The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I should like to speak to you today about something that to a certain extent falls out of the series of our present course of lectures. In another respect, however, it forms a supplement to them, recapitulating much that has been said and shedding more light on it.

We know indeed that man has only reached his present condition in the course of a long evolution, that he has developed to his present heights through different planetary stages. We know too that he will lift himself to higher stages of evolution in the future. Now we are also aware that when the human being was still in quite a dull state of consciousness on ancient Saturn, there were beings already in existence who stood as high as man stands today. There were beings too who at that time stood far higher than man stands today. We also know that there are beings today who have already attained a stage of evolution which man will only attain in the future. So we can look up to hierarchies—as they are called in occultism—of beings set over man whose various ranks are ranged one above the other.

The beings who stand next above man are called in esoteric Christian terminology “Angels,” Angeloi. The Angels are therefore beings who in the Moon-evolution, the planetary forerunner of our Earth, had already attained human consciousness and who stand today one stage higher than humanity. In the Jupiter-evolution man will himself have the consciousness which is possessed today by the beings whom we call Angels, Angeloi. This then is the first stage of beings standing above man, and from certain other connections we know of the subsequent stages.

Passing upwards beyond the Angels we have the Archangels, Archangeloi; then the rank of the “Original Forces” whom we also call Archai; and then the “Revelations” or Powers, Exusiai; the so-called Mights or Dynameis; the Dominions or Kyriotetes; the Thrones; the Cherubim, and the Seraphim. Then only, beyond the Seraphim, should we speak of what in the Christian sense, one calls the actual “Godhead.” Genuine occultism, true spiritual science, cannot share the usual trivial notion that man can look up direct to the highest Divinity; we have the whole ladder of Beings whom we call Angels, Archangels, and so on, standing between. In a certain respect it is a sign of indolence to say—as we can often hear today—“Well, why do we need the whole succession of beings? Man can quite well come to a direct relationship to the Godhead.” The student of spiritual science cannot share this indolence, for the beings are absolutely real. And today we will say something of their qualities and their tasks.

We will first try to form an idea of the nature of the Angels. We shall most easily form an idea of their consciousness if we think of the physical consciousness of man and how it includes the four kingdoms of nature. He can perceive mineral beings, plant beings, animal beings and the human kingdom itself. We can therefore describe the human consciousness as one having for its contents these four kingdoms perceptible to the outer senses. Everything that man perceives through the senses, no matter what it is, be-longs to one of these four kingdoms. If we now ask: What is the consciousness of the Angels? we receive as answer: In a certain respect it is a higher consciousness since it does not reach down to the mineral kingdom; the Angel's consciousness does not reach down to where the stones, rocks, minerals are. On the other hand it includes plant, animal and human beings together with its own kingdom of Angels which there plays the same role as the human kingdom does for us. We can say then that the Angels are also aware consciously of four kingdoms, the kingdoms of plant, animal, man and the kingdom of the Angels.

That is the peculiarity of the Angel beings: they have no physical body and therefore no organs of the physical body such as eyes, ears, and so on. Hence they do not perceive the physical world. As their lowest being they have the etheric body and hence have a certain relationship with the plants. Their consciousness can descend as low as the plants and they can perceive them. On the other hand, where there is mineral they perceive a hollow space—just as during the devachanic condition, man, as we described, will also perceive as a hollow the space filled up here on earth by a mineral. So that wherever the physical kingdom is here, the Angels perceive a hollow space. On the other hand, their consciousness projects up to where as yet man's consciousness does not reach.

But we know too that men bear a certain relationship to each other; there are those who lead and those who are led. I wish to allude only to children and grown-up teachers: children must be guided until they are as mature as the teachers. Men are growing in their present development into the Jupiter consciousness, which will be similar to what the Angels possess today. The Angels today are therefore actually the leaders of men, their guides, preparing them, and there exists an intimate connection between what gradually develops in man and the task of these Angel beings. What then is forming in man during the rest of his earth existence? It is something of which we have often spoken. We have said that man has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an ego and that he is now occupied in transforming his astral body so that it gradually becomes spirit-self. He is working on his other members as well, but the essential task of earthly existence consists in the full development of the spirit-self. The Angels have developed it already, they had developed it when Earth-existence began, and thus the Angels in the hierarchies of evolution are the spirits which guide this task of man—the transforming of the astral body into the spirit-self.

Now we ask how they do this.—Let us remember here what happens after a man's death and how he has round him at first what we have called the memory panorama of the just completed life. This lasts for two or three days, it differs somewhat for individual persons. It lasts as a rule for about the length of time that the person could hold out without sleep. Different people vary very much in this: one is accustomed to sleep after every twelve hours and then his eyes close; another on the contrary could keep awake for four to five days. The memory-tableau lasts as long as the person can keep himself from sleeping. Then the etheric body dissolves and only an extract of it remains—the life-fruit of the past life. This is taken with him for the whole of the time that follows, is incorporated into his being and forms the basis for the upbuilding of the physical body in the next incarnation. He is enabled to build up his next body more perfectly, because he can make use of the fruits of his past life. Thus man has this life-essence and forms his next body out of it in the life that follows.

Now we know too that man not only forms this body but that in Devachan he is by no means inactive. It would be a false idea to think that man had only to occupy himself. with himself. The world is not built up on such egotism. In every situation of life the world requires man to share in working on the earth and during his stay in Devachan he shares in work upon the earth's surface. We are aware of the fact that the ground on which we stand today looked quite different a few centuries ago; the earth is continually transformed. At the time when Christ Jesus walked upon earth there were mighty forests here, there were quite other plants and animals. Thus the face of the earth is continuously changed. Just as men labor with physical forces in building cities and so on, so from Devachan they work with those forces which transform the physiognomy of the Earth together with the plant and animal kingdoms. In a new incarnation therefore man meets a ground that presents quite a different picture; he always experiences something new. It is not for nothing that man is born into a new incarnation; he is to experience something new. Man contributes to the transformation of the Earth, but he cannot do it without guidance. He cannot determine the succeeding incarnations, for then he would not need to experience first what is to happen in the future. And the beings who guide man's work of transforming the earth with the forces of Devachan, who create the harmony between the different human individuals and the evolution of the earth as it corresponds to them, these spiritual Beings are the Angels. On the stones, on the solid earthly crust they cannot work, for their consciousness does not extend to the mineral, but it reaches down to the plant kingdom which the earth bears. There they can work, not indeed creatively, but transformingly. Such an Angel being works in fact with every human individual, guiding him in his task of developing the spirit-self in the astral body. In a part of Christian doctrine it speaks of man's Guardian Angel and that is a conception completely corresponding to reality. They are the beings who create the harmony between the human individual and the course of earthly evolution until man will have advanced so far at the end of Earth's evolution that he can release his Angel. He will then himself have the consciousness of an Angel.

Now you will readily understand that the Archangels have a consciousness that no longer reaches down to the plant kingdom but only to the animal kingdom. The plants, so to speak, do not exist for them, the plant kingdom is too subordinate, too insignificant. They still have points of contact with the animal kingdom and can perceive it. They have no etheric body, the astral body is the lowest member of their being. The animal has an astral body and hence the Archangels work in the astral bodies of the animals. In addition they perceive the human kingdom, the kingdom of the Angels and their own kingdom. The Archangel kingdom is that to which they say “I,” as is for man the human “I.” These beings too have an important mission, and since they have a consciousness two stages higher than man, you can understand that the mission must be a very lofty one. The consciousness of the Archangels is so high that they have fully perfected the life-spirit, Budhi, and they can therefore guide and lead in earthly evolution from an insight corresponding to the life-spirit. This is shown in the fact that the Archangels are leaders of whole peoples; what one calls the folk spirit, the common spirit of the people or folk, is in reality one of the Archangels. You will now find it comprehensible that those peoples who were still conscious of such a spiritual connection, did not look up direct to the highest Being, but that they turned their gaze to the Beings nearest to them, who directed and led them.

Let us take the old Hebrew people. They revered as the highest God, Yahve or Jehovah. But for them Yahve belonged to the rank of the Revelations. He was a sublime Being whom they acknowledged as their God. They said, however: He who directs and leads us as the actual arch-messenger of Jehovah is “Michael,” one of the Archangels—his name means “the one who stands before God.” In ancient Hebrew he was also called the “Countenance of God,” because when a member of the Old Covenant looked up to God he felt that Michael stood before Him and was the expression of His being as the human countenance is the expression of man's being. He was therefore called literally the Countenance of God.

When one speaks in occultism of the folk spirit one does not speak of an incomprehensible being difficult to grasp. When in our materialistic age people speak of the folk spirit they really mean nothing, they mean by it an abstract external combination of the characteristics of a folk. In reality there is a spiritual representative, an Archangel, who leads and directs the people as a whole. This Being reaches down into the animal world, and this was felt by the peoples, they felt it out of their instinct. The one folk dwelt here, the other there, and according to the different regions they occupied they had to make use of such and such animals. They felt instinctively that this was allotted to them by their folk-spirit. This spirit worked as far as the animal world, so that the ancient Egyptians, who experienced this very clearly, said: When we consider plant development, then the Angel is working into it; when we consider the animals, these are apportioned to us by the guiding spirit of the whole people. They therefore saw the power which supplied the animals to them as a sacred power and the way in which they treated the animals was an expression of this consciousness. They did not speak of Archangels but they had the same feeling about it, and it was this feeling that the Egyptians united with the animal worship. Moreover, where there was a consciousness of this spiritual connection, these spirits were not represented by pictures of earthly animals, though with animal images, as for instance the Sphinx, winged beasts, and so forth, which you find in the various images of the peoples. It was as if the guiding Archangels shone in, and you can see portrayed in the different animal groups the esoteric expression of the ruling Archangels. Many of the Egyptian idols were based on the conception that the Archangel, the guiding spirit of the people, reached down as far as the animals. This is the special task of the Archangels; there is, however, still another task.

The names “Uriel,” “Gabriel,” “Michael,” are still known to the modern consciousness, but as a legend from the far past, and you need only look in the Book of Enoch to find the names of yet other Archangels. So, for instance, there is “Phanuel,” an important Archangel who has not only the task of guiding some people or nation, but another task too. We are aware that initiation consists of the fact that man strives upwards to an ever higher consciousness, and that even now in the course of earthly evolution he is ascending to an ever higher consciousness. Now the people in the Mystery centres knew well that here too guiding, leading forces were necessary. They therefore brought those who were to be initiated under the protection of the Archangel Phanuel. He was the protector who was called upon by the candidate for initiation.

Other spiritual beings of this rank have yet other tasks. So, for example, the whole course of world evolution is based upon a sum of forces which are guided by certain beings. Thus there is an Archangel, earlier called “Surakiel,” whose task it is to eradicate particularly wide-spread vices of a city or a whole district and to transform them into virtues. To one who knows this connection it is plain that what is called in general by the abstract word “Providence” is really guided. If one has undertaken the study of the spiritual worlds one should not be satisfied with general abstractions, but go into these details. For the highest beings of whom man can form any idea guide the course of world-evolution through such intermediate beings as we have just considered. These can be denoted as the various tasks of the Archangels.

Now we come to the rank of the “Original Forces.” They are still more lofty beings whose consciousness no longer descends to the animals. When the initiate lifts himself to intercourse with the Original Forces, he does not impart to them out of his human consciousness information about the animal forms on the earth. For their consciousness reaches down only to man; then they know the kingdom of the Angels, the kingdom of the Archangels and their own kingdom. To themselves they say “I,” and human beings are the lowest hierarchy which they perceive. For the Original Forces man is the lowest kingdom, just as the stone, the mineral, is the lowest for man. We see from this that they guide the progress of humanity from a very lofty height. People here and there have an inkling that something exists as a kind of “Spirit of the Age,” that differs according to the different epochs. We have often spoken here of the Spirit of the Epochs. We have said, for example, that in the first culture-epoch of the Post-Atlantean Age, that of the ancient Indian people, the Spirit of the Epoch consisted in the fact that men looked back to Atlantean times when they dimly perceived higher kingdoms around them. So the Yoga system arose, by means of which they sought to rise into the higher worlds. The physical plane of external reality had little value for them; it was maya, illusion. It will seem strange to you, but it is actually true, that if the ancient Indian civilization, with its lack of interest in the physical plane, had continued, there would never have been railways, telephones, and such things as exist in the physical world today. For it would not have seemed at all important to occupy oneself seriously with physical laws in order to people the world with all that today represents the achievements of civilization.

Then came the Spirit of the Persian epoch, and man learnt through him to know matter as an opposing element which he must work upon. He united himself with the good Spirit, Ormuzd, against the Spirit of matter, Ahriman. But the Persian had an interest in the physical plane. Then comes the Spirit of that epoch which found expression, on the one hand, in the civilizations of Babylon, Assyria, Chaldea, and on the other hand of Egypt. Human science was founded; it was sought through geometry to make the earth suited to man. One sought to know the meaning of the motion of the stars in astrology, astronomy, and one arranged earthly affairs in conformity with this motion. Eygptian social life was especially directed according to the passage of the stars. What was read there as the secrets of the stars was the basis of human conduct. The ancient Indian sought the way to the Gods by turning his attention completely away from outer reality; the Egyptian studied the laws which rule in order to find how the will and spirit of the Gods were brought to expression in the laws of external nature. That was again a different epoch. So you have for each epoch a definite spirit, and the evolution of the Earth comes about through one Spirit of the Epochs being relieved by another—that is the case in detail. People rise to the conception of Ages, but they do not know that behind this whole progress of the Ages, Spirits of the Epochs stand, nor do they know that to bring to expression the Spirit of their epoch they are only the instruments here on earth of Spirits standing behind them. Just think of Giordano Bruno. If Giordano Bruno had been born in the 8th century, he would not have become what he became in the period ruled by the Epochal Spirit whose expression he then became. He was the instrument of the Time-Spirit, and the same applies to other outstanding human beings. And conversely, the Epochal Spirit would not have been able to find such an expression as it found in Giordano Bruno, if Giordano Bruno had been born in the 8th century. By such things we see how men are the instruments of the Epochal Spirits who are the guiding beings of the great epochs and also of the Spirits of the “meanings and conceptions” of the smaller epochs. They are the Original Forces, they extend their consciousness down to man. They have no directing influence over what brings man together with other nature-kingdoms, for their consciousness does not reach the animal kingdom. How men conduct their lives according to the spirit of the time, how they found states, found sciences, cultivate their fields—everything of human origin, the progress of civilization from beginning to end stands under the guidance of the Original Forces. They lead man in so far as he has to do with others.

I have drawn your attention at various times to the fact that certain beings from each spiritual hierarchy stay be-hind, they have not risen as high as the others, but have stood still, so to speak, in world-evolution. You will be able to realize that there are beings who should have risen during the Moon-evolution to the rank of the Revelations or Powers, but who have only reached the Original Forces. They are different from those who have ascended to that stage in the normal course of evolution. Hence there are on earth Original Forces who are really immature Powers. We are now learning to know from another aspect many things of which we have heard already. Concealed behind the Original Forces, therefore, are some who could actually be Powers, and among the Original Forces who have really no right to be there is that being whom one is right in calling “Satan”—Satan, the “Unlawful Prince of this World.” This is a truth, however, only to those who look at things from the aspect of spiritual science. The Lawful Prince is one of the “Powers,” Yahve or Jehovah; the unlawful belongs to the ranks of the Original Forces. He expresses himself by continually bringing confusion into man's relation to the Time-Spirit, by bringing men to contradict the Epochal Spirit. That is the true nature of the Spirit who is also called the “Spirit of Darkness,” or the Unlawful Prince of our Earth, he who claims to be the actual guide and leader of men. You will now grasp what a deep meaning lies in the fact that the Christ appeared in order through His mission to throw a light upon the whole succeeding evolution, and that He must wage war against this Unlawful Prince of this World. The very deepest wisdom lies behind what is expressed in this remarkable passage in the Gospel.

It stands to reason that a certain view is held not among materialists alone but also by people who are haunted by old conceptions which they misunderstand—for Satan has for a long time been spoken of somewhat scornfully! And even people who are ready to acknowledge the other spiritual beings are not willing to concede reality to Satan; they deny him. This dates back to the Middle Ages when men had very curious views on Satan. They admitted that he was actually a backward Spirit of the rank of the Powers. But where are the Spirits of the Powers? They express themselves in what is revealed in the world as spirit. Satan was called a Spirit of Darkness; people thought: Darkness is a negation of light, light is real, but darkness is not real—and they made that apply spiritually. They ascribed reality to the Spirits who manifest in light, but to Satan who manifests in darkness they denied reality. That is just about as clever as if someone who has listened to a physicist were to say: Cold is only a lack of warmth, it is not real in itself; if we make the warmth less and less, it gets colder and colder, however much warmth we take away; cold is not a reality—so do not let us think of winter! But in spite of cold's being only a negation of warmth, it can nevertheless very well be felt when there is no heating—so is Satan very well a reality even if he is only the negation of light.

We have now raised ourselves to very lofty Spirits, and we come next to the hierarchy who are called “Revelations,” Exusiai. To them, for instance, belongs the being whom we have come to know in other connections as Yahve or Jehovah, together with his companions, the Elohim. The Spirits of Light belong to the order of the Powers or Revelations. We know that Yahve had six companions who separated off the sun. Yahve himself went with the moon which reflected the sun's light to the earth, but he is a companion of the other Elohim. If you now try to determine the consciousness of the Revelations on the analogy of what has gone before, you will realize that they do not concern themselves about the individual. Individual human beings are guided by the Angels, Archangels, Original Forces, up to those we have called Epochal Spirits. The whole structure in which man is embedded, the guidance of the planet and what occurs on it is the affair of the Revelations or Powers. For the whole present evolution of humanity could not have gone on without, on the one hand, the accelerating sun forces, and, on the other, the hindering moon forces. The Revelations or Powers have nothing to do with separate men but with groups of men. They guide the external powers and beings who give the planet its configuration and whom man needs in order that he may go through his evolution.

And so finally we look up to a lofty Being Who surpasses all that we have just described, the Christ Being Himself. Christ brings something to earth which is not concerned with the individual man, but with the guidance of all mankind. And to the Christ man must find his way himself; for it is only the Original Forces who constrain man to find them; to the Christ he must come of his own free will.

Thus we have formed some conception of the lowest ranks of the hierarchies set above man, the Angels, Archangels, and a slight idea too of the Original Forces and Powers. Only with a faint divining could we look up to a still higher Being, the Christ. On another opportunity we can consider what is to be said about the Thrones and so on. Today I wished to relate something of the spiritual structure into which man is interwoven, in so far as Angels, Archangels, Original Forces, and Powers participate in it.

Today I should like to start by giving a kind of sketch of the human soul, as this human soul stands in relation to the world and to itself. I should like to give this sketch in such a way that it can be said: we are looking at the profile of man as a soul being. So that we understand ourselves just as if we were to look at the physical man—not the soul-being (see Head in diagram 1)—not perhaps seeing him full-face but, let us say, from the right in profile. Let us observe him thus. If we try to sketch in outline anything like this we must naturally always keep in mind that we have to do with imaginative knowledge, that the reality behind the matter therefore is being given in picture form. The picture refers to the matter and is given, too, in such a way that it correctly indicates the matter. Naturally, however, we may not have the same idea of a drawing, a sketch, meant to represent something of a soul and spirit nature as we do of anything that in a naturalistic way is copied from an external perceptible reality. One must be conscious all the time of what I am now saying. I shall therefore omit all that concerns the physical and lower etheric organism of man and try to sketch only what is soul—soul-and-spirit (see diagram 2). As you know from the various descriptions that have been given, the soul-and-spirit stands in a more direct connection with the world of soul-and-spirit than physical man stands in connection with his physical environment. Towards his physical perceptible environment physical man is rather an isolated being; one might even say that physical man of the senses is really shut up within his actual skin.

It is not so where what can be called the men of soul-and-spirit is concerned. There we have to think of a continual crossing of the currents pulsating in the inner depths of man's soul-and-spirit—of all the movements and currents existing in the general, universal world of soul-and-spirit.

If I want first of all to describe from the one side the kind of relation the human soul-and-spirit has to what is of soul-and-spirit in the cosmic environment, I should have perhaps to do it in this way. I should, first of all, have to paint what enters in a soul-spiritual way from the universal, from the infinity of space, like this. Naturally I should have to paint the whole space in a way... but that is not really necessary. I shall only paint man's immediate environment. Thus it is now what we may understand as the surrounding world. (see blue in diagram 2).

Now imagine in this picture form of the soul-spiritual that into which man is placed. Man indeed is not yet there, but indicated in this blue is only the edge of the environment. Imagine this like a surging blue sea filling space. (When I say ‘blue’ sea this must naturally be taken as I have often described it in books available to you, namely, colours are to be grasped in the description of the aura, of the soul-spiritual.) Borne like a wave, swimming, I might say, or hovering, so nothing else is borne up which is of soul-and-spirit. This is what I should now have to represent perhaps in the following way.

Thus, if we pass from the cosmic environment to man, we may be able to think of ourselves and what belongs to the human spirit-and-soul as perhaps hovering in this red.

There we should have first of all part of the soul-spiritual; and if we would make the sketch in accordance with reality it is only the upper part we should have to give in a kind of violet, in lilac graduating into red. This could only be given correctly by toning down the red into violet.

Thus, you see, with this I have given you first what might be called the one pole of man's spirit-and-soul nature. We get the other pole when we can perhaps incorporate in the following way what, adjoining the universal soul-spiritual here, is swimming and hovering towards the human physical face: yellow, green, orange; green running into the blue.

Here you get from the right side what I might call the side view of the normal aura of man. I say expressly a normal aura seen from the right side. What is presented to the view in this figure shows how man is placed into his environment of soul-and-spirit. But t also describes where man, the soul-and-spirit in man, stands in relation to itself. When everything represented by this figure is studied, it can clearly be seen how man is a being bounded an two sides. These two sides where man has his limits are always observed in life; but they are not indicated correctly nor considered in the right way—at least they are not understood. You know how in external science it is said that when man observes the world, when with his science he wishes to gain knowledge of the world, he comes to definite limits. We have often spoken of these limits, of the famous ignorabimus (“we shall never know”) which holds good with scientists and many philosophers. It is said that man comes indeed to certain limits in his cognition, in his conception, of the external world. I have certainly already quoted to you du Bois-Reymond's famous statement that in his seventieth year he made to the Scientific Congress in Leipzig; Human cognition will never penetrate into the regions haunted by matter—this is roughly what he said at the time. Perhaps the more correct way of speaking about the limits to human knowledge would be the following. In observing the world it is necessary for man to hold fast certain concepts which he penetrates neither with his scientific cognition nor with his ordinary philosophical cognition, we need only consider such concepts as that of the atom. The atom, however naturally has meaning only when we cannot actually speak of it, when we cannot say what it is. For the moment we were to begin describing the atom, it would no—longer be an atom. It is simply something unapproachable. And it is thus already matter, actual substance. Certain concepts have to be maintained that can never be approached. It is the same with knowledge of the external world; inaccessible concepts like matter, force and so on, must be maintained. That they should have to be maintained, depends here simply upon the inner light of man's soul-and-spirit stretching out into the darkness. What is stated to be the limit of knowledge can, I might say, actually be seen clearly in the aura.

Here lies a boundary in front of man. His being, what he himself is, is here represented in the aura by what I nave made run from bright green into blue violet (see diagram 2). But by passing over into blue-violet it leaves off being man and becomes the encircling cosmos. There with his being, which is the inner force of his world outlook, man comes to a boundary; there in a sense he reaches nothingness and he has to hold fast to concepts having no content—concepts such as matter, atom, substance, force. This lies in the human organization, it lies in man's connection with the whole cosmos. Man's connection with the whole cosmos actually stands out in front of him. If we describe this boundary in accordance with the ideas of spiritual science, we can do so by saying (diagram 3): this boundary allows man with his soul to come into contact with the universe. If we indicate the direction of the universe in one loop of a lemniscate we can with the other loop show what belongs to man, only what proceeds from man goes out into the universe, into the infinite.

Therefore we must make the line of the loop, the lemniscate, open on one side, closed on the other, and draw it like this—here the line of the loop is closed and here it goes out into infinity. It is the same line that I drew there, only here the arm goes out at this end into infinity (see diagram 4 of lemniscate open to the outside). What I have here drawn as an open lemniscate, as an open loop, is not just something thought out, but something you can actually look upon as flashing in and out of a gentle, very slow movement as the expression of man's relation to the universe. The currents of the universe continually approach man; he draws them towards him, they become intermingled in his vicinity and proceed outward again. Thus this kind of thing streams towards man, interweaves and then goes out again; man is permeated by these currents belonging to the universe, which stop short in front of him.

As you may imagine, through this man is surrounded by a kind of wave-like aura; these currents enter from the universe, form a whirlpool here, and by making this whirlpool in front of him, as it were, salute man. So that here he is surrounded by a kind of auric stream.

This is essentially an expression of man's relation to the cosmos, to the surrounding world of soul-and-spirit. You can, however, find all that you actually experience as lying in your consciousness represented here as a mixture of blue, green and yellow running into orange towards the inside. But that pushes up against here; within the soul part of man this yellow-orange collides with what waves on the blue sea as the soul-and-spirit of the lower man, of the man below. What I have shown here in red passing into orange, belongs to the subconscious part of man, and corresponds to those processes in the physical that take place principally in the activity of the digestion and so forth, where consciousness plays no part. What is connected with the consciousness would be described, where the aura is concerned, in the bright parts that I have applied here. (see diagram 2)

Just as here the soul-spiritual of man meets the soul-spiritual of the surrounding world, so what is within man as his soul and spirit meets his subconscious—that actually also belongs to the universe. I shall have to draw this meeting of the currents so that one of the streams goes out into the infinite; within man I must draw this meeting differently. Here I must also draw a loop line but this must be done so that it runs towards the inside. Now please notice that I am keeping entirely to a looped line but I take the under loop and turn it around so that it goes thus (diagram 6).

Thus, I turn the lower loop around. In contrast to the above diagram 5, where I have made one loop run out to infinity, widen out into the infinite, I now turn back the lower loop; with this I have shown diagrammatically the obstacles, dams, that arise where the spirit and soul here in the inside enter the subconscious spirit-and-soul and therefore also that of the cosmos.

I must therefore describe these obstacles if I draw them as corresponding to what arises in man, in the following way; seven lemniscates with turned back loops—those are the obstacles that correspond to an inner wave in man (diagram 7). If you wish actually to follow up this inner wave, its main direction—but only its main direction—would perhaps take the course of running along beside the junction of man's wrongly named but so-called sensory and motor nerves. This is only said by the way for today I am going to describe the matter chiefly in its soul-spiritual aspect.

By this you can see the strong contrast existing in man's relation to the spirit and soul environment and to himself, namely, to that bit he takes in out of the spirit-soul environment as his subconscious, and what I have had to sketch as the red wave swimming on the universal blue sea of the spirit-soul universe.

We said that this wave here (see right of diagram 2) corresponds to the barrier against which man pushes if he wishes to know about the external world. But there is a limit here too (see left of diagram 2); within men himself there is a barrier. Did this limit, this barrier, not exist you would always be looking down into what is within you, my dear friends. Everyone would look within himself. In the same way that man would look into the external world were the barrier (on the right) not there, if the boundary on the left were not present he would look into himself. If man looked into himself in this present cycle of evolution this would indeed give him little joy, because what he would see there would be a most imperfect, chaotic seething upheaval in man's inner nature—something that certainly could not arouse joy in him. It is, however, that into which imaginative mystics believe they are able to link when they speak of the mysticism that is full of fantasy. All that the mystics of fantasy very largely look upon as a goal worthy of their striving, what, particularly in the case of many such mystics who really believe that in looking within themselves they are able to learn about the universe, what figures with them as mysticism—all that is concealed, entirely concealed, from men by just this dam.¹

Man cannot look into himself. what is formed inside this region (left) is dammed up and reflected, it can t be reflected back into itself; and the expression of this, reflection is memory—remembrance. Every time a thought or an impression that you have received comes back in memory it does so because this damming process begins to work. If you had not this stemming wave, every impression received from outside, every thought you grasp and which permeates you, would be unable to remain with you and would go out into the rest of the soul-spiritual universe. It is only because you have this obstructing wave that you can preserve the impressions you receive.

Through certain processes still to be described you are in a position to call back your impressions. And this is expressed in the functioning of recollection, of memory. You can therefore picture to yourself that you have in you something that here in this diagram is drawn in profile (for so it is drawn; there is in you just such a flat surface); There we find thrown back what should not penetrate. When you are awake you remain united with the external world, otherwise in the waking condition everything would go through you. You would actually know nothing of impressions; you would nave impressions but be unable to keep them.

This is what memory signifies. And the surface of this dam that brings about our memory conceals what the imaginative mystic would like to look at, within himself. One could say of what is underneath that for those who really know these things, the saying holds good that man should never be curious to see what the beneficent Godhead has covered with night and obscurity, but the mystics are fantastic and wish to look down into it. All the same, they cannot do so, however, for they would so bore into and destroy the normal consciousness that the waves of memory would not be thrown back. All that produces our memory, all that is so necessary for external life, conceals from us what the fantastic mystic would like to see but men should not look upon. Beneath recollection, beneath what causes recollection, beneath the surface of recollection, lies an essential part of man. Just like the back of a mirror, the mercury being a mirror, what is in front, what is thus in your consciousness works; it does not go inside but is thrown back and is therefore able to continue there as memory. In this way our whole life is reflected as a memory. And what we call the life of our ego is essentially reflection in memory.

Thus you see that we actually live our conscious life between this wave (right of Diagram 2) and this other wave (left). We should be mere funnels, therefore, letting everything flow through us; had we not this dam as the basis of memory, and we should see into the secrets beyond our boundary of knowledge were we not obliged to place ourselves outside the sphere of perceptible concepts for which we have no content. We should be funnels were we not so organised that we could not produce this dam, organised so that we should not be obliged to set up before us concepts as it were without a content, obscure concepts, we should become loveless beings, empty of love, with dry, stony natures. Nothing, in the world would please us and we should be so many Mephistopheles. Because we are organised so that we are unable to approach what is of soul-and-spirit in our environment with our abstract concepts, with our intellectual powers—to this we owe our capacity to love. For we are not meant to approach what we should love by analysing it in the ordinary sense of the term, nor by tearing it to pieces and treating it as chemicals are treated by the chemist in a laboratory. We do not love when we analyse like a chemist or synthesise chemically. The power of memory, the capacity to love—these are two capacities that correspond at the same time to two boundaries of human nature. The boundary towards within, corresponds to the power of memory; what lies beyond the memory zone is the subconscious within man. The other zone corresponds to the power of love, and whet lies beyond this zone corresponds to what is of the nature of soul-and-spirit in the universe. The unconscious part of man's nature lies beyond this zone as far as what is within man reaches; the soul-spiritual of the universe goes out boundlessly from the other zone into the wide space.

