself sometimes in this way and sometimes in that; that it strives for universality, for the all-embracing, and that at the same time it strives for inner depth, always wanting to experience more deeply all the different nuances of the soul life in a living way. It can be said that just as the I, the self, is the deepest part of the human being, and the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul are its expressions, so it is with the German, insofar as he belongs to his people , that in relation to the most intimate part of his mind, in relation to the depths of his soul, when he rises to the best that can flow from the German nature, he holds a dialogue with his deepest soul with the spirit of his people. Thus he also has a feeling, sometimes only an instinct, but on the heights of humanity also a clear consciousness of this confrontation with the spiritual powers of the world.

If we now look back again at the peculiarities of the British people, it becomes clear to us – and I would like to give an example that has greatness, because no one will accuse me of citing Shakespeare to denigrate him, and I would of course consider myself to be a madman, like anyone else, would consider myself a fool if I were to doubt Shakespeare's greatness in the slightest; of course I count Shakespeare among the best poets in the world – but it is one thing to recognize the foundations of the world's effectiveness and another to form value judgments.

Let us consider one of Shakespeare's most characteristic works, the work in which Shakespeare's thoughts and feelings can come to us so fully from his soul, let us consider his “Hamlet”. Let us see how real riddles of the world and of humanity are brought to our soul in Hamlet. “To be or not to be, that is the question.” The ghost of Hamlet's father appears; one might say that the dead intrude into the world of the living. But do we recognize Shakespeare's greatness on the one hand precisely in the fact that he is able to present his characters in such a wonderfully sharply outlined way, in a typical and completely individual characterization, showing us precisely that the part of his soul that is called the consciousness soul is directed towards the external-historical. What is solid in the world about the human being on two legs and reveals itself through the human being is characterized by Shakespeare from the consciousness soul with a wonderfully sharp contour. That is the remarkable thing, that he has become one of the greatest, that he was able to characterize a world from the consciousness soul as it stands before us. That is the characteristic.

But let us look at him just at the point where he wants to touch the boundary that leads beyond the sensual world into the supersensible. He wants to touch it. He wants to cross over this boundary. Hamlet's soul shows what happens to a person who wants to cross over this boundary. The question is raised: to be or not to be? He looks towards the other world, but how far does Hamlet get? He only gets to the threshold, he looks into that land from which no traveler has yet returned.

In this we have the entire workings of the consciousness soul in that the poet is great at characterizing what is in the physical world; but uncertainty immediately befalls the soul when it wants to go beyond the physical world. Shakespeare in particular shows us how he also emerged from the interaction of the folk soul with the consciousness soul.

If we now compare this with an episode in the greatest world poem, which is also the greatest German poem and the greatest German intellectual achievement, we conjure up the scene in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” where the question of “to be or not to be” also arises before the human soul, and the spiritual world and the sensual-material world stand before the human soul full of significance. Mephisto is there, he has the key to the spiritual world, but he is the representative of the materialistic view, he is the representative of those beings who only see the material, the transitory, out of the spirit. He has the key, just as science has the key to the higher secrets, but, if it is only filled with materialism, it cannot enter into these secrets. Goethe even depicts Mephisto as having to place himself in relation to the higher mysteries. And Mephisto addresses to Faust a question that touches so closely on the Hamlet question: “You will enter the indefinite, you will come to nothingness.” There is a reference to that which is to assert itself in Faust as spirit. And Faust replies to Mephisto: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.”

You see, this is the answer that comes from the depths of the I, the I that knows it is connected to the world spirit, the I that is directly strengthened by the fact that it is the German I that experiences the interaction between the national soul and what lives as the self in the soul. Doubt alone enters into the one-sidedness of the consciousness soul, the Hamlet doubt, precisely that which is truly experienced as the deepest. Then certainty enters and says: Because I experience the divine that flows and is through the world in my own inner being, I know that I must find the All in your [Nothingness]. That is the significant thing, that precisely this nature of the German essence has been expressed in the greatest German intellectual achievement. And what I have discussed in this one scene from Faust, it goes, like the spirit of Faust, through the whole of Faust. That is the significant thing, that at this point this influence of the folk soul into the depths of the soul is expressed through all the nuances of the soul.

But that is also what is so difficult for other Europeans to understand. It is this that appears to the other Europeans as an enigma. And enigmas that cannot be solved are best banished from the soul by such means as are now being used in the sophisticated and defamatory declamations that are being directed from all sides out of hatred towards the German national character, because it cannot be understood.

But from this interaction of the national soul with the individual soul of the human being, insofar as this human being is rooted in his nationality, follows what I would like to call the ever-rejuvenating power of the German spirit, of the German national soul. For by cultivating his innermost being, by being able to hold a dialogue with the national soul, the German always draws closer to this national soul. And when any cultural period has expired, when a cultural period has become decrepit and dies, then a new interaction of the German national soul with the national spirit occurs, a rejuvenation of the whole being. But through this direct contact with the national soul, the German essence not only rejuvenates that which lives within the German spirit itself, but also that which, as spiritual culture in the world, must also flow into the German essence.

Let us see how Christianity flowed into the old, worn-out cultures at the end of ancient times. Oh, one can observe how this Christianity adopted old forms, ancient forms of religions in the Greek and Roman folk. How that which was Greek philosophy was superimposed like a religious element, superimposed over that which was carried into human development as a living impulse as the deed of the living Christ.

And then we see how Christianity enters into the self-refreshing and rejuvenating spirit of the German being. This can be observed in individual phenomena. For example, let us see how the “Heliand” was written in the ninth century, a German way of presenting the events in Palestine that are grouped around Christ Jesus. If we allow this remarkable ninth-century poem to take effect on us, it shows us above all the peculiarity that here, out of the German spirit, the events surrounding Christ Jesus are described, who has taken Christ Jesus completely into his own mind, who sees a longing, an ideal in it, to live in his own soul life in such a way that the forces of Christ permeate this own soul life. Everything that is German soul should be permeated with Christianity. This is the source of the feeling that arises when reading the Heliand and letting it take effect in one: All this is related to us, the eternal of Christ is described to us in such a way that it does not appear as renewing, as rejuvenating an old culture, but rather that it appears as if the power of Christ itself is absorbed in its youthfully fresh achievement and is directly present, rejuvenating itself.

