The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Since Ms. Wandrey's illness has prevented her from giving her Faust lectures during our time together in Berlin, I would like to make some brief and rather random remarks about Goethe's “Faust” this morning. I have often lectured on Faust and I hope to one day put together a compilation of what I have said in various lectures in a smaller publication. The Faust theme is an extraordinarily comprehensive one on the one hand, and on the other hand it is extraordinarily difficult, difficult because there are probably not many works of world literature that are as inextricably linked to their author as Goethe's Faust is to Goethe. We need only consider the fact that Goethe brought with him to Weimar a kind of first form of the Faust legend, which he had developed as a Faust legend, and that in Weimar, in a relatively early period, he only had to add a little and work it out in detail, and then he could read it aloud. It is the figure that was published at the end of the 19th century, found in a copy that bears the rather distasteful name “Goethe's Urfaust”. So with this we actually have the Faust figure before us, which Goethe had very early on. Then we have a version of the Faust poem that Goethe published in 1790 out of certain feelings, a “Faust fragment”. I say out of certain feelings, of course, because the fact that Goethe published it was associated with the fact that Goethe actually despaired of finishing this Faust poem at the time. So it was a matter of repelling what he had thought up to that point because he no longer saw any possibility of continuing it. Then we have the form in which 'Faust' appeared in the early 19th century. That is roughly our first part today with the 'Dedication', the 'Prologue in Heaven' and so on. But that is not the end of it, because the “Helena Scene” was already finished at the time, and this now appears as the third act of the second part, so that at the time when Goethe had this figure of “Faust”, he already had in his feelings and thoughts a connection between this Faust figure and the figure of Helen. And then, in 1824, when Goethe was seventy-five years old, he energetically set about rounding off the second part and making it into a full-fledged poem, which he then left as a testament after his death.

We therefore have a piece of writing before us that not only accompanied Goethe throughout his entire life, on which he not only worked throughout his entire life, but which also continually changed its entire inner structure, content, form, conception, everything at all in the course of time. To this we must add that Goethe shows himself in this “Faust” as one of the most truthful poets that we find in world literature. For in writing Faust, his aim was never to present something outwardly beautiful or perfect, but always to give what he could give out of the deepest, innermost sincerity, to give unadorned what his soul had grasped as truth at the time. If we add to this the fact that this Goethean life was a striving through and through, that we can follow how this Goethean life developed and rose from decade to decade, how Goethe thought and recognized new things, formed relationships to new worlds, then we will recognize the importance that lies in the fact that Goethe always let what was in him flow into the Faustian poetry. So it could well be that here and there his “Faust” seemed rather questionable to him, when he undertook what he had written decades ago. In the meantime, he had progressed. Now, what he had created years ago is to be continued.

One thing will be considered here to take a look into Goethe's soul with the help of “Faust”. If you take what has now been published as “Urfaust”, you have something that you can call: It is approximately what brought Goethe to Weimar and rounded off the first Weimar years. It is something that could be called the poetry of a young, extraordinarily talented poet who, however, has not yet been able to bring much of what was actually in his soul out of his soul for himself. For this form of Faust poetry still lacks all the connections that Goethe would later in life call connections with the spiritual world. There are actually only the external, quite realistic human scenes that could be conceived in such youthfulness. It is self-evident that people who want to remain in such a relationship to the spiritual world all their lives, and who do not want to see the becoming, the development in Goethe, find contradictions. Of them, Goethe said:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars
In their favor.

The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
It means the riffraff
One would no longer

But let us look at Goethe's situation, let us look at the matter with regard to Goethe's soul. We can stop at the time when Goethe was in Italy, when he was in Rome, that is, in the second half of the penultimate decade of the 18th century, 1787 to 1788. What happened in the time between when Goethe wrote what is now combined in the Urfaust, until the time in the Goethean soul when he was in Italy, when he regarded as most appropriate the form of art he had given in “Tasso” and in “Iphigenia”? Consider what it means that it is the same personality that had already written the strange, chaotic “Götz von Berlichingen” in its first form on the one hand and then gave the wonderfully rounded form in “Tasso” and “Iphigenie” on the other. It is the same person. For reasons that will become clear later, when we no longer know that these works are by the same poet, it will be possible to prove that the same poet could not possibly have written these things. We can say that there were already different people in Goethe himself in the truest sense of the word. In 1775, Goethe had overcome Goethe, and in 1788, it was the Goethe who wrote “Hexenküche” (Witch's Kitchen) in the Villa Borghese in Rome and the wonderful scene “Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything, why I asked”. It is a fact of profound significance for our knowledge of Goethe's soul that the images of the original Faust, which he wrote in youthful titanic rebellion against the prevailing intellectual currents, arise before Goethe's spirit in the same mood in which “Götz von Berlichingen” was created. In Rome, the same Goethe felt the urge to bring measure and harmony into his conception and to take up the old figures again. He must again honestly and sincerely add something from his present to Faust, seek to continue Faust himself, as he himself has progressed. That was a very difficult situation. The earlier time is no longer there, but it confronted the poet Goethe. He would have had to rewrite everything that had been written so far, or he had something in front of him that was really as if he, at the age of forty, had his figure at seventeen, twenty-five, thirty, and so on, as if he had all that in front of him. And again, if he had completely reworked the whole of Faust, it would not have been true, because he would not have expressed the mood that was in him when he was interested in these scenes. All this makes the Faust legend so tremendously important and so unfit for the philistinism we find in life. But there is still something in Goethe when he wrote the “witch's cauldron” and the scene “sublime spirit”, there is still something there.

What had already occurred before Goethe? Goethe had approached everything that was in his soul, the fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, the Greek-Latin period. He is full of enthusiasm for this fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, for the Greek-Latin period. I have the suspicion, he wrote from Italy, that I am on the trail of the laws of Greek art. The artists proceeded according to the same laws that nature itself follows. After reading Spinoza deeply to find God in nature, when he stands before the works of art in Italy, what appears to him as art, stands before him, as he said: “Here is necessity, here is God.” Now, he felt himself confronted with what he had absorbed in the north from a culture in which what had emerged as the first dawn of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period had essentially played a role. No matter how strange some of the beliefs, legends, and superstitions that emerged during the strange twilight of the Middle Ages may seem, they are connected to the cultural period that followed the Greco-Latin period. And now, in this period, the completion of the human being in the Greco-Latin period stands before Goethe's mind in a very remarkable way. It was a perfection that was brought about by the fact that this cultural period, which is the middle of the post-Atlantic period, is preceded by three periods that are repeated to a certain extent later, but that this fourth period is the middle, the center of gravity of the post-Atlantic period, that at that time man went out into the physical world to the utmost. Hence the sense of completion and calm perfection in this art. That was what made such an impression on Goethe. He felt: when you have such a work of art before you, you do not need to go out into space, into the external world, everything has been poured into the work of art. — It was this outpouring into form, into the “how”, that particularly gripped him.

In the north, he was confronted by what he himself loved so much with the other side of his nature in the early days. Take a Gothic cathedral or the art of Dürer, Holbein and so on. There we have what prepared the fifth period. The works of art are not closed. You have to look for what is inside the work of art. A Greek temple is complete, so complete that no one needs to be there. The Gothic cathedral is not; it is only complete when there are devoted people in it. Until the time of decline in Greece, we always have the spiritual in the outer form. But in Dürer's form, we have the endeavor everywhere to go deeper than what the outer form expresses. The forms are sometimes ugly in the Greek sense because a powerful will wants to express itself there. In his youth, Goethe was a follower of this art, of Shakespearean art, which is the opposite of Greek art. What is here like two opposing elements in Goethe's soul would hardly have caused such inner turmoil in another soul. For Goethe wanted nothing less than to have everything that confronted him in the external world, and at the same time the supersensible, the spiritual. He was not one of those people who were satisfied with the external form, but rather one of those who valued the external form that he saw in Greek-Latin art so much because the supersensible was present at the same time. Form itself was a super-sensible reality. For Goethe, what is given in nature, what otherwise confronts him in the world, is already Maya, great illusion; Maya or great illusion is everywhere present. But from art he demanded that it place the true in the midst of Maya, the Greek temple, the Greek god, which from the super-sensible point of view is the true. Thus Goethe was thirsty for the truth of the supersensible in the sensible, drunk with Greek-Latin art because he wanted to place a realm of truth in the realm of Maja through art. All that is untrue should be removed from art.

But on the other hand, he saw how dangerous such an artistic demand is. Through spiritual science, we know why it is dangerous. Because every form of art is tied to a particular epoch, because it cannot reappear later. That was something for the fourth period, but not for the fifth. There, people had to focus on the supersensible, which cannot express itself in form. That was the fate of humanity, to be judged by that. Hence the struggle in the Nordic cultures against all outward appearance, the grotesque appearance of the spiritual in everything. As long as one — Goethe said to himself — merely talks about these things — Goethe said this to himself when he was sitting in the Villa Borghese —, as long as one merely talks, as I also did in my youth, one is not really true. For in external speech, the phrase is unavoidable as long as it is not imbued with inner soul. Everything Goethe had created up to that point seemed to him to be untrue compared to the plan he now had to place truth in art in the Maja. Thus arose in him the urge to bring across into the new era that which, like an eternal, can live on in every epoch, to bring across from the Greek-Latin epoch that which can live on. Do you grasp that? No, it is unconsciously brought across, because every cultural epoch stands on the earlier one. Unconsciously, the fourth lived on in the fifth cultural epoch. All this lived in Goethe as an urge: how can one consciously bring this across, how can one let that which lived at that time and has eternal value flow over? How would it appear if people could consciously transfer what lived in Greco-Latin culture into their consciousness? — This was something that lived in Goethe's soul: What would a person who had lived entirely in the Greco-Latin period and who now consciously transferred his consciousness into later times be like? — This was the beginning of the whole problem of reincarnation in Goethe's soul. It could not have been more deeply felt at that time. He wondered how one could consciously transfer earlier cultural ideas into later cultural ideas. It lived in him so much that he did not know how to grasp it in his own soul. In the subconscious soul lay that which had transformed the soul in such a way that in the transition from the fourth to the fifth period a figure as remarkable as Faust could appear.

Faust really lived and is registered in the records of the University of Heidelberg. What kind of a person was he? In a certain sense he was a contemporary of Nostradamus. He was a man who felt, in a certain way, the longing to bring forth, more or less consciously, what must now be brought forth again from the hidden depths of the soul. The third cultural epoch is to be brought up again. It is Faust's destiny to bring up this third cultural epoch again. The justification of such a spirit, alongside the spirit that arose as an ideal in Goethe's soul, was always clear to Goethe. He could never doubt that this modern spirit had a right to exist alongside the ideal man in his soul from the Greco-Latin period. But now he said to himself: This spirit must dive down into the depths of its own soul, must become acquainted with all that divides man when he enters the higher worlds. No sooner has man approached the “Keeper of the Threshold” than Goethe felt that a multitude of figures immediately confront him. Thus, for Goethe, Faust became a highly questionable figure, but one that he could not ignore: “How is the spirit that I have carried over from the fourth cultural period legitimately contained in a spirit in transition to the fifth cultural period?” It is contained in such a way that all the dangers that confront man when he passes the “keeper of the threshold” and enters the supersensible worlds must play a part in the striving. That Faust enters the supersensible worlds emerges from his longing, from his intuitive contemplation. Goethe was aware of this from the outset, but only gradually became aware of the dangers that still existed at that time, but no longer do today, because they can be avoided by following the teachings in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But Faust still faced these dangers. The way in which Faust enters the supersensible worlds is such that, simultaneously with the arising of a certain imaginative realization, an arousal, an inflammation and ignition of the lower passionate life must go along with it. Both things cannot be separated unless a regular spiritual path is taken. These things cannot be separated, you can also read that in Blavatsky. She says that one can only notice how the karma of someone who wants to penetrate into the spiritual worlds changes, how he can bring misfortune upon those around him if he does not enter the higher worlds in a regular way, how he spreads the circles that emanate from the impulses within him over his entire environment. In return, his own urges and passions also mingle in the higher worlds; worlds of forms surround the human being.

Goethe had to picture these real seekers of the spirit before his soul because he stood on the ground of having an inkling within himself of the absolute truth of Greek and Latin culture. He had to picture this seeker of the spirit of the fifth period with all its difficulties before his soul. What surrounds such a man, what dangers befall him? In the whole world of sense there is nothing that corresponds to what such a man experiences. He must enter into the spiritual world. But first one must know how what such a person experiences differs from the sense world. That is why there is the 'witch's kitchen': because Goethe wanted to show the whole supersensible environment into which Faust had to enter, because it had to be shown how the supersensible worlds present themselves in all the antecedents of which we have spoken. One must accept this 'witch's kitchen' as part of the spiritual world. It must be realized that Goethe knew certain secrets of the supersensible world, so that he was able to describe accurately how things are actually perceived by the clairvoyant consciousness. Thus the supersensible world is described with extraordinary accuracy, with all the seething human passions being described when the terrible process of entering the spiritual world takes place. All the seething passions that arise there are reflected in the monkeys, which have the names Meerkat and Meerkat, and are reflected in everything that is appropriately depicted in the “witch's kitchen”.