We can therefore speak of the zone of love and the zone of memory and can include man's soul-and-spirit in these zones. We must however seek beyond the one zone above (see right of diagram 2) whet is unconscious, and because it remains unconscious is on that account very closely connected with the bodily nature of man, with his bodily organisation. Naturally things are not in reality so simple as they must be in any representation, because everything is interwoven. What is red here (diagram 2) runs into things and is changed; again, what is green and blue is also changed. Actually, things all intermix with one another: in spite of this, however, the sketch is correct in the main and corresponds with the facts.

But from this we see that for physical life here on earth the spiritual is both strong and conscious. Here (left) the spiritual that actually merges into the universe is unconscious. These two parts of man are very clearly differentiated. The spiritual here (in the middle) is for this reason above all for earthly life a very finely woven spiritual element. Everything here (yellow) is what might be called finely woven light. Were I obliged to show where this finely woven light is in man, I should have to go to what I have been so minutely describing—the human head.

What I have thus described, what I have sketched in yellow, yellow-green, yellow-orange, on the other side, is what I might cell the finely woven spirit light. This has no very strong connection with earthly matter; it has as little connection with earthly matter as is possible. And because it has so little connection it cannot well unite with matter, and thus, for the greater part, remains unconnected with it; to this part matter is given that actually always comes from time to time from man's previous incarnation, and there is but a loose connection between this finely woven soul-spiritual element and what belongs to the body, what has actually been held together out of the foregoing incarnation. Your physiognomy, in its arrangement and characteristics, you carry over, my dear friends, from your previous incarnation. And those who are thoroughly able to explain man actually look through the physiognomy of the head; not through what has its origin in the luciferic within men, but more through the manner in which he adapts himself to the universe.

The physiognomy must be looked upon as though it were stamped into man, not to the extent of being the product of this stamping, but rather one has to see in it the negative of the soul; it is this that is seen in the negative of the face. If you were to make an impression of any face you would actually see there the physiognomy that relentlessly betrays what has been made of the last incarnation. On the other hand, all that I have sketched down there as being only connected with the surging sea of the world of soul and spirit, all that is to be understood as corresponding to man's subconscious or unconscious, is closely related to the bodily nature; it permeates the bodily nature. The bodily nature is united with the spiritual in such a way that the spiritual is wholly incapable of appearing as such.

For this reason were we to look down we should see this seething and merging of the spiritual and the bodily behind the threshold of memory. It is this that pares the head of the next incarnation and seeks to transform what will take definite material form only in the future and will not become head until the next incarnation. For man's head is something that outstrips his stage of development. The head in its development therefore—as you may remember from lectures previously held here—has actually come to an end by man's twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth year. (See NSL 122-123 Historical Necessity and Free Will and R-LII Ancient Myths and Their Meaning). In the form of the head there is already our development of man.

But, strange as it may seem, the rest of man is also a head only it is not so far advanced as the other head. If you picture to yourself a decapitated man, what remains is another head but at a more primitive stage. When further developed it become head, whereas what you have as the human head is the rest of the organism of a previous incarnation. If you picture what in your present organism is discarnated, free of the body, if you think away the head of your present organism, the organism that will become head in the next incarnation (and this organism is but an image, everything physical being an image of something spiritual), if you imagine the spiritual element of what in its external form has not yet appeared in man, then you see this in the Group in our luciferic figure—there you have it!

Now imagine compressed into the human head all the soul-spiritual that is merged into man, and held back in you from the head, all that forms a barrier, that is to say, which man cannot penetrate (see right in diagram 2); then man will not have the old dignified head that he ordinarily has; he will have a bony head, and will be altogether bony, like the figure of Ahriman in our Group. (see Der Baugedanke des Goetheanum.)

What I have here been explaining to you has not only great significance for understanding man, but also great significance for understanding what is going on spiritually in mankind's evolution. If we have not a fundamental comprehension of these things we shall never understand how Christianity and the Christ-impulse have entered human evolution. Neither shall we understand what part is played by the Catholic Church, what part is played by the Jesuits and similar currents, what functions belong to the East, what to the West, if all this cannot be considered in connection with these things.

I shall take upon myself to tell you something of these currents tomorrow, currents such as those of East and West, Jesuitism, and the tendency to put everything into terms of mathematics, which really can only be rightly understood if we take into consideration what lies at the basis of soul-spiritual man.

• 1. Mysterien Wahrheiten und Weihnachtsimpulse. 6 Lectures 24-31, December 1917. (Mystery Truths and the Christmas Impulse), 4 lectures in Magazine, 24-29)

We have often discussed the development of the human being during the first periods of life. Many years ago I first drew attention to the fact that up to about the time of the change of teeth the child behaves to a great extent as an imitative being. He instinctively participates in everything that goes on in his environment. Later in life, though man is not aware of it, this participation continues but only in the sense organs.

A process takes place in our eyes, for example, which in a certain sense imitates what goes on in the external world, reproducing what is there just as a camera reproduces what is in front of the lens. The human being becomes aware of what is reproduced in his eyes and thus learns about the external world. The same applies to the other senses. It is only in later life that this imitative principle becomes confined to the periphery of the human being. In early childhood, until the change of teeth, the whole body participates in the imitative process, though to a lesser degree. At that time the whole body has, in a certain respect, the same relationship to the external world as the senses have in later life. The child is predominantly an imitative being and he inwardly adapts to the effects upon him of the external world. Therefore, it is very important to let nothing happen in the young child's environment, not even in thoughts and feelings, which is not suitable for it to absorb and adopt.

With the change of teeth, the possibility arises for the child to cease reacting as a sense organ and assimilate thoughts and ideas. The child is more and more guided by what he is told; whereas, formerly, he was influenced by deeds done in his environment, he now begins to grasp what he is told. Authority becomes the decisive factor between the change of teeth and puberty. What the child is told must be of such a nature that he can be guided by it and follow it quite naturally. The child learns language through imitation but what is expressed through language—i.e., what grownups impart to the child—becomes significant for him only from the change of teeth onwards. Not until puberty does real power of judgment awaken and the child or adolescent begins to make his own judgment. Only then can one assume the child's judgment to originate within himself.

This is merely an external description of how the child adapts to the world, which any unbiased observation can verify. These things are, however, connected with significant inner processes of which I want to speak today. I have often mentioned that only up to the time when the change of teeth occurs does the human ether body live in intimate union with the physical body. Therefore, it can be said that the change of teeth marks the actual birth of the ether body. We can likewise speak of puberty as marking the actual birth of the astral body. But, as I said, this is merely an external description of what takes place; today we shall try to reach a deeper insight into these processes.

When we observe man in the spiritual world, long before he develops an inclination to leave that world and descend to physical embodiment, we see him as a being of soul and spirit in a world of soul and spirit. So were we all before we descended to unite with what was prepared as physical body in the maternal organism. We unite with this physical body in order to go through our earthly existence between birth and death. But long before this we were spiritual-soul beings in a spiritual-soul world. What we are and what we experience there differs considerably from what we experience here on earth between birth and death. Hence, it is difficult to describe the experiences between death and new

birth; they are utterly different from earthly conditions. Yet one can make use only of ideas and mental pictures relating to earthly experiences. However, today we will not deal so much with man's life in the spiritual-soul world—this will be the subject for tomorrow and the day after—but rather focus our attention on how he draws near his descent to earth in order to penetrate a physical body.

Before man approaches his physical body, or rather the embryo, he draws to himself the forces of the etheric world. The characteristic of the physical world we live in here, is that we perceive it through our senses and understand it with our earthly intellect. Yet everything in the physical world is permeated by the etheric world. Everything we see and hear and so on is everywhere permeated with the etheric world, the world in which man lives prior to his life on earth. Before uniting himself with the physical world, through the embryo, he draws forces from the etheric world and fashions his etheric body.

In order to represent this more exactly let me draw a diagram on the blackboard. Let us imagine this to be the soul and spirit of man approaching from the spiritual world (see drawing, violet). That which man draws towards himself from the general ether becomes his etheric body. He clothes himself, as it were, with his etheric body (orange) as he descends from the spiritual world. But to say that is to say very little. We must enter somewhat more closely into the nature of this etheric body. The etheric body which develops within man is a world in itself. One might say that it is a universe in the form of images. In its circumference it has something like stars (yellow stars), and in its lower part something reveals itself which is more or less an image of the earth. It even contains a kind of image of the sun and moon.

It is of extraordinary significance that we, in our descent into earthly life, draw together forces from the universal ether and thus take with us, in our ether body, a kind of image of the cosmos. If one could extract the ether body of man, at the moment when he is uniting himself with the physical body, we should have a sphere which is far more beautiful than any formed by mechanical means—a sphere containing stars, zodiac, sun and moon.

These configurations of the ether body remain during embryonic development, while the human being grows together more and more with his physical body. Though they fade a little they remain. Indeed, they remain right into the seventh year, until the change of teeth. In the ether body of a little child this cosmic sphere is always recognizable. But with the seventh year or with the change of teeth these structures, which are to be seen in the ether body, begin to ray out; up until then they were more star-like. I will make a schematic drawing of how it appears between the ages of seven and fourteen—i.e., roughly between the change of teeth and puberty (see drawing, red rays). As I said, the structure begins to grow paler during embryonic development and continues to do so but is still clearly present. From the change of teeth, it becomes quite pale, at the same time it sends rays inwards (red). One could say that the stars dissolve within the human ether body and become rays which have a tendency to come together inwardly.

All this takes place gradually throughout the period of life between the change of teeth and puberty. At puberty the process is so far advanced that these rays, having grown together at the center, form, as it were, a distinct structure (red). It could be said that the surrounding stars become very pale and so too the rays, though something is still discernable. By contrast, what has come together into a ball-like formation in the center becomes particularly vivid and alive. Within this structure the physical heart, with its blood vessels, is suspended by the time puberty sets in (blue).

Thus, we have this extraordinary situation that the star- ether body draws inwards. As ether body it is, of course, present throughout the body but in later life it is undifferentiated at the periphery. During the time from the change of teeth until puberty it rays intensely from without inwards. It forms a center within which the physical heart is suspended.

You must not suppose that until then man has no etheric heart. He certainly has one, but one obtained differently from the way in which he acquires the etheric heart he now has. For what has thus rayed together into a center becomes, at the time of puberty, the etheric heart. The etheric heart he had before this time he had received as heritage through forces inherent in the embryo. When man gathers his ether body and with it approaches the physical organism a kind of etheric heart, a substitute etheric heart, so to speak, is drawn together by the forces of the physical body. But this etheric heart which man has in childhood slowly decays—this may not be a very nice expression, but it does fit the situation—and is replaced gradually, as the decaying processes take place, by the new etheric heart. The latter is formed by a raying together of the whole universe. In reality, it is an image of the cosmos which we bring with us as an etheric structure when, through conception and birth, we enter earthly existence. Thus, we trace, throughout the time from birth or rather conception until puberty, a distinct change in the structure of the etheric body. One can say that not until puberty is man's own etheric heart present—formed out of his own etheric body. Thus, he no longer has a provisional heart.

All the ether forces active in man up until the time of puberty have a tendency to provide him with a fresh etheric heart. It can really be compared with the change of teeth in the physical sphere. At the change of teeth, the inherited teeth are pushed out and replaced with our own. Likewise, the inherited etheric heart, which we have until puberty, is pushed out and we get our own etheric heart. This is what is essential: that we get our own etheric heart.

Parallel with this, something else occurs. When we observe man soon after his entry into the physical world, that is, when we observe a very young child, we find an extraordinary number of organs distinguishable in his astral body. As just described, man gathers together an ether body which is an image of the external cosmos. But in his astral body he brings with him an image of the experiences he has undergone between his last death and his present birth. Much, very much is to be seen in the astral body of the young child; great secrets are inscribed there. Very much is to be seen of his experiences since his last death. This astral body is extraordinarily differentiated and individual. The strange thing is that during the time when all that I have described takes place in the etheric body, the highly differentiated astral body becomes ever more undifferentiated. Originally, it is a structure of which one must say—if one observes it with understanding—that it comes from a different world. It has entered into this world from a realm that can be neither the physical nor the etheric. Up to the time of puberty all the many individual structures living in the astral body slip into the physical organs, as it were, primarily into those which are situated above the diaphragm (that is not quite exact but approximately so). Wonderful structures, radiantly present in the astral body in the first days of life, gradually slip into the brain and also penetrate the sense organs. Other structures slip into the organs of breathing, yet others into the heart and through the heart into the arteries. They do not slip directly into the stomach; but through the arteries they spread into the abdominal organs. Gradually, one sees the whole astral body, which man brings with him into physical existence through birth, dive down into the organs. The astral body slips, as it were, into the organs. One could express it by saying that by the time we reach adulthood our organs have imprisoned within them the individual structures of our astral body. This may sound strange to ordinary consciousness but it corresponds absolutely to the reality. It also provides a deeper knowledge of the human organs. One cannot fully understand the human organs unless one understands the astral body that man brings with him. One must know that each individual organ, in a certain sense, harbors within it an astral inheritance, just as the first etheric heart is an inheritance.

Gradually, the inherited astral is completely permeated by what man brings with him as his astral body. This astral body dives down, bit by bit, into the physical and etheric organs. The heart is as it were an exception. Here, too, the astral dives down; but in the heart, not only the astral process, but the etheric, too, is concentrated. This is also the reason why the heart is such a uniquely important organ for man.

The astral body becomes ever more indefinite because it sends the distinct structures it brought over from another life through birth into the physical organs in which they become confined. This causes the astral body to become more or less like a cloud. But the interesting thing is that while, on the one hand, the astral body becomes cloud-like, on the other, new differentiations enter in, slowly at first, but from puberty onwards quite regularly.

When a baby kicks with its little legs this is not particularly noticeable in the astral body. True, the effects are there but the differentiations which the astral body brought with it are so strong that the following occurs: Let this be the astral body with its wonderful structures (yellow). (This sketch is, of course, merely an indication, but it does illustrate the reality.) These structures gradually disappear; they slip into the physical organs and the astral body becomes ever more cloud-like. But, as I said, when the baby kicks, all kinds of effects are to be seen in the astral body. They

impinge upon the structures within it and from these the effects are reflected and disappear (red). It is comparable with making an impression on an elastic ball—the ball at once recovers its shape. No matter how forcefully the child kicks, while it does make impressions in the astral body they do not last. However, more and more is retained in the astral body in proportion to the child's learning to speak and form mental pictures which are retained in memory. To the extent that the child speaks and develops memory, to that extent less and less is thrown back. Rather does one see how the movements which the child now makes—no longer kicking, but reasonable movements with arms and legs and so on—are retained in the astral body. Indeed, an extraordinary amount can be inscribed in the astral body.

At forty-five practically all movements have left their traces in the astral body and much else besides, as we shall see. The astral body will by that time have taken up much of what has happened since the person, as a child, learned to speak and to think and the astral body's own configuration dissolved. Therefore, the wonderful structure, which the astral body of the child presents, gradually becomes undifferentiated; though not completely so, as its content disappears into the organs. Into this undifferentiated structure all the movements we make with our arms and legs are inscribed. And so, too, are the actions resulting from these movements. For example, when we guide a pen in writing, all that comes about in the external world through this action is inscribed. When we chop wood, or we give someone a box on the ear, all is inscribed into the astral body. Even when we do not do something ourselves but instruct somebody else to do it, this too is inscribed. In the latter case it happens through the relation that exists between the content of our words and the deed. In short, the whole of man's activity which finds expression in the external world is inscribed into the astral body (red in yellow). Thus, our astral body becomes differentiated in the most varied manner through our human activity. As already mentioned, this begins when the child learns to speak, endowing its speech with thoughts. Those concepts which the child receives but cannot later remember are not so inscribed. It begins only at the time to which our ordinary memory reaches back in later life. From then on practically everything a man does become inscribed in his astral body.

The strange thing is that what is thus inscribed has a tendency to meet inwardly just as the rays in the ether body meet in the etheric heart. All human deeds also meet there. This coming together is due to an outside cause. As human beings we must, right from childhood, engage in some activity. All this activity expresses itself as indicated throughout the astral body; but there is a constant resistance to its being inscribed. The influence on the organism cannot always take full effect in the upper part (upper part in drawing). It meets resistance everywhere in this part and is pushed down. Whatever we do with the help of our physical organs has a tendency to stream upwards to the head. But the human organization prevents this from happening by holding it back. This causes the influences to collect together and form a kind of astral center (red).

This, again, is clearly developed at the time of puberty, so that at the same place where our own—not the inherited- etheric heart formed itself we have also an astral structure which centralizes all our deeds. Thus, from puberty a central organ is created wherein all our doing, all our human activity is centered. In the same region where man has his heart the sum total of all his activity is centralized, but in this case neither physically nor etherically, but astrally. The significant thing is that at the onset of puberty—the astral process coincides only approximately with the physical process—man's etheric heart is so far prepared that it can take into itself the forces which develop from our activity in the external world. Thus, to describe what actually occurs one could say: From puberty onwards, the totality of man's actions pours, via the astral body, into the etheric heart—i.e., into the organ which is an image of the whole cosmos.

This is a phenomenon of extreme significance. When you think about it you will realize that it amounts to an interconnection of man's earthly deeds with the cosmos. You have in the heart, as far as the etheric world is concerned, a whole cosmos drawn together, and, at the same time, as far as the astral world is concerned, the totality of man's activity drawn together. This is where the cosmos and its processes join with man's karma. Only in the region of the heart is there such a close correspondence between the astral and etheric bodies and man's organism. The reality is that the ether body which man brings through birth is an image of the whole cosmos; and this essence of the

cosmos within him permeates itself with all his deeds. This flowing into one another in mutual permeation provides the opportunity for human actions continually to be inserted into the essence of the cosmic images.

When man goes through the portal of death and lays aside his physical and etheric bodies, this etheric-astral structure—within which the physical heart, as it were, swims—contains all that which man takes with him into his further soul-spiritual life. Because within the heart, in the etheric body, the substance of the whole cosmos is drawn together, man is able, as he grows spiritually larger and larger, to hand over to the cosmos his entire karma. The etheric structure, which is an essence of the cosmos drawn together in the heart, now returns to the cosmos. The human being expands into the whole cosmos and is received into the soul-world. He then continues his passage through what I described in my book Theosophy as the Soul World and Spirit Land.

When we observe the human organization in its becoming we have to say: In the region of the heart the cosmic and the earthly come together. They form a union in such a way that the configuration of the cosmos is taken into the etheric heart and there it prepares to receive all our deeds. Then when we go through the gate of death and enter a new cosmic existence, we take with us the outcome of this intimate union of the etheric and our human actions.

This is, in fact, a concrete description of how man lives his way into his physical body and how he is able to withdraw from it again through the fact that his deeds give him the force to hold together what he formed out of the essence of the cosmos.

The physical body is built up within the physical-earthly realm through heredity—i.e., through embryonic forces. With this unites that which man brings down from the spiritual world after having drawn together the ether body. This T,' which has gone through many earth-lives and has a certain development behind it, lives within that wonderful structure he has brought with him as his astral body. His T has a certain sympathy for the structures that exist in the astral body. When they slip into the organs of the physical body as described, the `I' retains this inner sympathy which now extends to the organs. (The word `sympathy' denotes the concrete reality.) The `I' expands more and more within the organs and takes possession of them. Indeed, the `I' has already in earliest childhood a relation to the organs; however, at that time the hereditary conditions are present, as I explained, and the relation is, in consequence, an external one.

Gradually the `I' and astral body slip into the organs of the physical body. This occurs as follows: To begin with the `I' has a somewhat separate existence along the bloodstream within the child, then it begins to unite ever more closely with the blood circulation until at puberty they are fully united. Thus, while you have an astral structure surrounding the etheric and physical heart (see drawing, page 94, orange), the `I' takes another path to the heart. Let us say the `I' slips into the lungs—it will then, through the veins leading to the heart, gradually approach the latter. The `I' follows the circulating blood, becoming more and more intimately united with it, so that here again, via the detour of the ego forces circling with the bloodstream, the `I' enters the structure formed by the union of the etheric and astral heart. This structure alone makes it possible for the cosmic-etheric to grow together with a human astral. I said earlier that the astral body gradually comes to contain an extraordinary amount because all our deeds are inscribed in it. But more than that is inscribed. Through the fact that the `I' has sympathy for everything concerning the astral body, our intentions—that is, the ideas on which we base our actions—also become inscribed. In this way human karma unites with cosmic laws.

Of all this taking place in man's inner being, practically nothing is known nowadays. What is known are the results of man's physical actions which are judged according to laws of nature; also known are his moral actions which are judged according to laws of morality. But man's moral and physical deeds come together in the heart. Therefore, these two things, which for man today go on side by side independently of each other, are discovered to be a unity when one learns to understand the whole configuration of the human heart. That is to say, when we understand what takes place in the heart, albeit in a much more hidden way, it is comparable to what occurs openly at the change of teeth.

We inherit our first teeth and form the second ones out of the organism. The first fall out, the second remain. The first have an inherent tendency to decay; even if they did not fall out they would not last. The reason that the second teeth sometimes decay is due to external circumstances; to these belong the external causes within the organism itself. Hidden from sight, at the onset of puberty, our inherited etheric heart succumbs to forces of decay and we acquire a kind of permanent etheric heart. Only the permanent etheric heart is fully adapted to take into itself our deeds. Therefore, it makes a great difference whether a person dies before or after puberty. When a person dies before puberty he has only the tendency to bequeath his earthly deeds to karma. Separate earthly deeds may be incorporated in their karma when children die before puberty, but these will be indefinite and changeable. The real building up of karma only begins from the moment when the astral heart has fully penetrated the etheric heart, so that the two form a unity. One could say that this union constitutes, as it were, an organism for the forming of karma; what has thus united and contracted within man, becomes after death ever more cosmic. In the next earthly life, it is again incorporated into the human being. Thus, something is incorporated in us out of the cosmos which retains the tendency to hand over our deeds after death to the cosmos. The laws that shape our karma are effective within the cosmos so that at the start of a next earthly life we carry into it the consequences of what the cosmos made of our deeds.

Our recent studies have led us to consider the relationship of the human being to the spiritual world, and this relationship has in its turn made it necessary for us to cast a glance at the development man goes through between death and a new birth. We will take this as our starting point today.

Yesterday we said that the human being carries through the portal of death what I called a mineral consciousness. It can be called this because essentially its content is the mineral world with its laws, and this consciousness therefore is tinged by, or rather steeped with man's moral feelings and experiences. Bearing with him what comes from these two directions, the human being makes his way in the world through which he journeys between death and a new birth. When we consider what the human being is after death, we find that the astral body and the I have wrested themselves free from what surrounded them as a kind of shell, that is, from the physical body and the etheric body.

Now, if we picture the cosmic evolution of humanity, together with the cosmic planetary bodies that have to do with it, we know, from the description given in my Occult Science, how in the past this cosmic evolution has gone through the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, and how the human being then arrived at the Earth evolution, in which he is still involved. We also know that essentially in the Saturn evolution the first rudiments of the physical body were formed as a kind of universal sense organ that was developed further in the Sun, Moon, and Earth evolutions. We know that the first rudiments of the etheric body were added during the Sun evolution, those of the astral body during the Moon evolution, and that the Earth evolution is actually the time during which the I of man is evolved.

When we consider the human being as a whole, we find that he has his ego through the bond of the human being with the earth, for through those forces that exist on earth the I is formed, is molded. If we now say, therefore, that the human being passes through the portal of death, bearing his I through it, he really takes through the portal of death all that he has from his earthly evolution, all that he acquires within the earthly evolution. We bear through the portal of death just what belongs to the earthly evolution, and it is during the earthly evolution that the mineral world has been added to the other kingdoms. This, too, you may gather from my Occult Science. The outer, mineral world is, therefore, bound up with the evolution of the I. That the I goes through the portal of death with a mineral consciousness is essentially connected with what the human being actually has gained from the earth.

If we comprehend the earth only in a general way, however, as it first appears to us as world body, we understand it very imperfectly. The earth as world body, as it were, is a being that may be compared to a large drop in the infinite ocean of space; but this drop is constituted in such a way that it is differentiated in its substance—it contains substances of varying weight, varying density. We need only observe the metals in the earth to find that they are of varying density. What the human being incorporates into himself from the earth with the mineral consciousness originates from the whole earth, and it originates simply because the earth is a complete planet in the cosmos. What is differentiated into the various mineral substances then works in such a way that the human being takes with him through the portal of death not only what his I has become but also, for a time, what was his astral body. This has been described in my books, Occult Science and Theosophy, as the passage of the human being through the soul world.

We may therefore say that when the human being leaves the earth he develops the mineral consciousness. At first, however, this consciousness is permeated with all that the human being takes with him from the differentiated earth, from the earth insofar as it consists of various substances. This constitutes the period of his passage through the soul world. We can therefore say that the human being takes with him something that then goes on further and that to begin with is not only his I but is in a certain way an astral fruit of the earth (see drawing, page 119).

If we then follow the human being further, after he has laid aside this astral fruit of the earth, as described in my book, Theosophy—where it is shown how a short time after death man completes his passage through the soul world—we find that his I goes on further. At first, however, it is permeated by mineral consciousness. When we raise our spiritual gaze to where the human being is, we fmd the mineral consciousness of the deceased human being, that is, the thought world, which is related to what is mineral. It is actually the case that this thought world borne by man through death works on earth, and also in the cosmos, upon what is the mineral kingdom (see drawing at end of lecture).

This is an extraordinarily noteworthy and significant relationship. When we look at our minerals here on earth, when we observe the mineral kingdom that is also in the clouds—for there, too, there are mineral effects—and ask ourselves what spiritual essences are at work there, we must answer that in these mineral formations, which show us their outer side when as human beings on earth we observe them with our physical senses—in all these mineral effects live the thoughts to which human thought comes after death. If we look at the mineral kingdom intelligently, allowing our gaze to peruse this mineral kingdom, we can say that in all this mineral activity there is working inwardly that which constitutes the consciousness of the dead at the beginning of their career beyond the earth. We must therefore—and not merely for outer reasons—call the mineral kingdom a non-living, dead kingdom: but we must also call it a dead kingdom in the sense that at first the human thoughts, the actual human thoughts that man harbors immediately after death, work into this mineral kingdom.

When the human being then continues his journey, he comes ever nearer the Midnight Hour of Existence. Both before and after this time he develops, in the sense in which I spoke yesterday, a consciousness that is more plant-like in nature; it is not the mineral consciousness he possessed before but a consciousness that arises through the human entity being permeated with plant-creating forces. The human being receives from realms beyond the earth something different from what the earth as such can give him; in addition to what the earth can give him, he receives what is a kind of higher consciousness, and it can become apparent to us that he develops a plant-like consciousness. During this time he works on the plant realm both on earth and in the cosmos (see drawing at end of lecture).

It is one of the secrets of existence that when we study the plant covering of the earth, all the vegetable existence, we are shown only its outer side; it also has an inner side. Naturally we must seek this inner side, not under the roots but above the blossoms. When we picture to ourselves the blossoming plant, we see its inner aspect in what inclines astrally toward the plants, in what lives astrally, as it were, and has its-outer expression in the plant covering, in the processes of fructification, in all, therefore, that is unseen. It may be said that if one observes the plant itself purely from root to flower, the inner side would be that which is over the flower. If, therefore, we consider what can be perceived outwardly of the vegetation as an outer side, then the inner side consists of the sphere of those forces that in part have their point of origin in the consciousness of human beings in the middle period of their existence between death and a new birth—before and after the Midnight Hour of Existence. We therefore must look upon the vegetation of the earth as being connected in its cosmic existence with the whole of human evolution.

If we can say regarding the mineral kingdom that in this dead kingdom live the weaving thoughts of human beings in the first half of their life between death and a new birth, then we must say that in the vegetation of the earth is outwardly revealed what lives inwardly in the universe, so that it constitutes the world of human consciousness in the middle period between death and a new birth.

The intimate relationship between the human being and the world about which we spoke yesterday made it possible to close yesterday's study with the words, “Knowledge of the world is knowledge of man, and knowledge of man is knowledge of the world.” This relationship reveals itself here in a quite special way. It shows us that here on earth we actually behold something of what the human being is between death and a new birth. If we look at the minerals, they reveal to us in a kind of outer picture what human beings do in an inwardly conscious way in the period immediately following death. When we look at the plant world, we see revealed what man does inwardly in the middle period of his evolution between death and a new birth.

To an unprejudiced view such things can be observed in a certain outer way. Whenever we consider Goethe's very peculiar nature—which is only an outstanding example—each time we are surprised afresh. What constitutes the peculiarity of Goethe's nature? For one thing, Goethe attempted again and again to become a draughtsman or painter. He never accomplished this, but the drawings and paintings he left are striking in their sureness of touch. When one considers Goethe's poems, especially some that are unusually characteristic in this respect, one says to oneself that though Goethe could not become a painter his poems are expressed in a kind of displaced painting. In his poems Goethe does a good deal of painting. If this were to be expressed in the same way as some modern talented critics do, for example, one might say (though I do not think that it is such a good thing to do) that Goethe had the tendency to become a bad painter; he carried his painting tendency into his poetry and therefore became in that way merely a painterly poet.

One may say further that those people were somewhat justified who described many of Goethe's poems as being smooth and cold as marble, even “Iphigenia” and “Tasso,” in a certain sense, but still more so “The Natural Daughter.” Goethe offered dramatic poems in which a sculptor actually lives, and as dramatic poems they do not breathe forth the inner life that permeates the poems of Shakespeare. In a certain respect they are poems that have stopped short and are expressed in sculptural form.

Briefly, Goethe can appear as a special genius, perhaps for the very reason that he never actually came quite fully into the world. He came to the world as a painter, but never became one. He then turned to poetry but brought things to expression in a way half-painterly. He never fully mastered the art of dramatic poetry. For this he had poetic inclinations but never actually became a real dramatic poet; he stopped short of this, turned back again, and brought it to expression in a sculptural way. When one studies Goethe correctly, one becomes conscious of something that is most characteristic of him—Goethe is a human being who was never really born quite right. He produced a theory of color but was never in a true sense a physicist. He occupied himself with natural science but never completely entered into its technicalities. In short, there was actually nothing in the world into which he entered fully—he never came into the world properly.

One might go even further, considering his relationships to women. These also developed only to a certain stage, never to the point to which they develop in ordinary human beings born correctly into physical life. One could find confirmation of this everywhere, if one feels and senses these things, and if only this feeling and sensation is not limited by ordinary pedantic, commonplace ideas and obvious objections to which I need not refer here in detail. About this thesis that Goethe was not entirely born the objection naturally may be made that he was indeed born on such and such a day in Frankfurt, as may be seen in any of his biographies. Let me draw your attention, however, to a matter that calls for comment, that he arrived in the world half dead, his body absolutely black. He therefore did not enter the world robustly but in a way that was half dead.