And then we see how, for example, such profound poetry, which of course did not originate on German soil in its first form, like Parzifal – and I could name others – how such poetry has been seized by the German essence, how it has been deepened, how the adventurous nature that was formerly associated with Parzifal appears to us in the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach and later in those of other writers, and how we see Parzifal as a representative of the striving human soul in general. We see in it something that lives in such a way that its striving is intimately connected with the forces in the human soul that strive for the highest, for the path to the spiritual. And we see, for example, how medieval religious spiritual life is grasped so profoundly by the power of what I have just explained. We see, for example, in the work of Meister Eckhart, this profound German mystic, how he constantly speaks of the fact that the divine must merge with the soul itself, that the soul can feel how God lives in it. Yes, that everything the soul experiences as thinking, feeling and willing can be experienced as if God Himself were thinking, feeling and willing in it. To let God rule completely within oneself becomes the ideal of German mysticism, the ideal of Meister Eckhart and others.

And if we follow the course of this spiritual current, we find numerous expressions by him that show us the same way of thinking. One of his expressions, I would just like to present it to you now for the reason that it can show this way of thinking so extraordinarily characteristically. It is a saying by Angelus Silesius:

I die and do not live either. God himself dies in me,
And what I am supposed to live, he also lives for and for.

Here we have direct proof of the intimate union of the individual human soul with the all-embracing spirit of the world. And do we not see in this an expression of an infinitely profound idea of immortality, an idea of immortality that can confront us, so to speak, in gigantic grandeur? Here Angelus Silesius says: I die and do not live either, God Himself dies in me. But when God Himself dies in me, it means that the event of death is experienced by the God who lives in me; then death can only be an appearance, because God cannot die in me! One sees that this profound German mystic grasps even the thought of death in connection with the divine, living permeation of the world, and he comes to the certainty of immortality from the experience of the divine world within himself. This stems from the fact that the German cannot remain with an old realization, but, as is so magnificently expressed in Faust, always strives for the sources of life. And even if he has studied everything, like Faust himself, he strives beyond everything, he strives for direct contact with the spirit of the world. For that is the peculiar nature, that is the essence, that the self seeks interaction with the national soul in German intellectual life. Therefore, out of this nature of its essence, the true German mind also feels in harmony with the eternal forces of the world that lie beyond death.

That is why we find such profound words in the works of Jakob Böhme and later in those of Fichte, in different ways in both, but both striving in the same direction. They said: He who grasps the essence of death from the depths of the human soul actually grasps that which is already immortal within mortal human nature. That which we carry with us through death is the self, which we have within us even while we live here on earth between birth and death. Therefore, Jakob Böhme, and later Fichte in the manner of Jakob Böhme, regards it as the highest goal to become aware of that which passes through the gate of death, that which lives in man as the eternal, to become aware of it already in earthly life, so that that which can be recognized as the fully developed eternal can be carried through the gate of death, out of the mortal body. And here Jacob Böhme expresses in a wonderful way the saying that is so characteristic of the peculiarity of the German national character as described. He says:

He who does not die before he dies
Perishes when he dies.

These are profound words! For it should be said: Those who are unable to unite during their life on earth in the body with the immortal, cannot in a proper way achieve the consciousness of their unity with the spirit freed from the body after death.

He who does not die before he dies
Will perish when he dies.

These words are spoken with such depth of feeling, and they are spoken by someone who wants to unfold her best powers by allowing the spirit and soul of her nation to weave into her own depths what it wants to give her.

In this respect, the Russian national spirit is incomprehensible, quite incomprehensible, precisely in terms of what is most deeply characteristic of the German national soul. This Russian national spirit, whose characteristic peculiarity, however strange it may seem to some, may appear strange to some, but since I can only characterize many things very briefly, sometimes radical words must be used -, this Russian national spirit, whose peculiarity in relation to Western European and, above all, Central European intellectual culture is arrogance, pride. When people often speak of the modesty of the Russian national spirit, this is based, in relation to what we see as characteristic, on a complete misunderstanding of the innermost impulses of this Russian national spirit. If one can see in the Italian people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the soul of the individual; if one can see in the French people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the soul of the mind or emotions; in the British people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the consciousness soul of the individual; and in the German being, a direct experience of the national soul in the self of the individual, then one must say: the Russian being, to this day he lives in such a way, despite all the forces he carries within himself, that the Russian national soul has not yet found its way into the individual soul. That is why someone who is completely immersed in Russian national identity, whether as a philosopher or as an artist, does not experience the kind of intimate coexistence that the German seeks through the characteristics just described within his being.

The Russian person does not know this flowing in of the forces of the national soul into one's own soul, into the individual soul. The Russian person sees something in the national soul that hovers over the individual souls like a mist. A Russian person, even a profound philosopher like Soloviev, who is the greatest philosophical mind of the Russian people, does not speak as a German would, for example, saying: I have my trust in the deepest core of my soul, which is within me, and it can connect with the divine that flows and weaves through the world. And so he is certain of true spiritual progress for humanity because he feels the power within him through which God reigns in him, which finds expression in the great creations of the German spirit.

That conversation, which every German, the simplest, most original German instinctively feels, is basically quite unknown even to a philosophical Russian person. And so we see, especially in the case of the most outstanding spirit of the Russian people, of the Russian world-view striving, in Soloviev, who died in 1900, we see in this great philosopher: when we go through his works, then one has to – forgive the expression – get out of one's Western European skin in order to live one's way into what one encounters there. It has greatness – that should not be denied, greatness should be acknowledged wherever it is to be found in the world – but it has greatness in such a way that when Solowjow, for example, speaks of what should happen through Russian culture should come, it will come as if from the heights of the mist, as a kind of nourishment, as something that should be sprinkled down by grace at a certain time into the deeds of the Russian people. He is waiting for a miracle. When God Himself works from the heights of the beyond into people, then people will move forward.