But Goethe has the urge to get Faust up to the truth, not to this world of untruth. It is a world that is absolutely true in fact, but a world that is even more illusion than the ordinary world of the senses is for the senses, Maja. Goethe must endeavor to approach the truth. He must depict how the external world, to which Mephistopheles belongs, the supersensible world, which is depicted in the “Witches' Kitchen”, is surrounded. Goethe wants to show that Faust can get out of the world from which Mephisto can receive his inspiration. Imagine a person placed in the supersensible world, as Faust is in the “witches' kitchen.” If one can no longer find one's way in this world, then not even the ordinary laws of the number system can be right. It does not depend on a witty interpretation of the witches' multiplication table; one must feel what it means to really stand in the presence of what is written in the witches' multiplication table:

You must understand!
From one, make ten,
And two let go,
And three make equal,
So you are rich.
Lose the four!
From five and six,
So says the witch,
Do seven and eight,
And it is done:
And nine is one,
And ten is none.
That is the witch's multiplication table.

It is about putting oneself in the shoes of a person who suddenly finds themselves in this world, where everything is different, after having known the ordinary number system. If you interpret these things more or less ingeniously, you do a disservice to the poetry, because it then seems as if the poet himself had symbolized it that way. No, the situation was vivid before the poet. Anyone who calls Goethe a symbolist or an abstract thinker shows that he is incapable of grasping the meaningful and real aspects of this situation. What had to happen to Faust if he did not want to destroy his own karma and that of those around him, such as Gretchen? It was a long way from this Faust to the one who speaks out of the contemplation of the fourth cultural epoch: Oh, from the human heart arise the imaginations that spin a web around the whole world of illusion:

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
Why I asked. You did not give me
Your face in the fire in vain.
Gave me the glorious nature of the kingdom,
Strength to feel and enjoy it. Not
Coldly astonished visitors, you only allow,
Allow me to look into her deep chest
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks,
The giant spruce topples, crushing neighboring branches
And neighboring trunks, sweeping them down,
And the hill thunders hollowly with their fall,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, showing
Then to myself, and to my own breast
Deep, secret wonders open up.

That is Faust, who speaks with nature by connecting his imaginative world with what is present as Maja or illusion, who is different from the one to whom Mephistopheles may say so strangely:

How would you, poor son of the earth,
Have led your life without me?
From the creeping craw of the imagination
I have cured you for a time.

How did he cure him? By introducing him to the transcendental world. But Faust is not to be cured of imagination in this way, but rather in such a way that he recognizes imagination as the all-embracing Maja, the illusion. What is necessary for Faust to be able to say:

And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks,
The giant spruce toppling neighbor branches
And neighbor trunks squashing down,
And her fall dull hollow the hill thunders,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then show me myself, and to my own breast
Deep, secret wonders open up.

In order for this classical sense of calm to arise, what must Faust confront in the “witch's kitchen”, where he must lose himself if he does not develop something very specific? He must not proceed like a theosophical theorist; he must come to himself like a human being with a very specific experience; he must see himself objectively. He must encounter something in the “witch's kitchen” in which he sees himself. Something of higher truth must appear in the imagination, but something that has a higher reality than the “witch's kitchen”. The higher self is feminine for man. This is very realistically depicted in the appearance of “Helena” in the “witch's kitchen”, the appearance of the etheric body, which can only be seen from a certain distance. Faced with this figure, Mephistopheles says, because he does not understand her:

With this potion in your body,
Soon you will see Helens in every woman.

This is portrayed from a true poetic impulse that strives for what people of the outer world will not see as what is important. For the people of the fifth period, there will still be a question about what they need, a question that could easily be somewhat ambiguous, but when it is truly answered, it is easy to understand. How could one speak to the most important matter of the people of the fifth period?

What is cursed and always welcome?
What is longed for and always chased away?
What is constantly defended?
What is harshly scolded and accused?
Who should not be summoned?
Whom does everyone like to hear named?
What approaches your throne's steps?
What has banished itself away?

It is a remarkable enigmatic speech with which Goethe approaches us at the beginning of the second part. One could find enough words to solve this riddle, but for our humanity the best solution will be found if one word is applied to everything that is asked. The word: Spirit. But Goethe did not want it to be so easy to solve the riddle, he did not want to present it so bluntly. But the spirit is enchanted in the most diverse ways and yet always welcome. One need only observe the spiritual development of mankind to know: What is longed for and always chased away? One need only point to spiritual science, for example. In those days, the spirit was only allowed to show itself in the guise of the court jester, otherwise it was not very welcome.

The big question is how the fifth post-Atlantic culture should come to spirit, to spirit from what it has, how it can grasp the actual basic essence of the world. Now, in no cultural epoch has humanity been better suited to finding the spirit in the form of the ego than in our cultural epoch. But how could one find the true nature of man if one could grasp this I on the basis, on the background of the astral body? Let us assume that if a person in the 19th or even the 16th century wanted to find out what the astral body is. Imagination is not something that a person has in their external perception. Man should seek the astral body, that which lies at the basis of the moon-time of the outer development of the I. Of course, because all the powers can reach everywhere, even when man applies the intellect to things, he can arrive at something, but what will he bring out of the astral body? Let us assume what emerges from the astral body when we apply to it that which is well suited to the external world of maya. We cannot express this more aptly than by calling what emerges from the astral body the homunculus. The homunculus has something to do with the astral body, as it is structured around that which is the I. We are dealing with the supersensible, so that Goethe is allowed to coin a word here that from the outset refers to something that is created in the supersensible world. Then Wagner says – the philistine intellect does indeed produce the homunculus in the laboratory –:

It will! The mass stirs more clearly!
The conviction of the true, the true!
What was praised as mysterious in nature,
We dare to try intelligently,
And what otherwise allowed her to organize,
We let crystallize.

With these words of conviction, commentators have tried to explain the strangest thing, because they could not understand that it is not a matter of conviction here, but that Goethe, in the sense in which he speaks of the superhuman, is speaking here of a conviction. But the second part of Faust has been commented on in such a strange way that the spelling mistakes have been commented on. For example, when Goethe dictated and the writer wrote: “Only do not strive for higher orders” and so on — it is truly not meant here, but the one to whom Goethe dictated wrote “order” instead of “places”. These things that we have here show us that for Goethe, after he had envisioned Faust in all his spiritual striving, the question now becomes particularly urgent: How can one consciously bring across consciousness? — The consciousness that lived, for example, in Helena, who now came before his mind. That was the burning question. In this context, I must mention – you have to take the Goethe of 1797 – that the greatest change that has ever taken place in the entire soul of Goethe has occurred. At the same time that the Faust figure in him, as a result of the necessity to think it, not only as a result of processes of the inner soul, when he had to write the “Prologue in Heaven”, all things in his inner being changed, so to speak. Then necessity also approached him, to give ever more definite form to this conscious coming over of consciousness from the fourth to the fifth period. Hence also the endeavor to solve the question somehow.

I have often hinted at how Goethe attempts to solve the question of reincarnation in poetry by showing that the eternal part of Helena rests in the spiritual world of the “mothers”. But man cannot enter the spiritual world without further ado, otherwise what happened to Faust when he looked at the image of Helena would paralyze him. The spirit must first envelop itself with the soul, then with the natural body. Helena envelops herself with the soul when soul material is made available in the astral as a homunculus. In the homunculus we have the forces of the astral body of a human being entering into existence.

He does not lack spiritual qualities,
But he is sorely lacking in tangible substance.

Everything is described quite appropriately, and finally the enveloping with the outer nature, where we are shown how the external corporeality is taken up. There he must pass through all the elements of nature, beginning with the mineral world and passing through the plant world. Goethe finds the wonderful word “It grunelt so” (it grunts so) to indicate what can pass from the greening plant world into human nature. So it goes through everything. “... until you reach man.” But then you cannot go any further.

Because once you have become a human being,
Then you are completely finished.

This continues until the human being comes into existence through the mystery of love, which is so wonderfully portrayed, as the human being is called into existence through the mystery of love, through the mystery of the sexual opposition. After Goethe has portrayed everything that precedes the mystery, he has the sirens express the wonder:

What fiery wonder transfigures the waves
That crash against each other, sparkling?
So it shines and sways and brightens up,
The bodies glow on their nocturnal path,
And all around is enveloped in fire;
So let Eros, who started it all, reign!

And man comes into existence.

Hail to the mild-favored airs!
Hail to mysterious tombs!
Here be celebrated,
Element, all four of you!

And we turn the page. Act Three: Helena has arrived. These things must not be grasped with coarse hands, must not be entrusted to external interpretation. These things can only be described by running after and slipping into what is being expressed, by dissolving them in the metamorphosing water, as in Goethe. But that is all there is to it. In Goethe is the urge to consciously bring up what has unconsciously lived in man of the fourth cultural period and what must consciously come up.

And then Goethe still uses the moral-religious-mystical element of the north to show how what has shown itself unjustifiably in the “witch's kitchen” can indeed come out justified. He shows this so magnificently in the final scene, where spiritual science and mystery interact so wonderfully, where everything that lived in Goethe is so wonderfully compressed in the 'Chorus mysticus', that this Chorus mysticus can almost be used as a symbol of spiritual science, which is already expressed by the scattered roses, and when it is said:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable;
Here it becomes reality;
The ineffable
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
draws us on

In just a few lines, everything that we recognize as spiritual scientific truth is expressed.

I would like to take the liberty of outlining tomorrow a world view from the perspective of spiritual science. Today, as an introduction, so to speak, I would like to precede it with a description of the world view of German idealism.

It is possible to speak of such a world view of German idealism if one attempts to extract from the innermost being of the German national soul, so to speak, what has been attempted by this national soul in the greatest period — in terms of intellectual life — to get closer to the riddles and secrets of the world. If we consider the impulses and forces assimilated by the national soul in those days as still active in the second half of the nineteenth century and continuing into our own time, when the world picture of German idealism has receded in the face of other endeavors, where it has lived hidden, as it were, as an urging force in the development of the national spirit, then one can also speak of such an effective world view in the present. However, we must bear in mind that, due to many things that have arisen in our intellectual life and have become dominant for the generality of this intellectual life, this – I would say – most “original German” intellectual construct of German idealism has receded. But especially in these days we may express our hopes that this world picture of German idealism will again come to the surface and incorporate its strength into the general process of human development.

In my lectures this winter, but also earlier, I have often mentioned a name that was borne by one of the most German minds of the second half of the nineteenth century; I have mentioned the name Herman Grimm, the great art historian. And it may be said that what I have ventured to suggest here about Herman Grimm can, especially when one considers what Herman Grimm achieved as an art historian, as an art observer and in other ways through his entire literary work, be proof that it is born directly out of German feeling, out of German thinking, in short, out of the innermost impulses of the German national soul. When Herman Grimm tried to lift up his soul to that which presented itself to him—more from his feelings than from philosophical reflection—as the world view of the Goethean worldview, he had to place this world view alongside the other which in modern times has found the widest dissemination and the widest interest; that world view, of which its adherents, its believers, repeatedly claim that it is based on the genuine and correct assumptions of science. This world-picture, which in a certain sense now holds sway in the minds of many, Herman Grimm, moved by his intuitive perceptions, desired to set beside the other, which presented itself to his imaginative fancy as the world-picture on which all Goethe's work and activity was based. I have already mentioned the conclusion which Herman Grimm arrived at when he made this attempt. He said:

“Long ago, in his” — Goethe's — “youth, the great Laplace-Kantian fantasy of the origin and the former destruction of the globe had taken hold.” Herman Grimm wanted to suggest the idea that if Goethe had wanted to profess this Laplace-Kantian world view, he would have had plenty of opportunities to do so because it had already taken hold in his youth. And now Herman Grimm continues:

"From the rotating nebula – which children already learn about at school – the central drop of gas forms, which later becomes the Earth, and, as a solidifying sphere, goes through all phases, including the episode of habitation by the human race, over inconceivable periods of time , and finally to plunge back into the sun as burnt-out slag: a long process, but one that is completely comprehensible to today's audience, and one that no longer requires any external intervention to come about, except for the effort of some external force to keep the sun at the same temperature."