Let us follow his life and see how he never fully arrives anywhere—how he has setbacks, even to the point of illness. Everything is like this, even the way he went about in Weimar, inapproachable in a certain respect; one could say that he never entered fully into the world. This has its origin in the fact that he brought with him an especially large portion of the plant-like consciousness that is developed in the Midnight Hour of Existence. Hence, the urge he had toward developing the metamorphosis of the plant, in which he accomplished his greatest work: this wonderful view of the plant world.

I can well imagine that it sounds unusual to speak seriously about Goethe not having come fully into the world. There are many people who prefer to speak of the outer world as a kind of maya, speaking in general, in the abstract. When we explore how the individual stages of maya are differentiated, however, it must be admitted that it is absolutely a maya if one takes Goethe completely outwardly as do Mr. Lewes or Professor Bielscbowski,⁸ for example. He is most definitely not like that, however; he is quite different. His nature is such that its essential origin is really discovered in the sphere that lies just in the middle of man's life between death and a new birth.

We now come to the third part of this development, when a new incarnation, a new earthly life, is drawing near. In this period, as you may easily imagine, the human being develops a more active consciousness (see drawing below, red). Outwardly he has a consciousness such as I described to you yesterday, but he works with what now lives in his consciousness—chiefly with all that develops here on earth as the animal world. At this point, however, we cannot say that when we look at the animal world outwardly this signifies only the outer side and that the inner side leads us to human thoughts or to the contents of human consciousness during the third part of his life between death and a new birth. We cannot really say this, but we can say that if we look at the animal world this animal world yields us a kind of inner aspect. The mineral and plant realms therefore show us their outer side, as it were—the plants to a lesser degree, but they may nevertheless be included. The inner side of the plant-like is presented to us, in addition to other things, by the state of consciousness of those who have passed through the portal of death and are on the way to a new earthly life. When we look at the animal realm, however, we must actually say that this gives us its inner side, its outer side being the group-souls of the animals, which ascend up to the creativity of hierarchies beyond the earthly. There in the animal realm we cannot find in the animals themselves what works out of the human being, out of human consciousness. Rather we can say that human thoughts live and weave in the animal group-souls, in what is developing in the whole world of the animal group-souls.

During this third period the human being actually lives through all the subtle and complicated configurations of the world of the animal group-souls. This is what now becomes the human world, this world of animal group-souls. Out of what he beholds there in the world of the animal group-souls, out of what passes there in and out of his consciousness, the human being builds up his own organs. He gradually draws together, as it were, what he sees there in the breadths of the world into the active beholding of his own being. Man forms his own organism—his inner organs—out of the sum total of the animal group-souls.

We might say that the human being then builds up the principal forms of his brain—of course at first as forces, not as a lump of matter, as such, but as forces—his lungs, heart, blood vessels, and so on. The human being builds up his individual organs out of the whole relationship of the animal group-beings. Thus, whereas in the first part of his super-sensible life, man constructs the outer world, he now recedes more and more into himself, finally building up the individual organs of his inner organism out of the entire world of animal group-souls.

In the last stage of his becoming, the human being then enters, as I told you yesterday, the sphere of the planetary forces. This is a later stage, as it were, that the human being undergoes. After having gone through his activity in and out of the animal group-soul system, he becomes dependent on what lives in the outer world, of what lives in the movements of the planets and their constellations. Through this the etheric body of man is prepared. Man is drawn toward a new birth. His etheric body is developed. In this etheric body there now become visible the webs of thought of which I have spoken, which are to be found between the etheric body and the physical body. Man thus now weaves into his system of organs what he has worked upon more out of feeling—feeling, however, that has been thoroughly permeated by thought. Around this he then forms a web of thought. This web of thought is therefore a result of what the human being has experienced from the working of the planetary world on his being that is approaching a new birth. He thus becomes ready to enter the sheath provided for him by what is accomplished in successive generations.

What, then, is the human being who descends? Immediately after death he poured out of himself into the outer mineral world the thought element, the mineral thought element, that he took with him. By virtue of having poured out these thoughts, will impulses and feeling content gradually press upward. All this then permeates him with the content of the plant-like consciousness. The human being now begins to work with the plant realm in the outer world; then he withdraws into himself again, works out of the animal consciousness of the group-soul activity of the animals, and builds up his organs, which he then surrounds in a certain way with the sheath woven out of the substance of thought. This is what then wants to descend into physical existence.

How does this incorporation into physical existence now take place? In earlier lectures, and also again yesterday, I have pointed out that in modern science it is expected by many that someday cells will be found to have the most complicated chemical structure for which the most complicated chemical formula will be discovered. That idea, however, is completely wrong. In the cell, even in the ordinary organic cell (see drawing below, bright), the chemical cohesiveness is not stronger than in an ordinarily complicated chemical compound; on the contrary, the chemical affinities become most chaotic in the fertilized germ-cell. The fertilized germ-cell is chaos in relation to what is material, chaos that disintegrates, chaos that really disintegrates. Into this disintegrating chaos pours what I have described to you as the human being, which was formed as I just described (lilac). What is actually physical is then formed, not through the germ itself but through the processes taking place in the mother's body between the embryo and the environment. What descends from the spiritual world is thus actually placed into the emptiness and is only then permeated with mineral substance. What we have described here is, as you may see, an absolutely transparent process.

We cannot look upon the animal consciousness as working back but must rather say that it works up into the animal group-souls (see drawing, page 119, red arrows). Then, when the human being reaches the planetary realm, he fashions man himself and incorporates himself in this way into the place prepared for him, as I have just described.

If you bear in mind the beginning and the end of life between death and a new birth, you certainly must say that things appear that can be related to one another. In what we may call the passage of the human soul through the soul world after death there arises something that still has a relationship to the earth, something that points the human being back to what is earthly. We know that then, as I have often described for you, the human being proceeds backward through his earthly life in about one-third of the time his life lasted. What he experiences in the passage through the planetary system before birth is, as it were, the polar opposite to this. Something is imparted to the human being that he brings down with him from heaven to earth. Just as he bears out into the soul world something of what is in his astral body, by means of which he lives backward through his earthly life, so he brings with him out of the cosmos something that then permeates his etheric body—something that has to do with his etheric body in the same way as what I have called the astral fruit of the earth has to do with our astral body. What he brings from the cosmos bears the same relationship to his etheric body as what he carries as astral fruit of the earth bears to his astral body.

I may therefore say that the human being brings with him from the cosmos the etheric cosmic fruit. This etheric cosmic fruit actually lives on in his etheric body. From the first moment of his birth, the human being has in his etheric body something like a cosmic force impelling him forward, which works through his entire life. Karmic tendencies remaining from the past unite with this cosmic impelling force and are active in it.

We thus are able to show how perceptibly karma is related to the real human being. While telling ourselves that the human being has a pre-existent life, that he comes down from spiritual heights into earthly physical life and incorporates his I and astral body into his physical body and etheric body, we may also say that the karma he brings with him from his former life on earth incorporates itself into the etheric impelling force that he brings along with him from the influence of the planetary system that preceded his earthly incorporation.

Now you can grasp quite vividly how all that inwardly urges and impels the human being can be quite practically calculated from the planetary relationships. In this way one can look intimately into what is working in the human being and follow it out of the physical, sense activity into the soul-spiritual world, whence man again carries it down into his physical, bodily existence on earth where it continues to work. These things can be given in all their particulars.

When a person becomes filled with ideas that come from this knowledge, he will say: I enter this earthly existence in the form of physical man and am apparently shut off from the rest of the world. This consciousness of being shut off is given me where my super-sensible aspect is laid into the place prepared for it by the earthly, physical existence. When I am incorporated into this sheath, however, I again grow more and more into the cosmos through my perceptions, through my experiences. I grow into it especially when I form such mental pictures of the human being's connection with the world.

Through anthroposophical spiritual science man thus learns to feel himself at one with the universe. He feels the world in himself and himself in the world. He feels the life of the macrocosm pulsing in his own inner being, and he feels how all that he inwardly experiences pulses forth again into the whole cosmos. His breathing becomes for him a symbol of all-embracing existence. The indrawn breath assumes the form of the human body and becomes inner life. The breath that leaves the organism spreads itself out again into the world. It is the same with the soul-spiritual: the whole cosmos is, as it were, breathed in soul-spiritually and becomes man. All that originates in the human being is breathed out again soul-spiritually and disperses itself in the cosmos until it reaches the very periphery of the cosmos. Then it returns once more to form the human being. In the human being we may see the image of the world, and in the world we may see the finely dissolved essence of the human being. We thus may come to an all-embracing knowledge of the world and of man in the words:

O Man, thou art the condensed image of the world!
O World, thou art the being of Man poured out into infinite space!

Man should acquire a consciousness that really unites his being with the cosmos, so that his future evolution may proceed in an upward, not a downward, direction.

• 8 . George Henry Lewes, 1817–1878, Life of Goethe, 1855. Albert Bielschowski, 1847-1902, Goethe, 1895-1904.

The ability to perceive karmic connections in human life demands a clear understanding of laws and conditions of existence with which, generally speaking, the man of modern times is entirely unfamiliar. For into the karmic connections extending from one earthly life into another, spiritual laws are working, spiritual laws which will be totally misconstrued if they are associated in the very slightest degree with causation similar to what is meant when we speak in the ordinary way of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ in the world.

In order to understand the real nature of karmic connections we must, in the first place, have a clear and exact perception of what is happening within man behind the sphere of his ordinary consciousness. And it is only by observing the being of man as revealed to super-sensible cognition, to Initiation-knowledge, that such understanding can be attained.

Let us therefore consider to-day how the attainment of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition makes it increasingly possible for man to recognise how he lives, as man, within the whole cosmos. This will enable us to continue the study of certain matters that were touched upon in recent lectures and will eventually lead to an understanding of karma.

It has often been said, even in public lectures, that at the stage of Imaginative Cognition a tableau of the present earthly life spreads out before man. A vista of his life lies before him in mighty pictures and he is able to behold things that cannot be yielded by memory in the ordinary sense.

In this vista which opens out as a result of the striving for Imaginative Knowledge, man is, to begin with, entirely within his physical and etheric bodies, but through the appropriate exercises he makes himself completely independent of everything by which impressions are transmitted to him from his physical body. In the activity of Imaginative Cognition man is therefore independent of his sense-impressions, and also of his intellectual knowledge. He lives entirely in the etheric body and the memory-tableau lies outspread before him.

We can therefore say: man is now living in the super-sensible, inwardly detached from his physical body. And in point of fact it would not be so difficult as it actually is for the majority of people to acquire this faculty of Imaginative Knowledge, if only there were a stronger inclination to break through the inner link between the life of soul and the physical body.

It is, of course, comparatively easy to break through the link with direct sense-perception. But remember that a man is also connected with his physical body through the attitude and tenor of soul he acquires in his earthly life. After all, our moods of soul are also dependent upon the physical body, are essentially influenced by the physical body. When a man ascribes one thing or another to his capacities, his talents or other qualities of soul, this is all connected with his experiences in the physical body. If he is to acquire the faculty of genuine Imaginative Knowledge he must free himself from all this; and if he succeeds, even if only for a moment, he knows what Imaginative Knowledge is and the life-tableau begins gradually to unfold.

It is necessary to bear in mind the difference between the condition of being bound up with the physical body and thus living within it, and the condition of being independent of the physical body but for all that remaining within it. There is a real difference, and it is the latter condition that obtains in the activity of Imaginative Knowledge. We remain within the physical body, we do not leave it, but we are nevertheless independent of it.

When you remain with your soul and spirit within the physical body, then you fill the physical body, even if you are not bound up with it. I will illustrate this diagrammatically.—

Let us think, first, of man's ordinary, everyday condition. Take this (a) to represent the physical body (inner curves), this the etheric body (outer curves) and this the soul and spirit (short branching lines).

The etheric body is connected everywhere with the physical body through the muscles, bones and nerves. These connections are everywhere, proceeding from the etheric body to the physical body. Now picture to yourselves that you have a porous clay vessel and you pour liquid into it. The liquid fills the pores and runs out into the porous clay. But it may also happen that your vessel is not porous and in that case none of the liquid is absorbed; the liquid will then be in the vessel but there will be no channels into the clay walls. In the activity of Imaginative Knowledge man is in this sense within his body but the etheric body does not enter into the muscles, the bones and so forth. This condition can be indicated by (b) in the diagram. Physical body; then etheric body which is now on its own; and within, the soul and spirit. All that has happened is that the etheric body is now inwardly detached. The result of this detachment will of course be perceptible when returning to the previous condition. It is therefore only natural that when a man really tries to make himself free of his physical body but remains within it, as is the case in the activity of Imaginative Cognition, he is aware not only of exhaustion but of actual heaviness. He becomes intensely aware of his physical body because he has now to make his way into it again.

This is the condition obtaining in the activity of Imaginative Cognition but not in that of Inspiration, Inspired Knowledge. In the activity of Inspired Cognition—which begins, as I have described to you, with consciousness that has been emptied of images—man is outside his physical body with the soul and spirit. Thus (c) in the diagram represents the soul and spirit outside the physical and etheric bodies.

The outer configuration must therefore be the same as in sleep. Knowledge through Inspiration is possible only when with his ego and astral body a man can be outside the etheric body.

And now, when he returns into his physical and etheric bodies, he notices the presence there of something else; the physical and etheric bodies are not at all as he is accustomed to know them; something is there within them. This is very important, because knowledge of it gives an indication of the whole process of Initiation.

At first, a certain difficulty is experienced in coming back into the physical and etheric bodies after the state of Inspiration, because there is the feeling of diving down into something quite different.

Remember what I told you yesterday about the backward survey of the memory-tableau. If this memory-tableau is blotted out in the activity of Inspired Knowledge, we perceive what it is that is present there within the physical body. And when the memory-picture of the phase between birth and the 7th year, until the time of the change of teeth, is blotted out, we perceive that within this physical body there was an Angelos, an Angel! We actually behold there a Being of the Third Hierarchy. So that what happens is this. We succeed in getting outside the physical body and then return into it as into our house and home ... and lo! we meet our Angel there when we look back upon the phase of life from birth until the 7th year.

Knowledge of such truths existed in the days of the ancient, instinctive clairvoyance, knowledge which took different forms in the various epochs of evolution; and these truths were taken into account in establishing certain customs and usages.

In olden times men were fully conscious that the giving of names should conform with spiritual realities. Generally speaking, people to-day are indifferent about the kind of names their children receive. For some the only consideration is whether the name has a pretty sound. There is often an element of coquetry in giving a name to a child; people ‘fancy’ the name. But in olden times men were mindful of the child's relation to the spiritual world and chose the name accordingly. In an epoch, for example, when a prophetic being was venerated under the name of ‘Elisha’, girls were sometimes named ‘Elisa-beth’, that is to say, the ‘house of Elisha’. In this way expression was given to the hope that by placing a child in the world with this name, the grace of the prophet would be ensured. And so the names were given with this aim in view.

What were the grounds for this? It was known that when man has been outside his body and then returns into it, he sees himself as the bearer of spiritual Beings. And the whole conception that little children, especially, are guarded by their Angel originates in the fact that when with Initiation-knowledge we look back upon the phase of life from birth to the 7th year, we experience what I described yesterday by saying that when this phase in the memory-tableau is blotted out, the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, that is to say, the deeds and activities of the Moon-sphere shine through.

Again, when we look back upon the phase from the 7th to the 14th years and then return into the body, we find an Archangelos. This Archangel is of course also present within the human being from birth until the 7th year, but we do not find the Archangel when we are looking back only at the phase between birth and the 7th year.

And so when we return into the body after having been outside it, we become aware that there, within the body, are Beings of all the higher Hierarchies. But this form of self-knowledge, the knowledge that the body is the bearer of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, cannot be acquired in any other way than by having first been outside the body and then returning into it again.

This can be understood only when it is connected with another fact. I have told you that the many stars in the heavens are but the outer signs of colonies of gods. Where the stars sparkle in the heavens there are, in reality, colonies of spiritual Beings. But you must not imagine that these gods have their consciousness only in Venus, or only in the Sun, or in Mercury, or in Sirius. They have their main habitation, the focal point of their existence in these several spheres, and this is true of all spiritual Beings of the cosmos who have anything to do with the earth. But it is impossible to say of their existence in the cosmos that they have their dwelling-place only in Mars, only in Venus, and so forth. Paradoxical as it will seem, I am nevertheless obliged to say that the Divine Beings who belong to the earth and who people Mars, Venus, Jupiter or another of the planets—also the Sun—would be blind if they inhabited only one of these spheres. They would live, they would be active—just as we can walk about and take hold of things even if we have no eyes; but they would not see—I mean, of course, in the way in which Divine Beings ‘see’—they would lack a certain faculty for perceiving what is happening in the cosmos. But this, my dear friends, will lead you to ask: Where, then, is the eye of the gods, where is their organ of perception? This organ of perception is provided by the Moon, our neighbour in the cosmos—in addition to all its other functions. All the Divine Beings belonging to the Sun, to Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, have their eye in the Moon and are at the same time in the Moon.

And now think of some of the things of which we have spoken here from time to time. Take only one fact. The Moon was once part of the earth, and separated from the earth only in the course of time. Before the separation of the Moon, therefore, the eye of the gods was bound up with the earth; the gods beheld the cosmos from the earth. Hence at that time the great primeval Teachers too were able to impart their wisdom to mankind. For in that they were living on the earth, and the Moon was still within the earth, they could gaze into the cosmos with the eye of the gods. When the Moon departed, remembrance of this vision of the gods remained with them for a time; thus they could behold, in remembrance, what was now seen with the eye of man, and could communicate this to the gods. But the primeval Teachers themselves had then to make their way to the Moon, where they are to this day, and to found a colony there in order to be able to see with the eye of the gods.

And now turn your minds to something else. From the Moon, Jahve reigned over the heart and soul of the Jewish people, and those of the primeval Teachers who were still associated with the cult and the teaching of Jahve united with him in the Moon, in order to look out into the cosmos through his eyes. In time to come the Moon will again be united with the earth and then it will be possible for man on the earth to gaze into the cosmos with the eye of the gods. Vision of the cosmos will then be a natural human faculty.

It is only by understanding these things that we can come to know the nature of the universe. For only when man views the universe in this way can he have any true conception of the function of the Moon.

And now we have the reason why freedom, free spiritual activity, can be unfolded in earthly life. As long as the Moon was connected with the earth, as long as the primeval Teachers taught men out of their store of remembrance, and as long as this teaching was preserved in the Mysteries—actually until the 14th century A.D.—all wisdom consisted in what had been seen with the eye of the gods. Only since the period I indicated to you, only since the year 1413, has it become utterly impossible for the earth to see with the eye of the gods. So that with the development of the Consciousness Soul, freedom begins to be within the reach of men.

But in point of fact man is on the earth only in the activity of sense-perception and intellectual knowledge, for the latter is also bound up with the physical body. The truth of the matter is as follows. Let us picture the human being. It is only in his sense and intellectual knowledge that he extends beyond the Hierarchies who are within him. In respect of all that lies behind his intellect, he is filled with the Third Hierarchy; in all that lies behind his feeling, he is filled with the Second Hierarchy; in all that lies behind his willing, he is filled with the First Hierarchy.

We are therefore in very truth within the Hierarchies and it is only in respect of our sensory organs and intellect that we extend beyond their realm. It is actually as though we were swimming, with the head rising a little out of the water. With our senses and our intellect we rise out of the ocean of the activities of the Hierarchies.

All this we find when, having experienced the reality of perception outside the body, we return again into the body. And then we find that in very truth man is the House of the Gods.

Something else will now be clear to you. When the gods desire cosmic vision, they gaze through the eye of the Moon. But when they desire to behold the cosmos from the earth—whereby an entirely different aspect is revealed—then they must look from out of man. The human race is the other eye of the gods!

In very ancient times it was natural for man to be able to see with the eye of the gods because the Moon was within the earth. And he will be able to do so again when in future time the Moon and the earth are re-united. Through Initiation, however, through becoming aware on returning into the body that the gods are present there, and through coming to know these gods, man learns to behold the world through the “eye of man.” Thus Initiation reveals to man what in earlier times was revealed to the gods through the eye of the Moon.

What we do with our everyday consciousness, the intentions we form, and so forth—all this depends upon ourselves; but our karma is shaped and fashioned by the Hierarchies within us. They are the architects and shapers of an entirely different World-Order, a World-Order belonging to the soul, to the moral sphere of life. This is the other aspect of man, the aspect of the Hierarchies who are within him.

As long as we remain at the stage of Imaginative Knowledge we are convinced, as we look back over our own earthly life, that we are a unity; we are also convinced that certain actions in life are free, because they proceed from this unity. With Imaginative Knowledge we perceive little of our karma. When we reach the stage of Inspired Knowledge, however, and then return into the body, we feel ourselves divided into a world of countless Hierarchies. We return into the body and at first do not know our identity. Are we the Angel, are we a Being of one of the Hierarchies, one of the Dynamis, or Exusiai? We are divided into a world of Beings, dazed by the multiplicity of our nature, for we are one with all these Beings.

At this point the appropriate exercises must make a man so inwardly strong that he can assert his unity over against this multiplicity. And then—it is of course all an after-effect of the life between death and rebirth—he perceives how karma is shaped by the interweaving activities of the many Beings within him. Countless Divine Beings take part in the shaping of human karma. It is therefore true to say that man leads an earthly life in the real sense only in respect of his intellectual and sensory activity. In the activity of his life of feeling and of will—yes, and even in a more remote and hidden activity of thought—man shares in the life of the gods. In a hidden thought-activity he shares in the life of the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai; in respect of what is hidden in his life of feeling he shares in the life of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes; and in respect of his will he shares in the life of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

What we call human destiny is therefore an affair of the gods and as such it must be regarded.

But what does this mean for earthly life? If a man cannot accept his destiny with inner composure, if he rebels against his destiny, if—from his personal point of view of course—he is discontented with it, if he brings his destiny into confusion by subjective decisions, then it is as though he were continually disturbing the gods in the shaping of his destiny. Destiny can of a truth only be lived through in the right way when life is accepted with inner composure and tranquillity. To feel and perceive how destiny works is something that brings with it hard and heavy tests for human nature. If a man can succeed in taking his destiny earnestly, this experience will give him a strong and deep impulse to live in communion with the spiritual world. And life itself will unfold in him a feeling for connections of destiny, of karma.

Men of the modern age have to a great extent lost this sensitivity, this delicacy of perception; their perceptions have become crude. But suppose there is someone who looks back with more delicate perception upon the relationship he had with a human being who was an example to him in his youth—a teacher, perhaps. People do not always feel contemptuous about those who were their teachers; many look back with inner happiness to those who educated them. When this is so, the recollection can deepen into a very intimate experience. It may come to us that between our 7th and 14th years, for example, we always felt obliged to do whatever this revered teacher did; or we may realise that when this teacher told us something we felt as though we had already heard it, as though it were just being repeated. It is actually one of the most beautiful experiences in life when we remember something of this kind, feeling that it was repetition. And then it strikes us that something must underlie this experience. Healthy human reason will tell us that there is nothing to account for it in the present earthly life, and then the same reasoning faculty points us to previous lives. There are indeed many whose attention is directed in this way to earlier lives on earth.

Now what does it mean when we can look back to a teacher with feelings like these? It means that in our present life destiny has led this teacher to us. It is our karma to have such a teacher and it points to a previous earthly life.

As a rule—and this is shown by occult observation—as a rule it is not the case that in the previous earthly life the teacher was also our teacher; the relationship then was quite different. From a teacher we receive thoughts, ideas, even if they are clothed in the form of pictures; in true education we receive thoughts and ideas. When this is the case it points back, as a rule, to a relationship where feelings, not thoughts, were communicated by the person in question; there was less opportunity for receiving thoughts from him, but feelings were communicated—feelings which can be transmitted in so many different ways. And the same may apply to the present and a future earthly life.

Let us suppose that in this present life a man feels drawn by warm, inner sympathy to some other person with whom life does not bring him into specially close contact, whom he merely meets but to whom he is strongly drawn. In such a case it may happen that these feelings of sympathy lead to the other becoming his teacher in a later-life.

What, then, has actually happened? When feelings of sympathy and attraction towards another person unfold in a man, this is the result of what the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—the Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai—unfold in and around the human being.

Then, in the next life, when the influence does not work by way of the feelings but by way of thoughts and ideas, this means that the Beings of the Second Hierarchy have given over what they wrought in a preceding life, to the Beings of the Third Hierarchy, to the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai; and it is they who are now working within the human being.

When, therefore, our karma unfolds from one earthly life to another, this means that actual deeds are passed on from one Hierarchy to another and that in the cosmos, in the spiritual cosmos, something of immense significance is taking place.

In looking at a man's destiny we gaze, as it were through a veil, into a wide vista of cosmic happenings. If we can become conscious of this, the impression will be one of tremendous power. You have only to picture it to yourselves, entering into it with the right feeling and understanding.

Imagine now that you are observing the manifestations of destiny in the life of a human being. This should never be done in a spirit of indifference, for in observing the destiny of a human being we are in truth beholding deeds which have poured from the highest Hierarchy into the lowest Hierarchy, and again from the lowest into the highest Hierarchy. We are gazing upon a weaving activity of life in the ranks of the Hierarchies when we study the destiny of a human being. It is something that must be contemplated with deep piety and veneration, because as we behold this destiny the world of the gods lies manifest before us.

This was the feeling I tried in some measure to convey when I was writing the Mystery Plays. Throughout the Plays you will find scenes that have their setting in earthly life and others that have their setting in the spiritual world. And I have also made it evident how not only the higher Hierarchies but elemental beings, also the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers, mingle in the living, weaving deeds that flow from above downwards and from below upwards when the destiny of man is being fulfilled.

Think of the scenes when Strader and Capesius are within the super-sensible world in quite different forms of existence but for all that the same individuals. This is only the other side of man's life which is just as truly part of him—the side that belongs to the world of the gods and not to the world of the minerals, the animals, the plants, the mountains, the clouds, the trees and so forth. To learn to contemplate the destinies of human beings with reverence and awe—that too is something that the times demand of us. It is a dreadful experience to read biographies from the pens of materialistically-minded authors to-day, for they write without an iota of reverence for the destiny of the one whose life they are narrating. Of a truth it would be well for biographers to realise that when they intrude into the life of a human being, even if only for the purpose of describing it, they are coming into invisible contact with all the Hierarchies.

Deliberations of this kind lead us to the ‘feeling’ side of Anthroposophy. We realise that everything offered to us in Anthroposophy must also move our feelings. For in Anthroposophy it is not merely a question of acquiring knowledge; feelings about the world are quickened within us, feelings which alone can enable us to find our rightful place in life. And without such feelings we cannot truly understand or perceive the laws by which the karma of man is pervaded.

Question: For many years I have suffered from hayfever. Now I have heard that it must be treated early in the year. If injections are administered as early as January or February before a person begins to suffer, they are supposed to be more effective. Should I go along with this remedy?

Dr. Steiner: What you have said is correct, but there is one small catch. You see, the remedy that is in use here is meant to be applied prophylactically; that is, it is meant to work ahead of time. In fact, it should be used weeks before the symptoms of hayfever arise. The problem, however, is that patients come in only when they are already afflicted with the malady. Just today we received an interesting letter about another hayfever remedy. The inventor of this other remedy writes that his medication brings only a little relief to individual hayfever attacks. He believes that our remedy can permanently cure hayfever, especially if it is taken twice at wide intervals. Naturally, we would much prefer patients to be treated in January or February rather than in May or June. Understandably, however, people generally see a doctor only after an illness has been contracted.

Yet, our hayfever remedy works in such a way that if given to the patient even during the external appearance of the illness, which is only the final result of an inner affliction, it protects him from a renewed attack. It is particularly effective if applied again a year later. After that, the application need not always be repeated. Even though the illness affects only one organ, this remedy treats its basis in the whole bodily organization. To explain this, I would like to go into more detail concerning the causes of internal illnesses and how they arise in the first place.

Of course, it is quite simple to comprehend why one becomes indisposed if one breaks a leg or sustains a concussion due to a fall. In these cases the injury is external and the cause easily understood; the cause is externally visible. In the case of internal illnesses, however, one usually does not really consider where they come from and how they suddenly assert themselves. This pertains to another question raised earlier of why one may become infected when in contact with certain people. An external cause also seems to be present here.

Ordinary science offers a simple explanation for this. Bacilli are transmitted from an ill person who has influenza, for example, and then these are inhaled and bring about the disease in another. It is like someone injuring a man by hitting him with a mattock. In this case the injury is caused by a patient bombarding another person with a multitude of bacilli. Matters are not at all that simple, however; they are much more complicated. You will understand this when you realize that in everyday life a man constantly becomes a bit indisposed and then must cure himself. The point is that all of us are really a bit sick when thirsty or hungry, and we cure ourselves by drinking and eating. Hunger is the beginning of an illness, and if it is allowed to continue we can die from it. After all, we can die of starvation and even sooner of thirst. So you see that even in our everyday lives we bear something like the beginning of a disease. Every act of drinking or eating is in truth an act of healing.

We must make clear to ourselves now what in fact happens when we become hungry or thirsty. You see, our body is inwardly always active. Through the intake of food, the body receives nutrients. External substances are absorbed through the mouth and the intestinal passages into some part of the body. Now, you must understand that the human organization immediately rebels against these nutritional substances; it does not tolerate them in their original forms and destroys them. Food substances must actually be disintegrated. In fact, they are annihilated, and this begins in the mouth. The reason for this is that there is continuous, never-ceasing activity in our body. This activity must be observed in the same way as fingers or hands are. Ordinary science simply records how a piece of bread is eaten, dissolved in the mouth, and then distributed in the body, but we must also take into consideration that the human body is continually active. Even if nothing is put into it, if nothing goes into the body for five hours, say, still its activity does not cease. You may even be like an empty sack, but things have not quieted within. You remain in constant inward activity, and things are still bustling around. Only when this internal activity can become occupied with something is it content. That is especially the case after a meal when it can dissolve and disintegrate the food substances; then it is content.

This internal activity that we possess is quite different from man in general, for the human being can become lazy. The internal activity is never lazy, it never ceases. If I don't eat anything, it is as if I had an empty flour sack in which there is activity even if I avoid all tangible substance. This activity—for reasons that I shall tell you later on—is identified in spiritual science as the astral body. It is never lazy, and if it can stay active destroying and dissolving the food substances, it is filled with inward comfort; it then has a feeling of inner well-being. But if I take in no food substances, then the astral body is not satisfied, and this dissatisfaction is expressed as hunger. Hunger is not something at rest within us; it is an activity, a soul-spiritual activity that cannot be stilled. We can truly say that this inner activity is in love with the food substances, and if it does not receive them it is just as dissatisfied as any jilted lover. This dissatisfaction is the hunger, and it is by all means something spiritual.

So the activity that is executed internally consists of disintegrating food substances. What is useful is transmitted into the blood vessels, and the rest is eliminated through urine or feces. This is the healthy, normal and regular activity of the human being in which the astral body works properly to dissolve the food substances. It absorbs into the body what is useful and discharges what is not.