The Russian sees the folk spirit above the individual souls; he does not see it working in the three characterized soul powers, let alone really being able to grasp that intimate experience of the spirit in the individual soul itself, which is precisely the characteristic of the Central European folk striving. Therefore, we also find in the great philosopher the peculiarity that the folk soul does not grasp with its powers either the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, the emotional soul, or the consciousness soul. We find in Solovyov the peculiarity that these individual soul powers are at work in him. We see how they string together one idea and one sensation after another according to rules that we in Central Europe would never be able to perceive as logic or inner necessity. We see, as it were, the spirit of the people, revered by the Russian people, hovering in airy heights. And we see: there the souls can be active with their chaotically whirling soul forces. That this can be made clear precisely in the case of one of the greatest minds of the Russian world is remarkable.

And again and again we must remind ourselves of the momentous words spoken by Lessing in his Testament. Oh, this Testament of Lessing's, which is called 'The Education of the Human Race'! He explains how the whole development of humanity is a great unity. And he expounds an idea which, through spiritual science, will be elevated to the rank of a scientific truth: the idea of the repeated earthly lives of human beings. There are very clever people today who say: Well, Lessing created great things, but then he grew old. One need not attach so much importance to the fact that he came up with the idea that the soul always carries over again into a later epoch that which can be made fruitful in a later epoch by an earlier one. But Lessing truly did not grow old and decrepit, nor did he become weak-minded, as very clever people say, even if they do not say it in relation to this 'Education of the Human Race'. Rather, it was precisely at this point that Lessing grasped in the deepest sense what the human soul experiences when it can experience the rule of the world spirit within itself as the most characteristic of its deepest experiences. From this consciousness Lessing spoke the weighty word as in a testament: “I feel as a human soul through its own content, through its own essence; I too have surged from time to time, from eternity to eternity.” Through what I am, I am immortal. And now he concludes: “Is not all of eternity mine?”

There is a conception of the spirit, a cultural conception, which is the direct consequence of this ever-rejuvenating power of the German national soul.

Let us compare this with the belief of the great Russian philosopher, Solowjow, that what man can achieve can only be achieved by a miracle giving the Russian people their mission themselves. If we compare these two beliefs, we have every reason to understand why what is Russian in nature cannot understand what is Western European, what is Central European, and especially what is German in nature. And therein lies the entire arrogance, the entire arrogance of the Russian intellectuals, these Russian intellectuals who have been talking for a long time about how what the West has achieved in terms of culture is actually rotten, ripe for destruction, and that it must be replaced by something that could emerge from the forces of the Russian character into world culture. This was not given much consideration in times that were not as war-torn as our present fateful times, but it has always been the basic tenor of Russian intellectual life that Western culture is rotten.

We have seen the most diverse minds, Khomyakov, Katkov, Aksakov and so on, appear in Russian intellectual life in the nineteenth century. They all repeatedly say: Western European intellectualism must perish. One of these minds even went so far as to say: In this Western European culture, everything has been led by the impulses of art to that human-selfish, to that egoistic individualism, which leads people apart and founds everything that is to be established on violence, on servitude and hatred.

According to important Russian minds of the nineteenth century, these are the characteristics of Western European culture: “violence, servitude and hatred”. While, according to the same minds, Russian culture is said to be based on “freedom, concord and love”.

Now, Solowjow was an important mind, an important spirit. And precisely because he was so great, the feeling that he had to develop from his intimate connection with the Russian essence was that he says: the national soul still hovers above us. We have not yet connected with it in our individual souls. God must perform a miracle, must radiate down to us that which is to be our mission.

But he was convinced that it is up to the Russian people to redeem the world, because Western European culture has reached its death throes, because it has become decrepit. So he, Soloviev, says further: We do not want to destroy this Western European culture, but we want to heal it.

What has just been said about Russian culture should not be seen as a special impulse within the spirituality of the Russian people. For precisely in Russia, what is to be mentioned can be counted among the symptoms that arise from the instincts of nationality. Therefore, in Solowjow, as in his Slavophile predecessors (although he fought against them), we see a connection between what they, out of their arrogance, characterize as the mission of the Russian people; we see how they deduce the whole course of future politics from it. We see them, out of these impulses, demanding that Russia expand ever further and further against the West, that Constantinople become a Russian city, that the Sea of Marmara become a Russian lake, and so on. Everything that we are experiencing today, everything that underlies the attack that the Russian essence is also politically waging against the Central European, the German essence, everything is completely permeated, in terms of feelings and emotions, especially in the best Russians, by what has just been characterized, by the haughty conviction that Russia alone can save European culture, indeed world culture.

It is precisely the contrast between the German and the Russian nature that makes it possible to understand what the driving forces of our present world culture are and what struggles the German nature will be drawn into in the future, which will most certainly come.

Dear attendees, one can refer back to Goethe's “Faust” when one wants to show what is mentioned here as the rejuvenating forces of the German national soul, what has been characterized as such. Don't we see Faust standing there – Goethe wrote this scene in the 1770s , the words have become almost trivial, having been heard so often and probably already declaimed by everyone themselves – we see Faust standing there, wanting to escape from everything he has absorbed from the forces of the past, because he wants to connect directly in his soul with living knowledge, we hear his words:

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,

law and medicine,

and unfortunately also theology

to the full, with great effort.

There I stand, poor fool that I am,

and am no wiser than before!

Goethe wrote this from his own consciousness, from what he himself felt in the seventies of the eighteenth century.

Then came what can truly be called a 'rejuvenation of the German spirit' through German idealism. Goethe himself, like Faust, strove to absorb the sources of life with his thinking, feeling and willing into his soul. Then the great German idealistic philosophy, which had been pushed back precisely by the invasion of the French and also the Russian worldviews, came to Central Europe itself. Then came what must be seen as an achievement: the fact that these struggles again made it possible for the greatness of this German philosophical idealism to be discussed in wider circles.

And so they came, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, who tried to present law and medicine to the German people in a rejuvenated way. And they were not only philosophers, for Schelling wrote a yearbook for medicine; Fichte wrote a treatise on the state. And they all wanted to be theologians. The German intellectual powers that emerged from the depths of the German soul after Goethe wrote these Faust words were tremendous.

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and unfortunately also theology
to the full, with great endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool that I am,
and am as wise as before!