Herman Grimm alludes to the world view that is so widespread today: that once upon a time there was nothing but extraordinarily thin matter, that this thin matter clumped together, began to rotate, to move in circles, that from this the world building gradually formed, the planets split, that then on the earth – the one of the planets split off from the central gas drop – in the course of time the mineral, the vegetable and the animal kingdom developed from the gas, and that then the whole course of evolution took on that form which presents itself to us as human 'history'. But then, later on, there would come a time when all living things would have to wither and dry up, when everything would fall back into the sun, and with it all life would sink back into inanimate matter. Many people believe that this world view is the only one that can be achieved on the solid ground of natural science. And, as I have already indicated, it is easy to make this world view comprehensible. Herman Grimm says of it: children already learn it at school. You just have to carefully slide a cut-out card through a drop of oil floating in a liquid, stick a needle through it from above and turn the needle to set the whole thing in motion; then smaller drops separate from the larger oil ball and move around the larger one. And so, there you have, quite “evidently,” the origin of a small world system, and from that you draw the conclusion that the origin of the great world system must have occurred in just the same way. However, I have always pointed out how obvious it is, even to a child, that the world could not have come into being any other way; but in this experiment, people usually forget one thing – and one should maintain perfection when demonstrating something. For it is usually not taken into account that the “Mr. Teacher” or the “Mr. Professor” is standing there, turning the needle and setting the whole thing in rotation, and one must not forget oneself in an experiment that one does. Therefore, if one wanted to accept the experiment cited as proof, one would have to place a giant Mr. Teacher or Mr. Professor into outer space.

Herman Grimm continues:

So said Herman Grimm. In contrast to this, it may be pointed out that the entire period of German Weltanschauungsidealismus in its striving for a Weltanschauungsbilde was basically a protest against the fact that the culture of the time incorporated precisely this world view with the most fruitless perspective; and it may be further pointed out how it actually came about that such a world view could take hold. But to do this, it is necessary to point out a little of the way in which, so to speak, popular thinking, the world-view thinking of the present day, has come about. And since it can be noted again and again how little account is taken of all the circumstances that are drawn upon in these arguments, I would like to point out that what I have to say in this regard is really not only of this war and is not said merely because we are living in these fateful times; rather, as many of the listeners here present know, it has been said and advocated again and again, not only in Germany but also outside of Germany. I would like to emphasize this in particular because it could very easily be thought that these discussions lack objectivity precisely because, in our fateful times, they draw attention to what can help to guide the German soul to what is rooted in the deepest depths of the German national spirit.

If we want to grasp the development of our newer world view, we have to go back – to not go further back – at least to the point in time when, under the impression of powerful external discoveries about the world building of space and also about the world building of time, humanity began to work on the renewal of the world view as well, as it must present itself to the human mind. In this context, it must be pointed out time and again how the work of Copernicus and what was achieved by minds such as Kepler, Giordano Bruno and Galileo in the wake of this work, basically provided the first impetus for the world view under the influence of which present-day education still stands. Today, I would like to focus on the extent to which Europe's individual nations and peoples have worked towards this world view, which now surrounds us in the consciousness of most thinking people; and how, on the other hand, the world view of German idealism has been incorporated into what Europe's peoples have contributed to the common world view.

The spirit that can appear to us as particularly characteristic in the — I would like to say — reshaping of the world view of modern times is that of Giordano Bruno, who was burned in 1600. By pointing to Giordano Bruno, we must point out the contribution that Italian culture, Italian thinking, and Italian striving for a world view has made to general world culture. In earlier lectures I pointed out that the life and striving of the human soul can be seen in three forms of expression by a true spiritual science: as sentient soul, as mind or emotional soul, and as consciousness soul. and that in this surge of inner experience, which comes about under the influence of the forces of the sentient soul, the forces of the mind or emotional soul and the forces of the consciousness soul, the actual self of the human being acts as the all-uniting element. I have also said that today one can certainly scoff at this classification as an arbitrary one, but that in the future spiritual science will make it clear that the division of the human soul into a part of feeling, a part of understanding and a part of consciousness is just as 'scientific' as the division undertaken by physics in order to divide light into seven colors or — we could also say — into three color groups: into the yellowish-reddish part, into the greenish part and into the blue-violet part. Just as one will study the colors of light in this threefold division, not out of arbitrariness but out of an inner nature of the thing, if one wants to come to a result at all, so the human soul in its wholeness must be studied in the three “color nuances” . The reason why the same mental operation that is accepted in physics is regarded as mere speculation in spiritual science is that today we are not accustomed to approaching the soul in the same way that we approach the nature of light in physics. I have also pointed out that the essential thing about the national impulses, in so far as they take hold of the human soul, consists, for example, in the case of the Italian people, in the fact that the impulses which play from the Italian folk soul into the soul of the individual Italian ripen the soul of feeling in the latter , but not in the sense that he is considered as an individual, but as a member of his people; so that a person who strives for a world view within Italian culture will do so as a person pulsating with the power that works through his sentient soul. And if we look at Campanella, at Vanini, and at other spirits in the newer age of Italian culture, we see that it was Giordano Bruno who most vividly expressed this aspect. Bruno, in the dawn of modern times, seizes with the powers, which we say are the powers of the sentient soul, that which Copernicus has brought up as a spatial world view?

Let us take the medieval world view. Man could see no further than the sky, which was bounded by the vault of heaven, in which the stars were set. Then there were the spheres of the individual planets, with the spheres of the sun and moon. Such a world view corresponded to the senses. But it was only compatible with the view of the world of space that preceded Copernicanism. As Copernicanism — I might say — descended into the infinite capacity for enthusiasm of the soul of Giordano Bruno, who with all the depths of his sensibility recognized the world, this view arose in him: What was called the vault of heaven up there is not up there at all; it is not a real boundary, but only a boundary up to which the human view of space comes. The world extends into infinity! And embedded in infinity are innumerable worlds, and dominating these innumerable worlds is the world soul, which, for Giordano Bruno, permeates this perceived universe in the same way that the individual human soul permeates the individual human elements that make up our organism. One needs only to read a page of any of Giordano Bruno's writings to realize that the enthusiasm kindled in his soul by Copernicanism led him to direct his hymns – for that is what his writings on revelation are – to the infinite world building permeated by the soul of the world. And so will others who, like him, have been inspired in their quest by his folk culture. Thus we see how in Giordano Bruno we are confronted with a world picture which everywhere sees not only the material and spatial in the world, but sees everything material and spatial at the same time spiritualized, ensouled; how the individual human soul is for him only an image of the entire world organism, which is permeated by the world soul just as our individual organism is permeated by our soul.

This world view of Giordano Bruno stands before us — I would like to say — formed from the same basis of feeling as the older world view of Dante; only that Dante's world view took up in its poetic creation what had also been handed down from earlier times and led into the infinite, but into the infinite supersensible. I have already pointed out how Giordano Bruno can teach us lessons that are so necessary to learn in the face of the newer spiritual science. For, in the first place, this newer spiritual science is always objected to on the ground that it asserts something that contradicts the “five senses” of man. Now, nothing contradicted the five senses of man more than the world-picture of Copernicus, which made on Giordano Bruno the impression just characterized; nevertheless, the world-picture of Copernicus has entered, if gradually, into the thought-habits of mankind. But other things have also become part of people's thinking. Just as Giordano Bruno called out to his contemporaries: “You imagine space as being limited by the blue vault of heaven; but this blue vault of heaven does not exist, because it is only the limit of your perception,” so the newer spiritual science must speak in the face of what the older world view sees in birth and death as the limitation of the world view. For what appears in birth and death as the limits of the temporal is just as little really there outside of human perception as the blue vault of heaven is really there for the spatial perception outside of human perception. It is only assumed as the boundary of the spatial because the human spatial view only extends as far as the blue vault of heaven. And because in relation to the temporal, human perception only extends to birth and death, birth and death are assumed to be the limits of the temporal; and today, with spiritual science, we stand at the same point in relation to birth and death as Giordano Bruno did in his time.

I would like to say: in order to effectively impress what emerged as his world view on the culture of the time, the stirrings arising from the sentient soul that Giordano Bruno gave to this world view were needed. It is as if what he has to say about the world does not in the least engage his intellect, does not in any way trouble his reason – one has only to read a page of his work to find confirmation of this – but as if everything emerges for him from the most direct intuition, that is how Giordano Bruno speaks. Thus, at the end of the Middle Ages, the Copernican world picture was accepted, which was bound to be accepted because it was so deeply significant for human progress. And so we can say: the “nuance of feeling” of the soul's life is clearly pronounced in the world picture of Giordano Bruno and also in that of those who, with him, received their most significant impulses from the Italian soul. For that is the significant thing that has come from this side to the present day: that all philosophizing, all the gathering of thoughts into a world-view, has flowed out of this most direct life of feeling. What warms the worldview with inner strength comes from this source. Therefore, we may say: insofar as the individual Italian places himself in his nationality, the enthusiastic soul speaks out of him when he wants to work out a worldview.

If we now turn to another current – one of those currents that then led to the modern world view: to the French current, we also find an excellent spirit at the starting point of the newer world view current; but if we look closely, we see him facing the origin of the world view under completely different conditions than Giordano Bruno: Descartes (Cartesius). He is also a spirit who, like Giordano Bruno, belongs to the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he starts from completely different premises. Let us take a look at these premises as they present themselves in this outstanding mind. What is it that he starts from, in contrast to Giordano Bruno? In Giordano Bruno, we see how he is seized by an ever-increasing enthusiasm for what gives him the foundations of the modern world view. With Descartes, we see the opposite: we see how he starts from doubt, how he realizes that everything that arises from the external world or from within the soul as knowledge, as insight, as experience, can be doubted as to whether it is a reality, whether it is justified, whether it has more justification than a passing dream image. Descartes comes to doubt everything; but he seeks knowledge, to know with inner powers. First of all, he looks for the characteristics that knowledge must have in order for the soul to accept it; and for him, clarity and distinctness are these characteristics. What can present itself most clearly and distinctly to the soul bears the mark of certainty. I would like to say: in the sea of doubt in which he initially finds himself, he realizes that he must seek something that presents itself to him with clarity and distinctness, with transparency; for only that can count as a certainty for him. So it is not the original enthusiasm that drives him, but the striving for clarity, for distinctness and transparency. From this it then follows that he says to himself: And even if I doubt everything, even if everything I could perceive in the external and internal world were only a dream image: I cannot doubt that – whether it be a dream or not, I am thinking this; and if everything that takes place in the sea of experiences and that I can doubt is not, and this is established with clarity above everything: I think – then I am too! And from this clarity and distinctness, the thought arises in him: everything that presents itself to the soul as clearly and distinctly as this model of clarity and distinctness has legitimacy; one may think about the world as one must survey it: I think, therefore I am. And now let us see from this starting-point with Descartes and his followers how a world-picture comes into being that thirsts for clarity and distinctness. This clarity and distinctness was prefigured in Descartes' soul in that he was a great mathematician, and above all a special thinker on the basis of geometry. He demands mathematical clarity for everything that should belong to this world-picture. He and his successors then went on to say: About the world of space and about everything that moves in space, one can gain clarity and distinctness, one can form an image that is inwardly as clear and distinct as only mathematics itself is clear and distinct. But I would like to say that the soul-life actually escaped this world-picture. Not that Descartes denied the soul, but by taking certainty: I think, therefore I am —, he did not take it in such a way that one would get the impression that he delved into the soul as he delved into the external world of space, into what happens externally. What happens externally in space gives him the opportunity to survey the details, and also to survey the context of the details; but the interior remains more or less obscure. He said to himself: “Certain ideas that arise in the soul are clear and distinct; these are ‘innate’ ideas; by arising clearly and distinctly, they structure and organize the soul internally. But a connection between the inner-spiritual and the outer-spatial did not arise for him; they stood side by side like two worlds. Therefore, he could not — like Giordano Bruno, who thought of everything as inspired by the world soul and of this world soul pouring its spiritual impulses into everything — come to think of the soul in everything spatial as well. He said to himself: When I look at an animal, a spatial structure presents itself to me; I can look at it like another spatial structure; but it does not show anything other than spatial structures; therefore it appears like a moving automaton. He did not find in animals that which moves the animal. He found it only in himself. Therefore, he ascribed a soul only to human beings, not to animals. He called animals “living machines” — and with that we have the beginning of a mechanical world view. They were not so bold – neither Descartes nor his disciples – to deny what was present from the old religious tradition, this inner soul, but they sought to consider it as belonging only to humans; and in animals, they considered it as presenting its creations to the soul in the way that mathematical creations present themselves to the soul.

Do we not see clearly and distinctly the working of the intellectual or mind soul, the middle soul, in the striving for clarity and distinctness, which has increasingly become the characteristic of all work on a worldview in France? Until recently, this remained the basic feature of the current that worked from this perspective on the construction of a general world view. One might say that everything in a worldview that is mathematically transparent, that can be expressed in mathematically clear thoughts, that can be presented in such a way that one thing mathematically follows from another, came from this worldview – up to the world view created by Auguste Comte, where everything – from the simplest phenomena of nature to human social coexistence – is to be presented as in a large, powerful painting, with one sentence always following another in mathematics. It would be interesting to show how this nuance of the mind or soul, this systematizing soul, permeates this entire culture, how it forms the innermost nerve of this culture.