We must assume, gentlemen, that this activity of man is no ordinary activity; rather, it contains something immensely wise. Now, dissolved and transformed food substances are constantly being transmitted through blood vessels to the inner organs, and the nourishment that goes into the lungs is completely different from what goes to the spleen. The astral body is much smarter than the human being. Man can only stuff the provisions into his mouth, but the astral body can distinguish them. It is like sorting two substances, throwing one in one direction to be used there and the other in another direction. This is what the astral body accomplishes. It selects certain substances to dispatch to the lungs, spleen, larynx and other organs. A wise distribution is at work within. The astral body is immensely wise, much wiser than we. The most educated person today would not know how to send the proper substances into the lungs, larynx or spleen; he would not even know what to say about it. But internally man can do this through his astral body.

The astral body, however, can become stupid—not as stupid as the human being can become, but stupid in comparison to its own cleverness. Let us assume that it thus becomes stupid. Man is born with a certain predisposition and is inwardly endowed with certain forces. The activity that the astral body develops for food substances occurs even if somebody sits down all day, immobile like an Oriental idol. His astral body still remains active, but that is not enough. We must also do something externally, and if we have no work to do we must go for a stroll; the astral body demands that we at least walk around. This differs with each individual. One person needs more physical activity, another less.

Let us suppose now that someone has certain predispositions from birth that make him into a sedentary person. It pleases his stupid head—or we could say his stupid ego—to sit around a lot. Now, if he is predisposed to sit around, but the astral body is predisposed to walk about, then his astral body will become stupid. This will also happen if somebody overexerts himself walking. In both cases the astral body will become stupid and will no longer accomplish things correctly. It will no longer properly sort out the food substances and transmit them to the appropriate organs; it will do all this clumsily instead. The astral body becomes too disorganized to send the right substances to the heart or larynx. Substances improperly transmitted to the heart, for example, will remain somewhere else in the body. They are not put in the organ where they belong but, since they are basically useful, neither are they eliminated with the feces. Instead, they are deposited somewhere else in the body. But a man cannot tolerate having something deposited in his body that is not part of its proper activity; he cannot stand that.

So what happens with these improper deposits due to the malfunctioning astral body? What happens to us on account of that? Well, suppose we have in our body certain deposits that should have been directed to the larynx. Because someone's astral body does not function properly, “larynx refuse” is secreted everywhere in his body. The first thing that happens is that his larynx becomes weak. The organ does not receive sufficient sustenance, and thus the person suffers from a weakened larynx. But apart from that, his body contains larynx refuse, which is dispersed everywhere. As I have already told you, the human body is ninety percent water, and the refuse dissolves in this whole fluid organization. The pure, animated fluid that a man requires within him is now polluted. This is what happens so often within ourselves. Deposits meant for certain parts of the body dissolve in our fluid organization, contaminating it.

Say that the refuse of the larynx is dissolved in us and comes into contact with the stomach. It cannot cause damage there, because the stomach has what it needs and was not deprived of anything. But the bodily fluids flow everywhere in the human organism and penetrate into the area of the larynx, which is already weakened. It receives this polluted fluid, this water in which the larynx refuse is dissolved, and specifically from this the organ becomes diseased. The larynx refuse does not affect the other organs, but it does cause the larynx to become afflicted.

Let us now consider a simple phenomenon. A sensitive person finds it pleasant to listen to another person speak beautifully. But if someone crows like a rooster or grunts like a pig, he will not find this so pleasant to hear, even if he understands what is being said. It is not at all pleasant to listen to a person crowing or grunting. Listening to someone who is hoarse is a particularly uncomfortable and constricting experience. Why do we experience such sensations while listening to another? It is based on the fact that in reality we always inaudibly repeat whatever the other is saying. Listening consists not only in hearing but also in speaking faintly. We not only hear what another says but also imitate it with our speech organs. We always imitate everything that someone else does.

Now imagine that you are near a person who is sick with flu, and though you may not be listening to him and inwardly imitating his speech, you feel sorry for him. This makes you quite susceptible and sensitive to him. The flu patient's fluid organization contains many dissolved substances, which contaminate the pure, living fluid I told you about and make it instead unhealthy for him. I even describe the nature of such a contaminated fluid organization.

Imagine that you have a piece of ground where you plant various things. Not everything thrives in every kind of earth, but suppose you want to plant onions and garlic in this particular spot. Should the earth be unsuitable, the onions would be small and the garlic buds still smaller, so you should also add to this soil something that contains sulphur and phosphorus. Then you would have the healthiest onions and garlic buds, and they would smell strong, too!

Now, when a man has influenza refuse within his body, the same substances are dissolved in his fluid organization that had to be added to the ground in order to produce the finest onion and garlic plants, and before long, the sick person begins to smell like these plants. Now, I associate with this, though I may not even be aware that I am sitting in this odour of onion or garlic, because it need not be strong. The odour exuded by a person who is sick with the flu causes the patient's head to feel dull, because a certain organ in the head, the “sensorium,” is not properly supplied with the substance it needs. As a result of having flu refuse within us, an organ in the mid-section of the head is not properly supplied. This odour is always like that of onions or garlic and can be detected by one with a sensitive nose. Just as we tune in on and imitate a shrill and rasping voice, so do we join in with what an ill person evaporates. As a consequence, our own astral body, our own activity, becomes disorganized. This disorder causes a chemical basis that in turn makes us contract the flu. It is like making soil suitable for onions and garlic. At first, then, the illness has nothing to do with bacteria but simply with the relation of one person to another.

If you want to plant predominantly onions and garlic in a garden, and you add to the earth substances containing phosphorus and sulphur, you can now wait and say, “Well, I've done my duty. I want to harvest onions and garlic, and so with some kind of organic fertilizer I have added sulphur and phosphorus to the garden.” But it would be foolish to think that this is all it would take to grow the onions. You would first have to plant the bulbs! Likewise, it would be foolish to maintain that in man's interior, bacteria are already growing in the environment that is being prepared.

They first have to be introduced into it. Just as the onion bulb thrives in soil rich in phosphorus and sulphur, so do the bacilli thrive within a sulphuric environment in the body. Bacilli are not even necessary for one person to catch the flu from another. Instead, by imitating with my fluid organization what is happening in the patient's fluid organism, I myself produce a favourable environment for the bacilli; I myself acquire them. The sick person need not bombard me with them at all.

When we look at the whole matter, we must reply in quite a specific way to the question, “What is it that causes us to be stricken with a certain disease?” We become sick when something injures us, and even in the case of internal illnesses something is actually injuring us. The impure fluid, in which substances are dissolved that should have been digested, injures us; it injures us internally.

Now we can turn our attention to illnesses like hayfever. The incidence of hayfever depends much more on the time of year than on the pollen in the air. More than anything else, what makes a man susceptible to catching hayfever is the fact that his astral body is not properly excreting; it is not properly executing its activity that is directed more to the external surface. As a result, when spring approaches and everything begins to thrive in water, a person makes his whole fluid organization more sensitive and thus susceptible to this illness by dissolving certain substances in it. By dissolving various substances in this fluid organization, the fluids in a man's body always become a little diluted. The fluid organization in a man who has a tendency toward hayfever is always somewhat too large. The fluids are being pushed aside in all directions by what is dissolved in them. That is how a person becomes sensitive to everything that makes its appearance in spring, especially to pollen, those particles from plants that are now particularly irritating.

If the nose were not enclosed, hayfever could be induced by many other irritants. Pollen does enter the nose, however, and it cannot be well tolerated if one already has hayfever. Pollen does not cause hayfever but it aggravates it.

Our hayfever remedy is based on drawing the extended fluid organization in the body together again so that it becomes a bit cloudy and once again secretes what it had initially dissolved. It is really quite simple and based on nothing more than contracting the fluid organism to its normal size. It first becomes a little cloudy, and you have to watch that what is secreted from the fluidity is not later retained in the body. That is why it is beneficial for a person to perspire somewhat after having been inoculated with the remedy; it is good if he can move about and do something that induces perspiration right after the inoculation. The inoculation is always somewhat problematic when given to a person who is suffering from constipation, and the patient should first be asked if he is constipated. Otherwise, if the fluid organization is contracted, things accumulate too much and are not eliminated right away. This, of course, is not good. A person who is constipated should be given a laxative along with the inoculation.

Healing entails not only applying a medication but also adjusting life accordingly, so that the human body reacts in an appropriate manner to what has been given it. This naturally is of tremendous significance; otherwise, the person can be made even sicker. If you inoculate somebody with a remedy that is quite effective, even exceptionally good, but you do not see to it that the patient's digestion functions properly and that everything the remedy brings about is eliminated, you naturally drive him further into the illness.

With truly effective remedies it is important that the doctor know not only what medicine cures what disease but also what questions to ask the patient. The greatest medical art lies in asking the right questions and in being familiar with the patient. This is extremely important. Yet it is strange, for example, that we meet doctors who frequently have not even asked the patient his age, though this is significant. While he may use the same remedies, a doctor can treat a fifty-year old in a manner completely different from the way he treats one who is forty, for example. They should not be so schematic as to say, “This medication is right for this illness.” For instance, it makes a great difference if you want to cure someone who is constantly afflicted with diarrhoea or someone who has chronic constipation. Such remedies could be tested, and here experiments with animals would be much less objectionable than they are in other areas. Regarding constipation or diarrhoea, you can easily learn how some remedy reacts in the general physical organism that men have in common with the animals by giving the same medicine to both a dog and a cat. The dog regularly suffers from constipation, and the cat from diarrhoea. You can acquire a wonderful knowledge by observing the degree of difference in the medication's effect in the dog or the cat. Scientific knowledge really is not attained by university training in how to do this or that with certain instruments. True science results, rather, when common sense is aroused a little; then people know how they must conduct their experiments.

In sum, it is of prime importance to realize that an illness has its basis in the whole human organization. The individual organ becomes afflicted because the activity of the astral body directs substances to it that have been precipitated from within. The development of certain inner diseases like influenza, hayfever and even typhoid fever becomes comprehensible when we understand how substances improperly deposited in our bodies are dispersed in our fluid organism.

We are not only a “material man” but also a “water man,” and, as I have already explained to you, we are also an “air man,” whose form changes every moment. One moment the air is outside, and the next it is within.

Just as the solid substances that we contain within our bodies as refuse dissolve in the water, so does that water itself constantly evaporate within us. Within the muscles of your little finger, for example, are minute evaporations of water. Water constantly evaporates throughout your whole body. Furthermore, what is evaporating in the fluid organism penetrates into what you inhale as oxygen, which is also a vapor or gas. When water on the ground evaporates, it rises up into the atmosphere, and when water constantly evaporates in delicate processes within the fluid man, it penetrates into the air that we inhale. We cannot tolerate solid substances being dispersed in the fluids, and neither can we tolerate fluids evaporating into the air organism.

Take the case of a person whose lungs have become afflicted because something has occurred like the process that I have just described. This person can become afflicted with a lung disease, which can be cured if it arose from the wrong substances being deposited in the water man. But let us assume that the lung's affliction is not pronounced enough to become apparent. After all, the human organs are sensitive. The condition does not reach the point where the lungs become so strongly afflicted that they are inflamed, but they do become a little indisposed. The person can tolerate this slight indisposition, but substances now enter into his fluid organism that really should penetrate the lungs. In this case, the fluids within the lungs have the wrong kinds of substances dissolved in them; and these substances evaporate, especially if the lungs are not completely well.

Thus, in the case of the quite obvious internal diseases, the water man receives something inappropriate from the solid substances, and in this case something inappropriate reaches the point of evaporation and mingles with the oxygen that is inhaled. The fact that water evaporates inappropriately and unites with oxygen damages the nervous system in particular, because the nerves require healthy oxygen, not oxygen that has evaporations in it from the contaminated fluid of the water man. Contaminated fluid evaporates into the lungs, and this fluid may be responsible for their slight indisposition. Something that should not evaporate does, and this is damaging to the nervous system. The person does not become radically ill, but he does become insane.

It can be said that internal physical illnesses are based on something in man that causes improper substances to be dispersed in his fluid organism. But so-called mental illnesses are in reality not mental at all, because the mind or spirit does not become ill. Mental illnesses are based on body fluids evaporating improperly into oxygen and thereby disturbing the nervous system. This can happen when some organ is so slightly impaired or indisposed that it cannot be detected externally. You see, then, that man must continually process substances correctly so that nothing inappropriate disperses in his fluids and that his fluids in turn do not improperly evaporate. But even in everyday life there is a process that causes improper evaporation of water, and this becomes noticeable when we are thirsty. We cure the thirst by drinking; we free our water, so to speak, from what is inappropriately evaporating within it and wash away what is incorrect.

So we can say that in hunger there is actually the tendency to physical illness, and in thirst there is the predisposition to mental illness. If a man does not properly nourish himself, he forms the basis for organic diseases, and if he does not quench his thirst rightly, he may bring about some form of mental illness. In some circumstances, the improper quenching of thirst is difficult to detect, especially if it occurs in infancy. At this stage one cannot clearly distinguish between assuaging thirst and hunger since both are satisfied by milk. Therefore, if through the mother's milk or that of a wet nurse something harmful comes into the organism, this can much later cause the fluid organism to evaporate incorrectly and thus lead to some mental disorder. Or let us say a person is wrongly inoculated. An ill-chosen inoculation with one or another cow lymph or diseased human lymph can afflict the organs that work upon the water, even though the water itself does not become directly diseased. As a result of an inappropriate inoculation, a person's evaporation processes may not function correctly, and later he may be disposed to some kind of mental illness.

You will have noticed, gentlemen, that nowadays a great many people become afflicted with dementia praecox, so-called “youthful insanity,” which extends, however, quite far beyond the years of youth. This illness, in which people begin mentally to deteriorate in their youth, originates in great part from the wrong kind of feeding during the earliest years of childhood. It is not enough merely to examine chemically the baby's milk; one must look into completely different aspects. Because people have ceased to pay attention to feeding in our age, this illness arises with such vehemence.

You will have realized from all this that it does not suffice simply to train doctors to know that a certain remedy is good for a certain illness. One must rather seek to make the totality of life healthier, and for that one must first discover all that is related to a healthy life. Anthroposophy can provide this understanding. It aims at being effective in the field of hygiene and seeks to comprehend correctly questions of health.

My dear friends! So, we have prepared ourselves initially with regard to the development of the attitude and disposition for the office of carer for souls. Before we now proceed on the basis of what has been created, we must become quite clear about a number of things, because the whole conception, which you entered into by placing your ego in a direct relationship with the spiritual world yesterday, so to speak, is one that already necessitates a spiritual-scientific foundation in a certain sense.

The point is that, as I said in my first discussions, the concept of the “priest” - we will find the name later - points to something other than what is given in today's Protestant conception. In this, the priest is more of a teacher. Now, the point is that it must appear justified in a certain way to distinguish oneself from the ordinary layman. This justification could not exist at all, that is, what we did yesterday would be an unjustified act if the whole concept of your profession were not placed in a spiritual atmosphere, if I may say so. And here we must ask: Can we make the concept of the “community” or, if we use the old word, the “ecclesia” a real one?

In the communities that have been established in more recent times, even if there was a different intention, this community was essentially an association of individuals, and apart from these individuals, there is actually nothing else of which one is fully aware. Now you must remember – what I am saying now is not meant as a theory, but so that it may permeate your work, because only in this way can your work become a true one – you must remember that everything higher that was realized in human primeval times through individual people leads us back to the concept of a group or species soul. In earlier times, groups of people were bound together by blood ties as tribes or, later, as larger blood communities or communities of relatives. But what was bound together in this way could not be counted as one, two, three, and so on, as so many individual people. Never in the mystery was such a community understood as a mere sum of people, but it was understood that a real community spirit is present, not incarnated on earth, but always present when something is to happen from the community.

Mankind has outgrown this way of being connected to the spiritual. But it is in the sense of what emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha, on a higher level, to lead mankind back to associations that have a real sense of community, so that it develops something through which an entity from higher worlds, in the sense of Christianity a servant of Christ himself, descends. “Servant of Christ” means in this case: a part of Christ, so that the community is not alone, but a part of Christ is there. In the times when blood provided the bond of community, the inclination towards the spiritual was an instinctive one and conditioned by physical basis. In the sense of Christianity, all this must be raised to a spiritual level. People must feel that when they gather in the church of their own free will, it means that in a certain sense they are only members of a common, more delicate body, but one that is truly animated and spiritualized. The one who is the priest then feels himself to be the bearer of this communal spirit. Thus it is not merely a matter of intellectual, theoretical, symbolic speech when the reality of the presence of the spiritual is repeatedly pointed out in the ritual forms, when, as it were, what is living down from spiritual worlds is called into the community of believers, into the “Ecclesia”. Therefore, it is necessary that the stripping of the personal also appears externally in the effectiveness of the priest. The priest actually ceases to have any significance as a personality during the most important acts of worship. He is truly a servant of the word, not a teacher of the word, he is a transmitter of the word from divine heights into earthly existence. And the purpose of donning the cultic vestments is to relinquish one's personality and to appear as a representative of a higher order than the human order on earth.

Therefore, we can say: In the Mass Sacrifice, in the Act of Consecration of Man, when we begin with the relay prayer and then proceed to the reading of the Gospel, we are actually only dealing with the first part of the Mass, with a preparation. And if you recall the first words of the relay prayer given to you, you will immediately find the words: “Let us worthily accomplish the Act of Consecration of Man.” The “worthily” is of the utmost importance for the priest's understanding. Every time he celebrates Mass, the priest must be aware that he must first struggle to achieve the dignity to celebrate the Mass. In this struggle for the worthiness to celebrate the Mass, lies precisely the stripping away of the personal. The priest is clothed in priestly garments and proceeds to the altar in them. That is to say, he completely disregards what is human about him, earthly man, earthly personality in this particular incarnation. He must become the instrument for the Spirit to express itself through him. Therefore, he must try each time anew to struggle for worthiness. And then it says [in the prayer of the Mass]: From the revelation of Christ, in the veneration of Christ, in devotion to Christ's deed. These are words that, in the immediate aftermath of Christ's deed, of the Mystery of Golgotha, are intended to express and support the struggle for an impersonal action.

This is how the service should begin. We must be clear about the fact that the Catholic Church has fostered extensive errors in this regard. It is right that the personality of the priest should not come into consideration, but in many cases it does not take into account the struggle for worthiness and the difficulty of achieving this personality; and so the Roman Catholic view has incorporated the notion that it does not matter if the priest is personally a sinful or even a bad person, because at the moment he celebrates, his personality is not taken into account, because the spiritual power, the spiritual authority, is at work. The Catholic Church has developed this with an extraordinarily great spiritual skill in a one-sided way, and it has been absorbed to a high degree into the consciousness of the faithful. Even the simplest, most primitive Catholics distinguish the spirit-bearer, who stands before the faithful through the symbolic vestments, from the living garment under the vestments, of which many Catholic priests become; he may be a sinful man, but he does not celebrate, the spirit celebrates, for which he is merely the bearer. This kind of Catholic view naturally eliminates the relationship that must exist between the individual personality of the priest and his priestly office. The priestly office is something that comes from the higher worlds. But there is no way around the fact that at least the priest's language is influenced by what he is as an individual human being, that his heart and his mind also influence his language, that he strives for worthiness to be allowed to wear this priestly garment as this one personal human being. Therefore, it is necessary to have a correct understanding of consecration.

What does “consecrate” actually mean? We cannot arrive at an adequate concept in this regard if we simply take a historical view of what has developed over the past few centuries. If we want to proceed historically, we can only do so by considering the acts of consecration as they have existed since the original revelation and as they have been renewed by Christianity, in terms of their spirit. What then do the words 'consecrate' and 'initiate' mean? It means that the spiritual world is lowered over something earthly, so that one beholds this earthly thing as enveloped by the spiritual world. If we want to draw this symbolically, we could do so in the following way (it is drawn on the board). I attach great importance to making this quite clear to you. Let us take for example an ancient Near Eastern mystery. There was, let us say, the sixth degree of the “sun hero”, the seventh degree of the “father”. What does that mean? Well, if this figure represents a person of the sixth degree, his dignity meant that which descended from above and enveloped him from above. He walked around as an earthly man, but for his followers he represented not what was created by the earth, but what is created by the sun, that is, by the spiritual sun. “To consecrate” therefore means to take something away from the earth. The robe worn by the priest, if it is to be regarded as consecrated, envelops, as it were, the earthly personality; the person wearing the robe belongs to the spiritual world. There is only one exception to this, which of course was not yet present when the Persian mysteries were instituted and performed, and that is the following: In the older mysteries you will find everywhere that the act of consecration consists in calling down a heavenly being upon an earthly one. That which is impressed upon the earthly being is not present on earth. The only exception was Jesus Christ, who was present on earth and who, when celebrating Holy Communion, did not say what an old initiated priest would have said: I offer the bread as the body of the heavenly spirit, I offer the wine as the blood of the heavenly spirit. - He would, of course, have clothed it somewhat differently, because he could not have said “body” and “blood”, but “etheric body”, “etheric current” or the like, words that can no longer be heard today, but which were possible at that time in the sacred language. The only exception is what was said by Christ at the institution of the Lord's Supper: “This is my body, this is my blood.

This is radically opposed to all earlier acts of consecration. If you look at the acts of consecration of earlier times, you will have to say to yourself that these acts of consecration were based on the possibility of unearthly events having an effect on earthly events; they were therefore magical. When Christ Jesus came to Earth, He became a human being among humans, and the consequence of this is that the relationship of confession and trust in Christ Jesus now has a power that previously only existed in magical power. Thus, a human consecration ceremony is now possible, which simply begins with the words: “Let us worthily accomplish the human consecration ceremony out of the revelation of Christ, in the veneration of Christ, in devotion to Christ's deed.” An old priest would have had to say: “Let us worthily perform the Act of Consecration of Man in the revelation of extraterrestrial spirituality, in the worship of extraterrestrial spirituality, in devotion to extraterrestrial spirituality.” One must be aware of this; then one comes to feel and experience the Trinity correctly, in the Christian sense, and this is to be expressed in the relay prayer, which is then the continuation in the worthy preparation. You will see from each sentence that there is a struggle for a correct understanding of the Trinity.

I have already pointed out to you that the Gospel of John is basically not understood correctly by most theologians, because the Father God is called the “Creator” and Christ, the Logos, merely the “Savior”. But the Gospel of John expressly states: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. — The active, productive, actual Creator in the world is the Son of God, not the Father, so that the Trinity formula must express the confession of the Son of God as the Creator. God the Father must be felt as the underlying substance of all, as the underlying being of all; he must be felt in the sentence “God the Father be in us,” as the Son of God, who came to earth through Christ, is correctly understood by: “The Son of God creates in us”. This is simply the correct understanding in the sense of the Gospel of John, and such a correct understanding of the Trinity must be striven for at the beginning of every reading of the Mass.

In the consciousness of our humanity, we feel the divine Father.

There is an immediate indication of the sense of being with this “we feel the divine Father”.

He is in all that we are.

He is the underlying substance of everything.

Our substance is his substance. Our being is his being. He walks in us through all existence.

Thus, the Being in the Father is that which must be brought to consciousness. Then one proceeds to the confession of the Son-God:

In the experience of Christ in our humanity, we feel the divine Son. He reigns as the Spirit-Word through the world. He creates in everything we create. Our being is His creation.

Therefore, in so far as there is creation in us, we have come into being through the Word just as everything else has, for apart from the Word nothing of what has come into being has been created.

Our life is his creative life. He creates through us in all spiritual endeavors.

Once you have properly absorbed this into your consciousness, you can develop the right relationship with the Spirit God, the third aspect of the Godhead.

In the grasping of the spirit by our humanity, we feel the healing God. May He shine as the spirit-light through the world. May He shine in everything we behold. May our beholding be imbued with His spirit-light. May our recognition accept Him into His spirit-shining life in a pleasing way. He spiritualizes everything in our human soul.

We have seen, by first bringing the Act of Consecration of Man before our soul as a test, that the words “Christ in you” are often repeated, whereupon the acolyte says: “And fill your spirit, O Lord”. The priest turns to the congregation, and it is immediately understandable what is to be done with the pronouncing of the word “Christ in you”. As the altar server stands before the priest as the representative of the congregation, he is, so to speak, the one who indicates where the earthly plan, the earthly level begins. He speaks for the community, and the words “And may your spirit be filled” are not an order from the community, nor a wish of the community; when the words are spoken in the subjunctive, they signify that which actually comes from the community. Do you now understand the whole context and the subjunctive? What does the priest represent? The priest is only the one who represents the spirit of community within himself. In what does this spirit of community prevail in his body? In the believers who are there, in the participants of the Ecclesia. So what the community says through the altar boy is: Christ fill your spirit, the spirit of the community. Thus it is a matter of the community spirit of the congregation; it is diverted from the human and directed to the spiritual. “And may He fill your spirit.” You just have to understand this word in its subjunctive mood in the right way. Such things are quite important, and there must be an awareness of them.

When this preparation is over, the reading of the Gospel can begin in the manner indicated. The reading of the Gospel is, after all, the proclamation of the word of God by the Priest. The Catholic Church also inserts the so-called “Gloria” before the Gospel on feast days. It is entirely in the right spirit of spiritual intention that you take as little account as possible – in fact none at all – of what has only come about over time from the Roman Catholic Mass sacrifice. The progression over the course of the year must also be marked by the fact that the most important sections of the Gospel are read to the community during the year, so that, in a sense, the Gospel is divided up and the whole process from the birth of Christ to the Ascension is developed through the reading of the Gospel over the course of the year, although it is certainly possible to use one or the other Gospel. The most correct thing to do is to start at the Feast of the Nativity, at Christmas, by reading the first chapter of the Gospel of John, and then, by Christmas, to have progressed so far that, during the year, the Gospel has been covered by reading the Mass.

Regarding the further progress of the Mass, it should be noted that after transubstantiation has taken place and Communion is still to come, then the right place in the Mass is to interrupt the ritual that we read three days ago on a trial basis and insert the Lord's Prayer. Indeed, in recent times there has been a great deal of laxity in all denominations with regard to the Lord's Prayer. Originally, the Lord's Prayer is actually a compendium of the most important truths in the world, reflected through human feeling. In the Protestant confession, the Lord's Prayer is said in a way that is, I would say, not always sufficiently prepared. Just think of the solemnity of saying the Lord's Prayer when transubstantiation has preceded and the Lord's Prayer is inserted at this point. I am not saying that the Lord's Prayer should not be recited by the faithful as often as possible. But even the simplest individual prayer, such as the Lord's Prayer, is recited more reverently by the faithful - despite all the errors of the Roman Catholic Church - by the fact that the Roman Catholic hears the Lord's Prayer at an important point in the mass. This gives the whole mood in which the Lord's Prayer is prayed a certain solemn nuance. However, the Catholic Church has thoroughly dispelled this solemn nuance among the faithful by telling the penitent during confession, when a penitent has confessed his sins to the confessor, to say five Our Fathers every day as penance. This bartering of sin for the recitation of the Lord's Prayer is, of course, a terrible thing and desecrates the sacred character that the Lord's Prayer takes on during Mass and which helps it always retain its solemn tone. What the Catholic Church achieves in this respect, by speaking in Latin, a language that is incomprehensible to the faithful, can be replaced by the force with which the Lord's Prayer is spoken, because merely reciting the Lord's Prayer does not actually correspond to the grandeur of the Lord's Prayer. Although there should not be the slightest tendency to create a sense that something bordering on magic is being done – the Catholic Church has achieved this through the Latin language – it should be said that the Latin language, in a certain respect, also proves to be non-magical when it comes to nuancing the profound truths of the Lord's Prayer, which should never become trivial. It is true that there is a certain justification for the continued use of the Latin language for certain purposes that were intended to steer humanity away from the personal. But today, what could be given by the Latin language in the Lord's Prayer must be replaced by the power of speaking when praying the Lord's Prayer in front of the community. The believer must hear the Lord's Prayer during the cultic action, precisely because it is his daily prayer, in a way that goes beyond the ordinary measure of language. The Latin language has, after all, recreated the Lord's Prayer in such a way that it is, in a certain sense, a mantram:

Oremus. Praeceptis salutaribus moniti et divina institutione formati, audemus dicere:

Pater noster, qui es in coelis:
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts,
as we also forgive those who owe us debts.
And lead us not into temptation.
But deliver us from evil.

Something must be transferred back from the Latin Lord's Prayer, which already exists in a mantric way, to the Lord's Prayer when it is prayed at the point between transubstantiation and communion during Mass. We will include these things in the Mass at the next Mass rehearsal.

Each of you will read the mass. This expresses what makes each of the priests the same as the other priest before the spiritual world. It is the highest form of democracy in spirit. Thus, what takes place in the spiritual through the formation of the community is fulfilled with the offering of the sacrifice of the Mass, and in the sense of Christianity, the ordination of a priest is actually the only form of initiation. The other religious communities that are not directly Christian, especially the old religious communities, had the degrees, the degrees within the spiritual hierarchy. In a certain sense, such degree initiations can still be introduced today; they have a good purpose. However, they cannot be introduced within a Christian community led by a Christian priesthood. Therefore, what are higher levels in the Christian priesthood are to be understood differently than as higher degrees. As priests, all stand equal. But what must enter into the church are human conditions. Within human conditions, we need a hierarchy of offices; so that where a Christian community is based on properly understood worship, “leadership” and “senior leadership” and so on relate to the order of communities on earth. This must be very carefully distinguished. The Catholic Church has not understood how to make this distinction in the right way, otherwise it should not have regarded, for example, the confirmation as a monopoly of the episcopal dignity. Every priest should be able to administer confirmation. Strict views must prevail in these matters. You see the stricter views sometimes peeping through in history, but at the same time you see confusion in history.

Our time is so far advanced in the development of mankind that you, my dear friends, cannot afford to allow confusion in this direction. For example, you will have to be very strict about the following: If we do things in such a way that a priest appears among us first as an ordained priest and he ordains the others, then in terms of ordination they all become equal to him. If he is also a superior, there is nothing superior in his conferring the ordination on the others. He confers the ordination on the others because he has already become a priest. But what is added is that with the ordination the priest is at the same time installed in office, and that is an earthly act; it is, if I may use a profane word, an administrative act; that must be added. Thus, for example, one can say: Since the one who is appointed as the highest arbiter also has an overview of how the individual priests who are to be ordained are used, it is simplest if he performs the ordinations at the same time, but as a priest he performs the ordination to the priesthood, and as the highest arbiter he establishes the office. This is reflected in history in the famous Investiture Controversy, where the way historians talk about it reveals something terribly confusing, while the distinction between secular office, secular office and incorporation into a spiritual order must be observed. It was simply not possible to properly distinguish between the conferral of the priestly dignity and the conferral of the office. You will see that if the correct understanding of these things takes hold among you from the very beginning, then you will have created a kind of cement for all your connections that would otherwise be lacking.