But let us now assume that Goethe did not write these words of Faust in 1772, but only in 1840, after a new philosophy, a new jurisprudence, a new theology had passed through the German soul. Do you think that Goethe, if he had written the beginning of Faust in 1840, only after emerging from the Faust mood, would have written the words as follows:

Now, thank God,
I have studied with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel;
so there I am, I wise man,
and no longer need to be as stupid as before?

Even in the 1790s, despite all this greatness that had passed through German culture, Goethe would certainly have said:

I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and unfortunately theology as well
with great zeal and effort.
There I stand, poor fool that I am,
and am no wiser than before!

And again, just as before, Faust would have longed for the sources of life and sought his refuge in the living spirit that was to appear to him. The German does not crave knowledge that has grown old; he always craves that knowledge that has flowed from the depths of the soul and emerged into the visible world. He craves the rejuvenating power of the German spirit itself, as it lives in the interrelationship between the German national soul and the German soul of the individual.

That is what one must feel, ladies and gentlemen, if one wants to visualize the fundamental character of the German spirit. And one may say: it has actually been felt, felt even by those who now dare to say the most defamatory, hateful and poisonous things about the peculiarity of the German spirit in the most diverse languages.

Let us look, for example, to the West. It is very strange: if we go to the far West, we find an excellent spirit of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, as is natural for an English-writing writer, names the English as the first people in the world. Yet in numerous passages of his writings, he shows us that he values the Germans more than the English. And today, we can reflect on some of what this English-writing writer said, because it would be unpleasant for us to give a characteristic of our own nature in our own words. Emerson, who had a sense of the rejuvenating power of the German national soul, said the following about Goethe:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public:

— spoken in English in the nineteenth century, mind you —

that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.

Now, I would like to say: What more could you want? In English, you hear that Goethe is the representative of Germanness, that he expresses something that he has in common with the whole nation: “that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.”

In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of their conviction. In France, people are delighted when they see brilliant ideas, regardless of where they lead. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts reach. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind possesses neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed for the practical, nor, finally, the American adventurousness. What it does have, however, is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself on them. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it advocate? What is the man's opinion? Where does he get his ideas?

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

Dear attendees, the entire nature of this presentation shows what I have tried to characterize for you today from the perspective of spiritual science. Emerson senses something of this intimate connection between the self of the individual German and that which passes through the world as the Spirit of Truth, as an ideal that indeed hovers over German development. Emerson also sensed this, as he says in the following words:

For this reason, the distinctive terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and the French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks, not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something in his eye that is even better. [...] He has that fearsome independence that springs from contact with the truth.

From many of the hateful words we hear today, my dear audience, if you are sensitive to such tones, you can discern what Emerson calls “the fearsome independence that springs from the truth”. That independence that is so unbearable to those who cannot muster sympathy for such things. One truly does not need to be chauvinistic to express these things. They arise not only objectively for the observer who stands in the midst of the spiritual essence, they also arise for those who can rise above the peculiarities of their nation.

But one also has such feelings in other places, and in order to illustrate to some extent what I have discussed from spiritual scientific research, I would also like to add the following: Perhaps you know that one of those who spoke the most brutal, hateful, venomous words against the German 'barbarians' was the Belgian-French poet Maeterlinck, Maeterlinck, who himself found so much recognition within the German character. I would like to draw attention to a peculiar compatriot of Maeterlinck. And I would like to tell you a little about this compatriot in a very brief way. So, he is a fellow countryman of Maeterlinck, and a Franco-Belgian poet. When he talks about the influence that an archetypally German spirit, an archetypally German soul, has had on him, when he talks about the influence that Novalis has had on him, this Franco-Belgian poet says some very strange and significant things. It was some time ago, but it is still characteristic to hear a Belgian who writes in French talk about what the soul of Novalis has become for him. This Belgian says: “Isn't Novalis, out of his German uniqueness, a spirit who created something that cannot even be expressed, that is not limited to the earthly at all!”

And so this Belgian writer comes up with something special to describe the purely spiritual influence and the deep impression that Novalis makes on him. He thinks of saying: When you read Schiller or Shakespeare, you find everything that is poetically depicted in Schiller and Shakespeare, but it is only of interest to what is experienced by people on earth. But if one wants to characterize what the soul of Novalis wrote, one would have to assume that spirits from the spiritual heights, spirits from other planets would be interested in it. What Schiller and Shakespeare said is only of interest to people on earth; what Novalis wrote must also interest angels, it must also interest beings that have never heard of the earth. So significant, so deeply connected is what Novalis wrote with the spiritual forces of the German national soul. He characterizes the nature of the influence that the original German, Novalis, has had on him very peculiarly, and he says:

But if he needed other proof, it would lead him among those whose works almost stir silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [by one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the boundaries of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably [only] begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are [only] in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone, there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas [that resemble and are] as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a [strange] reason; but [the people I am talking about have come out of the small village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community [count].

This French-writing Belgian feels impressed by Novalis. He feels the magic breath of the German spirit as it flows from Novalis to him. If one were to believe what Maeterlinck, his fellow countryman, said about German “barbarism” after the outbreak of the war, one would not believe that this Belgian would have said: Oh, these useless screamers, who only resort to phrases, they should remain silent when it comes to matters of the mind!

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to discern its weak childish voice amidst the useless clamor that surrounds it.

Yes well, my dear attendees, the French-writing Belgian whom I have quoted here has already spoken, but I have somewhat mystified you. It is the same person who said what I read about Novalis; it is Maeterlinck himself. He only spoke in this way in the healthy days of his soul. One can only believe when reading that it was said by a completely different personality. This is what has become of those who once felt something of the magic breath of the German soul. Maeterlinck himself wrote about Novalis in this way.

From this we can see what will be necessary to defend the German soul against the misjudgment of its essence, with the weapons that we ourselves must take from it as its members. And this defense will truly become more and more necessary. What good does it do that the German soul, having also become part of external culture, has already been understood! That which separates it from those who have become its enemies will speak ever louder if it is not defended by the German essence itself. And what we hear today, one will have to be convinced, as [what we have heard] is in some respects only a beginning, especially with regard to the deeper currents of human life.