And if we now turn to a third current that also had an enormous influence on our intellectual culture, on our intellectual world view of the second half of the last century, if we turn to British culture, we find Bacon, Baco von Verulam, as the dominant spirit, in whose footsteps all of England's other leading spirits still follow. And how does he assert what he has to say? He said to himself: Mankind has lived for too long on mere ideals, has busied itself for too long with mere ideals and mere words, and it should now turn its attention to external things, to the things themselves, that is, to those things that present themselves to external observation ; one could only arrive at a true picture of the world by directing one's eyes and other senses to what is taking place in the external world, and only allowing “thoughts” to be valid insofar as they bring what is happening outside into a context. Bacon became the philosopher of experience, of the world view of experience, the world view that serves to summarize what is happening externally. Hence we see how, in the course of this school of thought, an outstanding mind such as Locke denies the possibility that the soul can gain any knowledge from itself; all it can do is to stand and observe the course of the world; then what it can observe will be written on the soul's blank slate. In this sense, the soul itself is a blank slate, a tabula rasa; not as with Descartes, innate ideas arise that are connected with the essence of the soul. Locke crosses out all innate ideas. For him, the world view arises only from the fact that the human soul focuses on its surroundings, that it analyzes, synthesizes and reflects on what is going on outside. This current extends right up to more recent times. People like John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and others are influenced by an impulse such as that just mentioned. One would like to say: with such a world view, everything that the soul could achieve by developing inwardly and bringing up what it does not yet have when it is placed in the world in a natural way, is rejected, so that it must stop at everything that presents itself externally and apply all the soul's strength to summarizing what presents itself from the outside.

When I first tried to find a concept, an idea for this kind of English philosophy, especially for John Stuart Mill, about fifteen years ago – this is presented in my “World and Life Views in the Nineteenth Century” – I struggled to find a suitable expression to characterize John Stuart Mill's world struggled to find a fitting expression to characterize John Stuart Mill's world view; and even then I had to characterize this world view in such a way that I said: This point of view is that of the 'spectator of the world', it is not the point of view of a soul that works inwardly on itself with the belief that it can advance in the knowledge of the inner connections of things through this inner work. John Stuart Mill also takes this standpoint as a spectator, for Mill was also one of the followers of Locke and Bacon, and he faces the world in such a way that he stands before what is presented to the senses externally and what can be joined together in thoughts, just as thoughts are joined and dissolved in everyday life.

Now we see how, in yet another way, Giordano Bruno, Descartes and Bacon in the way they are characterized work on the creation of a world view, in German, Central European intellectual culture on the emergence of a world view; we see how, in solitude, a profound German mind seeks to gain a world view from the depths of the national soul. It is easy to misunderstand this thinker, who strives for the highest possible insights for a human being, and to ridicule him; but when we speak of German intellectual life, we must draw attention to this one man: Jakob Böhme, who lived at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is certainly easy to misjudge this simple shoemaker from Görlitz, for he did not speak as did Copernicus or Giordano Bruno, who drafted a world picture out of his elementary intuitive perception; nor did he speak out of a striving for clarity and distinctness, as we find in Descartes, and he spoke even less like Bacon, who wanted to summarize what presents itself outwardly to the senses. Rather, he spoke in such a way that when he delved into his soul or was with nature, something was there that had not been there before; he spoke of how an inward path is traversed that leads to the innermost secrets of existence. He spoke of what ignited within him when, as a shepherd boy, he once looked into a hole in the ground at the top of a mountain and saw a metal vessel full of gold in the recess. He said that this experience ignited something within him, and he wanted to say: A spark has been kindled in my soul, which has been ignited by the spirit that is weaving in the world; I felt connected to the spirit living in the world. And he goes on to tell us how he pursued this experience in his soul and also lived in a state of soul alienated from everyday life for seven days, how he had gone through a “paradise and realm of joy,” how he did not feel connected to reality through his senses, nor to what the senses presented through his mind, but how he felt connected through his soul to what invisibly and supersensibly reigns in things. But when he told this to his master, with whom he was then apprenticed, the latter told him to get out of there, because he could not use any young house prophets! And many still speak like this master today; in this respect, people have not become more understanding.

But if we delve into Jakob Böhme, we see how he wants to tie his soul to what pulses through the soul spiritually and emotionally. While Giordano Bruno directed his soul outwards, in order to see the 'soul of the world' everywhere, which he assumed, it is the case with Jakob Böhme that he only wants to form and shape his soul inwardly, that he does not want to look at the soul of the world outwardly, but rather immerses himself in it, so that he participates in the life of this soul of the world. Participates, I said. This is the starting point for world views that arise from a dark urge, for Jakob Böhme works without external scholarship, only from his soul. It is the beginning of the striving of a soul that draws its impulses from the impulses of the German national soul: this immersion in what is otherwise only observed or what is presented in clarity and distinctness. Jakob Böhme would not have understood what Cartesius strove for; for him it was not a matter of clarity and distinctness, but of allowing the soul to live the life of the great world soul. And if he could do that, then it did not matter to him whether it was clear and distinct, because “it is simply experienced!” And this “it is experienced” has remained like an impact, like a ferment within the striving of the German national spirit. Those spirits whom I mentioned in my lecture of eight days ago are the continuers of that first germ which was in Jakob Böhme; one can still see in them how they only want to strive clearly for what was already in Jakob Böhme's striving, which can be expressed by saying that he wanted to experience the secrets of the world — not just look at them!

Now, however, we must look at a second starting point for the more recent striving for a worldview if we want to recognize all the forces that are inherent in this newer striving for a worldview. This other starting point is often more admired today by people who are striving for a worldview than the starting point of Jacob Boehme; it is the one that is also found in a German mind, and again in an eminently cosmopolitan mind, namely in Leibniz. His world view is similar to that of Giordano Bruno, but expressed in a German world view nuance. If we want to characterize the Italian world view, we have to say: it is born out of the sentient soul. In the same sense, the French world view is born out of the mind or mind soul; especially when studying Cartesius, one notices this to a very special degree. The British world view is born entirely out of the consciousness soul, out of that consciousness soul which, especially in the stage of observation, is able to focus on what is external and what the mind can bring to consciousness from it. The German view of the world emerges from the I itself, from the most intimate inner workings of the soul. And just as light is present in both the red-yellow and the green-blue-violet, so the I is present in the sentient soul, in the mind or emotional soul and also in the consciousness soul, , but is therefore also a continuous back-and-forth striving, sometimes striving for the sentient soul, as with Jakob Böhme, sometimes more inclined towards the intellectual soul, as with Leibniz. What Jakob Böhme strives for inwardly as a way of living in the soul of the world, Leibniz strives for through the intellect, but not, as is the case with Descartes, not as a mathematical mind, but as a soul that has a clear awareness that man in his essence is a part of the whole world. And so Leibniz said to himself: What I am as a soul, a conceiving being, is basically everywhere, underlying the whole world. What we see in space is not a mere spatial construction, but the reality is that everything that is reality outside is of the same kind as that which is within me; only my soul comes to an alert consciousness, as it were. In the beings outside, which are not human, there are also such basic components as are present in humans. Leibniz calls them “monads.” What is “really” in them is consciousness. Only the monads of the mineral and plant kingdoms have something like a sleeping consciousness; then they become more and more aware and aware, to finally come to self-awareness in the human kingdom.

For Leibniz, the world is composed entirely of monads, and if you do not see the world as monads, it is because you see it indistinctly – as it is with a swarm of mosquitoes, which, seen from a distance, appears indistinct and looks like a cloud, but as soon as you get closer, it dissolves into the individual mosquitoes. So, for example, the table in front of me consists of monads, but these monads are seen pushed together like the individual midges in a swarm. Thus, for Leibniz, the entire world consists of individual monads, and just as the individual monads are mirrored in the whole world, so they are a microcosm in the macrocosm. One must imagine that the entire world is mirrored in every single monad, and a harmony implanted by the original monad spreads throughout the whole.

If one wants to characterize the salient feature of this Leibnizian world view, one must say: the salient feature is its abstractness, its thoughtfulness; and this abstract-thoughtfulness is indeed immediately apparent when one looks at it more closely. For what would be the use of it if, as Leibniz does with regard to the individual monads, one were to dwell only on a clock and say: the individual link, the individual cogwheel would be effective with the whole clock, would thus be a “little clock,” and all the effects of the clock would find expression in it? Certainly, anyone who has knowledge of the composition of the clock can say how its individual parts are connected. But what would it matter if one were to say that the real characteristic of the clock is its harmony? One encompasses it with an abstract concept. Today, however, people are usually glad when they can put an abstract concept for something; but one cannot grasp a clock through the mere concept of harmony. In this we can feel the contrast between a rational, abstract world view, as offered to us by Leibniz, and an ever-increasing immersion in the workings and weaving of the world spirit, as first presented to us by Jakob Böhme, albeit more in the form of a hunch.

In a similar way to Descartes, who sought the possibility of mathematically subordinating thoughts to the world view, Spinoza also strove for a world view that is comprehensible like a mathematical system; but at the same time, he wanted to shape it in such a way that, as one ascends from concept to concept, an ever higher and higher experience of the human soul results. He characteristically calls his mathematical world picture 'ethics' because, as he strings concept to concept, each successive one leads the soul ever deeper into the secrets of existence, until the soul, by becoming ever more absorbed in the concepts that lead from mathematics to mathematics, can feel at one with the unified substance of the world, with the unified spirit of the universe. It is an inward progression, a self-development in Spinoza. Therefore Spinoza stands alone in his striving for a world view. He has the impact that he was able to get from Descartes; but he has brought it into his world view in a deeper way through what he himself was able to get.

All the elements that have now been mentioned have influenced, in a certain way, what the world view of the nineteenth century has now become. But one can say: the blossoming and development of what was called “German Idealism” here eight days ago was a protest — which only never came to full effectiveness — against the fact that the world view developed into what Herman Grimm said: “A carrion bone that a hungry dog would avoid would be a refreshing, appetizing piece compared to this excrement of creation.” And it was always the case with the most outstanding minds, who stood with their natures within the development of the German people, that they endeavored to take up all the impulses that necessarily entered into the spiritual development of humanity in the construction of their world view, but to shape this world view in such a way that the striving for a worldview is not merely looking, not merely “watching”, but inner experience. Thus we see that in the characteristic spirit of German striving — in Goethe — the individual members, the various parts of the currents of world-view, are absorbed. In Goethe's 'Faust', which in this respect is a reflection of his own striving, we can see how his Faust develops out of the details of external observation, how he wants to arrive at an overall feeling for what permeates and animates the world. This is truly the spirit of Giordano Bruno. In this, and in the other, how later Goethe did not rest until he could fully immerse himself in Italian art, we see everywhere something of that nuance of feeling of the soul that seeks to expand one's own self into the world's self. And this already flows through the first parts that Goethe wrote down of his Faust.

On the other hand, we can see how the second world-view current, which in Descartes took the form of the pursuit of clarity and distinctness, has taken on a characteristically materialistic expression in Europe. Goethe was already aware of this as a young man when he was in Strasbourg, in Holbach's “Systeme de la nature”. I have already indicated how Descartes, in his world view, presents animals as animated automatons that are not ensouled. From what this Cartesian world view and, later, the British world view, which spread to the continent through Voltaire and fully embraced the aforementioned rejection of what the soul can inwardly achieve in inward striving, in order to accept only that which can be space can be systematized: from this arose the world view that Goethe opposed in Holbach's “Systeme de la nature,” which knows only the moving atoms that group themselves into molecules, and through whose agglomerations everything that can be seen in the world is said to arise. That world picture, which seeks to resolve everything into the effect of moving atoms and molecules, has clarity, the greatest clarity, and distinctness, a clarity, a distinctness that cannot be increased in such a world picture. But everything of a spiritual-soul nature must fall away from such a world picture. There is no room in it for anything of a spiritual-soul nature.

Goethe was already confronted with such a world view in his youth. He rejected it by saying:

Goethe finds this world view “cold and barren”.