What I would still like to say today with regard to the reading of the Mass is that the simplicity of the four main parts should be maintained and that insertions should only be made on the most important annual feasts and on certain other occasions, which we will discuss in the next few days. So, of course, a Christmas mass must contain something special in the parts that are not the main parts, as must a Easter mass, a Pentecost mass and a mass that is said for a dead person or a mass that is seen as a somehow otherwise intended celebration.

That is what I wanted to tell you today.

The following lecture was formerly in GA 136 entitled, The Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature, published in German as, Die Geistige Wesenheiten in den Himmelskoerpern und Naturreichen. In Bn/GA 158, it is the 2nd of 12 lectures in the series, The Human's Connection with the Elemental World, published in German as, Der Zusammenhang des Menschen mit der Elementarischen Welt. Kalewala. Olaf Asteson. Das russische Volkstum. Die Welt als Ergebnis von Gleichgewichtswirkungen.

First of all I must apologise to you that I cannot give my lecture in the language of this country. The fact of this lecture being given is in response to the wish of the friends of our Theosophical Society, by whom I have been summoned hither to give a series of lectures lasting a fortnight, and who had the idea of making it possible within that time of adding the two announced public lectures. Hence I must crave your pardon if many of the names and designations which are borrowed from the national epic of the Finns are not rightly pronounced by me who have no language. Only in the lecture of next Friday shall we touch upon Occult Science or Theosophy; the consideration of this evening will rather have to do with a sort of neighbouring realm which in the profoundest sense of the word belongs to the most interesting of human historical considerations, of human historical thought.

The National Epics! We need only to think of some of the well-known national epics, of the epics of Homer, which have become the epics of Greece; of the legends of the Niebelungen in Central Europe; and finally of the Kalevala, and immediately the fact shines forth, that by means of these national epics we are led more deeply into the soul of humanity and the striving of humanity than by any other historical investigation; we are so led into the soul of humanity and the striving of humanity that ancient times are brought powerfully before our souls, as vividly as the present time, but in such a way that they affect us in the immediate present just as the fate aid life of the present day humanity living around us. How uncertain and dim from the historical point of view are the descriptions of the ancient people of Greece of whom the Epics of Homer tell us, and how, when we let the contents of the Iliad—of the Odyssey work upon us, do we look into the souls of those people who are far beyond the grasp of ordinary historical observation! No Wonder that the study of the National Epics is somewhat of a puzzle to those who are occupied with the scientific or literary aspect of them! We need only point to one fact with regard to the Greek Epics, to a fact which has been repeatedly expressed by an enlightened observer of the Iliad in a very beautiful book on Homer's Iliad which appeared only a few years ago,—I mean Hermann Grimm, the nephew of the great philologist of German myths and legends, Jacob Grimm. By letting the figures and facts of the Iliad work upon him, Hermann Grimm is again and again obliged to say: “Oh! this Homer!” We do not need to-day to go into the question of the personality of Homer; When he describes anything which is borrowed from a handicraft, from an art, it is as though he were an expert in that handicraft, in that art. If he describes a battle, a contest, he seems to be perfectly acquainted with all the strategic and military principles which come into consideration in the conduct of war. And rightly does Hermann Grimm point out that a stern judge in such matters, namely Napoleon, was an admirer of the reality of the description of battles in Homer; and he was a man who without doubt was qualified to give an opinion whether or not the military point of view is presented before our souls in a directly expert and vivid way. From the general human standpoint we know how plastically the figures are presented to our soul by Homer as if they were immediately in front of our physical eyes. And how does such a national epic as this continue to manifest itself through the various periods? For truly, he who observes dispassionately will not receive the impression that human artific or pedagogic cult could have maintained all through the centuries up to our own days, interest in the Iliad and the Odyssey,—for this interest is self-evident and universally human. Yet these epics set us in a certain sense a task; directly we study them they present to us a very definite—even an interesting task. They must be taken quite accurately in all their details. We at once feel that there is something obscure in such national epics if we try to read them as we read any modern work of art, a modern novel, or such-like. We feel even at the first lines of the Iliad that Homer speaks with exactitude. What does he describe to us? He tells us even at the beginning what he is describing. Much is known from other descriptions not contained in the Iliad, of events which form the connecting link with the facts of the Iliad. Homer wishes only to describe to us that which he states so pregnantly in the first lines,—the wrath of Achilles. And when we go through the whole of the Iliad and consider it impartially, we have to say to ourselves:—In very deed it contains nothing but what can be shown to be the result of the wrath of Achilles. Further, another peculiar fact appears at the very beginning of the Iliad; Homer does not begin simply with facts, he does not even begin with any personal opinion, but he begins with something which in modern times would perhaps be taken as mere words; he begins by saying:—Sing to me, Oh Muse, of the wrath of Achilles:—And the more deeply we penetrate into this national epic, the more clear does it become to us that we cannot at all understand the sense, and spirit, and meaning of it all unless we take these words at the beginning quite seriously But then we have to ask ourselves:—What do they actually mean?

And now to consider the manner of representation; the whole way in which the events are brought before our souls! For many, not only professional students, but even for artistic spirits like Hermann Grimm, there was a question in those words “Sing to me, oh muse, of the wrath of Achilles,” a question which penetrated deeply into the heart. How in this Iliad, as well as in the Niebelungen or in the Kalevala, are the deeds of spiritual-divine Beings—in Homer's poems chiefly the deeds and purposes and passions of the Olympic Gods—enacted in unison with the deeds, purposes and passions of men, men who like Achilles are far removed in a certain sense from ordinary humanity, and again with the passions, purposes and deeds of men who are nearer to ordinary humanity like Odysseus, or Agamennon? When Achilles appears before our souls, he appears to us to stand alone among the human beings with whom he lives; as the Iliad continues, we very soon feel that in Achilles we have before us a personality who feels himself unable to discuss his inner life with the other heroes. Homer also brings before us how Achilles has to settle his real affairs of the heart with divine spiritual beings who do not belong to the human kingdom; how the whole way through the Iliad he stands alone with regard to the human kingdom, and on the other hand stands close to super-sensible, superhuman powers. On the other hand how strange it is, that when we focus all our human feelings in the form and manner of thinking and perceiving we have acquired in the process of civilisation, and then direct our gaze towards this Achilles, he often appears such that we are obliged to say: How egotistical! How self-centred! A being in whose soul divine-spiritual impulses are at work acts, absolutely from personal motives for a long time, so important a war for the Greeks as the Trojan war of legend, was only carried on, only produced the special episodes which are described in the Iliad because Achilles fought out for himself what he personally had to fight out with Agamemnon. And we continually see superhuman powers taking part; we see Zeus, Apollo, Athene imparting the impulses, allotting to the people, so to speak, their places. It was always remarkable to me before I took up the task of approaching these matters from the standpoint of Occult Science or Theosophy, how a very intellectual man such as Hermann Grimm with whom I had often the pleasure of personally discussing this matter, should look at these things as he did. Not only in his writings but often in personal conversation, and then much more exactly expressed he used to say: “If we only take into consideration what historical powers and impulses perform in the evolution of humanity, we do not succeed in getting at what lives and creates there, especially in the great national epics.” Hence, for Hermann Grimm, the intellectual student of the Iliad and the national poems, there was something which transcends the ordinary powers of human consciousness, the intellectual, reasoning sense-perception, the ordinary feelings; something which was for him a real power as creative as the other historical impulses. Hermann Grimm spoke of an actual creative imagination permeating human evolution just as one speaks of a being, of a reality, of something which governs man and could say more to him at the beginning of the ages which we are able to observe, which could say more to him during the development and growth of the individual races that what the ordinary soul-forces mean to man. Thus Hermann Grimm always spoke of the creative imagination as the glimmering of a world which does not expend itself in the ordinary human soul-forces; an imagination which to him in some way fulfilled the role of a co-creator in the process of human development. It is strange however, that when we consider this field of battle in the Iliad, when we consider this description of the wrath of Achilles with all the interaction of the super-sensible, divine spiritual powers, we do not arrive at such an opinion as Hermann Grimm has; and in his book on the Iliad itself we find many a word of resignation which shows us that the ordinary point of view which is taken to-day in a literary or scientific way is not reconcilable with these matters. What does Hermann Grimm arrive at with regard to the Iliad and the Niebelungen saga? He ends by assuming that the historical dynasties, the races of rulers were preceded by other such races; this is literally what he thinks. Thus he considers that probably Zeus and his whole circle represent a sort of race of rulers which had preceded the race of rulers to which Agamemnon belonged. Thus he considers that there is a certain uniformity in the history of humanity, so to speak; he considers that in the Iliad or Niebelungen saga are represented Gods or Heroes of primeval humanity whom later humanity only attempted to represent by clothing their deeds, their characters, in the dress of superhuman myths. There is much that one cannot reconcile if one takes as a basis such an hypothesis, above all the special form of the intervention of the Gods in Homer. Let us take one case. How do Thetis the mother of Achilles, Athene, and other figures of the Gods intervene in the events in Troy? They so intervene by taking the forms of mortal men, inspiring them as it were, leading them on to their deeds. Thus they do not appear themselves, but permeate living men. Living men were not only their representatives but sheaths permeated by invisible powers which could not appear in their own form, in their own being on the field of battle. Yet it would be strange to admit that primeval men of the ordinary kind should be so represented that they had to take representative men of the race of mortals as a sheath. This is only an intimation which can prove to us all that in this way we shall not arrive at a true understanding of the ancient national epics. Just as little shall we succeed if we take the figures in the Niebelungen saga, Siegfried of Xanten on the lower Rhine who was removed to the Burgundian court at Worms, who then wooed Kriemhilde the sister of Gunther, but who by virtue of his special qualities can alone woo Brunnhilde. And in what a remarkable way are described such figures as Brunnhilde of Iceland, and Siegfried: Siegfried is described as having conquered the so-called family of the Niebelungen, as having acquired, won, the treasure of the Niebelungen, By means of what he has acquired through his victory over the Niebelungen, he gains special qualities which are expressed in the epic when it is said that he can make himself invisible, that he is invulnerable in a certain respect, that he has, moreover, forces which the ordinary Gunther has not! For the latter cannot win Brunnhilde who is not to be conquered by an ordinary mortal. By means of his special powers which he has as the possessor of the treasure of the Niebelungen Siegfried conquers Brunnhilde, and on the other hand, because he can conceal the powers which he has developed, he is in a position to lead Brunnhilde to Gunther his brother-in-law. And then we find how Kriemhilde and Brunnhilde whom we meet at the same time at the Burgundian court are two very different characters—characters in whom obviously forces are at work which are not to be explained by the ordinary soul forces. Therefore they quarrelled, and therefore also it came about that Brunnhilde was able to seduce the faithful servant Hagen to kill Siegfried. That again shows us a feature which appears so remarkably in the Sagas of Central Europe. Siegfried has higher superhuman forces; these superhuman forces he has through the possession of the treasures of the Niebelungen. Finally they make of him not an absolutely victorious figure, but a figure which stands before us as a tragedy. The powers which Siegfried possesses through the treasures of the Niebelungen are at the same time a fatality. Still more remarkable do things become if we take in addition the Northern Saga of Sigurd, the slayer of the dragon, but this is enlightening. In this, Sigurd, who is none other than Siegfried, appears as the conqueror of the dragon; as he who thereby wins from an ancient race of dwarfs the treasures of the Niebelunger. And Brunnhilde meets us as a figure of a superhuman nature, as a Valkyrie figure.

Thus we see that there existed in Europe two ways of representing these things; the one which directly connects everything with the divine-super-sensible, which shows us that in Brunnhilde is meant something which belongs directly to the super-sensible world; and the other way which represents the sagas in a human form. But we recognise even here, how the Divine resounds through everything.

And now from these sagas, these national epics, let us glance into that realm of which I really ought to speak only as one who can look at things from outside; only in such a way as one can understand them if one does not speak the language in question. I beg you to take into consideration that with regard to everything which in the Kalevala has to do with Western Europe, I can only speak as one who fixes his eyes on the spiritual contents—the great, mighty figures, and whose observation of course the undoubted fineness of the epic which can only appear when one has mastered the language in which it was written, must escape. But even in such a consideration how characteristically do we encounter the Trinity in the three—it is difficult to use a name for them; one can not say Gods, one cannot say Heroes, so we will say—in the three beings whom we encounter:—Väinemöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäinen. These figures utter a remarkable language when we compare them in character with one another; a language in which we recognise that the things which are to be said to us surpass what can be accomplished with the ordinary soul-forces. If we only consider these three forms externally, how they increase till they become monstrous! And yet it is peculiar that while they increase to the point of monstrosity, every individual feature stands before our eyes, so that in nowise have we any feeling that the monstrosity is grotesque, or a paradox; everywhere we have the feeling that of course that which has to be said must appear in superhuman size, in superhuman significance. And then what enigmas in the contents! Something which spurs on our souls to think of all that is must human, but which on the other hand, surpasses all that the ordinary powers of the soul can grasp. Ilmarinen, whom one often calls the Smith, the clever, artistic smith, forges for a region in which dwell the—so to speak elder brothers of humanity, or at least more primitive humanity than the Finns, forges for a strange region at the instigation of Väinemöinen, the Sampo. And we next see this remarkable thing, namely, that far from the field of action on which the facts take place of which we are speaking, many things are happening; we see how time goes by; and we see how after a definite time, Väinemöinen and Ilmarinen are induced to fetch back that which has remained in the strange land—the Sampo. He who lets the peculiar spiritual language work upon him which speaks in the forging of the Sampo, in the removal of it, and the regaining of it, has directly the impression—I must beg you to consider that I am speaking as a stranger, and as such can only speak of the impression—that the most essential thing in this magnificent poem is the forging, the removal, and the later recovery of the Sampo. And what affects me very specially and remarkably in the Kalevala is the ending. I have heard that there are people who believe that this ending is perhaps, a later addition. I feel that this ending of Mariata and her son, this entry as it were, of a very remarkable Christianity into the epic—I say expressly a very remarkable form of Christianity—belongs to the whole; and because this ending is there, the Kalevala gains a very special “nuance”, a colouring, which can so to speak, make the whale matter comprehensible to us. I may say that to my idea, such a delicate, impersonal representation of Christianity is nowhere to be found as in the ending of the Kalevala. The Christian principle is detached from anything local, the coming of Mariata to Herod, who is called Rotus in Kalevala, is expressed so impersonally that one is scarcely reminded of any locality or personality in Palestine. Indeed one might say, one is not once reminded of the historical Christ Jesus. As a most intimate concern of the heart of humanity, we find delicately indicated at the end of Kalevala the penetration of the most precious pearl of civilisation into the civilisation of Finland. And with it is connected the tragic touch which can work so deeply upon our souls, that at the moment when Christianity enters, when the Son of Mariata is baptised, Väinemöinen bids farewell to his people in order to go to an undefined locality, leaving to his people only the purport and power of that, which as a bard he had been enabled to relate of the primeval events which were included in the history of this people. This withdrawal of Väinemöinen before the Son of Mariata seems to me so significant that one might see therein the living cooperation of all that which fundamentally governed the Finnish race, the Nation-soul of the Finns, from primeval times up to the moment when Christianity found admittance into Finland; and this primeval force relates itself tom Christianity in such a way-that everything which was then enacted in the soul can be felt with wonderful intimacy. That I state as something of the objectivity of which I am conscious, something which I could never state to give pleasure in the way of flattery. We in the West of Europe have in these national epics one of the most wonderful examples of how the members of a race actually live before us in the immediate present, with their complete souls; so that through Kalevala, Western Europe learns to know the soul of Finland in such a way as to become perfectly familiar with it.

Why have I said all this? I have said it in order to characterise how in the national epics something speaks which cannot be explained through ordinary soul-forces, even if one speaks of imagination as a real power. And if, to many what is said sounds only like an hypothesis, so may that which Occult Science or Anthroposophy has to say with regard to the being of these national epics, so may the same perhaps be alleged with regard to this consideration of the national epics. Certainly I am conscious that what I have to say aims at something to which in our present day few can give their assent. Much of it will probably be regarded as fancy, as imagination; but some will at least accept it among other hypotheses which are brought forward with regard to the growth of humanity. But for those who penetrate into spiritual science as I shall permit myself to describe it in the next lecture, for them it is not an hypothesis, but an actual result of scientific investigation. The things sound strange which have to be said, because that scientific method which is to-day believed to stand quite firmly on the ground of facts, of truth, of the attainable, restricts itself to what is perceived by the external senses, to what the intellect connected with the senses and the brain can tell of things. And to-day it is simply regarded as unscientific if a method of investigation is spoken of which employs other forces of the soul, forces whereby it is possible to look into the super-sensible, at the interplay of the super-sensible with the sensible. By this method of investigation, by Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy, one is led not merely to the abstract imaginings to which Hermann Grimm was led with regard to the national epics, but one is led to something which far surpasses imagination, which represents quite a different condition of soul or consciousness from that which man can have at the present point of time in his evolution. And thus by means of Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy, we are led back in quite a different way to human antiquity than by ordinary science. Ordinary science is accustomed to-day so to look retrospectively at the growth of humanity that what we call man to-day has gradually developed from lower, animal-like creations. Spiritual science does not at all pretend to combat this modern investigation, but acknowledges fully the magnitude and the power of the acquisitions of this natural science of the 19th century: it acknowledges the importance of the idea of a transformation of animal forms from the most imperfect to the perfect; and it acknowledge the connection between the external human form and the most perfect animal form; but it cannot at all remain at such a view of the growth of humanity, of the growth of the organism as would be presented if with an external material gaze one could view that which has been accomplished in the course of the earth's happenings in the organic world up to man. For spiritual science, the humanity of today stands beside the animal world. We look into the world which surrounds us, at the various animal forms; we look at the—in a certain way—uniform human race distributed over the earth; in spiritual science we too have unprejudiced views of the fact that in the external form everything tells in favour of the relationship of man with other organisms on the earth; but in spiritual science, when we trace the growth of humanity backwards, we cannot do so in such a way that in the grey antiquity we let the stream of humanity flow directly into the animal train of evolution. Indeed we find if we go back from the present to the past that nowhere can we directly rank the present human form, the present man, as arising out of any animal form which we know in the present. If we go back into the evolution of humanity, we find first of all—one might say—the soul-forces, the forces of intellect feeling and will, which we have in the present day developed in man in more and more primitive form. Then we get back to hoary antiquity of which ancient documents tells us so little. Even when we go back as far as the Egyptians, or the early Asiatic races, we are led back everywhere into a primeval humanity which—certainly in a more primitive but yet in a great and noble form—has the same forces, the forces of feeling, intellect and will, which of course have only found their present-day development towards the present time, but which we discover as the most powerful impulses of humanity, as the most powerful historic impulses so far as we can trace humanity backwards when we take the present-day soul into consideration. Nowhere do we find it possible to place even the most remote human race in a special relationship with the present-day animal forms. This, which spiritual science must assert is recognised to-day by thoughtful investigators of nature. But when we go further back, and consider how the human soul has changed, when we compare how a present-day man—let us say—thinks scientifically or otherwise, how he uses his intellect and his mental powers,—when we trace that back, we can trace it fairly accurately; it first teamed forth in humanity at a definite time—we might say that it shone forth in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ. The collective configuration of the present-day feelings and thoughts does not actually reach back further than to that time which is recorded as the period of the first Greek natural philosophy.

If we go back still further, and have a sufficiently unprejudiced view we find without reference to occult science, that not only does all present-day scientific thought cease, but we find that the human soul in general is in quite a different condition, in a much more-impersonal condition; and also in such a condition that we have to describe its powers as much more instinctive. Not indeed as if we meant to say that before this time men acted from such instincts as the present-day animals have, but that guidance by the reason and intellect as it exists to-day was not there then; instead of it there was a certain instinctive, direct certainty in man; he acted from direct elementary impulses, he was not then controlled by the intellect connected with the brain. And then of course we find that in the human soul those forces still ruled unalloyed which we have now detached as the forces of intellect on the one hand, and those forces which to-day we carefully separate from the forces leading to intellectuality and science, the forces namely, of imagination. Imagination, intellect and reason worked simultaneously in those old times. The further we go back, the more do we find that what then ruled in the soul of man, what then worked, was not separated into imagination and intellect; we ought no longer to describe it as we designate a soul-force to-day when we speak of imagination. We know quite well to-day that when we speak of imagination we are speaking of a soul-power whose expressions we cannot really make use of, to which we cannot ascribe reality. The modern man is careful in this matter; he takes care not to confuse what imagination gives him with what the logic of reason tells him. If we look at that which the spirit of man manifested in those pre-historic times, before imagination and intellect were separated, then we can perceive a primeval, elementary, instinctive force ruling in the soul. In its characteristics we can find the present-day imagination, but—if we may use the expression—what at that time gave imagination to the human soul had something to do with an actuality, a reality; imagination was not yet imagination; it was still—I must not shrink from using the expression directly—clairvoyant power, was still a special capacity of the soul, the gift of the soul whereby men saw things, facts, which to-day in his epoch of civilisation when intellect and reason are to be specially developed, are hidden. More deeply did those forces which were not imagination but clairvoyant powers, penetrate into the hidden forces of existence, into the forms of existence which lie behind the sense-world. It is to this that an unprejudiced consideration must lead us when we consider the evolution of humanity retrospectively. We have to say to ourselves:—Truly we must take the world evolution, development, seriously. That the humanity of the present day has come in the last hundreds and thousands of years to its present lofty powers of reason and intellect, is a result of evolution. These soul-forces have been developed out of others. And whilst these, our present soul-forces are limited to the impressions received from the external sense-world, a primeval humanity who laid no claim to science in the present-day sense, or to the use of the intellect in the present-day sense, a primeval human soul-power at the basis of every individual race saw into the background of existence, into a realm which as a super-sensible lies behind the sensible. In all peoples clairvoyant powers were once the property of the human soul, and out of these clairvoyant powers have been developed the present-day powers of human intellect and reason—the present manner of thinking and feeling. Those soul-forces which we have to describe as clairvoyant were such that man felt at the same time:—It is not I myself which thinks in me, feels in me. Man felt as if entirely subjected physically and spiritually to higher super-sensible powers which worked and lived within him. Man felt himself to be a vessel by means of which super-sensible powers expressed themselves. If one considers that, then one also grasps the meaning of the progressive evolution of humanity. Man would have remained a dependent being who would only have felt himself as a vessel, as the sheath of powers and beings had he not progressed to the proper use of intellect and reason. Man has become more independent by the use of intellect and reason, but at the same time has been cut off for a short period of his evolution, from the spiritual world in a certain respect, cut off from the super-sensible background of existence. In the future it will be different again. The further we go back, the further does the human soul by means of the clairvoyant forces see into the background of existence, see how, out of this background of existence those forces have also emerged which have worked on man himself in pre-historic times, up to a point of time in which all the relations of the earth were still quite different from what they are to-day, when they were such that the forms of living beings were much more changeable, much more subject to a sort of metamorphosis than they are now. Thus we must go back far beyond that which one at present calls the period of human civilisation, we must trace human development and animal development side by side. And lying much farther back than is usually believed to-day, is the separation of the animal forms from the human. The animal then became rigid, more immovable, at a time in which the human form was supple and flexible, and could be modeled and impressed by that which was experienced inwardly in the soul. Then indeed we come back to a period in the development of humanity which did not reach the consciousness of the present day, but in which another consciousness existed in the soul, which was in connection with the clairvoyant forces which have just been described. Such a consciousness which could survey the past, and which saw the development of humanity emerging from the past into complete separation from all animal life, this consciousness also saw how the human forces ruled, but still in active connection with the super-sensible forces which acted with them; it saw that which in the times, for instance, when Homer's epics arose, existed only as an ancient echo, and which in still earlier times existed in much greater measure. If we go back beyond Homer we find that men had clairvoyant consciousness, which as it were, recollected human pre-historic events, and in the recollection was able to relate the circumstances of human development. In Homer's time the circumstances were such that one felt that the ancient clairvoyant consciousness was disappearing; but one still felt that it existed. It was a period in which man did not speak from himself as an independent ego-being, but in which the Gods, super-sensible, spiritual powers, spoke out of him. Thus we must take it seriously as if Homer were not speaking of himself when he says “Sing to me oh Muse, of the wrath of Achilles”; “Let a higher being sing within me, who takes possession of me when I sing and speak.” This first line of Homer is a reality. Thus we are not referred to ancient dynasties of rulers who in the ordinary sense resemble present-day humanity, butt we are referred by Homer to the fact that in primeval times there was a different humanity, in whom the super-sensible lived. Achilles is absolutely a personality of the transition period from the ancient clairvoyant to that modern mode of vision which we find in Agamemnon, in Nestor and Odysseus, and which is then led on to a higher vision. We can only comprehend Achilles when we know that Homer wished to represent in him one belonging to the ancient humanity who lived in a time which lies between that period when man still reached directly up to the ancient Gods, and the present-day humanity which indeed begins with Agamemnon. Just in this same way we are referred to a human antiquity in the Niebelungen Saga of Central Europe. The whole representation of this epic shows us that in it we have not do with men of our present time, in a certain respect, but with such men of out present time who have still presented something from the period of ancient clairvoyance. All the qualities of which Siegfried had command, whereby he could make himself invisible, whereby he had the power to conquer Brunnhilde who could not be conquered by an ordinary mortal—side by side with the others of which we are informed in him, show us that in him we have a man who has brought over into present-day humanity as if in an inner human remembrance, the achievement of the ancient soul-powers which were connected with clairvoyance and the union with Nature. At what period of transition does Siegfried stand? That is shown to us in Brunnhilde's relation to Kriemhilde, the wife of Siegfried. What the two figures signify cannot be more clearly worked out here, but we shall understand all the sagas if in the forms which are brought before us, we see symbolical representations of inner clairvoyant, or remembered clairvoyant relations. Thus, in Siegfried's relation to Kriemhilde, we have to see his relation to his own soul forces which govern within him. His soul is in a certain measure a transitional soul, because with the treasures of the Niebelungen, that is, the clairvoyant secrets of the ancient times, Siegfried brought over into the new period something which at the same time made him quite unfit for his present time. The men of ancient time could thus live with these treasures of the Niebelungen, that is, with the ancient clairvoyant powers. The Earth has altered her conditions. Hence, Siegfried, who still carries within his soul an echo of the ancient ages, does not fit into the present time, hence he is a tragic figure. How can the present age stand in relation to what is still active in Siegfried? Something of the ancient clairvoyant powers are still active in him; for when he is overcome, Kriemhilde remains behind; the treasure of the Neibelunge is brought to her, she can make use of it. We learn how later, the treasure of the Niebelungen is taken from her by Hagen. We can see that Brunnhilde also is in a certain way capable of working with the old clairvoyant forces. Hence she stands in opposition to those human beings who are suited to the present time—Gunther and his brothers, Gunther above all, of whom Brunnhilde thinks nothing. Why is that? We know from the saga that Brunnhilde is a kind of Valkyrie figure, there we have something again in the human soul: and indeed that with which in ancient times the clairvoyant powers in man could still be united, but which has withdrawn from man, which has become unconscious, so that man as he lives in the present day in the age of intellect, can only be united with it after death. Hence the union with the Valkyrie at the moment of death. The Valkyrie is the personification of active soul-forces to which the ancient clairvoyant consciousness attained, but which present-day man only experiences when he passes through the gates of death. Only then is he united with this soul which is represented in Brunnhilde. Because Kriemhilde knew something from the ancient time of clairvoyance, and knew something of the powers which the soul receives through the old clairvoyance, she is a figure whose wrath is described as the wrath of Achilles is described in the Iliad. It is amply indicated that the men who in the ancient times were still gifted with clairvoyant powers were not controlled by the intellect, did not let the intellect rule, but worked directly from their most elementary, most intense impulses. Hence the personal element, the direct egoism of Kriemhilde, as of Achilles.