I would like to give another example. Shortly before the outbreak of this war, an Englishwoman wrote a book about Germany. Yes, you see, an Englishwoman who differs from many of her compatriots in that she really got to know the German character. Because she was in Germany for eight years. She got to know universities, clinics, hospitals, educational institutions, all kinds of places. But she also got to know the German character, which, as an emanation of the German soul, must after all be present in every soul, even if it masks and hides itself in ordinary life. The book was written shortly before the war. As I said, not in Berlin, not in Cologne or Leipzig, but in England and in English, the following was said about Germany:

We read a great deal [...] about the new Germany and its new spirit. But there is no new Germany and no new spirit. What exists is the mature work of generations, which has always been. Blinded by the sudden splendor of Germany's prosperity, we are inclined to forget that, except for prosperity, it has rarely occupied a place other than one of the very top among nations. In religion and philosophy, Germany has shone at a time when everything around it was dark; in literature, it has made an epoch-making impact; in music, it has always dominated. [...]

German literature, German religion, German philosophy are books with seven seals for us. What we do know is how many dreadnaughts Germany has and how much its trade has increased. What is really important is not the dreadnaught, but the brain of its builder, the courage and talent of its commander. What is really important is not the increase in sales, but the human qualities that prompted it.

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence, and it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany is already at its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago.

At every border and across the water, the opponents sit, commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, so that they can pounce on her and overwhelm her. Germany knows this very well.

It would be good if those who are now reflecting on the cause of the war were also listened to, if those who say what the mood within Germany should be towards those who lurked in the period leading up to this war were also listened to.

And if we ask, my dear attendees: How do you understand German culture when you would like to destroy this German culture with more or less pride or from other points of view? A few more characteristics on this point at the end. There is, for example, a true Russian intellectual of the present day. If one picks up his latest book, one can get the impression, from the last words he says about Goethe, that he counts Goethe among the greatest in the development of humanity. We know how Goethe is connected with what must be called the rejuvenating forces of the German national soul. We know that his Faust, if not in an artistic sense, then at least in terms of the power of its characterization of humanity, rises above all other works of world literature. We know how nonsensical it would be to characterize Goethe without first seeing the great spirit of modern times that reigns in Goethe and from which his Faust could emerge. Mereschkowski, the Russian intellectual who certainly knows Faust and German culture as well as he can know it, judges Goethe from what I have just called the characteristic arrogance of the Russian intellectual. He judges the same Goethe about whom Emerson speaks as I read earlier, daring to say the following words:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed by an evil spell and shrink to the size of a dwarf; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German bourgeois and – may the shadow of the Olympian have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a decent son of the decent Frankfurt shopkeeper.

With certain people, it does not matter that such words may be correct, if one is a pedant, but it does matter whether the person who finds it appropriate to speak such words about Goethe understands the greatness of Goethe at all. Sometimes it does not matter what one says, but whether one is at all capable of saying something specific about a particular object or a particular person.

I said: One must seek the Russian national spirit as if floating above the Russian individual soul. But this means that this individual Russian soul, let us say, can easily live as if “down there” without being touched by its national spirit, without also having that confidence and security that arises from the way of dealing with the national spirit, as we were able to characterize it with the German national soul. Therefore, permeated by poetic values, but nevertheless like a worldview, what Mereschkowski calls the “barfoot worldview” as a newest kind of Russian worldview could arise. Now, we know how this barefoot worldview basically arises from the mood that must come when one feels so completely grounded and cannot find the connection with the folk soul, to see within the spirit, so to speak, to that which man is outside of the spiritual. Materialism has not yet taken this completely seriously, but it is characteristic that this Russian individual spirit has taken it seriously in his world view. And so he denies everything spiritual and comes to what an important Russian poet addresses as a characteristic of man. I would truly not mention this if it only occurred here and there. But it is something that the spirit of the East comes to, which characterizes the impulses that live there.

Yes, what is he to you, this human being? Do you understand? He takes you by the collar and crushes you under the nail like a flea! Then you may feel sorry for him! ... Yes! Then you may reveal all your foolishness to him. He will put you on seven different forms of torture for your pity. He will wrap your intestines around his hand and pull all the veins out of your body, one inch per hour. ... Oh you... Pity! Pray to God that you will be beaten without any mercy, and that's it! ... Pity! ... Ugh!

And Maxim Gorky says that these words are spoken entirely from his soul, because this is how he perceives what a person can find as his value when he looks at himself for what he actually is.

One must put such things together with the many things that have come from the East, the arrogance and the arrogance of Russian intellectualism in the course of the last few years, the outgrowth of which is the mood that speaks today of blood and death.

Among the Russian intellectuals I mentioned earlier, we must also mention Yushakov, who has written books that have not found a large audience but which nevertheless show what has been in the minds of many intellectuals in Russia. Yushakov has the following ideas about the course of world culture. I would like to briefly present these ideas to you. He says: This West, everything that this West of Europe has achieved in culture, is over. If you look over to the East, you find that there is actually still something in it of rejuvenation, of germs from which something can develop. But the West cannot develop this. This West has always shown [...] a gap in the text].

[In contrast, at the end of the nineteenth century, Yushakov writes about the Russian-English question in Asia: As far as Russia's mission in Asia is concerned, what the English are doing there is rotten through and through. What Russia is doing there is infinitely more spiritual.

The English – Yushakov says – have behaved towards Asia as if they believed that the Asian peoples existed only to “clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight each other with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English baubles”.

Russia alone, Yushakov believes, is capable of feeling an affinity with this Asia, which is now lying prostrate, groaning under the rape of Europe, because it cannot yet grasp the inner human being, which has been made sick and aged by the ego, like the European West.

It is an interesting book, published in 1885, about the relations between England and Russia. It highlights the superiority and arrogance of Russian over Englishness. In 1885, Yushakov has the following idea:

This West, it is over for him. If you look to the East, there is still something that can be developed, the West, especially England, have caused the darkening of India, Persia.

What have the English done in Asia? They have arrogated to themselves everything that was once established in Asia by the power of Ahriman. They have crept in where Ormuzd was at work. They have sat down everywhere where there was light to enjoy the fruits of that light. But what have the Russians done? The Russians have gone everywhere where Asia has been impoverished, where Asia was threatened and impoverished, where people had come down, where people were oppressed and oppressed, where people were plunged into poverty and darkness. Russia has taken care of these people. That is why Russia has its mission in Asia. Therefore, the world struggle between Russia and England must break out in Asia. Russia must be reinstated in the rights of Ormuzd against Ahriman, after it has behaved in this way, while the English have only interfered in what has been established in Asia in terms of fertility, greatness and beauty, and have exploited it.