And now we see how Goethe, summarizing everything that is in his soul, wants to combine clarity and distinctness with direct experience, in a way that was not present in Descartes. This is the characteristic that enters into the German world view during Goethe's time. How do we see the striving for clarity and distinctness in Descartes? In such a way that what one looks at, what one thinks about, must show itself clearly and distinctly. It must show itself clearly and distinctly to the observer. Goethe is clear about the fact that one does not gain any knowledge at all by merely seeing things clearly and distinctly placed before one; but he is clear about it, even if he does not want to stop at the mere inkling of Jakob Böhme: If one wants to gain a real world view that corresponds to reality, one must immerse oneself in things, to witness the forming of the crystal by placing oneself in the position of the forces that form the crystal; and in the same way, one must enter into the plant, witness the forces that make the plant a plant, and immerse oneself in all beings. Goethe does not want an abstract world view, cobbled together out of monads and harmonies, but a world view that is experienced. But not, as with Jakob Böhme, only intuitively, but by immersing oneself in all the things of the world, and through this immersion, the human being undergoes the path by which he or she approaches more and more the innermost sources of existence. That is why the world view that presented itself to him in Spinoza's work was able to have such an effect on Goethe. Spinoza never had the impulse to immerse his soul in the real external world. He sought to string together the impressions of the world in front of him, one after the other, but in such a way that the soul would undergo something in the process. Not that Goethe was ever a devout follower of Spinoza's world view; only those who know nothing about Goethe can say that. Rather, it is the case that Goethe felt the way he wanted to find his way into a world view with Spinoza, found it with him. The only difference is that what Spinoza strove for in an abstract way, Goethe wanted to seek in a concrete way. Just as Spinoza moves from concept to concept, Goethe wanted to move from plant to plant in order to experience what the plant experiences. Goethe called the soul's attainment by immersing itself in the plant world the “Utrpflanze”; and what the soul experienced by immersing itself in the animal world in the same way, he called the “Urtier”. Thus for Goethe the striving for a world-picture became a participation, but not a dark one as in Jakob Böhme; but the experience itself was to proceed in clarity and distinctness. This is witnessed to by Goethe's little essay on the “Metamorphosis of Plants”, in which he describes how the plant develops from root to leaf and to flower, with constant transformations taking place. But we must always bear in mind that Goethe sought to achieve his goal by immersing himself in the essence of things. While Cartesius, in his world view, threw everything of a spiritual nature out of the essence, for example out of animals, and turned them into living automatons, Goethe allowed his own soul to flow into plants, into animals, into the whole world, in order to connect with it in his soul and to recognize it clearly. Clarity and distinctness of experience is what entered the world-view striving of German idealism in Goethe's time. What Cartesius makes an external characteristic of knowledge, which he presents and behaves as a spectator, Goethe connects with the inner experience. And what is wrested with dark, elemental power from the soul of Jakob Böhme and expressed in his words, is also present in Goethe; but in that it shows itself in him, we find it in clarity and distinctness.

Now, however, we see in Goethe what the three great minds also strove for, which were cited as characteristic of German idealism.

Let us look at Fichte. Eight days ago, we characterized how he strives to gain a world view by seeking certainty entirely from the impulses of the innermost part of man, the I. And if we want to see through Fichte completely, what then dominates in his world view? We might put it this way: what dominates in his world view is everything that a person can develop within themselves, without directing any kind of gaze to the outside world, by gaining self-awareness. This is a welling up and flowing up from the innermost depths of the soul. I have often characterized it here: every external thing can be named by everyone in the same way as the name expresses it; but we can only name the I in such a way, if it is to express our being, by letting it resound within ourselves. Fichte did not express this; but it underlies his entire world view as an impulse, and he starts from the assumption that the I is only there when it places itself in the world. A volitional decision, then, is what Fichte seeks as the center of the development of his worldview. And he asserts of the ego — and this already characterizes Fichte's worldview — that it can find out of itself what the mission of itself is. For Fichte, this is the moral worldview. And the national world exists only to engage in moral activity. Thus, for Fichte, everything is permeated by the divine within man. Everything else is only appearance, is only created so that the moral world order can be active. The will, which is grasped in the consciousness of self, in the point of self-awareness, and radiates from the consciousness of self, is grasped as part of the soul of the world.

The way in which Fichte presents this shows us that, in a sense, he starts from full self-consciousness. Just as the light appears in every single color nuance – to return to this comparison – he starts from the self that appears in all three soul members; but he lets it prevail in such a way that it works through the consciousness soul. And in this respect, I would say that in Fichte we have the thinker who is the antipode, the opposite pole, of the British spirit. While the British spirit essentially brings to bear that which can prevail in the soul impulses in the consciousness soul, Fichte radiates everything that lives in the I into the consciousness soul. Hence the British spirit in Spencer's more recent work has come to expect the blessing of the world above all from the establishment of such an outer order, whereby the whole outer world is so arranged that the greatest possible benefit for outer human needs arises. What industrialization can offer humanity stands as an ideal in Spencer's world view; and to him, every link in a social order that is incompatible with the industrialization of society appears to be a curse, because the industrialization of society, of the state, brings eternal peace, according to Spencer, and works to eradicate everything that endangers peace. Thus the ultimate principle of utility has been incorporated into the world view.

With Fichte, we see that he is no less a practical mind. We have been able to emphasize how he directly influenced the development of his time, for example through his “Speeches to the German Nation,” how he stirred hearts, how he awakened enthusiasm, how his entire work is aimed at , but to take hold of what is not from the point of view of the external world of the highest benefit to mankind, but what is to be placed as the deepest ideals of the soul in the moral world order. So we see how Fichte works out of the nuance of the consciousness soul and, as it were, brings about the counter-image of the British spirit.

A spirit that places at the center of his world view what the soul can experience within itself, but which, through the way in which he processes this, is infinitely close to the French spirit, is Flegel. Hegel is one of the most German thinkers because he accomplishes from the opposite side what is peculiar to the French mind. Clarity and distinctness, systematic order in the spectator's point of view, in the point of view that is gained when one only confronts the world: that is what has emerged from Cartesius to Bergson as the characteristic of the French world view. Hegel wants to have the world picture as an experience; but he can only absorb from this world picture that which is as clear and distinct as a mathematical concept. That is why Hegel's world picture seems as clear as a mathematical concept. That is why one has the “cold feeling” towards it, as I have explained. But it is not a system of mathematical concepts that has been picked up, but it is conceived in such a way that it touches the soul in its deepest innermost being. And by touching the soul in its deepest innermost being, it finds itself elevated above all that is unclear and indistinct in the external view. But what remains for it, after all that is vague and indistinct has fallen away from it, is the clarity of the full being — to the point of the Gnostic and philosophical concept. What characterizes Hegel's world picture is this: even if it contains only external abstractions, these abstractions are experienced, directly experienced. That makes a great deal, to be sure. First of all, it makes it unthinkable for someone to become a “true Hegelian.” Basically, one cannot become a true Hegelian; it is an impossibility. Because thinking, continuing these external abstractions, really has no appeal for anyone else, and one always has the feeling that once someone has done this, that is enough in the world. What matters is the endeavor to see how the human soul can be experienced if one only experiences concepts, if one only feels as inner direct experience that which is a clear but also completely abstract concept. The pursuit of such a world view is what is admirable about Hegel; looking at him as he pursues it is what matters. Particularly when one is absorbed in a work such as his Phenomenology of Spirit (though admittedly very few people will be able to immerse themselves in it), one has a web of nothing but abstractions, of the most terrible abstractions; but it has life, it has soul. It is a characteristic sign that the German mind has once gone so far in its experience of a world picture that it said to itself: I find no clarity and distinctness anywhere; I will see what happens when I let one concept arise from the other. While Fichte allows the divine essence of the world to merge into “God as moral world order,” for Hegel God is the “world thinker”; and the individual soul can immerse itself through the most abstract logic by reflecting on the divine thoughts. That is certainly the tremendously sobering and cold thing about Hegel's philosophy, that if you get involved with it, you must get the thought: the divine order of the world was only concerned with “thinking,” and in order to represent thinking, everything else was represented. A moral worldview warms us; a moral worldview also, so to speak, places us in everyday life. Thinking only allows us to “behold” the world, and in this respect, beholding is also an experience with Hegel. And because it is the experience that is important in forming the world view of German idealism, we see how it is made fruitful by Hegel in such a way that he does not lose himself in the most external abstractions, but adheres to the thoughts that the divine order of the world allows the human race to experience by letting it go through history. The human soul is, as it were, directed to go through history in order thereby to take part in the course of the divine world-order. This “taking part” in the world, which I indicated in a much more universal sense in Goethe, is what we encounter in Hegel in relation to history. The way in which the thoughts run in relation to history, so they contribute to a world-picture of history. But in this experience of the logic of the world, history becomes for him what it must become: a twofold one. The whole ancient history up to the appearance of Christ on earth is the one part; and the appearance of Christ is a mighty impact, is the most powerful impact on earth-history, in order to bring something completely new into human evolution, which was not previously connected with the earth, and which now guides earthly evolution. The Christ-idea connects in the characterized way with the historical world picture, which the German evolution has brought forth. For Hegel, the whole of history is a progression conceived by the divine world government, so that it presents itself as an education of humanity to freedom. And the greatest educator, but one who divides the entire progress of earthly evolution into two parts, is the Christ-Being, which has come into earthly evolution from without — also in Hegel's sense. And the characteristic feature is this: with the clarity and distinctness that Cartesius demands, but with which all experience is also connected in Hegel, the soul can live itself into the whole course of history; there it immerses itself in the stage in which in which the event of Golgotha took place, and experiences in microcosm what the whole development of the earth has gone through, in that the Christ has incorporated Himself into the development of the earth.

Thus Hegel anchors his world picture in the soul of the intellect, and thereby becomes the opposite pole to Descartes' world view, just as Fichte is the opposite pole to the British world view.

The case is different when we come to the third of the thinkers mentioned, Schelling. One could say of him that his outer thinking already expresses how he can be brought into a relationship with the southern world view, the Italian one. I have already mentioned how he seeks to shape what underlies all natural and historical becoming out of a heightened imagination. In this regard, Schelling's outward appearance is physiognomically significant: his eyes, which sparkled throughout his life, bore witness to inner fire; the powerful forehead, his sardonic laughter and the inner fire made him a spirit similar to Giordano Bruno. Whereas in Fichte we have the point where the German mind tends towards the same nuance of soul as the British mind, but in complete contrast to it, and wants to grasp world events from within—whereas the German mind produces in Hegel something that is still opposed to the French mind , but which is more similar to it, the German spirit produces something in Schelling that is completely similar to Giordano Bruno, because Schelling works in just the same way as Giordano Bruno according to the nuances of the soul. It is only that Schelling builds his world view in a slightly different way than Giordano Bruno in all of nature and history. And while in Fichte the world-spirit pervading the world is the moral order of the world, while in Hegel we see this world-spirit as the clear and distinct logical thinker of the world, in Schelling — similarly to Giordano Bruno — we have before us the highest artist, art itself, the artist who creates everything in the world according to artistic principles. But if we compare Schelling's unique quest with Giordano Bruno's, we see again the difference between the work of the Italian national soul, which comes from the soul of feeling, and the work of the German national soul, which comes from the ego. In Giordano Bruno, everything is, as it were, of a piece, everything bears a common character. I would like to say: Giordano's world view is as clear as a shot. In Schelling, we see how he starts from the world view of his youth, how he laboriously searches to feel some of it, how one can experience a spark of world life in nature. And he arrives at the view that whatever lives in my spirit as feeling also lives in matter; matter is enchanted feeling, I must release it from the enchantment, must disenchant it; the experiencing of everything that is in nature is an experiencing of feeling. While Giordano Bruno attempts to gain his world-picture as if in a single bound, Schelling sets out on a journey. And I might say that from year to year we can follow how he seeks to penetrate deeper and deeper into the secrets of the existence of the world. He is passing through the path of evolution. He had to go through it in such a way that in his youth he was still understood in the way the inwardness of the I had opened up to him; later, when he still wanted to show the I in the moral world, he was no longer understood, and in the end he was laughed at and ridiculed.

The world view of German idealism is above all a path into the deeper foundations of world existence. If I may use an image, I would say: the British world view is like a person who is in a house and looks out of a window. What he sees there, he takes as the description of the world; and so he takes what he sees through the tools of the house as the world itself. German idealism is pointed in the direction of seeking to experience the world-spirit together with it. If we follow the path, however, we see how he, also living in a house, grasps himself inwardly. In Schelling, Hegel, Fichte, we see that German idealism seeks to make itself at home in the house; it sees meaningful images everywhere in the house, and the “images” already express the external entities; and because it wants to decipher the images, it seeks a world picture. Fichte seeks it in the moral soul: a world picture, sketched in the house, not created through the windows. Hegel explains the pictures in the house that represent nature and humanity. Schelling, in turn, deciphers another part, or rather, Schelling makes “house music,” and in it he sees an imprint of what is going on outside. Hegel sees what has been painted about what is outside. All these minds have a world picture ; but they have created a home in order to decipher what is in the house. What they have not come to, however, is, I might say, the door of the house – that they might go out, so that when they had come through the gate they might fuse the image with reality, might experience it directly.