The whole matter of consideration of the national epics becomes specially interesting when we add the Kalevala to those already mentioned: We shall be able to show (to-day it can only be indicated owing to the shortness of time) that spiritual science in the present day can point to the ancient clairvoyant condition of humanity only because it is becoming possible again now—of course in a higher manner permeated by intellect, not as in a dream—to call forth the clairvoyant condition by means of spiritual education. The man of the present day is gradually growing again into an age in which from the depths of the human soul hidden forces which again point into the super-sensible,—of course henceforth guided by reason, not left uncontrolled by it—will grow up, when man will be guided into super-sensible regions; so that we shall again learn to know the region of which the ancient national epics speak to us from the dim consciousness of ancient times. Hence we can say:—One learns to know that it is possible to attain to a manifestation of the world not merely by means of the external senses, but by means of something super-sensible which lies behind the external physical human body. There are methods—of which we are to speak in the next lecture—by means of which man can make the spiritual, super-sensible inner being, that which is so often denied to-day, independent of the sensible, external body, so that man, when he is independent of his body lives not in an unconscious condition as in sleep, but perceives the spiritual world around him. Hence modern clairvoyance proves to man the possibility of living consciously in a higher super-sensible body which fills the ordinary body like a vessel. In spiritual science it is called the etheric or ether body. This etheric body lies within our sense body. By means of it we come even to-day, when we inwardly detach it from the physical sense body, into that condition of perception whereby we become aware of super-sensible facts. We become aware of two kinds of super-sensible facts. First of all, at the beginning of this clairvoyant condition we become aware of the super-sensible when we begin to know that we no longer see by means of our physical body, we no longer hear through our physical body, we no longer think by means of the brain connected with the physical body. Then we still know next to nothing of all the external world—I am telling you just the facts, the more exact proofs of which will only be possible in the next lecture—we know next to nothing of an external world. On the other hand, the first stage of clairvoyance leads us so much the more to a view of our own etheric body; we see a super-sensible body of human nature which underlies it, and we can only express it as something which works and creates like a sort of inner master-builder—which permeates our physical body in a living, active manner. And then we become aware of the following:—

We become aware that what we perceive in ourselves as the true activity of the etheric body is, on the one hand limited, modified by our physical body; that it is as it were, clothed on the physical side, the etheric body as it were filling and giving shape to eyes and ears, and to the physical brain; thereby be belong in a certain measure to the earthly element. In this way we perceive how the etheric body becomes a special, individual, egotistical human being sheathed in the physical body. But on the other hand we perceive how this our etheric body leads us into those regions where we encounter impersonally something higher, something super-sensible, something which is not us, but which is present in us at this very time, which works through us as spiritual, super-sensible power and force. Hence, according to the consideration of spiritual science, the inner soul life is divided for us into three principles which are as it were, enclosed in three external sheaths, filling them. In the first place, we live in such connection with our soul that in it we experience that which our eyes see, our ears hear, our senses can grasp, what our intellect can comprehend; we live with our souls in our physical body. In so far as our soul lives in the physical body, in occult science we call it the spiritual (or consciousness) soul, because only through a complete familiarity with the physical body has it become possible in the course of human development for man to advance onwards to the “I” consciousness. Then specially does the modern clairvoyant also learn to know the life of the soul in that which we have called the etheric body. The soul so lives in the etheric body that it certainly has its forces, but the soul forces so work there that we cannot say:—these are our personal forces; they are universal, human forces, they are forces through which we stand much closer to the collective hidden facts of Nature. In so far as the soul perceives these forces in an external sheath, in the etheric body, do we speak of the intellectual soul, or rational soul as the second soul principle. So that just as we have the consciousness soul enclosed in the sheath of the physical body, so have we the intellectual or rational soul enclosed in the etheric body. And then we have a still finer body, by means of which we reach up into the super-sensible world. Everything that we experience inwardly as our own original secrets, as well as that which to-day is concealed from the consciousness, and which in the time of the old clairvoyance was perceived as the growing forces in the process of human evolution, which was so perceived as if one could look back at the events of hoary antiquity,—all this we assign to the sentient soul, assign it to this, so that it is enclosed in the finest human body, in that which we call the astral body—please do not take offence at this expression, but accept it as a technical term .I t is that part of the being of man which as it were, in him connects the external, earthly part with that which works inspiringly in his inner being, that which he cannot perceive with his external sense, cannot even perceive when he looks through his own inner being into the etheric body, but which he can perceive when he is independent of himself, of the etheric body, and is connected with the forces of his origin. Thus we have the sentient soul in the astral body, the intellectual or rational soul in the etheric body, and the spiritual or consciousness soul in the physical body. In the times of the old clairvoyance these things were more or less instinctively known to man, for they looked into themselves, they saw this three-principled soul-being. Not that they had by the use of reason analysed the soul, but when they had clairvoyant consciousness, the three-principled soul stood before them; the sentient soul in the astral body the intellectual soul in the etheric body, and the consciousness soul in the physical body. And when they looked back, they saw how the external part of man, the outer form—when the animal forms had long before hardened—developed out of what we encounter to-day in its results as the three-fold soul forces. Then they perceived that this threefold organisation is born from super-sensible, creative powers; they perceived that the sentient soul is born from super-sensible, creative powers which gave the astral body to man, that body which he not only has like his etheric and physical bodies between birth and death, but which he takes with him when he passes through the gates of death, and which he already had before he entered into existence through birth. Thus the old clairvoyant saw the sentient soul connected with the astral body; and that which, so to speak works inspiringly on man from the spiritual worlds and creates his astral body, they saw as the first creative force which built up man from the Cosmic whole. And as a second creative force they saw that, the result of which we have to-day in the intellectual or rational soul, and which so created the etheric body that this etheric body transforms all external substance, all external matter, so that it, can permeate the physical human form, in the human, and not in the animal sense. The creative spirit for the etheric body which in its results appears in our intellectual soul, was seen by the old clairvoyants as a superhuman Cosmic Power, working in man somewhat like magnetism in physical matter. They looked up into the spiritual worlds, saw the divine, spiritual power which framed, forged the etheric body of man, so that this etheric body became the master-builder which transforms external matter, breaks it up, pulverises it, grinds it, so that what formerly existed as matter is organised into man, and man receives human capabilities. The old clairvoyant saw how this creative power remodelled all matter in an artistic way, so that it could become human matter. Then again, they looked upon the third, upon the spiritual or consciousness soul which really makes the ego-man, which is the transformation of the physical body, and they ascribed those powers which rule in the physical body solely to the line of heredity, to that which is derived from father and mother, from grandfather and grandmother and great-grandfather, in short, to that which is the result of the human powers of love, of the human powers of propagation. In that they saw the third creative power. The power of love works from generation to generation. The old clairvoyant looked up to three powers, to a creative being who ultimately calls forth the sentient soul, in that it fashions the astral body in man which man had before he became a physical being through conception, the body which man will have when he has passed through the gates of death. This structure of forces—we might rather say—this heavenly structure in man which lasts on when the etheric body and physical body pass away, was at the same time to the old clairvoyants their direct experience proved this—that which could bring all culture and civilisation into human life. Therefore in the producer of the astral body they saw that power which brings in the divine, which itself only consists of the permanent, and by means of which the Eternal rings and resounds into the world. And the old clairvoyants from whom—I say it without fear—the characters in Kalevala have sprung, have represented in Väinemöinen the active, plastic form of that creative power whose results we encounter in the sentient soul which inspires the divine in man, Väinemöinen is the creator of that principle of the human body which endures beyond birth and death, and which brings the divine into the earthly. And we look at the second figure in Kalevala, Ilmarinen; if we go back to the old clairvoyant consciousness, we find that Ilmarinen brings forth everything that is copy or image, in his active moulding of the etheric body, from out of the forces of the earth, and from that which does not belong to the material earth, but to its deeper forces. We see in Ilmarinen the producer of that which fashions and grinds matter. We see in him the forger of the human form. And we see in the Sampo, the human etheric body, forged by Ilmarinen out of the super-sensible world, whereby material matter is pulverised, and can then be tarried on from generation to generation, so that in the powers which are given by the third super-sensible divine being, through the powers of love continued from generation to generation, the human spiritual or consciousness soul works on further in the human physical body. We see this third super-sensible divine power in Lemminkäinen. And thus in the forging of the Sampo we see the profound mysteries of the origin of humanity. We see profound mysteries from the ancient clairvoyant consciousness at the back of Kalevala, and thus we look back into human antiquity of which we have to say; that was not the age when one could have analysed the phenomena of Nature by means of the intellect; everything was primitive; but in the primitive lived the perception of what stands behind the material. Now it was so that when these bodies of man were forged, especially when the etheric body of man—the Sampo, was forged that it had first to be wrought upon for a time; did not at once possess the forces which were prepared for him by the super-sensible powers. Whilst the etheric body was being forged, it had first to grow accustomed to itself inwardly; just as when a machine is being prepared it must first be made ready, them as it were, fully matured, in order to be made use of. In human development—this shown in all evolution—there had always to be an interval between the creation of the principle in question, and the using of it. Thus man's etheric body was fashioned in remote primitive times; then came an episode when this etheric body was being sent down into human nature. Only later did it shine out as the intellectual soul, and man learnt to use his powers as external powers of nature; he brought forth from his own nature the Sampo which had remained concealed. We see symbolically in a wonderful way this secret development in the forging of the Sampo, in the concealment of it, in the inefficiency of the Sampo, in the episode which lies between the forging, and the rediscovery of it. We see the Sampo first sunk into human nature, then brought forth to the external powers of civilisation, which appear first as primitive forces just as they are described in the second part of Kalevala. Thus everything in this great national epic gains a profound significance when we see in it clairvoyant descriptions of the ancient occurrences in human development, of the coming into being of human nature in its various principles. I can assure you that to me who only learnt to understand Kalevala long, long after these facts regarding the development of human nature stood clearly before my soul, it was a wonderful, amazing fact to find again in this epic that which I had been able to represent more or less theoretically in my “Theosophy”, which was written at a time when as yet I knew not a line of Kalevala.

And thus we see how the secrets of mankind appear in that which Väinemöinen gives, he who was the creator of super-sensible inspiration, the history namely, of the fashioning of the etheric body. But there is yet another secret concealed. Now mark, I understand nothing of Finnish, I can only speak from spiritual science. I should be able to express the word “Sampo” only by endeavouring to form a word which could be formed in the following way:—In the animals we see the etheric body so active that it becomes the master-builder of the most varied forms, from the most imperfect to the most perfect. Into the human etheric body was forged something which collected all these animal forms as in a unity, with the one exception only, that over the earth the etheric body, that is the Sampo, is fashioned according to climatic and other conditions, so that this etheric body has the special national character, the special national peculiarities in its forces, so that it forms one nation differently from another. The Sampo is, to every nation that which determines the special form of the etheric body; which so places this special nationality in life that its members have the same appearance as regards that which shines out through them, through life-being, and physical-being. Just as similarity of appearance in the human form is modeled from the etheric, so do the forces of the etheric body lie in the Sampo. Thus in the Sampo we have the symbol of the cohesion of the Finnish people; that which in the depths of human nature has made the Finnish nationality assume a definite form.

But it is so with every national epic. National epics only arise when the culture is still enclosed in the forces of the Sampo, in the forces of the etheric body. As long as the culture depends upon the forces of the Sampo, so long does the nation bear the stamp of this Sampo. Hence this etheric body bears in all culture the national character, the nationality. When, in the course of the process of civilisation was it possible for a breach to occur in this nationality, this national character? It could occur when something entered into the process of civilisation which was not for one man, for one family, for one nation, but for the whole of humanity; which came froth from such depths of human nature, from such fine and intimate depths (and is then incorporated with the process of civilisation) that it influenced all mankind without distinction of nationality, of race, and so on. And that was given when those powers spoke to mankind which do not speak to a nation, but to the whole of humanity; those powers which are so impersonally alluded to even in the national sense, so finely and so delicately at the end of Kalevala, when the Christ is born in Mariata. When He is baptised, Väinemöinen leaves the land, for something has entered which connects the special national character with the universal-human. And here at this point where one of the most significant, most pregnant, most magnificent national epics ends in the description, the wholly impersonal—pardon the paradoxical expression—un-Palestine-like description of the Christ-impulse, then Kalevala becomes very specially significant. Here we are led specially into that which can be perceived when the benefits, the felicity of the Sampo are actively experienced as continuing to work through all human development, and at the same time in co-operation with the Christian idea, the Christian impulse. That is the infinite delicacy at the end of Kalevala, it is also that which explains to us clearly that what preceded this conclusion belongs to pre-Christian times. But as truly as universal humanity will only continue by preserving its individual character, so truly will the individual national civilisations which derive their being from the old clairvoyant conditions of the people, continue to live in the universal human; so truly will everything which is indicated at the end of Kalev as pertaining to the Christ, always be connected, keep up its special results through the endless working referred to in the inspirations of Väinemöinen. For Väinemöinen means something which belongs to that part of the human being which is raised above birth and death, which passes with man through the whole of human development. Thus, such epics as Kalevala represent something to us which is immortal, which can be permeated by the Christian conception, but which will make itself of value as something individual, and will always furnish the proof that the universal-human will continue to live in the many national civilisations just as the white light of the sun breaks up into many colours. And because this universal-human permeates the individual in the being of the national epic, and illuminates every man, therefore the individualities of the nations live so strongly in the spirit of their national epics. Therefore do the men of ancient times appear so vividly before our eyes, who, in their clairvoyance have looked upon the Beings of their own nationality as described in all the epics, and where it is still so wonderfully brought home to us in the conditions which surround humanity in its intimate life and nature as they exist in the Finnish nation; in the representation of that which lies in the depths of the soul, so that it can, as it were, be placed side by side with the latest revelations of spiritual science of the mysteries of humanity. At the same time, such national epics are in their very being a living protest against all materialism, against all derivation of man from merely external forms, material conditions, material beings. Such national epics, especially Kalevala, inform us that man has his origin and primitive state in the spiritual; therefore a renewal, a re-fructification of the old national epics in the most active sense of spiritual culture, can perform immeasurably great service. For as Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy to-day desires above all the renewal of human consciousness in the direction which roots humanity not in matter but in spirit, so an accurate consideration of such an epic as Kalevala shows us that the best which man has, the best that man is, is derived from the spirit-soul world. In this sense it was interesting to me that one of the Runic writings, the “Kantela,” raises a direct protest against interpreting the Kalevala in a materialistic sense. That instrument, that kind of harp, to which the ancient bards sang in olden times, is alluded to in the representation as if it were formed from the material of the physical world; but the ancient Runic writings protested in the sense of spiritual science, one might say, that the stringed instrument for Väinemöinen was not constructed of natural products which are visible to the senses. In reality, say the ancient Runic writings—the instrument upon which men played the melodies which came to him straight from the spiritual world, was derived from the spirit-soul world. In this sense the ancient Runic writings are to be explained in quite an occult sense as an active protest against the interpretation in a material sense, of what man may become; an indication that that which man possesses, that which is his being, and that which is only symbolically expressed in such an instrument as that ascribed to Väinemöinen that such an instrument is derived from spirit, and with it the whole being of man. The old Finnish Folk-Rune which is translated into German as follows, may serve us as a motto for the principles of occult science, and sums up in main outline and colouring what I was desirous of expounding in this lecture on the subject of the national epics.

“They certainly speak falsely and are in error, who believe that Väinemöinen fashioned the Kantela, our beautiful stringed instrument, from the jawbone of the like, and spun the strings from the tail of the Hiisi-horse; it was fashioned from sorrow, trouble bound its parts together, the tears of bitter longing and suffering wove its strings.”

Thus all being is not born of matter, but of spirit and soul; so says this Old Folk-Rune, so also says occult science which is to take its place in the active development of culture in our time.

German translation of Folk-Rune:—

“Falsches sagen die gewisslich and befinden sich in Irrtum die da glauben, Wainemoinen hab gezimmert die Kantele, unsere schönen Saitenspiele, aus den Kinnbacken des Hechtes, and dass Saiten er gesponne aus den Schweif des Hiisi-Rosses; sie ist aber aus der Not gezinmert, Kummer band dann ihre Teile, bittere Schmsuchstränen spannen and die Leiden ihre Saiten.”

Dear attendees, for a number of years now I have taken the liberty of speaking from this place about the subject of spiritual science, as it will also be meant in tonight's reflection. May I be allowed to present the foundations of this spiritual science in a certain way, I would like to say, in a clear way, and then to speak in more detail about some special subjects of this spiritual science in the next reflection the day after tomorrow.

It is - and this has been mentioned frequently over the years - fully understandable to anyone who stands on the ground of this spiritual science, as it is meant here, that in our time, from the most diverse sides, not only the most manifold objections, but, one might even say, hostilities against this spiritual science are asserting themselves. Not only does this spiritual science present itself to the rest of contemporary spiritual life as something still foreign to this spiritual life today - it has that in common with everything that has been incorporated into it as a new acquisition of human spiritual culture in a certain respect - but precisely in relation to the spiritual goals of our time, this spiritual science must appear on the one hand as something quite incomprehensible, fantastic, dreamy, although on the other hand it represents something that arises from the deepest longings and, one may say, from the most urgent needs of the soul life of the present day. With this I would like to have defined, so to speak, the theme of this evening.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, differs from the outset precisely from that in a fundamental way, the continuation of which it wants to be, and it is only too understandable that it experiences hostility after hostility from that side. I am referring to the scientific school of thought of our time, because basically, spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to be a continuation in the truest, most genuine sense of scientific thinking for the spirit and its secrets, its laws - a continuation of the scientific way of thinking that has left its mark on the spiritual life of the West for three to four centuries.

Nevertheless, although precisely because of this characteristic spiritual science is in no way obliged to confront the justified claims of natural science, it nevertheless differs in a certain respect from what is actually called science today from the point of view of the natural scientific way of thinking. It is just as much a science as natural research, but because it considers the objects, entities and processes of spiritual life, it must necessarily develop the scientific methods in a different way than natural science, which is limited to the senses and to the intellect (which has the senses as its basis), must do today. And so, let our attention be drawn to this fundamental difference between spiritual-scientific research and natural-scientific research.

What we usually call science today starts from that state, from that mood of the human soul, which is present in normal life, in everyday human life. We speak of what man can do by virtue of his soul, by virtue of his body, by virtue of his mind applied to the observations of the senses and to experiment, what man can do by virtue of all this, where the limits of knowledge for what has been indicated; in short, it is perfectly right to say that this scientific direction takes the human soul as it is, observes the environment of this soul and from this gains the laws of sensual-physical existence. The most important work for this science is therefore done in research, always within the activity of working itself, and what comes out of this activity is science, is a scientific result.

Spiritual research is different. Spiritual research, as it is meant here: Although, as we shall see in a moment, it is the same processes in the life of the soul that spiritual research has to undertake, which also govern external science, external scientific knowledge, but these activities of the spiritual researcher are for him preparations for his research, are for him there to prepare the soul for it, so that it can arrive at what can be called seeing. Of course, everything is meant spiritually, but if one assumes this spiritual meaning, then one can say: outer science presupposes the human soul, and these observations are based on the observation of the senses, on what the intellect has to say about the laws of existence.

Spiritual research uses all human soul powers, whether they are powers of understanding, will or feeling, to prepare what could be called the senses – in a figurative sense, of course – which then lead to direct perception , to prepare for the spiritual researcher to devote his work and efforts to preparing himself, so that he can then, as it were, access the impressions of perceptions from the spiritual world through himself.

Now I do not want to speak, not in this reflection, of abstractions, of concepts, of speculations, of a philosophy of ideas, but I want to lead directly into the facts of the soul life, which is suitable for spiritual research. All spiritual research is based on the fact that the human soul can apply to itself what is always on everyone's lips today as a scientific buzzword, that the human soul can apply to itself what lies in the word 'development'. Spiritual research starts from the premise that the human soul can undergo an inner development that brings about a transformation, a change in these soul forces, so that these soul forces become different in a certain sense. So everything that is the result of this spiritual research is not gained by simply accepting the soul in its abilities, but only comes about when, through careful preparation, the soul has transformed itself in such a way that it no longer has the sensual world around it in its direct spiritual perception the sensual world around it, but that it has another, a higher, a spiritual world around it, just as it has the sensual-physical world around it in ordinary life, which is viewed through the senses.

Now one could easily believe that some very special preparations are needed to transform the soul in this way. That is not the case, basically. What the soul has to undertake is based on things that are actually always present in everyday soul life, that belong to the most essential powers of this soul life, but which, in order to become suitable for spiritual research, must be developed into the infinite, one might say.

I will now show from a different angle, than I have often done in the past years, how the human soul, as it were, goes beyond itself, beyond its everyday point of view, in order to become an observer of the spiritual world. What it has to undertake in the intimate inner life has, as its elements, as its starting point, precisely the forces that are necessary in the most everyday life. One of these forces can be touched upon by using an easily understandable term that refers to something that is absolutely necessary in everyday life. It is what we call in this everyday life attention, interest in the things of the environment. This attention – I have already spoken about it from a different perspective in these lectures – consists in our focusing on some object in our environment, so that through this focusing it remains, as it were, in our soul life, living on in memory.

How necessary this attention is for everyday life can be seen from a very ordinary way of looking at things, which focuses on the connection between this attention and memory. Many a person will complain that their memory is either weakening or that it is in some way faulty or deficient. If one were to study – to the extent that such study is necessary for ordinary life – the connection between attention and memory, one would get over many of the things that one so often notices as defects in oneself.

I will start with a very trivial matter. Many a person cannot find an object in the morning that they still had in the evening. They have put it down with half-consciousness, not with attention. A cufflink that we put down in the evening in such a way that we harbor the arbitrary thought: You are now putting this button in this place - maybe we even think about the surroundings - in this environment. You will see, if you let these thoughts pass through your mind in the evening, that you will go directly to the place of the button in the morning, and it turns out that there is a connection between our ability to remember and what can be called attention. To a certain extent, the memory problem is an attention problem, and if we could get used to arbitrarily paying attention to things that we know need to be remembered, we would contribute an infinite amount, not only to the memory of the things in question, but we would also see that our memory is really strengthened by frequently practicing such activity, which means that the forces behind our memory would also become strong. Just as it is true that, to a certain extent, a good memory is part of an outwardly healthy mental life, it is equally true that observing what we call attention is very necessary in everyday life.

But there is another way to convince oneself of the connections between the human mental life and attention. Everyone knows – and especially those who are a little familiar with the literature on contemporary psychology – how a healthy psyche must be a coherent psyche, so that when we look back to the point of childhood that we usually remember, we must recognize the events that have occurred to us as our own. It would be unhealthy if the memory were so full of holes that we see our own experiences as those of a foreign being, when we would not recognize them as our own. In the case of diseased souls, these experiences emerge as if they were another ego.

Much could be done if, through spiritual science, one had trained oneself to be attentive to these things – one can recognize them – to be attentive to souls that show a tendency towards such holes in, let us say, their ego, their continuous memories, and one would then intervene in such a way as to strengthen and systematically strengthen interest. Much of the harm done to such souls could be averted by a certain education if one considered the connection between the life of memory, the life of the soul as a whole, and what we call attention.

What we might call attention is not attention to this or that, but the activity of attention, the activity that unfolds in the soul life while we are paying attention. For the purposes of spiritual research, this must be strengthened, increased, in intensity and without limit. This happens in what we might call the concentration of human thinking, feeling and willing, or, in general, the concentration of the entire soul life.

In our outer, everyday life, we develop attention by being stimulated by impressions from outside, by what, I might say, has a more brilliant, outstanding effect on our soul than anything else. This challenges our attention. We very rarely succeed in producing this attention through pure arbitrariness; but spiritual research must prepare for this: increasing attention to an unlimited degree through inner arbitrariness, through training of the soul, through intimate practice - one may say - into the unlimited.

An increase in attention is brought about in this way: If we have stimulated certain ideas, perhaps ideas that do not correspond to an external fact, but symbolic ideas that we can survey precisely, so that we know that no supernaturally conscious ideas are involved; that we take the same , quite arbitrarily, without any process forcing us, into the center of our consciousness, and then bring about such a life of consciousness as only develops in normal human existence during sleep.

During sleep, all external senses fall silent, all movement ceases, and the human being lies still in relation to his corporeality. Even the worries and concerns of life fall silent in sleep; only in normal life during sleep does unconsciousness occur. Again, I can only describe the principles here, not everything. You can find more details in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science”. But the soul can, through training, through years of exercises, produce such a mood in itself that its inner self arbitrarily silences everything in itself that otherwise only remains silent during sleep. The soul is, so to speak, in the same state in relation to outer activity and perception as in sleep, except that it is awake and thus detached from all outer life. The soul focuses solely and exclusively on the self-chosen idea with the most intense attention of all its activity. As a result, everything that the soul would otherwise use up of its energy to absorb and process the manifold impressions of the day, everything that the soul expends in energy, is now used to push itself towards this one goal of the idea. The soul life is concentrated, and something is now being created with that which even the most significant minds of human development have always regarded as the most worthy apparatus for all world exploration. What is needed now is what can be compared with the apparatus of the human soul, but I do not attach any particular importance to the comparison, with something like spiritual chemistry.

To understand why a person carries out an experiment on the soul, which is not just an inner process of imagination but a real process in the soul that actually brings about something in reality, I will use the comparison with chemistry to help us understand each other. Something is done with the soul that could be called spiritual chemistry. When we have water in front of us, its components are not necessarily recognizable externally. The chemist breaks this water down into hydrogen and oxygen. He separates the hydrogen from the water. Hydrogen has very different properties than water, properties that cannot be suspected in water as such. Just as one can only assume the properties of hydrogen in water, so too can one only assume the properties of the soul and spirit in the human being standing before us in everyday life; for just as hydrogen is bound to water, so too are soul and spirit bound to the physical body in everyday life. What I have characterized as an unlimited increase in attention to an arbitrary idea or sensation or concept concentrates the soul's powers so that this soul stands out from the physical body. Now it must be said, though, that when the soul wants to prepare itself, it must do so with patience and energy and often for years – that varies from person to person – but then the one who prepares his soul really does achieve connecting a meaning with something that can justifiably appear nonsensical to many people in the present. The spiritual researcher attains to connect a meaning in direct inner experience with the word: I now experience, I now feel in the pure spiritual-soul realm and know that in what I experience and feel, nothing lives that is connected to the physical-sensual. The spiritual researcher now knows the meaning of this word, which in ordinary life seems nonsensical, because he experiences this meaning through the direct power of the reality of what it means to have emerged from the physical body with his spiritual soul. The soul and spirit are as independent and endowed with other properties as hydrogen is endowed with other properties when it is removed from water. It is not an external process that can be compared experimentally with any external process, but it is a process that leads to the soul and spirit being drawn out. Only then does it prove its true independence, only then does it show itself in what it is in its true, own nature and what connects it to the physical-sensory for everyday life, which it uses to perceive the external world and to carry out the tasks of the external world.

The first thing that a person can experience from their physical senses is thinking and imagining. Since I do not want to speak in abstractions, but rather in the concrete facts of the inner experience of the , I do not wish to shy away from pointing out this experience, even at the risk, which I fully understand, of not being taken seriously by some people who believe they are standing on the firm ground of science. When the spiritual researcher, after years of hard work and sacrifice, has come to the point where he associates a meaning with the words: You experience and perceive things outside of your body, then at first he experiences this only in relation to thinking, which, as one can already suspect in ordinary life, one knows through spiritual science. That one must use the brain for thinking, that stops. One feels that one is inside the imagination, and one does not feel with this inner experience of the brain and nervous system, but one feels - as I said, I say this at the risk of not being taken seriously by some - that one what one is experiencing now, one feels oneself like an external object, like an inner self circling around a body located outside of oneself, if one has given it independence, and one experiences oneself circling around one's own body, one's own brain, and an important experience then occurs. One learns to recognize how ordinary thinking occurs, because in order to make progress in real spiritual research, one has to advance in stages. At first it is often a dull experience. But when you have progressed to the point where you can connect a full meaning with the word: You now live in a thinking that happens outside of your brain, human life is indeed between birth and death – so you have to return at a certain time.

You can only develop the thoughts you have outside the body with your brain when you return. This gives a very different feeling than the usual one, because you perceive the process with your brain. You start to use your brain as an instrument, you know that you have something in your brain that offers resistance, that you have to forcefully push into. A strange feeling arises when the imagination moves outside the brain and the brain begins to imagine, a feeling that can only be compared to a certain fear of now having to think again through the instrument of the brain, because one is now facing life outside oneself. You have, so to speak, got to know yourself from the outside for the first time, have learned to look back at your physical body from the outside, and the immersion imposes the necessity of working with heavy matter, plastic, so to speak, so that those experiences that you first undertook outside of this brain can now be expressed within.

In this way, a kind of emancipation of intellectual life from physical life can occur, so to speak. When this emancipation occurs, one no longer has the physical-sensory world around one. This physical-sensory world disappears at the same moment as the emergence from the physical body occurs. One has a new world around oneself, a world that can be described as the world of spiritual states. Only now can one see through what spiritual states are through direct contemplation. Something occurs that I would like to mention at this point, because I always want to progress from the abstract to the concrete in these considerations; one imagines this entering into the spiritual world wrongly if one imagines it according to the pattern of external perceptions. Here the observer stands there and the object stands there. When a spiritual researcher begins to perceive spiritual states, after having prepared himself, he must, in a certain sense, immerse his entire being in the object or being he is perceiving. Just as, in everyday life, when we experience something in our own soul, we experience this or that mood, this or that inner [affect ], how one expresses this in what is called the development of one's outlook, so one can only experience what states of mind are by imitating, as it were, with the spirit freed from the body, immersing oneself in what one perceives, really imitating in an inner play of expression the states of the spiritual outer world.

It is therefore an inner play of expression that one lives into, and one cannot say, when speaking correctly, “I have perceived an object or being of the spiritual world as if it were a being of the sensory world.” Rather, one can only say, “I have experienced in this being that which, in me, causes me to express myself with my soul and spirit in such and such a way.” In my inner expression, I emulate the peculiarity of the being in question. One becomes acquainted with an inner play of expression, in the reception of cipher-like ideas, and in a certain sense one becomes one with the being of the spiritual world. But it requires the spirit to be so sensitive within itself that the spirit expresses its own states as one otherwise expresses the states of one's own soul. An experience, in contrast to mere perception, is the beholding of the spiritual world, a becoming one with its states. This is precisely how this living into the spiritual world differs from the experience of everyday reality, which is ultimately something passive, something that one stands by, as it were, while that which allows itself to be led upwards by the will, to live into the spiritual phenomena, must certainly be in action, in activity - this inner activity, which in itself creates expression, forms. The soul must transform itself for the conditions of the spiritual world if it wants to penetrate into the spiritual world.

In this way, one experiences the conditions of the spiritual world, as one experiences forms in the physical-sensual world. But one can experience not only the conditions of the spiritual world, but also the processes, the events of the spiritual world. This happens when one leads other powers of the soul upwards from the physical body. Not only the power of imagination can be led upwards, but also another power. But then another everyday activity of the soul must be increased to infinity, and that is what can be described with a word that is a necessity in everyday life, the word “devotion”. If one succeeds in consciously developing this devotion, as it were, in the general world process, which we otherwise only develop unconsciously in sleep, when one is, so to speak, completely devoted, without doing anything oneself, to the general happening, as in sleep, when one so learns to be devoted, fully consciously while awake, to the spiritual world, then one comes to tear out, as it were, yet another soul activity of our inner life, out of the physical-sensual. This activity is the one through which we - as strange as it may sound, but it is true - experience the fruit in the outer physical: speaking, the power of speech. This power of speech, as is well known, is rooted in the activity of the brain, in the activity of the organs that ultimately lead to the larynx and so forth. This power of speech plays a completely different role than is usually believed. Most human thinking is expressed in words, so that the words run through the mind, so that, as modern science admits, for those who look more closely at things, all speechless thinking in humans also runs in such a way that they vibrate inwardly in a subtle way. The body is actually in a state of perpetual inner activity when it thinks. This activity silently repeats, so to speak, what would otherwise be expressed more robustly in the movements of the speech organs and the nervous system.

If, through careful practice, increased attention, that is, through concentration, increased devotion, that is, meditation, one arrives at the activity that the soul must expend when it speaks in everyday life, if one arrives at this activity without living it out in external speech, then one has raised a second soul power from the physical body. This elevation is somewhat more difficult than the other, but it can be attained through robust, energetic practice.

When I speak to you, my soul is spontaneously active, and that which is carried out in this activity is expressed in the outer word. If we now succeed in holding back the activity that would otherwise fade away in the word, so that it is carried out without a word and without that vibration, purely inwardly, in the soul, if, so to speak, the word “strength” is experienced inwardly in the soul, then the soul life is strengthened and invigorated the soul life inwardly strengthens itself far more than in the mere operation [separation?] of the thought from the physical-sensual, and then, through a similar spiritual chemistry, so to speak, one draws the ability to speak, the power of speech, out of the physical body, experiences it only in the soul. Once again, you know what it means to be outside of your physical body in your spiritual and mental experience and to now experience, where you cannot use your larynx to speak, where you develop these activities outside of your body, as you usually do when speaking, you now experience the ability to speak inwardly. You now experience the inner word. You experience the inner word purely spiritually.

This experience of the inner word is very closely related to the experience of the power of memory. Of course, when I say the experience of the power of memory, I do not mean what is expressed in the ability to remember, but rather what stands behind this ability to remember, what does not consciously live in everyday life, what works and remains half unconscious. When we incorporate a thought into memory, we are exercising soul activity, and this is related to speech power. This is therefore something we call the lower-soul power of memory, just as we can say the lower-soul power of speech, which we draw from ordinary speech and in which we then live as spiritual researchers. We live purely in the spirit and soul in the word, in the power of remembrance, when in ordinary daily life the memory is transformed so that we remember the everyday experiences, those where all memory is silent, as in sleep. What is left, so to speak, is what is otherwise used for memory. In everyday life, something is always used for remembering; inner strength is used to make what is happening take root in the soul life. Now that we have brought about a soul life that erases ordinary memory, this strength, which is otherwise used for remembering, is used purely spiritually, it pulses in the inner purely spiritual, recognizing literally.