This is how this Russian speaks about England. And he says: England exploits millions of Hindus. Its greatness and power depend on the people there. I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland. I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this sad state of affairs.

Could one not actually wish that the Russians of today, who admire the English, would take a little time to study this book by Yushakov, which was only published in 1885 and deals with relations between Russia and England? It could be interesting at all sometimes if people would get to know something of the driving forces that have worked and will continue to work on the forces that have led to what is now around us, that reaches our souls.

I believe, my dear audience, that what I have said, based on the spiritual-scientific foundations of the nature of the German being, can be substantiated, even if it is illustrated by this or that. And I could cite similar evidence to support what I have said for a long, long time. One could cite such things for so long that no one in the room would be listening.

All of this, however, would illuminate the one truth that is so important now, when we first have to forge the weapons to defend what is also being attacked spiritually and what will be increasingly surrounded, all of this would lead us to the one great truth with which one must come to terms, the truth that the German, by virtue of his immediate national character, could see the direct relationship, the experienced relationship of the individual soul with the national spirit.

And when we see how this German idealism always worked in the whole mood of the German people and its great representatives, especially in the time that we can call the great epoch of the German spirit, how there are seeds, and when we see what is all that is contained in these germs, then we may say to ourselves: We can also trust in the inner strength of the German character, just as we trust in the germs that must unfold into blossoms and fruits in nature; we may have confidence in the German spiritual life. And we know that in many respects it still contains the germs, and that it contains the power of perpetual rejuvenation, that this power is its own. And we know from this what those who, at great sacrifice in the east and in the west, have to defend that which is enclosed as in a large fortress in Central Europe.

But there is also a way to direct the soul's eye to the inner forces of the spiritual world. Then one does not look at this German people as it may be looked at today by the enemies of the German spirit, but rather in such a way that one says to oneself: the German spirit has not yet been fully realized. It has powers within it that are only germinal powers, that must first fully develop in the future. Therefore, from such considerations, however imperfectly they may be presented, as they could only be presented in a lecture in such a short time, nevertheless that which can be summarized in certain feelings emerges, feelings that give the German soul confidence and courage and hope, precisely from the depths of this being.

On the one hand, we are completely convinced today that we have no need to give courage and confidence to those who have to suffer and bleed for the great events of the time based on certain, genuine knowledge and insight – the whole course of events within the realm of the German being, the Central European being, shows that this is not necessary. European being, shows how the Germans went to war, how they knew how to wage this war. No, not to talk about it, but to talk about what reigns and works in the innermost being of the German soul, so that it gives us [and those in the field] certainty about the future and fills us with hope. It is to point this out that today's reflections were made. And that is why I would like to summarize, because the feelings are the most important thing, the feelings that underlie the individual words of this evening. I would like to summarize some of the feelings that, as I believe, can arise for German feeling and sentiment precisely from the contemplation of the German essence and its connection with the German national spirit:

The German spirit has not yet been fulfilled,
What it should bring to the world.
It lives hopefully in future concerns,
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerful
Hidden things that must still mature.
How can a wish for his end, without understanding,

I have now brought together many and various matters which may help us to a perception of the structure of the Universe in its relation to Man. We have seen—and this must be emphasised again and again—that the Universe cannot be grasped without Man. That means that it is not possible to understand the Universe in itself, without keeping in mind Man and the relation of the Universe to him. If one wishes to form in a very simple way an idea of Man's connection with the Universe, one need only think of a theme in elementary astronomy—the so-called ‘obliquity of the ecliptic’—that is, the oblique position of the Earth's axis in relation to the line, the curve, which passes through the Zodiac. This obliquity of the ecliptic may be understood and even interpreted as you will; with such interpretations we are not for the moment concerned as to whether they accord with reality or not; we are concerned rather to bring a certain fact to your notice. If the Earth's axis—the axis on which the Earth turns daily—were perpendicular to the plane through the Zodiacal ecliptic, then day and night would be equal throughout the year over the whole Earth. If the Earth's axis lay in the ecliptic, then over the whole Earth one half of the year would be day and one half night. Both extremes do in a certain respect actually occur at the equator and at the poles. But in between lie regions where the length of day varies in the course of the year. We need only reflect a little on this matter to arrive at the tremendous significance for the whole evolution of earthly civilisation, of the position of the Earth's axis in cosmic space. Just reflect, we could all of us throughout the Earth be only Eskimos if the axis lay in the ecliptic; were it vertical to the ecliptic, the whole Earth would be filled with the kind of civilisation that prevails at the equator.

Thus as regards the position of the Earth's axis, no matter how it may be interpreted—of course an understanding of the truth depends upon what interpretation we give it, but any interpretation will serve to make one perceive the connection between Man, his culture and civilisation, and the structure of the Universe; and the fact behind the interpretation, whatever the latter may be, compels us to regard Man and the Earth as forming part of the Universe, and not, in respect of man's physical being, as though he could be considered independently. This cannot be done. As physical being, Man is not a reality in himself, but only when regarded as one with the whole Earth, just as a hand severed from the human organism cannot be regarded as in any true sense a reality: it dies, it is only thinkable in connection with the organism. A rose, when plucked, dies, and as a reality it is only conceivable in connection with the rose-tree which is rooted in the Earth; so too, to estimate Man in his entirety, in his totality, one cannot regard him as simply enclosed in the boundaries of his skin.

Thus what we experience on Earth must be considered in connection with the Earth's axis. It is important in a view of the Universe based on reality that what is a partial truth should not be interpreted as a whole truth. We come to comprehend in its reality the whole man as a being of soul and spirit by not considering him as a reality in his physical nature. He is a reality as a being of soul and spirit, a complete independent reality, a true individual. What he inhabits between birth and death—the physical and etheric bodies—are not realities in themselves, they are members of the whole Earth, and as we shall presently see, they are even part of another whole.