It is true that Goethe took this path – through the gate. But he also went through all the difficulties of this path. He showed us how we must struggle endlessly to find an expression for what we experience when we really set out on the path of experience. Thus he went through the experience with its struggles and difficulties, which such an experience must go through, just as one who seeks development must go through life. We see how Goethe defined a certain stage of his life in Faust of 1797, which he characteristically calls a “barbaric composition” and of which he is convinced that something completely new must come in at a new stage of his life. That is one of the characteristics of the German view of the world: it can never be “finished”. That superficial judgment, which finds the great only “great” when it is “flawless,” is not a judgment suited to the hero of human endeavor. Anyone who might entertain the opinion that we can have a work of art in the Faust that is just as perfect as that given us by Dante in his Divine Comedy would be mistaken. In Dante's work, everything is magnificently complete, as if cast from a single mold; in Goethe's, the individual parts are written piece by piece, one after the other, with each one left lying around for years, then taken up again, and so on. It really is, as he himself says, a “barbaric composition.” Goethe's Faust is certainly incomplete as a work of art, for the reason that it could not become a unified composition from a single mold, because it always went along with life. But the point is not that we say: Faust of 1797 is a barbaric composition, a “Tragelaph”, as Goethe put it, but that we take Goethe's point of view and try to understand how it can be a barbaric composition; only in this way do we escape blindness, while one can only speak of recognition with the abstract word.

Thus Goethe goes the way through the gate, knowing that one can go out through the gate, and differs from the philosophers in that he tries to get ahead. But at the same time he knows: whatever man can imagine of himself, whatever picture he can make of himself, it cannot be what Fichte presents in his philosophy, nor what Schelling or Hegel present; otherwise one arrives at nothing but abstractions, at an abstract moral world order and the like.

What then is it in the Goethean sense that man can only gain as an idea of himself? It is Homunculus, as he presents him in the second part of Faust, the little man Homunculus, an artificial product of what man can know of himself. This must now first be submerged into living nature. And how that which man bears of himself must merge with living nature, that Goethe presents in turn. In the lowest becoming you must begin, Homunculus is told.

Thus Goethe presents the process of development in its entire becoming. For example, when he speaks of the passage through the plant stage, where he uses the words: “It grunet so.” He admonishes the homunculus to immerse himself in the entire process of development; he even admonishes him: “Do not strive for higher places” - it must be “places”, not “orders”, as it because Goethe spoke in an unclear Frankfurt dialect, the transcriber wrote a “d” instead of a “t”; and the Goethe commentators have thought a lot about how the homunculus should come to all kinds of medals. And then it is further explained how, by becoming part of the world, he can come to appear as Helen; for what appears in Helen is the human reproduction of what passes through the secrets of the world.

Thus, in Goethe we see the setting out for a world picture. The German spirit is aware: I must go out through the gate to what is present in living nature; then, in the continuous development of my soul, a world picture will come about. This world picture, however, demands what it means to experience the world. Patience for this was not yet present in the second half of the nineteenth century. Therefore, the striving for a world view, as it was inaugurated by Goethe, is being held back. So it could come about that in the second half of the nineteenth century — characteristically in Karl Vogt, Büchner and Moleschott, who are referred to as the “materialists,” Haeckel himself could be mentioned in this context — that which the British world view has brought has been resurrected. One can say that the British world view was absorbed by the German spirit in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is Haeckel's tragedy that he must now turn against the British world view, even though it has entered into the German striving through the characterized development.

But in this respect, too, the German conception of the world differs from the British one: the British conception is satisfied with the pursuit of ideas that merely synthesize the external sense world, and it allows “faith” in some spiritual world to coexist with the external conception of the world in which it believes, as a “scientific” conception of the world. Thus, for Darwin, faith can arise as he expressed it in his main scientific work, saying: “Thus we have traced the life of organisms back to a few to whom – as he puts it – the Creator has breathed life!” Yes, the remarkable thing happened that the German translator even left this sentence out at first! For the German mind everything must be capable of furnishing the basis for a Weltanschhauung; for the British mind this demand need not be satisfied, because it does not have the consistency to build up its Weltbild to such an extent that everything becomes material for its Weltanschhauung. It can afford a “double entry”: the scientific world provides it with the building blocks for what it considers to be scientifically correct; for the rest, there is faith. For the German mind, no double-entry bookkeeping is good enough. That is why German idealism was overwhelmed by English empiricism. That is why we see strange phenomena in the German pursuit of a world view. I will cite only Du Bois-Reymond: in him lives the admiration for the Descartes-Laplacean spirit, which thinks the world as a great mathematician might have put it together from atoms and forces. But: Ignorabimus! We can never know anything about the soul and spirit. Cartesius and Giordano Bruno did not need to go so far as this. But Du Bois-Reymond goes so far as to say: “[...] that where supernaturalism begins, science ends.” Descartes does not say this, but Du Bois-Reymond does, where we find the German spirit overwhelmed by Descartes. And so one can show further how the Italian spirit, that of Giordano Bruno, has flowed into numerous endeavors of the German striving for a world view. Thus today we already find many who show how the plant has a “soul” and how everything is ensouled. We need only think of Raoul France. But we could also mention many of his contemporaries, even Fechner himself, who says that everything has a soul: a revival of the spirit of Giordano Bruno. But something is missing. What is missing is precisely what lived in Giordano Bruno. That is why I have often been able to point out: when someone like Raoul France comes and says: there are plants – when certain animals come near them, they attract them, lure them; once the animal has crept into them, they close up a gap and suck it dry... don't we see a soul life in the plant? We have to say: if you read the same thing in Giordano Bruno, you would fully understand it because it is imbued with the impulse of the sentient soul. But when it occurs, as it has done through the clarity and distinctness of German idealism, then what I have often stated applies: there is something that, by the very nature of its being, attracts small animals, absorbs them – very much like the Venus flytrap – and then even kills them. It is the mousetrap. And just as one can explain the ensoulment of plants in the sense of Giordano Bruno, so one can also want to explain the ensoulment of a mousetrap.

The fact that certain ideological impulses poured into the worldview of German idealism, which is the protest against all externalization of the worldview, means that something has taken place that can be said of: German idealism has retreated for a while into German souls and minds. And today we see it only as an ideal of struggle, of inner discipline; we see it as transformed into outer action, again filling souls with hope and confidence and with strength. But we must realize that this power is the same power that once sought an inward world-view through an inward struggle on the road to the world-picture of idealism. And this world-picture of German idealism is in reality that which the German spirit must seek as lying on its own predetermined road. And our fateful time contains many, many admonitions, but undoubtedly also the admonition that the German spirit must struggle to bring forth again that which is in its deepest depths, so that it may be an obvious part of all its striving, of all its work.

I do not believe that this could lead to a lesser understanding of the peculiarities of other nations, that the German spirit will become aware that it must become the bearer of the world view of inwardly experienced idealism. On the contrary: the more the German brings to the world that which lives in his soul as his deepest being, the more he will be valued in the world. We shall be all the more understood if we bear in mind the words of Goethe:

“The German runs no greater danger than that of rising with and by his neighbors; perhaps no nation is better suited to develop out of itself, because it has been to its great advantage that the outside world took notice of it so late.”

And indeed, it has taken so little notice to this day that it was possible to make such judgments about the German character as were heard.

This is what German idealism calls to us as a warning in our fateful time: may the self-confidence of the German national soul awaken in our souls! This German idealism had to produce a moral, logical, artistic world view in the house, since it already reigned, I might say, in the house; it had the gift of recognizing the world – in paintings in the house. And it must find the way through the gate into the surrounding area. And he must recognize what this path looks like, in contrast to others, which leads not only to looking at the surroundings through the windows, as is the case with the British world view, but to reaching these surroundings through the gate, to lovingly reach everything in the world by becoming one with it. If German idealism practised itself by contemplating the world pictures of the microcosm, the human body, it will also find the gate out of the body to the path already indicated by Goethe, and which leads to seeking the world view experienced with things instead of the merely conceived, devised, inwardly fought world view. is contained in the first ominous lines of Jakob Böhme, which in Goethe's work have taken on clear contours and shine forth as an ideal for the future, and which does not remain limited to the ideas suggested by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who were looking at the paintings in the house, but which can also find its way through the gate to connect the living human soul with the living soul of the world.

By Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, M.D. (HON.)^*

In 1922/23 Ernst Stegemann and a group of other farmers went to ask Rudolf Steiner's advice about the increasing degeneration they had noticed in seed-strains and in many cultivated plants. What can be done to check this decline and to improve the quality of seed and nutrition? That was their question.

They brought to his attention such salient facts as the following: Crops of lucerne used commonly to be grown in the same field for as many as thirty years on end. The thirty years dwindled to nine, then to seven. Then the day came when it was considered quite an achievement to keep this crop growing in the same spot for even four or five years. Farmers used to be able to seed new crops year after year from their own rye, wheat, oats and barley. Now they were finding that they had to resort to new strains of seed every few years. New strains were being produced in bewildering profusion, only to disappear from the scene again in short order.

A second group went to Dr. Steiner in concern at the increase in animal diseases, with problems of sterility and the widespread foot-and-mouth disease high on the list. Among those in this group were the veterinarian Dr. Joseph Werr, the physician Dr. Eugen Kolisko, and members of the staff of the newly established Weleda, the pharmaceutical manufacturing enterprise.

Count Carl von Keyserlingk brought problems from still another quarter. Then Dr. Wachsmuth and the present writer went to Dr. Steiner with questions dealing particularly with the etheric nature of plants, and with formative forces in general. In reply to a question about plant diseases, Dr. Steiner told the writer that plants themselves could never be diseased in a primary sense, “since they are the products of a healthy etheric world.” They suffer rather from diseased conditions in their environment, especially in the soil; the causes of so-called plant diseases should be sought there. Ernst Stegemann was given special indications as to the point of view from which a farmer could approach his task, and was shown some first steps in the breeding of new plant types as a first impetus towards the subsequent establishment of the biological-dynamic movement.

In 1923 Rudolf Steiner described for the first time how to make the bio-dynamic compost preparations, simply giving the recipe without any sort of explanation—just “do this and then that.” Dr. Wachsmuth and I then proceeded to make the first batch of preparation 500. This was then buried in the garden of the “Sonnenhof” in Arlesheim, Switzerland. The momentous day came in the early summer of 1924 when this first lot of 500 was dug up again in the presence of Dr. Steiner, Dr. Wegman, Dr. Wachsmuth, a few other co-workers and myself. It was a sunny afternoon. We began digging at the spot where memory, aided by a few landmarks, prompted us to search. We dug on and on. The realer will understand that a good deal more sweating was done over the waste of Dr. Steiner's time than over the strenuousness of the labour. Finally he became impatient and turned to leave for a five o'clock appointment at his studio. The spade grated on the first cowhorn in the very nick of time.

Dr. Steiner turned back, called for a pail of water, and proceeded to show us how to apportion the horn's contents to the water, and the correct way of stirring it. As the author's walking-stick was the only stirring implement at hand, it was pressed into service. Rudolf Steiner was particularly concerned with demonstrating the energetic stirring, the forming of a funnel or crater, and the rapid changing of direction to make a whirlpool. Nothing was said about the possibility of stirring with the hand or with a birch-whisk. Brief directions followed as to how the preparation was to be sprayed when the stirring was finished. Dr. Steiner then indicated with a motion of his hand over the garden how large an area the available spray would cover. Such was the momentous occasion marking the birth-hour of a world-wide agricultural movement.

What impressed me at the time, and still gives one much to think about, was how these step-by-step developments illustrate Dr. Steiner's practical way of working. He never proceeded from preconceived abstract dogma, but always dealt with the concrete given facts of the situation. There was such germinal potency in his indications that a few sentences or a short paragraph often sufficed to create the foundation for a farmer's or scientist's whole life-work; the agricultural course is full of such instances. A study of his indications can therefore scarcely be thorough enough. One does not have to try to puzzle them out, but can simply follow them to the letter.

Dr. Steiner once said, with an understanding smile, in another, very grave situation, that there were two types of people engaged in anthroposophical work: the older ones, who understood everything, but did nothing with it, and the younger ones, who understood only partially or not at all, but immediately put suggestions into practice. We obviously trod the younger path in the agricultural movement, which did all its learning in the hard school of experience. Only now does the total picture of the new impulse given by Rudolf Steiner to agriculture stand clearly before us, even though we still have far to go to exhaust all its possibilities. Accomplishments to date are merely the first step. Every day brings new experience and opens new perspectives.

Shortly before 1924, Count Keyserlingk set to work in deal earnest to persuade Dr. Steiner to give an agricultural course. As Dr. Steiner was already overwhelmed with work, tours and lectures, he put off his decision from week to week. The undaunted Count then dispatched his nephew to Dornach, with orders to camp on Dr. Steiner's doorstep and refuse to leave without a definite commitment for the course. This was finally given.