So when we raise the power of speech from the physical-bodily, we not only experience states, but we can immerse ourselves in the essences of the spiritual world so that we experience what happens in them. We now develop not only a play of facial expressions, but what could be called an inner spiritual power of the gesture, [an inner gesture]. This must always be emphasized - that on which activity as a spiritual experience is based. If you want to experience a spiritual being, you have to immerse yourself in it and experience its processes, just as we accompany our own inner experiences with gestures, expressing in the gesture what is going on in our soul itself. Many people - myself included - use far too many gestures to express what is inner soul life. Just as the soul life, flowing out, branches out, so it must lead to inner gestures of spiritual and soul experience. Then one experiences processes, not just states; these are experienced through the thoughts that are raised up, the processes through the ability to speak and remember that is raised up. Then, when one experiences conditions of the spiritual world, one also experiences one's own inner conditions, and this leads deep into the nature of the human soul.

As the spiritual researcher begins to experience inner states, he connects the following with a meaningful concept: He knows why the materialistic view of the present is so difficult to refute from a purely idealistic point of view. This is because, as the materialistic way of thinking correctly asserts, everyday thinking does indeed arise from the nervous system, from the brain. For what one has in ordinary consciousness as content, as something experienced by the soul, is basically only an image of the soul.

There is not enough time to go into the arguments regarding pictoriality in detail. I will merely suggest that it is quite clear to the spiritual researcher who has come this far what ordinary feeling, will and imaginative life want. They take the form of images that emerge from the body. They emerge like the reflections of our own self when we stand in front of a mirror. The body forms what could be called a mirror for spiritual and psychological experience. However, like every image, the image is not actually complete. The image would only be complete if, when we step in front of a mirror in our ordinary lives, we had to send out forces from ourselves to shape the mirror in such a way that its material composition becomes such that it sends the images back to us. For we actually accomplish this in our body, that we first place this body with our deeper spiritual-soul in the ability to reflect back to us what we call our everyday life. We first make it a mirror in truth, it must be said, and that is the secret of the human soul life.

The spiritual researcher is led to a spiritual-soul experience that stands outside and behind the physical body, and he observes how the truly true spiritual-soul aspect first works on the body so that the contents of everyday soul experience then emerge from the body. It is as impossible for the spiritual researcher who sees through it to think that the spiritual-soul experience is only a function of the brain as it would be to think that the image we have in front of us rises up out of the mirror as a reality. With the same right one could claim: When one sees oneself in the mirror, what looks out comes out of the mirror – so that the spiritual-soul comes out of the nervous system. The reality of the soul and spirit lies behind the physical, and in truth the body is between the truly spiritual, which is its active agent, its plastic creator, and the everyday, limited to sensory experiences that in reality only take place in images. In this way one arrives at what is truly spiritual and soulful and stands behind the physical. When one arrives at this, then what one experiences as a state is quite different from what one would like to describe as the spiritual-soul through external speculation, because one is confronted with direct vision, with what the I is spiritually and soulfully in human nature. Then the doctrine of repeated earthly lives ceases to be mere theoretical knowledge. Then an expansion begins, one might say, of memory, which can then extend beyond repeated earthly lives. The complete human experience is seen through, how it unfolds not only between birth and death, but through many earthly lives and through the spiritual experiences between death and birth. That which can be called repeated earthly lives becomes an immediate experience. By developing the memory and power of speech, by transforming them into a power of knowledge and experience, past earthly lives emerge from the floods of spiritual life as reality, and the certainty emerges that the present one is also the cause of the following ones, and that between death and a new birth there is a much longer life than earthly life.

By pushing back the ordinary power of memory, the higher power of memory is awakened. When the power of memory, which otherwise only allows us to look back to birth, is eradicated, it awakens to an increased power that now extends to an understanding of repeated earth lives! This realization does not need to take on a modern spiritual truth from old religious systems. People who know nothing about the methods of spiritual research and who have superficially absorbed something of it, that this spiritual science must speak of repeated earthly lives, can very easily come to believe that some old Buddhist truth is being recycled. Such a claim is no more useful than if one wanted to claim that today only one person could prove the Pythagorean theorem by going to the [gap in the transcript].

Spiritual science has nothing to do with anything historically handed down, but only with what the mind can explore within itself at any time through the stated means. Just as one arrives at the results of science through external experimentation, so one arrives at the results of spiritual research through inner experimentation. That the results of spiritual science may appear fanciful today is hardly surprising to anyone who knows the nature of this spiritual science and how it can be applied to the spiritual life of the present time. In this sense, it must be emphasized time and again: Just as the Copernican view seemed strange, so the results of spiritual science may seem paradoxical to the modern mind. But just as the Copernican world view has become part of modern culture, so will the results of spiritual research. Certainly, the way people today approach this spiritual research is the same way they approached the Copernican worldview; and if someone back then had planned to give a lecture to present something like the Copernican worldview, which at the time also had to appear as something quite fantastic , one would perhaps have announced such a lecture back then: the Copernican world view as a surrogate for Christianity; especially because one could have believed that the Copernican world view endangered Christianity. It took a long time before people began to realize that the matter is different, and in our time one can actually have a different experience from the genuine aims of the present.

Compared to the experiences I have here, one must be touched in a pleasant way, as one could hear a Catholic theologian, who is a deeply feeling philosopher, said: Certainly a prejudiced world once opposed the Copernican worldview as if it could endanger religious life; today - and it is not I who says this, but this Catholic theologian - today the true Catholic will even know that what is being explored in the secrets of existence, what is being of the greatness of the world, can never contribute to the satisfaction of religious life, but only to the greater admiration for the greatness of the divine Creator, the more one gets to know his deeds in the development of the world. - The time will also come when one will recognize in repeated lives on earth a promotion of the Christian point of view, as today in the Copernican worldview a promotion of the Christian view. Thus I have spoken to you, as it were, of two soul powers that can be led upwards from the experience with the physical body.

There is still a third soul power that must be spontaneously led upwards on the path to spiritual research, and through this third soul power one now attains not only to the states and processes, but to the entities of the spiritual world itself, so that this spiritual world becomes, on another level, something like the natural world — not something that is spoken of in generalities, but rather as one speaks not in generalities about nature, but about individual animals, plants, stones, individual clouds, mountains, rivers, and so on.

Where the spirit does not appear before the eyes as a sum of real spiritual beings, something else must indeed be brought up from this human truth as it stands before us in everyday life. We must remember how we entered life as human beings. What distinguishes us as human beings from the other sensual phenomena on earth is that we must, in the early days, make of ourselves that which most beautifully characterizes our destiny. We enter the world as quadrupeds, so to speak; we first acquire the ability to stand upright and walk. I want to make it clear from the outset, to avoid any misunderstanding, as I have done elsewhere, that I am aware that other creatures also walk on two legs, such as chickens, for example, but the difference is that they are designed to do so from the outset, whereas humans overcome gravity by the application of an inner force that acts purely in the material world. In the first years of his physical existence, the human being makes himself into an upright being, into that being of whom those who are more deeply attuned have always known what it means to stand upright, to be able to direct one's gaze out into the universe. But the human being makes himself into this. An inner strength is applied, through which the human being actually becomes what he is destined to be.

This power does not come to our consciousness again in the course of life. In a time when our consciousness is still in the realm of dreams, we experience what, so to speak, gave us our position, our equilibrium in the world, whereby we are human beings. But we can rediscover them, and the spiritual researcher must rediscover them, these powers. These powers remain in the soul. In normal life they are only used to maintain the upright position of the human being, but then they rest. They are again brought up, and this inner soul power, when it is experienced, is something that is revealed by a will that is also being led upwards, permeated by that will, which allows our spiritual and mental experience outside of the physical body to bring us into different situations regarding the various truths of the universe. In this way one attains the following: Just as man in the physical world makes himself what he is only through his upright balance, as he, so to speak, grasps his I-being in his inner activity and power of preparation for the earth, so he grasps, when he grasps this inner activity through which he human being, when he grasps this activity in its organization, he grasps the inner truth of other spirit beings, grasps the inner essence of real spirits, experiences how other beings make themselves into their essence, as he makes himself into an essence on earth through what has been stated.

However, all these things can only be attained through a certain resignation, through a certain inner tragic mood. Much has to be overcome, and in a sense these surmountings are a kind of suffering. But if the spiritual researcher courageously goes through this suffering, then he will succeed in detaching from this suffering the inner activity that is now able not only to educate us, that gives man on earth his true outer purpose, that makes man can turn his gaze out into the universe, but also to delve into other beings, to grasp their destiny by living it, and to experience how they become what they are in their worlds in a different way from human beings on earth. Now one experiences not only conditions and processes, but the inner life of the spirit beings themselves. One enters into it by becoming one with these truths through inner mobility, through the right inner strength. Now it is a certain, but inwardly mobile physiognomy. Just as a person acquires his overall physiognomy on earth, so he emerges into the physiognomies of the other truths on this third level.

In this way one ascends to the spiritual co-experience of the spirit beings through inner play of features, through inner gestures and postures, then through inner physiognomy, through knowing the inner being of other spirit beings. In this way the spiritual world gradually becomes a true reality, and it always shows that this becoming of the spiritual world a true reality differs from the experience of the outer physical world. This is experienced in passivity. A spiritual world can only be experienced in activity, and this brings us to the point that really shows us how this spiritual science must be introduced into the spiritual cultural life of the present.

As I said, I wanted to show today how the spiritual researcher comes to his experiences. I will develop special experiences the day after tomorrow. But what can emerge from today's is that the spiritual researcher appeals to the activity of the soul, to that which the soul can only lead up from the physical-bodily in un- [gap in the transcript] activity, can experience purely spiritual-soul activity. In the immersion, which is purely spiritual-soul, in the other truths, the states, processes and the essence of these truths themselves are experienced.

All these things cannot be experienced without extending to the entire soul what is otherwise only experienced in the moral. When a person experiences inwardly in the moral sense: 'You want to do this, that is good', then the experience of one's inner duty, which must become an outer deed, is indeed the experience of the highest morality. This experience is an inner one, and it is such that the person must disregard himself, because basically all immorality comes from selfishness. Morality, however, comes from disregarding the narrow-mindedness that man places in the foreground. Just as man, through his feelings, becomes free in the moral, at least from that which he otherwise uses in everyday life, so in the life of the soul as a whole he becomes free in the experience of the higher worlds. In a certain respect, the moral life is the dark model for the higher life of knowledge.

I did not want to show by words, but by describing soul processes, what spiritual science consists of and what the relationship between spiritual life and spiritual science is. If, on the other hand, we look at contemporary life, we can truly say that this experience is not geared towards the inner life of the soul. In particular, when a person is supposed to recognize the world, he is passive today. One could substantiate with almost grotesque examples how much man likes to be passive today. It is very gratifying that you have appeared today in such large numbers, even though [gap in transcript] are connected with light images. But you will all admit that the presentations that are linked to light images are preferred to those where such promises are not made. The spiritual researcher appeals to the supersensible, the invisible, and if he also makes use of the light pictures, it is only to make something extraordinarily sensible. But humanity today is to a great extent not disposed to be won over to the spirit or to something that can be explored by appealing to the activity of the soul, but to contemplation.

Of course, in the spiritual fields that have produced the most admirable achievements, this beholding is necessary; but the spirit cannot be grasped in external contemplation. What is sensual is not spiritual. This is trivial, but it is not understood. I am not telling fairy tales. It could happen that an otherwise very meritorious contemporary philosopher recently said or presented a [monistic] idea. In an introduction in which he wanted to write about an evolution in philosophy, he said that if you read Kant and so on, you read into concepts, but that could be remedied, because today – and again, it should be noted that nothing should be said against the technical achievements of the present time , these technical achievements have their significance, their justification; but what has been said is characteristic – the philosopher says that if you want to immerse yourself in Spinoza's Ethics, it is difficult to live into the intangible concepts. So you use the movie to help! You depict how Spinoza sits there spontaneously when a thought occurs to him, how the thought expansion then occurs to the same. Then you depict the force on the one hand, which represents the expansion, then you depict the remaining orderly concept, as concepts are generally formed.

The person in question has set out to do nothing less than present Spinozian ethics through film. Thus, one might hope to see a complete cinematographic adaptation of Spinoza's Ethics, or Kant's “Pure Reason”. As I said, I am not criticizing the arts, although it seems strange when the editor says that in this way ancient metaphysical longings of the human soul can be satisfied by an art that the superficial mind usually regards as something playful. Thus, ancient metaphysical longings could be satisfied by the application of this cinematic art.

I wanted to mention this because it shows how man today has the need not to put his soul into action, not to appeal to what, out of all passivity, must go into the fullest activity, as well as what man today wants to be offered everything, that is, how he does not boldly want to achieve existence in his own activity, does not want to prove existence to himself by leading this activity in his own activity to a proof of existence, but wants to have existence proved to him from outside. The reasons why one assumes something to be must be forthcoming. This is there for the thought habits of the whole of philosophy: increasingly imaginable from the standpoint that all thinking that cannot prove that it is based on foundations of something, to which nothing has been added, that all this thinking is understood as mere fantasy.

Gradually, the goals of the present tend to declare all thinking to be fantasy that cannot prove that it has been sucked out of the material existence that presents itself from the outside. I have indicated this basic character in the goals of the present. This basic character was necessary, because only through the fact that man has enjoyed an education through the natural sciences have the great, powerful explorations of natural science come about, which has commercially and technically transformed the globe, and has also greatly increased knowledge. For this to happen, it was necessary for man to be passively confronted with the outside world. The boldness that man must develop for his inner experience is, so to speak, incorporated today into outer activity.

It is a law of human life that whatever grows on the one hand must, in a sense, wither on the other. The last three to four centuries have brought it to the point that humanity has been able to undertake such tremendously bold things as the achievements up to aeronautics. The fact that boldness was developed for the external achievements has resulted in an education in humanity that has provided inner boldness for a certain period of time, where it is necessary to grasp a spiritual that cannot be grasped if one surrenders positively, but only if one is able to surrender to this spiritual with its activity, so that one stands on the point of view: What you experience in yourself is not reality. One can never come to a real knowledge of the spirit, because the spirit only lets us actively enter into its spheres.

So, what is the basic requirement for the recognition of spiritual science is, of course, spontaneously opposed to the goals of the present. However, this too turns out to be the case for the process of becoming as a whole: just as an elastic body, when sufficiently compressed, exerts its counter-force, so too, when something is pushed to a certain point, the opposing force, the reaction, asserts itself. Anyone who can observe our age knows how in our time, already quite thoroughly in souls, without them knowing it themselves deeply, that opposite longing is present - after education in external natural science has brought it to a certain high point - the soul, as I said, longs, without often knowing it itself today, for a knowledge of that which is present behind the senses as the actual basis of all human life. To use the same comparison again: spiritual science today is at the same point in relation to the aims of our time as natural science was at the time of Giordano Bruno, who, in his insights, broke through what had been thought of as a blue celestial sphere, as a blue vault. What was significant was that Bruno said: What is up there is not a real boundary, it is only caused by the boundary that man sets for himself. What the human being recognizes must set as a boundary, that extends there. In those days, the limited world was broken through, the view was expanded into the unlimited distances of space.

But such a firmament – now a temporal firmament – is there for mere natural science, and when it asserts it from its standpoint, it is justified; only it should recognize its limitations. Such a temporal moment is what asserts itself for the external world in birth and death. Just as the physical firmament is only set in space by man himself and knowledge could be newly expanded in relation to spatial infinity, so spiritual science will do the same for the spirit, [as] what was once the temporal firmament [has been broken through] for birth and death, and teaches us to look into a temporal infinity, that is, into the eternity, into the immortality of the human soul. The opponents will still have to find the newly expanded view of the spirit today.

But just when you are considering the goals of the present, you see that on the one hand there are people for whom it seems completely outrageous and nonsensical that such things can be said as they are said in spiritual science. On the other hand, however, it can be perceived how the soul always thirsts to really get to know the world as spiritual science recognizes it as its task to explore. Much of what later emerges clearly in the soul is first present as a dark urge. The spiritual researcher sees it and knows that the very near future will find souls who will come to recognize spiritual research as the path to spiritual science.

So superficially everything speaks against spiritual science. But if one considers what is taking place in the depths of the soul, then there is a guarantee that spiritual science will truly win the hearts and souls of people. Today, people only draw from what they often say is based on the true goals of science; they do not draw the right conclusions, otherwise they could come to something that is to be said now for our understanding through a kind of metaphor.

I do not want to deal with the meaning of the great significant word that stands at the beginning of the Bible. To what extent it corresponds to a fact in human life on earth can be dealt with on another occasion. But with a tremendous view of the development of human experience, this Bible word stands before us, this Bible word, which is put into the mouth of the adversary of humanity, so to speak:

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

And this indicates to both the religious person and the scientifically discerning person, when the matter is only considered in its depths, how man has been tempted in certain respects to go beyond the measure allotted to him in primeval times. Here too, it has already been discussed how this word, or rather what lies behind it, is connected with the possibility of evil and the fact of human freedom.

Thus one could say that a world view that is hallowed by tradition, which spiritual science certainly recognizes as much as anyone, that such a world view sets the word at the beginning of human development of the temptation to want to go beyond human beings in inner experience. One can say of every time that it is a transitional time. It is often said in a trivial way, but it is important, even if every time is a transitional time, that one characterizes the transitional moments in the right way, and that he who tries to penetrate into the goals of the time recognizes them even where they still remain unconscious to the souls. But whoever reveals them, whoever penetrates them, notices that today, in fact – if nothing superstitious is meant – something like an evil spirit lurks at man's side. Allow me to say what I want to say with a strong expression. [Gap in the transcript.]

The saying may seem paradoxical to some; but it is intended to express as clearly as possible, by means of an apparent [paradox], what is to be said. If we consider the transitional moments of our time, it becomes clear that much of what is believed today is a kind of seducer, not meant in the superstitious sense. But when you say something like that, using extrasensory words, you have to remember the word:

The little people never feel the devil,
And if he had them by the collar.

Again, there is something like a tempter, and it is difficult to become aware of him because one does not draw the consequences from what lies dormant in the goals of the world. Because one does not draw this conclusion, it seems paradoxical when [one] shows you the conclusion. If it were true what some materialistically minded people draw from current science, then one would have to say: Man is placed in the mere animal kingdom by what is today understood as the theory of evolution. Today, one only feels quite clever, and one thinks that one can consider the lower classes stupid when one can say: what man experiences in terms of morality and intellect is only a higher education of what appears in the animal kingdom, and the more one can associate man with the animal kingdom, the more one believes today to be scientific.

Even if a philosophy today makes the somewhat weak attempt to come up with a value system alongside it, this itself is something imperfect, because it must be said that if the consequences were really drawn from what is regarded today as a genuine scientific way of thinking, then it would consist in the fact that distinguishing between good and evil would amount to the same thing that we feel towards the laws of nature. Good and evil would arise from the human soul with the necessity of natural law. Since, if one wants to base oneself on the ground of science, as one often does, one wants to base oneself on the narrowly defined science, it is inconsistent not to draw the conclusion that man should actually be understood merely as an animal transformation, and that the moral should be classified in what is recognized as natural laws, as natural necessity. But then it follows that, just as there is no distinction between good and evil in the law of nature, there is no distinction between good and evil.

As I said, it sounds paradoxical, but it is true nevertheless; the tempter is standing there again, only due to inconsistency we do not see him, the tempter who now says the opposite of the tempter who is put at the top by the Bible. Now he says: You will be like the animals and no longer distinguish good from evil. This may seem ridiculous to some people today; it only seems ridiculous to those who do not understand the consequences that lie in some purely materialistic views of the present. So one could say that today the tempter speaks the opposite of what he did then. Back then he said:

You will be like the gods, knowing good and evil.

Man was to be elevated above himself. As a result, he stands there today, saying: You will be like the animals, you will also recognize as animals and no longer distinguish good from evil. - Just as that was a tempter's word, so is this a tempter's word, even if it is not spoken out of inconsistency. The more one will recognize – it rests in the goals of the present – how the soul, when it becomes aware of this temptress word, that the soul will then develop the longing to recognize the spirit again in its immediate form, which lifts it out of what the [gap in the transcript].

On the one hand, it [spiritual science] may be perceived as a dreamer, as something nonsensical. One can understand that. But on the other hand, it can also be seen as being called for by the deepest goals of our time, which rest in the souls. Because it is so intimately connected with all the goals of the human soul, when one stands on its ground one feels how one is in harmony with what spiritual science wants to express with clarity, how one is in harmony with the intuitions of the spirits who have always worked for spiritual science. These spirits of the past, because spiritual science is something that is only to be bestowed upon our time, have not yet tried to express in a clear way what spiritual science has to say today. But as what can be clearly expressed in a time [gap in the transcript], so the leading spirits have always felt what spiritual science is.

I had to express clearly some things that had to follow today from what is often called science, which is not followed because people are not consistent enough; the soul, familiar with the spirit and its development, has always felt this. Even if development is fully recognized as the continuous pole of our lives, something enters into this human experience with the human soul that goes beyond everything that can be observed externally as external development. And spiritual research only shows, one might say – if I may use the may use the word, which sounds dry and pedantic in the face of these things, only shows through spiritual experiment that what we call the immortal, the eternal, the truly spiritual human soul can really be experienced in detachment from the physical.

Thus, through spiritual science, man will always look at what man's dignity and man's destiny in earthly life really is. We feel when the tempter approaches, however unconsciously, however unacknowledged, and wants to tell us: Development shows man only as the last link in animal development - when he says: You will be like the animals and no longer distinguish evil from good. In the face of this temptation, spiritual science will stand united in the good with the personalities of all times who are striving towards the spiritual light. It will hold up as knowledge to this tempter what Schiller said out of deep poetic intuitions and in which what has been considered is to be summarized. When Schiller became aware of how the similar idea emerged through Herder and Goethe, that man [is] placed at the pinnacle of the animal organization, it was clear to Schiller that such a teaching could only be properly grasped if at the same time the spirit is fully recognized in its independent significance, separate from the physical. That is why Schiller does not say what so many say today, and which, when taken to its logical conclusion, gives the tempter language, but rather, Schiller said the following – and at the same time saw humanity's true destiny – he said the following about the incarnation of man on earth, at the moment when man comes into existence:

Now dullness has lifted from animality
and humanity steps forward with a clear brow
and the lofty stranger, thought,
leaps from the wondering brain.

As in the past winters, I will take the liberty of giving a series of lectures on spiritual science here in this place during the course of this winter semester. The program will show that these lectures will first cover what spiritual science has to say about the questions of life from its point of view, that then the transition will be made to the illumination of some important cultural phenomena, outstanding cultural facts and outstanding personalities of the past, such as Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, and that finally the relationship between spiritual science and various phenomena in the immediate present spiritual life will be illuminated. Today, these lectures are to be begun in a peculiar way. At the outset, we shall not present what can be said in support and confirmation of this spiritual research, but, on the contrary, what can be said in the way of possible, more significant objections to this spiritual science.

It is in the nature of things that this spiritual research attracts much opposition in our time, owing to the state of our present-day culture and owing to many other facts. But nothing would be more inappropriate to this spiritual science than for it to lapse into fanaticism and, so to speak, only to want to see what can be adduced in support of it from the standpoint of its representatives. Fanaticism must — and we shall see for what reasons this is completely foreign to spiritual research. Therefore, more than is perhaps necessary from any other point of view, it must be anxious to understand the objections of its opponents; indeed, in a certain sense it must almost tolerate them, and it must appear understandable to it that a good number of honest truth-seekers of the present time cannot go with it. It has been my custom – and those who have honored me with their attendance at my earlier lectures will be aware of this, and I shall continue to follow this practice – to take possible objections into consideration at the same time as I present my arguments. Today, so to speak, more significant and weighty objections are to be anticipated. For objections to what can be said from the point of view of spiritual research do not arise merely from the opponents, but in the conscientious pursuit of spiritual research, the soul that is devoted to such an undertaking is confronted with these possible objections at every turn. Since the truths of spiritual research have to be won and fought for in the soul, the soul must in a certain sense be equal to the opponent with regard to such objections as are raised in the soul itself. And much better progress will be made in this field if one is clear from the outset about what can be objected.

Now it is not my intention to deal with those objections or alleged refutations which can be found on the street, so to speak, or conjured up out of thin air. Instead, I shall consider the objections that an honest seeker of truth in our time, based on our education and the spiritual foundations of our present age, can and to a certain extent must raise. Nor will the objections of those be dealt with who often call themselves spiritual researchers or Theosophists; for it must be admitted at the outset that much of what passes today under the name of “Theosophy” is not to be taken seriously. But what has been and is advocated here is to be taken into account in my objections today. But if we want to engage with such objections, then much of what has already been said in the course of the previous cycles and what will be discussed in the next lectures must be brought to mind, as it were in outline. So, let us briefly agree on what is meant by spiritual research in terms of its content and sources here.

First of all, one can characterize spiritual science in very general terms by saying that spiritual science takes the view that it must go beyond everything that man perceives through his senses, everything that he is able to fathom with a science that is based primarily on the senses and on the intellect, which draws its conclusions from the senses. that it must go beyond all this to the spiritual causes of the sensual facts that can be investigated by the mind, so that it not only assumes but attempts to prove a spiritual world behind these sensual facts, a spiritual world in which lie the causes of all that the senses can see and the mind can investigate.

This spiritual science differs from many other schools of thought in the present and the past in that it does not merely assert in general, hypothetically, that there is a spiritual world beyond the mind and the senses, but that it assumes that the human being is capable of training and developing his powers of knowledge and soul to such an extent that they are able to see into a spiritual world — something they are incapable of doing without this development. So it is not just the possibility of a spiritual world, but the recognizability of a spiritual world that is the peculiar feature of this spiritual research or anthroposophy, if we want to call it that. It is admitted from the start that the soul forces and the qualities of the cognitive powers as they are in man in his ordinary daily use, if we may so express it, are not such as to enable him to penetrate into the spiritual world. But spiritual science denies that these powers of knowledge are undevelopable, that they cannot unfold to look into a spiritual world after their externalization to this higher point of view, just as the eyes look into the sensory world. But with that we are already at the sources of this spiritual research.

These sources reveal themselves to the soul when, through inner work, through inner development — and the methods of this inner development have often been mentioned here — this soul works its way up to a higher point of view. Then, as spiritual science shows, there is another world, a spiritual world, alongside the sense world that surrounds us, and it is from this spiritual world that the true causes of all phenomena in the sense world emanate.

Through the study of the spiritual world, however, we come to see man as a much more complicated being than he is for ordinary sensory or intellectual perception. We come to see man as a four-part being. That which is called the physical body is regarded by spiritual research only as part of the entire human being. This physical body can be observed by the ordinary sense life and can be grasped by the intellect. This sense body is the subject of ordinary science. For a large part of our present-day view of the world, this physical body is the totality of the human being. For spiritual scientific research, it is only one part among four members of this human being.

Beyond this physical body, spiritual research distinguishes the so-called etheric body or life body, which is incorporated into the physical body. But spiritual research does not speak of this etheric body or life body in the same way as if it were only accessible to the mind, but in such a way that the developed soul powers are able to see it, just as the developed eye can see the colors blue or red, while the color-blind eye cannot see these colors. And then she says that the necessary conclusion arises that the physical body, through the powers inherent in it, naturally disintegrates at death, because the powers belonging to the physical body cause its disintegration, its decay, and only held together by the etheric body, which is a continuous fighter against the disintegration of the physical body, being incorporated into the physical body during the time of life between birth and death. Only when the separation from the etheric body occurs at the moment of death does the physical body follow its own forces, which, however, then, because they work in their own way, cause its decomposition. The human being has the physical body in common with the whole mineral, inanimate world. The etheric body is shared with all living things, with the whole plant world.

But spiritual science cannot stop there. It recognizes a third link in the human being that is as independent as the physical body. There is no need to be offended by expressions; they will be explained and have already been partly explained. The third link is the astral body. It is the actual vehicle of the passions, desires, instincts, affects, in other words, of everything that we call our soul life, that takes place within. And in spiritual research, we then distinguish the actual carrier of the ego from this astral body. While the human being shares the astral body with everything that, for example, has affects and passions in the animal world and can develop an inner life of imagination, the human being has the ego as the fourth link of his being for himself as the crown of his individuality. Man's being initially lies in the physical body, in the etheric or life body, in the astral body and in the I-bearer for spiritual research.

Furthermore, for those who are able to penetrate into the spiritual world, there is the realization of how a large part of our life conditions, to which we are subject, differs from ordinary life, namely the life of sleep. For the spiritual researcher, sleep differs from waking life in that in sleeping humans, the I-vehicle and the astral body of the person are separated from his etheric body and physical body. The latter two remain in bed during sleep like a vegetative form, whereas the I-bearer with the astral body and with the affects, drives, imagination and so on move out of the physical body and ether body during sleep and then unfold their own life in a spiritual world that exists for itself. But for the average person today, when the I and the astral body are alone during sleep, ordinary life is impossible because this astral body and the I have no organs for perceiving the environment, do not have eyes and ears like the physical body. So it is impossible for the astral body and I to perceive the world in which they then are.

The higher development of the soul consists precisely in the astral body and I becoming able to develop organs to perceive their surroundings, and that through this a state can arise for the spiritual researcher in which he perceives the spiritual world ; so that in addition to the waking state and the sleeping state, he has a waking sleep state, if we may call it that, which is precisely the state in which the spiritual researcher can perceive the spiritual world to which man belongs according to his actual origin. Thus spiritual science tries to explain the transition of man between waking and sleeping in twenty-four hours on the basis of spiritual facts.

What is more, spiritual science approaches the great riddle of life and death, that is, in other words, the question that moves the human heart so: the question of the immortality of man. Spiritual science comes to the conclusion that the actual spiritual essence of man is not just a result of his physical organization, but an independent unit and entity belonging to a spiritual world, which builds up the physical body, which exists before birth, even before conception, and from the first moment when man enters into existence as a germ cell, has the effect of building up his organism. In other words, it is the spiritual soul that is actually active and constructive, that organizes the human being throughout his life, that carries only the fruits of his life experiences through the gate of death and that passes with death into a spiritual world to then have further experiences, and that then organizes a new physical body for a further life, to undergo a new life and repeat the cycle.

Spiritual science speaks in other words of repeated lives on earth, speaks of repeated lives on earth in such a way that we look back from our present embodiment within the sensual existence to other embodiments in the past, but also look into the future to later incarnations of our being. So that we divide the total life of a person into one life between birth and death and into another one, which runs purely spiritually for the senses and for the mind between death and the next birth. But spiritual science does not see this in an eternally recurring way, but rather in such a way that it recognizes only intermediate states in these repetitions, but traces the total life of man back to an original spiritual state that preceded all life, especially on our planet; so that the lives on earth once had a beginning when man emerged from a purely spiritual existence, and that, after the conditions have once been fulfilled, man will again enter into purely spiritual states, which will contain within them the fruits of all that man has gone through through the various earthly lives.