This brings us to something which must be observed still more closely. I must again and again point out one thing. The ideas we form of man almost always tend, unconsciously, to our regarding him as a solid body. True, we are aware that he is not precisely a hard body, that he is to some extent plastic, but we are very often unaware that he consists of far more than 75% fluid, of which only the residue can be regarded as solid mineral being. Man is really 75% a water being. Now I ask you, therefore, is it possible to describe the human organism, as is usually done, in sharp outlines—saying: ‘Here we have the lobes of the brain, here this organ’, and so forth, and then assume that the solidly circumscribed organs combine in their activity to bring about the activity of the whole organism? There is no sense whatever in that. It is a question of bearing in mind the fact that Man within the limits of his skin, is, as it were, surging water; that what is purely inwardly surging fluidity also has a meaning, and that we should not describe Man as if he were more or less a solid body. In Spiritual Science this has a very deep significance. For precisely when we consider the solid in Man, which is in a manner connected with the external minerals, we find that the solid in the human being has a certain relation to the Earth.

We have observed the various relations of Man to the world around him, we will now establish the relation of his solid substance to the Earth. This connection exists; the watery element in Man has, however, primarily no connection with the Earth but with the planetary Universe outside, and especially with the Moon. Precisely as the Moon, not directly but indirectly, has a relation to the ebb and flow of the tides, to certain configurations of the fluid part of the Earth, so too it has a connection with what takes place in the fluid part of the human organism. I described yesterday that we have on the one side the astronomy that applies to the Sun—and also to the Earth. We ourselves are part of that astronomy, for we are organised into it as organisms containing solid substances. Lunar astronomy however, is different. We are organised into lunar astronomy in so far as it is connected with our fluid constituents. Thus we see that the forces of the Cosmos work into the solid and fluid parts of our physical nature.

This has a still greater significance, which is, that what we call our Ego has primarily a direct influence on our solid man, and that what we call our astral body has an indirect influence on our fluid man—so that what works from the soul and spirit upon our organisation, comes, through our bodily nature, also into connection with all the forces of the Cosmos. These movements of the Cosmos have always been a subject of observation, from the most varied points of view. When we look back to the ancient Persian civilisation we find that even then researches were made into the movements of the Universe. These researches were also made by the Chaldeans and by the Egyptians, and it is not without interest to study the attitude of the Egyptians to movements of the Universe. They had, of course, for what were apparently quite material reasons, to study the connection of the Earth with the outer Cosmos, for their land depended upon the inundations of the Nile which took place precisely when the Sun was in a definite position in the Universe. This position could be determined by that of Sirius; so that the Egyptians had arrived at making observations as to the position of the Sun in relation to what we now call the Fixed Stars. Especially in the Egyptian sacerdotal colonies, in their Mysteries, extensive researches were made into the relation of the Sun to the other stars. As I have already said, the Egyptians knew perfectly well that each year the Sun appeared to have shifted its position in the heavens in regard to the other stars, and they calculated thereby that the stars—whether apparently or really is immaterial just now—as they daily moved round the heavens, had a certain velocity, and that the daily movement of the Sun had also a certain velocity, but not quite so great as that of the stars. The Sun always lagged somewhat behind. The Egyptians knew and recorded the fact that the Sun lagged behind about one day in 72 years, so that when a particular star which rose with the Sun in a definite year rises again 72 years later, the Sun does not rise with it but 24 hours later. A star belonging to the world of fixed stars, a star in the Zodiac, outstrips the Sun by one day, one full day, in every 72 years. Multiply 72 by 360 and we obtain 25,920 years. That is a number which we often meet with. It is the time needed by the Sun in its lagging behind to get back to its starting-point; having thus gone round the whole Zodiac. The Sun is therefore exactly one degree behind in 72 years, for a circle has, as we know, 360 degrees. According to this reckoning, the Egyptians divided the great year—which really comprises 25,920 years—into 360 days; but such a day was 72 years long. And 72 years, what is that? It is the average limit of duration of man's life. Certainly there are individuals who live to be older, others not so old, but in general it constitutes the farther limit for human life. Thus one can say: The whole connection in the Universe is so constructed that it sustains a man's whole life for a solar day, which is 72 years. True, man is emancipated from that. He can be born at any time; but his life here as physical man between birth and death is arranged according to the solar day. Referring to historical records, one generally finds that the ordinary year of the Egyptians was reckoned as 360 days (not 365.25 as it actually is), until later on it was found to accord so little with the course of the stars that the other 5 days had to be inserted. How came it that the Egyptians originally took 360 days for the year? In the cosmic year a degree—that is, a 360th part—is actually a cosmic day of 72 years. Thus in the Egyptian Mysteries it was taught that man is so connected with the Cosmos, that the duration of his life is one day of the cosmic year. He was thus organised into the Cosmos. His relation to the Cosmos was made clear to him through connections which belong to the decadence of the whole evolution of the Egyptian people.

The essential nature of man and his connection with the Cosmos was not then made known to the wide mass of the Egyptians—that is characteristic of the time. It was said that if all men knew the nature of their being, how it is organised into the Cosmos, and that the duration of their own life has its part in the duration of the Sun's revolution, then those who felt themselves organised into the Universe would not allow themselves to be ruled, for each would regard himself as a member of the Universe. Only those were allowed to know this who it was believed were called to be leaders. The rest were not to possess such knowledge of the Cosmos, but a knowledge of the day only. This is connected with the decadence of the Egyptian civilisation. It was certainly necessary in regard to many other things, that immature people should not be initiated into the Mysteries, but this was extended to such things as gave power to the leaders and rulers.

Now, very much of what permeates our human souls today is derived from oriental sources. Traditional Christianity too contains much which has come from oriental sources; and especially into Roman Christianity a strong impulse has descended from Egypt. Just as the Egyptians were kept in ignorance concerning their connection with the Cosmos, so in certain circles of Romanism the view prevails that people must be kept in ignorance of their connection with the Cosmos which comes about through the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence the fierce conflict which arises when, from an inner necessity of our age, we emphasise that the Event of Golgotha is not simply something which must be regarded as outside the rest of cosmic conception but rather as inserted into it, when we show how what took place on Golgotha is really connected with the whole Universe and its constitution. It is regarded as the worst heresy to describe Christ as the Sun-Spirit, as we have done.