The agricultural course was held from June 7 to 16, 1924, in the hospitable home of Count and Countess Keyserlingk at Koberwitz, near Breslau. It was followed by further consultations and lectures in Breslau, among them the famous “Address to Youth.” I myself had to forgo attendance at the course, as Dr. Steiner had asked me to stay at home to help take care of someone who was seriously ill. “I'll write and tell you what goes on at the course,” Dr. Steiner said by way of solace. He never did get round to writing, no doubt because of the heavy demands on him; this was understood and regretfully accepted. On his return to Dornach, however, there was an opportunity for discussing the general situation. When I asked him whether the new methods should be started on an experimental basis, he replied: “The most important thing is to make the benefits of our agricultural preparations available to the largest possible areas over the entire earth, so that the earth may be healed and the nutritive quality of its produce improved in every respect. That should be our first objective. The experiments can come later.” He obviously thought that the proposed methods should be applied at once.

This can be understood against the background of a conversation I had with Dr. Steiner en route from Stuttgart to Dornach shortly before the agricultural course was given. He had been speaking of the need for a deepening of esoteric life, and in this connection mentioned certain faults typically found in spiritual movements. I then asked, “How can it happen that the spiritual impulse, and especially the inner schooling, for which you are constantly providing stimulus and guidance bear so little fruit? Why do the people concerned give so little evidence of spiritual experience, in spite of all their efforts? Why, worst of all, is the will for action, for the carrying out of these spiritual impulses, so weak?” I was particularly anxious to get an answer to the question as to how one could build a bridge to active participation and the carrying out of spiritual intentions without being pulled off the right path by personal ambition, illusions and petty jealousies; for, these were the negative qualities Rudolf Steiner had named as the main inner hindrances. Then came the thought-provoking and surprising answer: “This is a problem of nutrition. Nutrition as it is to-day does not supply the strength necessary for manifesting the spirit in physical life. A bridge can no longer be built from thinking to will and action. Food plants no longer contain the forces people need for this.”

A nutritional problem which, if solved, would enable the spirit to become manifest and realise itself in human beings! With this as a background, one can understand why Dr. Steiner said that “the benefits of the bio-dynamic compost preparations should be made available as quickly as possible to the largest possible areas of the entire earth, for the earth's healing.”

This puts the Koberwitz agricultural course in proper perspective as an introduction to understanding spiritual, cosmic forces and making them effective again in the plant world.

In discussing ways and means of propagating the methods, Dr. Steiner said also that the good effects of the preparations and of the whole method itself were “for everybody, for all farmers”—in other words, not intended to be the special privilege of a small, select group. This needs to be the more emphasised in view of the fact that admission to the course was limited to farmers, gardeners and scientists who had both practical experience and a spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical background. The latter is essential to understanding and evaluating what Rudolf Steiner set forth, but the bio-dynamic method can be applied by any farmer. It is important to point this out, for later on many people came to believe that only anthroposophists can practise the bio-dynamic method. On the other hand, it is certainly true that a grasp of bio-dynamic practices gradually opens up a wholly new perspective on the world, and that the practitioner acquires and applies a kind of judgment in dealing with biological—i.e. living—processes and facts which is different from that of a more materialistic chemical farmer; he follows nature's dynamic play of forces with a greater degree of interest and awareness. But it is also true that there is a considerable difference between mere application of the method and creative participation in the work. From the first, actual practice has been closely bound up with the work of the spiritual centre of the movement, the Natural Science Section of the Goetheanum at Dornach. This was to be the source, the creative, fructifying spiritual element; while the practical workers brought back their results and their questions.

The name, “Bio-Dynamic Agricultural Method,” did not originate with Dr. Steiner, but with the experimental circle concerned with the practical application of the new direction of thought.

In the Agricultural Course, which was attended by some sixty persons, Rudolf Steiner set forth the basic new way of thinking about the relationship of earth and soil to the formative forces of the etheric, astral and ego activity of nature. He pointed out particularly how the health of soil, plants and animals depends upon bringing nature into connection again with the cosmic creative, shaping forces. The practical method he gave for treating soil, manure and compost, and especially for making the bio-dynamic compost preparations, was intended above all to serve the purpose of reanimating the natural forces which in nature and in modern agriculture were on the wane. “This must be achieved in actual practice,” Rudolf Steiner told me. He showed how much it meant to him to have the School of Spiritual Science going hand in hand with real-life practicality when he spoke on another occasion of wanting to have teachers at the School alternate a few years of teaching (three years was the period mentioned) with a subsequent period of three years spent in work outside, so that by this alternation they would never get out of touch with the conditions and challenges of real life.

The circle of those who had been inspired by the agricultural course and were now working both practically and scientifically at this task kept on growing; one thinks at once of Guenther Wachsmuth, Count Keyserlingk, Ernst Stegemann, Erhard Bartsch, Franz Dreidax, Immanuel Vögele, M. K. Schwarz, Nikolaus Remer, Franz Rulni, Ernst Jakobi, Otto Eckstein, Hans Heinze, and of many others who came into the movement with the passing of time, including Dr. Werr, the first veterinarian. The bio-dynamic movement developed out of the co-operation of practical workers with the Natural Science Section of the Goetheanum. Before long it had spread to Austria, Switzerland, Italy, England, France, the north-European countries and the United States. To-day no part of the world is without active collaborators in this enterprise.

The bio-dynamic school of thought and a chemically-minded agricultural thinking confronted one another from opposite points of the compass at the time the agricultural course was held. The latter school is based essentially on the views of Justus von Liebig. It attributes the fact that plants take up substances from the soil solely to the so-called “nutrient-need” of the plant. The one-sided chemical fertiliser theory that thinks of plant needs in terms of nitrogen-phosphates-potassium-calcium, originated in this view, and the theory still dominates orthodox scientific agricultural thinking to-day. But it does Liebig an injustice. He himself expressed doubt as to whether the “N-P-K” theory should be applied to all soils. Deficiency symptoms were more apparent in soils poor in humus than in those amply supplied with it. The following quotation makes one suspect that Liebig was by no means the hardened materialist that his followers make him out to be. He wrote: “Inorganic forces breed only inorganic substances. Through a higher force at work in living bodies, of which inorganic forces are merely the servants, substances come into being which are endowed with vital qualities and totally different from the crystal.” And further: “The cosmic conditions necessary for the existence of plants are the warmth and light of the sun.” Rudolf Steiner gave the key to these “higher forces at work in living bodies and to these cosmic conditions.” He solved Liebig's problem by refusing to stop short at the purely material aspects of plant-life. He went on, with characteristic spiritual courage and a complete lack of bias, to take the next step.

And now an interesting situation developed. Devotees of the purely materialistic school of thought, who once felt impelled to reject the progressive thinking advanced by Rudolf Steiner, have been forced by facts brought to light during research into soil biology to go at least one step further. Facts recognised as early as 1924-34 in bio-dynamic circles—the significance of soil-life, the earth as a living organism, the role played by humus, the necessity of maintaining humus under all circumstances, and of building it up where it is lacking—all this has become common knowledge. Recognition of biological, organic laws has now been added to the earlier realisation of the undeniable dependence of plants upon soil nutrient-substances. It is not too much to say that the biological aspect of the bio-dynamic method is now generally accepted; the goal has perhaps even been overshot. But, important as are the biological factors governing plant inter-relationships, soil structure, biological pest-control, and the progress made in understanding the importance of humus, the whole question of energy sources and Formative forces—in other words, cosmic aspects of plant-life—remains unanswered. The biological way of thinking has been adopted, but with a materialistic bias, whereas an understanding of the dynamic side, made possible by Rudolf Steiner's pioneering indications, is still largely absent.

Since 1924 numerous scientific publications that might be regarded as a first groping in this direction have appeared. We refer to studies of growth-regulating factors, the so-called growth-inducers, enzymes, hormones, vitamins, trace elements and bio-catalysts. But this groping remains in the material realm. Science has progressed to the point where material effects produced by dilutions as high as 1:1 million, or even 1:100 million, no longer belong to the realm of the fantastic and incredible. They do not meet with the unbelieving smile that greeted rules for applying the bio-dynamic compost preparations, for these—with dilutions ranging from 1:10 to 1:100 million—are quite conceivable at the present stage of scientific thinking. Exploration of the process of photo-synthesis—i.e. of the building of substance in the cells of living plants—has opened up problems of the influence of energy (of the sun, of light, of warmth and of the moon); in other words, problems of the transformation of cosmic sources of energy into chemical-material conditions and energies.

In this connection we quote from the book Principles of Agriculture,¹ written in 1952 by W. R. Williams, Member of the Academy of Sciences, U.S.S.R.: “The task of agriculture is to transform kinetic solar energy, the energy of light, into the potential energy stored in human food. The light of the sun is the basic raw material of agricultural industry.” And further: “Light and warmth are the essential conditions for plant life, and consequently also for agriculture. Light is the raw material from which agricultural products are made, and warmth is the force which drives the machinery—the green plant. The provision of both raw material and energy must be maintained. The dynamic energy of the sun's rays is transformed by green plants into potential energy in the material form of organic matter. Thus our first concrete task is the continuous creation of organic matter, storing up the potential energy of human life.” And still further: “We can divide the four fundamental factors into two groups, according to their source: light and heat are cosmic factors, water and plant food terrestrial factors. The former group originates in interplanetary space...”

Or again: “The cosmic factors—light and heat—act directly on the plant, whereas the terrestrial factors act only through an intermediary (substance).”

We see that the author of this work rates knowledge of the interworking of cosmic and terrestrial factors as the first objective of agricultural science, while ranking organic substance (humus) second on the list of objectives of agricultural production. This is what was published in 1952. In 1924 Rudolf Steiner pointed out the necessity of consciously restoring cosmic forces to growth processes by both direct and indirect means, thereby freeing the present conception of plant nature from a material, purely terrestrial isolation; only through such restoration would it be possible to re-energise those healthful and constructive forces capable of halting degeneration. He said to me, “Spiritual scientific knowledge must have found its way into practical life by the middle of the century if untold damage to the health of man and nature is to be avoided.”

Our research work began with the attempt to find reagents to the etheric forces and to discover ways of demonstrating their existence. Suggestions were given which could only later be brought to realisation in the writer's crystallisation method. Then it was our intention to proceed to expose the weak points in the materialistic conception and to refute its findings by means of its own experimental methods. This meant applying exact analytical methods in experimentation with physical substances, and even developing them to a finer point. We proposed to work quantitatively as well as qualitatively. During my own years at the university, for example, it was my regular practice to lay my proposed course of studies for the new term before Rudolf Steiner for guidance in the choice of subjects. On one occasion he urged me to take simultaneously two—no, three—main subjects, chemistry, physics and botany, each requiring six hours a day. To the objection that there were not hours enough in the day for this, he replied simply, “Oh, you'll manage it somehow.”

Again and again, he steered things in the direction of practical activity and laboratory work, away from the merely theoretical.

Suggestions of this kind were constantly in my mind during the decades of work which arose from them. They led me not only to work in laboratories, but also to apply the fundamentals of this new outlook to the management of agricultural projects, both in a bio-dynamic and in an economic sense. Dr. Steiner had insisted on my taking courses and attending lectures in political economy as well as in science, saying, “One must work in a businesslike, profit-making way, or it won't come off.” Economics, commercial history, industrial science, even mass-psychology and other such subjects were proposed for study, and when the courses were completed, Dr. Steiner always wanted a report on them. On these occasions he not only showed astounding proficiency in the various special fields, but—what was more surprising—he seemed quite familiar with the methods and characteristics of the various professors. He would say, for example, “Professor X is an extremely brilliant man, with wide-ranging ideas, but he is weak in detailed knowledge. Professor Z is a silver-tongued orator of real elegance. You needn't believe everything he says, but you must get a thorough grasp of his method of presentation.”

From these and many other suggestions it was clear what had to be done to promote the bio-dynamic method. There was the big group of practising farmers, whose task it was to carry out the method in their farming enterprises, to discover the most favourable use of the preparations, to determine what crop rotations build up rather than deplete humus, to develop the best methods of plant and animal breeding. It took years to translate the basic ideas into actual practice. All this had to be tried out in the hard school of experience, until the complete picture of a teachable and learnable method, which any farmer could profitably use, was finally evolved. Problems of soil treatment, crop rotation, manure and compost handling, time-considerations in the proper care and breeding of cattle, fruit-tree management and many other matters could be worked out only in practice through the years.

Then there was the problem of coming to grips with agricultural science. Laboratories and field experiments had to provide facts and observational material. I was now able to profit from the technical and quantitative-chemical education urged upon me by Dr. Steiner. This was the sphere in which the shortcomings and weaknesses of the chemical soil-and-nutrient theory showed up most clearly, and where to-day—after more than thirty years—one can see possibilities of building a bridge between recognition of the existence of cosmic forces and exact science.