This is, of course, only an outline, which will be filled in with individual colors in the coming lectures, but which can show the results that spiritual scientific research comes to. If we picture this whole tableau before our mind's eye, then it must be said that for a large part of thinking humanity today, this picture will not only have something incomprehensible, unprovable, but perhaps even something offensive, something that may even provoke irony, scorn and derision. Even when speaking of the nature of spiritual science, a person who wants to relate everything important to him on the right ground of science must raise serious objections. A person who stands on this ground of science must ask himself: What do all the great, not just individual, achievements of science mean in the face of such an argument? What do scientific methods mean, what do seriousness, dignity, exactness mean in the face of spiritual research, what do all the efforts that science has made in recent centuries and decades to achieve certainty, to achieve objective certainty, mean? Spiritual research does not want to work against science, as has often been emphasized, but to be in full agreement with science. Therefore, it must be aware of what science has to object to, not only in terms of its content, but especially in terms of its seriousness and its achievements in recent centuries.

It can rightly be said that spiritual science points out that these sources of spiritual research lie in a certain development of the soul, in that the soul undergoes certain inner processes of perception, feeling and will, undergoes that what is called meditation, so that it has inner experiences, which are of course purely limited to one's own soul, which no one can control but the person experiencing it, and then something like this is presented as a scientific result about the spiritual worlds that cannot be verified. Where does science come in, can it say, on what is precisely the most beautiful achievement of this science, that through the research of the last centuries it only accepts that which can be verified by every person, objectively and everywhere and at all times? External experiments and observations have the peculiarity that everyone can approach them. Not so with that which is achieved and fought for within. When we look at people who experience things in this way within themselves, does the great variety of the contradictory things they constantly express not show how uncertain the experiences are that are given through a mystically absorbed consciousness? By contrast, how the research conducted by individual researchers in the clinic, in the laboratory and so on must agree! It will be pointed out that this could not be otherwise, so that what a person experiences subjectively is thus shown to be unscientific, and this especially because it cannot be checked by anyone else, since the other person cannot look into the soul of the spiritual researcher in question.

Do not these experiences of the soul bear a complete similarity to everything that can be proven to come from some kind of pathological state, from exaggerations of the soul, in ecstasy and so on? If the spiritual researcher objects that he is not willing to accept every vision that occurs in the soul as a research result, but that he proceeds according to certain methods, then one can still object, and this objection seems entirely justified: Yes, but does it not appear in everything that people experience through visions, hallucinations and so on that such people, when exposed to such states of mind, develop a much greater belief in their fixed ideas, in their hallucinations and visions than in what their senses give them externally or what their minds impose on them? When one beholds the rigid and unbending faith of the illusionists, one must become dubious about what the spiritual researcher wants to bring up from the depths of his soul, as something that is not an illusion, that is supposed to have objective existence in the spiritual world. One could say that there could be something that has an objective existence in the spiritual world, but with regard to the validity of such a soul experiment, it must be said that the illusionist has just as much confidence in his delusions as the spiritual researcher has in his research results, which he owes to what comes up from the depths of the soul.

Only someone who has not followed the development of objective research, which one might say is the sound science of the last centuries and decades, can smile at such an objection. It is more weighty than one usually thinks, and is usually thought by those who come to their spiritual-scientific results from a one-sided direction. It must be said, for example, with reference to what is communicated in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, where certain indications are given for the individual soul, that the soul, if it abandons itself entirely to such an experience, has no point of reference to control it. All this shows that one must deal with such an objection, which may even appear trivial to a superficial spiritual researcher, in the most serious way. So much has been said about the nature of, as one might say, untrue ideas that what is said against it can also be applied to spiritual science by saying: everything you present as methods to educate the soul need not be anything other than just a more sophisticated ability to create illusions and hallucinations.

But then, especially spiritual science appears out of place compared to serious, verifiable science when it points out the individual results. The conscientious seeker of truth of the present day, who has become familiar with the developments of recent years, might say: Do you know nothing of all that has happened? You speak of an etheric body or life body that is supposed to have an independent existence from the physical body. Do you know nothing of the fact that until the nineteenth century people believed in something called life force, and that serious scientific efforts have finally dispelled the belief in this life force? Do you know nothing of the following fact: In earlier centuries, it was said that a chemical process takes place in inanimate nature between the individual chemical substances out there. But when the same combination of substances enters the human organism, the so-called life force takes hold of it; then, under the influence of the life force, the individual substances do not interact as we learn in chemistry and physics, but the individual substances interact under the influence of the life force. It was a great advance when this vital force was thrown overboard, when people tried to say that this vital force does not help at all, but that one must proceed in such a way that what can be investigated in the inanimate world can be investigated must be pursued further in the living organism, that one must only take into account the more complicated way in which the substances interact there, and that one does not have to throw oneself onto the quagmire of the life force.

The vital force was dismissed as just such a “scientific redoubt” when it was shown how the effectiveness of certain substances, which in the past could only be thought of as influenced by the vital force, could also be achieved in the laboratory. And because it is not yet the end of the day, science must still set itself the lofty ideal of also considering the composition of substances as they are present in the cell of the plant, and must not lie on the foul bed of a life force when it comes to investigating how the substances and forces work in the organism.

As long as it was not possible to produce certain compositions of matter in the laboratory, it was justified to say that they only came about when the individual substances were captured by the life force. But since we have succeeded – particularly through Liebig and Wöhler – in producing certain substances without the aid of a special life force, since we no longer believe in the life force, it must be said that even the more complicated combinations in the human organism no longer require the help of a special life force. Thus, in the course of the nineteenth century, science was confronted with the lofty ideal that most researchers hold, even if there are also “neo-vitalists.” This ideal will be fulfilled: to recognize the material connections as they assemble in the living organism and to produce them without the aid of a nebulous, mystical life force, which, as the serious scientific research of the nineteenth century has always maintained, is of no use at all because it contributes nothing at all to the objective knowledge of nature.

Anyone who recognizes these facts and, above all, who sees the seriousness and dignity underlying this development of science, may well object: Is it credible that a number of people are now appearing as so-called spiritual researchers who, in the form of their etheric body or life body, are reviving the old life force? Is it not a sign of scientific dilettantism? They may “believe” who know nothing of the ideals of science; but the scientific researcher himself cannot be taken in by what can only appear as a rehash of the life force. Thus spiritual science, one might say, dabbles in a dilettantish way, disregarding everything that belongs to the most beautiful ideals of modern science. It only uses the fact that science has not yet succeeded in producing certain substances found in the living organism in the laboratory, in order to be able to claim for the time being that a special etheric body or life body is necessary for the production of life. It can be said that advancing science will eventually expel this etheric body or life body from the human being. As long as science, in its triumphal march, has not yet succeeded in showing that there is no etheric body and that the combination of the substances of the living organism can also be produced in the retort, as long as the theosophists or spiritual researchers make a fuss about the etheric body, which is just a rehash of the old life force! This reproach could be raised, initially, as a fact of dilettantism.

If spiritual science now says of the sleeping life: affects, drives and desires of the human being are bound to a special astral body, and this emerges from the etheric body and physical body when sleep overcomes the human being and leads an existence of its own, then one can say that it is very easy to speak of an inner soul life if one simplifies matters by not accepting this inner soul life with all the difficulties and riddles that present themselves to science, but by saying: There is an astral body, and what takes place within is bound to it. One can also refer to the progress of science and ask: What about the great progress that has been made, especially in recent decades, to explain the phenomena of sleep life and dream life in purely scientific terms? It would take a long time if I wanted to present to you all the efforts of science – which are to be taken very seriously and with great dignity – to explain the life of sleep and the life of dreams. It would take a long time especially because a large number of research projects have emerged recently that are very much open to discussion.

It suffices to consider one point of view that can show how difficult it is for the serious truth-seeker of the present day to profess what may initially seem like an assertion: the I and the astral body of the human being withdraw from the physical body and etheric body when falling asleep.

If we take a blanket explanation of sleep life, summarizing a large number of different hypotheses and statements about sleep life, it is the following: It is said that to explain sleep life, all that is needed is an unbiased look at the phenomena of the human or animal organism. It shows that waking life consists of the phenomena of the environment making an impression on the sense organs, of them exerting stimuli on the brain. Throughout the whole day they exert such stimuli. How do they affect the brain and nervous system of the human being? They have the effect of destroying the substance of which the nervous system consists. All day long, says modern natural science, we are confronted with the fact that external colors, sounds and so on penetrate our soul, that is, our brain life. This causes dissimilation processes, that is, destruction processes. Certain products are deposited.

As long as these processes are taking place, the human being is unable to bring about the reverse process, that of rebuilding his organism. Therefore, every time we wake up, our inner soul life is destroyed to a certain extent, so that by the time we have become tired, we have destroyed our organism and it can no longer develop an inner soul life; it ceases. We need assume nothing else except that fatigue substances are deposited in our organism through the day's life. We need only assume the attrition of the organic substance, that the organic substance is no longer able to develop its internal processes for a certain time. But then the external stimuli no longer work, and the result is that the inner organism now begins to develop its nutritional processes, the opposite of the dissimilation processes, the assimilation processes, that it now restores the destroyed organic substance, and this is how night sleep is effected. Once the organic substance has been restored, the inner soul life is also restored, and so the waking life can again exercise new stimuli until fatigue sets in again. Thus, we are dealing with what is called the self-regulation of the organism.

Can we not admit that the conscientious truth researcher, who is familiar with the results of today's science, must say: If the alternation of waking and sleeping can be well explained by the self-regulation of the organism, then it is not only superfluous but also directly harmful to impede the progress of such human science by saying that there is no self-regulation, but that something comes from outside the organism because the human being is independent. Since it can be explained entirely by the organism that the alternation of sleep and waking occurs, it is unnecessary and harmful to assume that consciousness is something special and steps out of the organism to develop a special life during the night. Again, one can point out that on the part of spiritual science there is a terrible dilettantism in which only those who do not know the path of science itself believe in order to explain the organism from within.

When people speak of the independence of spiritual life, when they speak of the fact that spiritual life is independent, that we have the human organism as a physical one through our senses and explore through the methods of science how physical occur, while the spiritual is still there, this is something that has often been emphasized, for example by Du Bois-Reymond and also by others who do not readily profess materialism. For example, take any cerebral representation: if you magnify the human brain to such an extent – Leibniz already said this – that you could walk around in it, you would only see material processes in it. But the spiritual life is still something special, and that testifies that one is dealing with a spiritual life that is separate from the processes of physical life. If that is justified, then what Benedict says, for example, shows this: the fact of consciousness is basically no different from the fact of the effect of gravity in connection with matter. Because we see, for example, the physical matter of a celestial body. According to the assumptions of physical science, this exerts the force of gravity, and there is something that is attracted, for example, by the sun. In the past, such effects between the sun and the earth or moon were thought to be something supernatural. But it is just the same as if we have a piece of soft iron and, in addition to it, the power of electricity or magnetism. And when we have the brain before us, with its crowded ideas, passions, affects and so on, it is just the same as the fact that gravity and other forces prevail around the material earth. So why should it be different from another effect, when processes are at work around the brain that occur in the same way as the gravitational processes around the material earth? The earth in connection with gravity and the other invisible forces at work around it is no different from what is at work around the brain in the form of affects, ideas and other processes. How can one have the right, one might ask, to speak of the independence of the spiritual life when one does not ascribe to oneself the right to speak of the fact that gravity is also exerted when there is no attracting body? And one can go on to say: Just as one has no right to speak in such a case in the free space of the universe of a world body developing gravity, so one has no right to speak of a special soul that is not bound to a material existence in a brain.

It should be clear to every serious spiritual researcher that such matters must not be dismissed with an unscientific fanaticism.

If there are already serious objections to the spiritual-scientific assumption about the life of sleep and wakefulness, about the independence of consciousness in general, how can anyone who takes the scientific methods of the present seriously somehow reconcile himself with what spiritual science about repeated earthly lives, about the existence of the human core of our being, which continues to exist after death, which undergoes experiences in the time between death and a new birth, and then reappears in a new, next physical earthly life! This is not only objected to by those who rely on scientific facts, but also by those who today want to be spiritual scientists themselves in many respects: by psychologists, by the soul researchers of the present day. The question is asked: What is the necessary characteristic for the continued existence of the human being? The psychologist of the present can find this in nothing other than in the fact that the human consciousness remembers the conditions it has gone through during life. Continuity of consciousness is what the psychologist of the present particularly focuses on. He cannot concern himself with that which does not fall within the consciousness of the human personality, and he will always have to rely on the fact that although man has a memory of his particular states in his life between birth and death, nothing analogous can be shown for the existence of the human being that comes over from previous earthly lives. Many a serious seeker after truth today will be able to object to many other things that have been presented in the course of this series of lectures. It can be said: You can indeed put forward the idea that certain things in human life appear in such a way that they cannot be explained by the events of the individual life, but that one must assume that a person brings certain abilities, talents and so on with them through birth, so that one can assume that the soul already exists before entering into physical life. But all of this remains a mere daring hypothesis. All this remains insufficient in the face of modern soul research, in that the latter again takes a path that seems to be steering quite conscientiously towards an ideal.

What is presented here can be characterized in the following way: anyone who looks impartially at human life, at how it unfolds with these or those passions, with this or that shade of feeling, with an inclination towards these or those ideas, will, if they place themselves without much hesitation the standpoint of spiritual science, will say: Our education has indeed achieved many things for us; but it cannot explain everything, for we bring with us from birth something that comes from earlier stages of our existence on earth. But, the serious scientist may reply, have we not started to investigate the first childhood life, the childhood life that is not remembered later?

The modern natural scientist or the philosopher might then say: Here the spiritual researcher wants to explain an ingenious person, such as Fexzerbach, for example, by saying that he has brought certain powers with him from his previous life and that this has enabled him to work artistically. But now the following discovery has been made: Such a painter paints with a very special color mood, prefers a certain facial expression and so on, in a very specific direction. If one follows this up, one finds that, for example, in his first years as a child he saw a bust in his room and that a particular way in which the light always fell on it engraved itself on the child's soul. This then reappears later, and it then becomes apparent, one might say, that such impressions are deeply effective and significant. It is possible to explain a lot through this. Spiritual science wants to trace everything back to earlier lives on earth, while perhaps everything can be explained by careful observation and research into early childhood.

One can then point further to modern natural science, which shows through the biogenetic law how man really does go through the animal forms, which are assumed to have passed through the human race in earlier states on earth, in the prenatal state, so that there is justification for showing this. Following on from this, one can say: Where does spiritual science point to something similar, that something is repeated in the individual life that a person has gone through in previous lives on earth? One would have to be able to demand this if, as a legitimate seeker of truth in the present, one is to believe that in this respect spiritual science applies the same seriousness and dignity that is present in a similar claim on the basis of natural science. And so it has come about — and with a certain justification one can say — that once man has acquired a little scientific knowledge about human life, animal life and also planetary life, which is accessible to us through astronomy, he can then give free rein to his imagination, draw conclusions and devise all kinds of other worlds that give a very strong impression of reality. Of course, someone who has no knowledge of natural science will very soon become entangled in contradictions, and his ignorance will soon become apparent as he projects all kinds of things that do not correspond to the results of natural science. But anyone who is familiar with natural science will show that his ideas fit very nicely into what natural science shows. Then he will not be refuted. But who in spiritual science stands up for the fact, one can ask again now, that something like this has not been projected out of such assertions without justification and then developed fantastically? Who guarantees that we take the standpoint that only that which can be investigated by everyone should be valid? Therefore, we would have to embrace this for the simple reason that we see how something emerged in the nineteenth century that is also asserting itself in modern spiritual science.

We have seen that in the nineteenth century in German and French intellectual life, the things that spiritual science asserts have asserted themselves. In 1854, Reynaud published a work, “Terre et ciel”, and Figuier published a work about what happens to man after death. There have been numerous opponents with a scientific education who have said: Yes, what is better, that you invent facts based on natural science about a multitude of human lives on earth, about life after death, and so on, or is it better to accept some other equally fictitious hypothesis about these things?

When such objections are raised, and when they are not raised in a frivolous way, but entirely on the basis of a serious search for truth, then it must be said that they are not objections that arise only from a spirit of contradiction, but that the human soul must raise itself, all the more so because on the other hand one sees again how little conscientiousness on the part of those who want to cultivate spiritual science when “proofs” are presented that human life is an individual one and it is said that one cannot find an explanation for phenomena such as human conscience and the sense of responsibility unless one wants to assume certain tendencies and inclinations from previous lives on earth. Some people say: If I feel responsible, then I must have acquired the disposition for it. Since I have not acquired it in this life, it must have been in a previous one.

It is also said that human conscience is a phenomenon that proves that an inner voice speaks to us that we cannot derive from this life, and therefore we must derive it from a previous one. Then it is also said: You look at the different children of the same parents, they have very different spiritual characteristics. But if everything is supposed to be passed down from parents to children by inheritance, how can such differences be explained, as they occur even in twins? Therefore, one may conclude - so people say - that the children of the same parents have different individualities, which cannot be inherited, but must have been drawn from a previous life into the present one.

The conscientious truth-seeker will object: Do you not take into account the fact that the individuality of a person, as he appears to us, arises from the mixture of the paternal and maternal elements, and that therefore the mixture must be different for each individual child? Should not even twins, because they have different mixtures, have different individualities if they are explained only by inheritance?

This objection is not far-fetched, but one that arises from the matter itself. If you consider everything, you find it perfectly understandable that those who always demand a “controllable” science do not include spiritual science because it is not controllable; and if you consider that such opponents have something significant for themselves, you understand them. They have this for themselves, that there is something else besides the critical spirit in our time. This critical spirit is certainly present, and when spiritual science says something, it immediately calls upon its opponents, who are not only logically irritated but also morally outraged that such theories are put forward. Such opponents are called upon, and criticism is something we see springing up everywhere. And because spiritual science and its ideas are a shock to our time, such criticism is quite understandable.

But alongside the critical spirit, credulity also lives in our time, running after anyone who claims something from spiritual science. The longing to get things in such a way that one can also understand them is not very present in people, it is just as little present as the critical spirit and credulity are strongly present. Thus we see that through credulity, through the acceptance of authority by a gullible public, which accepts all kinds of things from spiritual science, the way is paved for precisely that which has always asserted itself against real, serious spiritual research, namely, charlatanry. It is a challenge to charlatanry when people gullibly run after everything. And it is a great temptation for people when all sorts of things are believed, when they are relieved of the difficulty of really justifying these things before the forum of science, before the forum of the spirit of the age. Even in our time, what is mentioned here is only too widespread. We see how credulity and the most blatant superstition are running rampant. There are hardly two other things in the world that are as closely related as spiritual science and charlatanry. If one cannot distinguish between the two paths, if one accepts everything only on the basis of blind faith in authority, just as by nature some things must be accepted on authority, which is often the case in the present time, then one invites what is rightly criticized by serious truth seekers: the charlatanry that is so closely linked to spiritual science. It is understandable that someone who is unable to distinguish the charlatan from the spiritual researcher might object that it must all be charlatanry.

It is easy to make the transition to the moral and religious spheres. We can characterize the objections that arise in these areas more quickly because they are easier to understand.

One can say: Just look how what must be the most intimate matter of the human soul, what a person can find for themselves as faith, as their subjective belief, is blown up into an apparent science! And one can object to the spiritual scientist: If you present that as your faith, we will leave you alone. But if you want to impose on others what you present as a teaching from the higher worlds, then that is contrary to the nature and character of how the inner life of man should relate to the spiritual worlds, to religious life in general. If one then also wants to show the fruits in this respect, one can say: One looks at people who, in spiritual-scientific circles, for example, have made the idea of repeated earthly lives their conviction; one can see in them how what is the moral world view is introduced into the most blatant egotism precisely through a spiritual-scientific world view. And one can compare the results of spiritual science with the materialism of the nineteenth century by saying: There were numerous people who were able to go beyond mere material processes with their minds, and who said: I do not see my higher morality in claiming a spiritual world after my death in order to be accepted by it and to continue to live there, but when I do something moral, I do it without hope of a spiritual world, because duty commands me to do so, because I gladly give what is my own egoity.

There have been many for whom the morality of immortality was only a selfish morality. This morality seemed to them to be much less good than the one that lets everything that is done pass into general world life at the death of man. In contrast to this is the morality of those who say that it would make no sense if what they do did not find its compensation in the following life on earth. This law of karma, the opponents of spiritual science can now say, only favors human selfishness; quite apart from such people, who may even say: I recognize many lives in the future. So why should I become a decent person now? I have many lives ahead of me, and even if I remain stupid in the present, I can still become wise and clever in the lives to come. “So one could say that repeated lives on earth are an invitation to lead a comfortable and carefree life. All this shows that the idea of repeated lives on earth is that selfishness, which wants to preserve one's self, is very far removed from selfless morality.

And an objection can be raised to Friedrich Schlegel's view of repeated earthly lives, as they are assumed by the Indians: The view of the human being's life, which rushes from embodiment to embodiment, leads to man being alienated from active, direct intervention in reality, so that he loses interest in everything in which he is to develop. It is easy to notice a certain unworldly eccentricity in those who immerse themselves in spiritual science. A certain spiritual egoism, a certain unworldly doctrine is cultivated as a result. Indeed, it can be seen that such people say: After studying spiritual science for a certain period of time, I lose interest in what I used to love. This is a common occurrence, but it shows that the objection is taken seriously, that the person should work in the world to which he is assigned! It is a serious objection that spiritual science should not alienate people from the direct and strong life of reality, should not turn them into eccentrics who let everything go haywire.

And now religious life! One can say: What is the most beautiful flower, the most glorious flower of this religious life? It lies in devotion, in the selfless devotion of the human individuality, one can say, to a divine beyond the human. The self-loss of the mind, the self-sacrificing devotion of the mind to the divine beyond the human, produces the actual religious mood. But now spiritual science comes and explains to man that there is a divine spark in him, which first expresses itself in a small way in one earth life, but then is developed and becomes more and more perfect, so that the God in man becomes stronger and stronger. That is self-deification instead of selfless devotion to the extra-human divinity.

Yes, one can object with some justification, if one takes the religious view seriously, that by living in one's own divine nature, if it is realized through the various incarnations, the true religious sentiment can be destroyed, as can the life of love. If a person does not feel impelled to live in direct loving devotion, but thinks that he will make up for it in a later life on earth, then he is only loving with a view to making up the balance. And the religious man can say: In the world view of spiritual science, religious life is based on the egoism that man does not have God outside himself, but within himself. And the objection is justified: what a sum of arrogance, pride and self-deification can be established in the human soul as a result!

Those who have such objections do not need to imagine them. But it can be seen from this how dream-like followers of spiritual science can come to such pride and repeatedly to such self-deification. This is why we find such a rebellion against the existence of the divine spark in man in the Occident, against the existence of the human essence before birth. One should not take it lightly, which one can find in a serious truth researcher as such an objection to repeated earthly lives in contrast to the conditions of inheritance.

One objection, which I will read out – and I will not talk about it further so as not to weaken it – is found in Jacob Frohschammer, who can be taken as a type of person who can object to the assumption of a pre-existence of the soul in many ways:

”... The human soul cannot possibly regard itself as a divine essence or as a part of God, not so much because of the Thomistic concern for the unity of God, since they could still be moments in him without damaging his unity, but rather because of the human soul's own consciousness and testimony, which can neither regard itself nor the world as a direct expression of divine perfection or as the realization of the idea of God himself. As coming from God, it can only be considered a product or work of divine imagination; for the human soul, like the world itself, must in this case come from divine power and activity (since nothing can come from mere nothing), but this power and activity of God must, as in the creation of a model, also be effective in the realization and preservation; thus as formative power (not only formally, but also in a real way), therefore as imagination, i.e. as a power or potency that continues to act and create within the world, thus as world imagination, - as this has already been discussed earlier. As for the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls (of souls that are either considered eternal or created temporally, but already at the beginning and all at once), which, as noted, has been rediscovered in more recent times and is considered suitable for solving all kinds of psychological problems, it is connected with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and the incarceration of souls in earthly bodies. According to this, when the parents are conceived, neither a direct divine creation of the souls nor a creative production of new human natures by body and soul takes place, but only a new connection of the soul with the body, thus a kind of incarnation or immersion of the soul in the body, at least partially, so that it is partly embraced and bound by the body, partly it extends beyond it and maintains a certain independence as a spirit, but still cannot escape from it until death breaks the connection and brings liberation and salvation for the soul (at least from this connection). In this state, the human spirit was said to resemble the poor souls in purgatory in its relationship to the body, as they are usually depicted by bungling painters on votive tablets, as bodies half immersed in the blazing flames, but with the upper part (as souls) protruding and gesticulating! Just think what position and significance this view would give to the sexual contrast, the nature of the human race, marriage and the relationship between parents and children! The sexual antagonism only a means of incarceration, marriage an institution for the execution of this fine task, the parents the minions for the detention and incarceration of the children's souls, the children themselves owing this miserable, laborious imprisonment to the parents, while they have nothing else in common with them! All that is tied to this relationship is based on miserable deception!"

If you are a fanatical spiritual scientist, you may smile at such a thing, but fanaticism should be alien to spiritual science. It should understand and truly tolerate that which the soul rebels against. For this reason, this introductory lecture was not given as a “justification” but as a “refutation” of spiritual scientific research. But what will be presented in the next lecture, “How to Justify Spiritual Research?”, will be all the more solid if we can make the objections to be justified ourselves. You may well believe that I do not want to refute spiritual research in truth!

I could only list a very small number of objections here. Many such objections could be made. Some of this can be done in the near future, and the refutation will follow on immediately. But from all that is stated, one can see how man, by undertaking spiritual research, is inwardly summoned to a battlefield, how not only the things that speak for repeated earth lives, for man's passage through a spiritual world, and so on, arise, but how all the counter-arguments can also arise from the dark depths of the soul. It is good when someone who is quietly engaged in spiritual research is also familiar with these counterarguments. Then he will also be able to show the right tolerance towards his opponents. Simply occupying oneself with spiritual science or turning a blind eye or laughing at the objections of one's opponents can never be the way of the spiritual researcher. That this does not have a beneficial effect was already shown in a particular case in the nineteenth century, which I would like to relate here.

In 1869, Eduard von Hartmann's “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published. Even if one does not agree with it, one can still say that it was a good attempt to go beyond the sensory view. Therefore, Eduard von Hartmann had to oppose much of what had emerged as an ideal of science at the time, especially what came from the newly emerging Darwinism. Thus we find much in The Philosophy of the Unconscious that should not have become fashionable in the face of Darwinism. But the one thing that all those who, on the side of Darwinism, could not declare themselves in agreement with this book had in common was that they rose up against Eduard von Hartmann as one who had not familiarized himself with what followed from contemporary natural science. A flood of refutations appeared. It would be a mistake to think that these replies contained nothing but nonsense; some of them were written by people who are outstanding in their own fields, for example, by Ernst Haeckel, the zoologist Oskar Schmidt and others. Among these writings was also one whose author did not name himself, with the title “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent”. In it, a number of cogent arguments were put forward to show how many things in the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” could not be sustained and how its author had thereby demonstrated that he was nothing more than an amateur in the field of natural science. Many people were positively amazed at the ready wit with which this anonymous writer attacked his subject, and Oskar Schmidt, then at the University of Jena, thought that from the standpoint of natural science this was the best that could be said against The Philosophy of Unconscious. Some said: He calls himself us, because he is one of us; and Ernst Haeckel said that he himself could not write anything better against the “Philosophy of the Unconscious”.

So it was no wonder that the first edition of this work, “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent,” was soon out of print. A second edition appeared, and now the author called himself : it was—Eduard von Hartmann! Now some voices ceased that had previously said: he calls himself us, he is one of us. But the significant thing had been accomplished: a man had shown that he knew everything that the most serious opponents could bring against him. Once and for all, it has been proved that one should not believe that, if something can be said against a Weltanschhauung, the author of that Weltanschhauung could not have said it himself.

For spiritual science, this is a vital question. Today, I could not say everything that could be said. But spiritual science must know what objections can be raised against it, and it would only be desirable if some of those who believe they can summon up profound knowledge in order to refute spiritual science with this or that good scientific, exact reason could sometimes consider how much better the person against whom the objection is raised knows the matter than the person who raises it. This is the case with a conscientious spiritual researcher. Of course, he cannot bore his audience by always mentioning all possible counter-arguments. But when something is said in favor of spiritual science, and when many opponents arise, then the latter should first ask themselves whether what they are saying cannot be said by those who represent spiritual science.

The task of the next lecture will be to raise the question: How should the soul correctly relate to the counterarguments that arise from its depths? Is it really true that, because so much can be objected to spiritual science, man really has to position himself as - to put it in a somewhat figurative way - Goethe ultimately has his Faust say: “Could I remove magic from my path”? Are the counter-arguments of spiritual research the same as Faust's attitude towards the counter-arguments of magic? Are they such that a philosopher like Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is right when he says: In the face of world observation, there is really only the following. We see that man is weak in many respects. Why should we not admit this weakness to ourselves, and why should it not be a strength precisely when one comes to terms with one's weakness? How man must admit to himself that he is weak against wind and weather, against volcanic forces and natural disasters! How man must admit to himself that he is weak in the face of what nature inflicts on him when he plants the seed in the earth and the unfavorable weather does not allow it to ripen, which only allows a famine to arise from his diligence! If man must often remind himself of his weakness, why should he not say it, out of honesty: although the mind can rise above itself in many ways, it is also weak and limited and can do nothing about what nature imposes on it; so it can recognize nothing about what our nature is – we must resign ourselves!

If the reasons that have now been put forward were so weighty that the next lecture could not be given, there would be nothing left but such resignation, which not only Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, but many others feel from an honest, truth-loving soul, and who believe that they have to defend the idea that man cannot penetrate into a spiritual world. Because the counter-arguments arise not from a spirit of contradiction but from the nature of things themselves, the dispute about the nature and value of the counter-arguments of spiritual science is not merely a theoretical fact, but something that must arise out of the battlefield of the soul, where opinions wage a seemingly more or less justified war against opinions, and where only through hard struggles can one recognize which of these reasons can remain victorious there. If one faces the inner struggle of the soul openly and unreservedly and can say what speaks for and against a knowledge of the spiritual world, then one does not become a fanatical representative of this or that invented or contrived principle, but one adherer to that principle, and builds up a calm conviction on a foundation of reasons which are only then, and never before, asserted for themselves when they have driven out all opposing arguments from the field of their own soul.

When the seeker of truth seeks his conviction in this way, he may confidently go forward into the future development of spiritual life, for what the earnest seeker of truth has said is true: Whatever is untrue, however often it may be repeated, will be cast out by the ever-developing striving for truth in humanity. But that which is true and has to fight for its existence against opposing arguments, as we can see in the events of world history, finds its way in the development of humanity in such a special way that one can stand before this development of truth into the centuries and millennia and say: And no matter how many covering impressions, that is prejudices and contradictions, are piled up, the truth will always find crevices and cracks to assert itself, to assert itself for the benefit, progress and use of humanity.