It must not be supposed that the point at issue is not well-known; but just as the Egyptian priest knew quite well that the ordinary year has not 360 days but 365.25, so certain people are perfectly well aware that the matter with which the Christ Mystery deals is also connected with the Sun Mysteries. But present-day humanity is to be hindered from receiving this knowledge—the very knowledge that it needs; for as I have already said, the materialistic view of the Universe is much preferred by that side to Spiritual Science. Materialistic science also has its practical consequences, in which again the present time may be compared with ancient Egypt. I call attention to the fact that the Egyptians as such were thus dependent upon the course of the Sun, on the relation of the earthly to the heavenly, as regards their external civilisation. The withholding of the knowledge of the connection of cosmic phenomena and their effect on the cultivation of the land, represented a certain power in the hands of the declining priesthood, for thereby the Egyptian labourers had to submit to direction from the priests, who had the requisite knowledge.

Now if the European and American civilisations were to retain their present character, adhering only to the materialistic, Copernican view of the Universe—with its off-shoot, the Kant-Laplace theory—a materialistic cosmogony must necessarily arise concerning earthly phenomena, biological, physical and chemical. It would be impossible for a cosmogony of this kind to include the moral world order in its structure. It could not embrace the Christ-Event, for it is impossible to be a believer in the materialistic view of the world and at the same time a Christian; that is an inner lie, it is something that cannot be, if one is honest and upright. Hence it was inevitable that the practical consequences should be seen in Europe and American culture, of the split between materialism on the one hand and a moral cosmogony on the other, and along with the moral cosmogony, also the contents of the religious faiths. This result was evidenced in the fact that men who had no external reason for being inwardly dishonest, threw faith overboard, and established a materialistic cosmogony for human life also. Thereby the materialistic cosmogony became a social cosmogony. This would however have the further consequence for our European and American civilisation that man would have a materialistic cosmogony only and would know nothing of the Earth's connection with cosmic powers, in the sense that we have described it. Within a certain caste, however, the knowledge of the connection with the cosmogony would remain, just as the Egyptian priests kept the knowledge of the Platonic year, the great cosmic year and the great cosmic day; and such circles could hope then to rule the people who under materialism degenerate into barbarism.

Of course these things have been said today only from a sense of duty towards truth; but they must be said out of such a duty to truth. It is of importance that a certain number of people should realise how necessary it is to give the Mystery of Golgotha its cosmological significance. This significance must be recognised by a number of people, who must on their part, undertake a certain responsibility that the fact should not remain hidden from earthly humanity—the fact that humanity is connected with the non-earthly Spirit, who lived in Palestine in the Man Jesus, at the beginning of our era. It is necessary that the knowledge of the entrance of Christ from the non-earthly world into the Man Jesus of Nazareth, should not be withheld. To such penetration belongs the overcoming of that dishonesty which is so general today in questions of cosmic conceptions and of faith. For what is done today? We are told on the one hand that the Earth moves in an ellipse round the Sun and has evolved in the sense of the Kant-Laplace theory, and we subscribe to this; and on the other hand we are told that at the beginning of our era such and such events took place in Palestine. These two things are accepted, without being connected; people accept them and think it of no consequence. It is not without consequence however, for it is much less evil when a lie is consciously accepted, than when it takes shape unconsciously, and degrades Man and drags him down. For if we consider a lie as it appears in a man's consciousness, every time he falls asleep it leaves his physical and etheric bodies with his consciousness, and lives on in spaceless, timeless being, in the eternal being, while Man is in dreamless sleep. There is prepared all which can result from the lie in the future; that is, everything is made ready to correct it, if it is in the consciousness. But if it is in the unconscious, it remains with the physical and etheric bodies lying in bed. When Man is not occupying these bodies, it then belongs to the Cosmos, and not to the earthly Cosmos alone, but to the whole Cosmos; there it works for the destruction of the Cosmos; above all, for the destruction of the whole of humanity, for this destruction begins in humanity itself.

Man can escape what threatens humanity in this way, by no other means than by striving after inner truth as regards such supreme questions of existence. Thus there is a kind of appeal to humanity today from out of the impulses of our time to realise that a materialistic astronomy knowing nothing of how at a definite point of time the Event of Golgotha took shape, should no longer exist. Every astronomy which includes the Moon in the structure of the Universe just the same as the Sun and Earth, instead of allowing the two streams to run in with one another, but still as separate streams—every such astronomy is no Christian astronomy but a heathen astronomy. Therefore every theory of evolution which describes the Universe homogeneously must from the Christian stand-point be rejected. If you follow my book, Occult Science, you will see how, in the description of the Saturn and Sun periods, the stream divides into two, which then intermingle and work together. Here we have two streams. In the descriptions usually given, however, the ideas are in accordance with the continuation of the pagan development. And you will find this true down to the very details. You know that Darwinian theorists describing the evolution of the organic form, would say: First there were simple organic forms, then more complicated forms, then more and more complicated forms, and so forth, up to Man. But this is not so. If we take Man as three-membered, his head alone is the development from the lower animal form. What is added to it has arisen later. Thus we cannot say that in our vertebral column we have something which transforms itself into head, we must say: Our head certainly arose from earlier structures which were spine-like; but the present spine has nothing to do with that development, it is a later appendage. What is now our head-organisation has arisen from a differently formed spine.

This I say for those who are interested in the theory of descent. I mention it so that you may see that a straight line leads from cosmic considerations to consideration of what lies in human evolution, and so that you may see the necessity for an enlightened Spiritual Science in all different realms of knowledge and of life. For science must not simply continue to develop, as did the science of the last century, under the influence of the materialistic view of the Universe, which is itself a child of the materialistic comprehension of Christianity. We owe materialism to the materialisation of the Christian view of the Universe. The teaching of the cosmic Christ must be re-established in opposition to the materialised form of Christianity we have today. This is the most important task of our time; and until its importance is realised, man will not be able to see clearly in any domain.

I have wanted to tell you these things, because they will enable you to understand better why ill-willed opponents fight so strenuously against what we are bringing before the world today. I was obliged to connect this whole study with a kind of cosmology, with the consideration of which we will continue in the next lecture.