The first possibility of breaking through the hardened layer of current orthodox opinion came through discoveries that cluster around the concept of the so-called trace elements. Dr. Steiner had pointed out as early as 1924 the existence of these finely dispersed material elements in the atmosphere and elsewhere, and had stressed the importance of their contribution to healthy plant development. But it still remained an open question whether they were absorbed from the soil by roots or from the atmosphere by leaves and other plant organs. In the early thirties, spectrum analysis showed that almost all the trace elements are present in the atmosphere in a proportion of 10-6 to 10-9. The fact that trace-elements can be absorbed from the air was established in experiments with Tillandsia usneodis. It is now common practice in California and Florida to supply zinc and other trace elements, not via the roots, but by spraying the foliage, since leaves absorb these trace elements even more efficiently.

It was found that one-sided mineral fertilising lowers the trace-element content of soil and plants, and—most significantly—that to supply trace-elements by no means assures their absorption by plants. The presence (or absence) of zinc in a dilution of 1:100 million decides absolutely whether an orange tree will bear healthy fruit. But in the period from 1924-1930 the bio-dynamic preparations were ridiculed “because plants cannot possibly be influenced by high dilutions.”

Zinc is singled out for mention here not only because treatment with very high dilutions of this trace element is especially essential for both the health and the yield of many plants, but also because it is an element particularly abundant in mushrooms. A comment by Rudolf Steiner indicates an interesting connection which can be fully understood only in the light of the most recent research. We read in the Agricultural Course: “... Harmful parasites always consort with growths of the mushroom type, ... causing certain plant diseases and doing other still worse forms of damage. ... One should see to it that meadows are infested with fungi. Then one can have the interesting experience of finding that where there is even a small mushroom-infested meadow near a farm, the fungi, owing to their kinship with the bacteria and other parasites, keep them away from the farm. It is often possible, by infesting meadows in this way, to keep off all sorts of pests.”

Organisms of the fungus type include the so-called fungi imperfecti and a botanical transition-form, the family of actinomycetes and streptomycetes, from which certain antibiotic drugs are derived. I have found that these organisms play a very special rôle in humus formation and decay, and that they are abundantly present in the bio-dynamic manure and compost preparations. The preparations also contain an abundance of many of the most important trace elements, such as molybdenum, cobalt, zinc, and others whose importance has been experimentally demonstrated.

Now a peculiar situation was found to exist in regard to soils. Analyses of available plant nutrients showed that the same soil tested quite differently at different seasons. Indeed, tests showed not only seasonal but even daily variations. The same soil sample often disclosed periodic variations greater than those found in tests of soils from adjoining fields, one of which was good, the other poor. Seasonal and daily variations are influenced, however, by the earth's relative position in the planetary system; they are, in other words, of cosmic origin. It has actually been found that the time of day or the season of the year influences the solubility and availability of nutrient substances. Numerous phenomena to be observed in the physiology of plants and animals (e.g. glandular secretions, hormones) are subject to such influences. The concentration of oxalic acid in bryophyllum leaves rises and falls with the time of day with almost clock-like regularity. Although in this and many other test cases the nutrients on which the plants were fed were identical, the increase or decrease in the plant's substantial content varied very markedly in response to varying light-rhythms and cycles. Joachim Schultz, a research worker at the Goetheanum whose life was most unfortunately cut short, had begun to test Dr. Steiner's important indication that light activity acts with growth-stimulating effect in the morning and late afternoon hours, while at noon and midnight its influence is growth-inhibiting.

When I inspected Schultz's experiments, I was struck by the fact that plants grown on the same nutrient solution had a wholly different substantial composition according to the light-rhythms operative. This was true of nitrogen, for example. Plants exposed to light during the morning and evening hours grew strongly under the favourable influence of nitrogen activity, whereas if exposed during the noon hours, they declined and showed deficiency symptoms. The way was thus opened for experimental demonstration of the fact that the so-called “cosmic” activity of light, of warmth, of sun forces especially, but of other light-sources also, prevails over the material processes. These cosmic forces regulate the course of material change. When and in what direction this takes place, and the extent to which the total growth and the form of the plant are influenced, all depend upon the cosmic constellation and the origin of the forces concerned. Recent research in the field of photosynthesis has produced findings which can hardly fall to open the eyes even of materialistic observers to such processes. Here, too, Rudolf Steiner is shown to have been a pioneer who paved the way for a new direction of research. It is impossible in an article of this length to report on all the phenomena that have already been noted, for they would more than fill a book. But it is no longer possible to dismiss the influence of cosmic forces as “mere superstition” when the physiological and biochemical inter-relationships of metabolic functions in soil-life, the rise and fall of sap in the plant, and especially processes in the root-sphere are taken into consideration.

In an earlier view of nature, based partly on old mystery-tradition and partly on instinctive clairvoyance—a view originating in the times of Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus, and continuing on to the days of Albertus Magnus and the late mediaeval “doctrine of signatures”—it was recognised that relationships exist between certain cosmic constellations and the various plant species. These constellations are creative moments under whose influence species became differentiated and the various plant forms came into being. When one realises that cosmic rhythms have such a significant influence on the physiology of metabolism, of glandular functions, of the rise and fall of sap and of sap pressure (turgor), only a small step remains to be taken by conscious future research to the next realisation, which will achieve an experimental grasp of these creative constellations. Many of Rudolf Steiner's collaborators have already demonstrated the decisive effects of formative forces in such experiments as, the capillary tests on filter paper of L. Kolisko and the plant and crystallisation tests of Pfeiffer, Krüger, Bessenich, Selawry and others.

Rudolf Steiner's suggestions for plant breeding presented a special task. Research in this field was carried out by the author and other fellow-workers (Immanuel Vögele, Erika Riese, Martha Kuenzel and Martin Schmidt), either in collaboration or in independent work. Proceeding from the basic concept of creative cosmic constellations, one can assume that the original creative impetus in every species of sub-type slowly exhausts itself and ebbs away. The formative forces of this original impulse is passed on from plant to plant in hereditary descent by means of certain organs such as chromosomes. One-sided quantity-manuring gradually inhibits the activity of the primary forces, and results in a weakening of the plant. Seed quality degenerates. This was the initial problem laid before Rudolf Steiner, and the bio-dynamic movement came into being as an answer to it.

The task was to reunite the plant, viewed as a system of forces under the influence of cosmic activities, with nature as a whole. Rudolf Steiner pointed out that many plants which had been “violated,” in the sense of having been estranged from their cosmic origin, were already so far gone in degeneration that by the end of the century their propagation would be unreliable. Wheat and potatoes were among the plant types mentioned, but other such grains as oats, barley and lucerne belong to the same picture. Ways were sketched whereby new strains with strong seed-forces could be bred from “unexhausted” relatives of the cultivated plants. This work has begun to have success; the species of wheat have already been developed. Martin Schmidt carried on significant researches, not yet published, to determine the rhythm of seed placement in the ear, and to show in particular the difference between food plants and plants grown for seed. According to Rudolf Steiner, there is a basic difference between the two types, one of which is sown in autumn, nearer to the winter, and the other nearer to the summer. Biochemists will eventually be able to confirm these differences materially in the structure of protein substances, amino-acids, phosphorlipoids, enzyme-systems and so on by means of modern chromatographic methods.

The degeneration of wheat is already an established fact. Even where the soil is good, the protein content has declined; in the case of soft red wheat, protein content has sunk from 13% to 8% in some parts of the United States. Potato growers know how hard it is to produce healthy potatoes free from viruses and insects, not to mention the matter of flavour. Bio-dynamically grown wheat maintains its high protein level. Promising work in potato breeding was unfortunately interrupted by the last war and other disturbances.

Pests are one of the most interesting and instructive problems, looked at from the bio-dynamic viewpoint. When the biological balance is upset, degeneration follows; pests and diseases make their appearance. Nature herself liquidates weaklings. Pests are therefore to be regarded as nature's warning that the primary forces have been dissipated and the balance sinned against. According to official estimates, American agriculture pays a yearly bill of five thousand million dollars in crop losses for disregarding this warning, and another seven hundred and fifty million dollars on keeping down insect pests. People are beginning to realise that insect poisons fall short of solving the problem, especially since the destruction of some of the insects succeeds only in producing new, more resistant kinds. It has been established by the most advanced research (Albrecht of Missouri) that one-sided fertilising disturbs the protein-carbohydrates balance in plant cells, to the detriment of proteins and the layer of wax that coats plant leaves, and makes the plants “tastier” to insect depredators. It has been a bitter realisation that insect poisons merely “preserve” a part of moribund nature, but do not halt the general trend towards death. Experienced entomologists, who have witnessed the failure of chemical pest-control and the threats to health associated with it, are beginning to speak out and demand biological controls. But according to the findings of one of the American experimental stations, biological controls are feasible only when no poisons are used and an attempt is made to restore natural balance. In indications given in the Agriculture Course, Rudolf Steiner showed that health and resistance are functions of biological balance, coupled with cosmic factors. This is further evidence of how far in advance of its time was this spiritual-scientific, Goethean way of thought.

The author is thoroughly conscious of the fact that this exposition touches upon only a small part of the whole range of questions opened up by Rudolf Steiner's new agricultural method. He is also aware that other collaborators would have written quite differently, and about different aspects of the work. These pages should therefore be read in accordance with their intention: as the view from a single window in a house containing many rooms.

• *. Contributed by Dr. Pfeiffer to the German symposium, Wir erlebten Rudolf Steiner, of which a complete English translation, “Rudolf Steiner, by his pupils,” was published as a special number of The Golden Blade, 1958. This translation is used by permission of The Golden Blade and the Verlag Freies Geistesleben G.m.b.H., Stuttgart, publishers of the book, Wir erlebten Rudolf Steiner.
• 1. Translated from the Russian by G. V. Jacks, Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Soil Science (London, 1952).

Spiritual research cannot interfere in the immediate problems of the day. Besides, the confidence must also not arise that the spiritual knowledge should be anything that floats above all reality and would have to do nothing with the life praxis. We do not want to state the events, which turn up the world directly today, in which way one treats the current events, and we do not want to belong to those who want to be blind and deaf to that which moves the human hearts immediately what concerns us directly. Between these two cliffs, the spiritual researcher has always to find the way, so that he is never merged in the opinions and the views of the everyday life. On the other side, he is never allowed to be involved in mere empty abstractions or to be addicted to authorities. I said that repeatedly from this place: spiritual science has to make us directly practical, much more practical than normally the pragmatists think. However, it should make us practical leading us in the deeply succumbing forces of life and clarify us about the things that they direct our actions in harmony with the big universal laws. Only then, one can achieve anything in the world and intervene in the activities of the world if one does it in accordance with the big universal laws.

After this premise, let me point to a few facts at first that should solely show us the importance and actuality of our questions.

Perhaps, you remember the fact that 24 August 1898 the authorised representative of the czar (Nicholas II) sent a circular to the foreign representatives accredited in Petersburg. In this circular you find, among other things, the following words, “The maintenance of the general peace and a possible lowering of the excessive armaments which press on all nations constitute an ideal in the present situation of the whole world to which the efforts of all governments should be directed.

The human and highly noble-minded striving of His Majesty, the Emperor, my elated lord, is completely dedicated to this task. In the conviction that this elated final goal corresponds to the most essential interests and the entitled wishes of all governments the imperial government believes that the present moment is extremely favourable to search for the most effective means on the way of international consultation, in order to ensure the benefits of a true and durable peace and to set an objective, above all, to the progressive development of the present armaments.”

Moreover, you find the following words in this document: “Because the financial loads increase and impair the national well-being, work and capital are headed off in great part from their natural determination and are consumed unproductively. Hundreds of millions are used to acquire dreadful destruction machines which are considered today as the last word of science and are condemned already tomorrow to lose any value as a result of any new discovery in these fields ... Because the armaments of every power grow to such an extent, they correspond less and less to the purpose which the concerning government has proposed to itself.” The document closes with the proposal that a conference with God's help should be an auspicious sign of the next century.

Certainly this manifesto arises from an intention. The last events teach us how this intention could come true. This intention is not quite new, because we can go back even centuries, and there we find a prince, Henry IV of France, in the 16th, 17th centuries, who stimulated the idea of such a general peace conference. Seven of sixteen countries were won when Heinrich IV was murdered. Nobody continued his work. If we were interested in it, we could probably trace back the intentions still much farther.

This is one range of facts. The other is this: the Hague peace conference took place. You all know the name of the meritorious person who pursues her ideal with a rare devotion and with a rare skill, the name of Bertha von Suttner (1853-1914, Austrian novelist and pacifist). A year after the Hague peace conference, she tried to collect the acts for a book in which she registered the partly nice and marvellous speeches. She prefaced the book. I ask to take into consideration that one year had passed, after Bertha von Suttner could have seen in this work of the peace conference. She already anticipated the results, after one year had passed. In the meantime, in the diametrical contrast to it, we had the bloody Transvaal war (1899-1902) with rejected mediation, and today we have war again (Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905).

Looking around in the world today, we see the struggle of many noble human beings for the idea of peace, the love for a global peace already in the hearts of high-minded idealists, and, nevertheless, so much blood has hardly flowed in other times on our earth as now. It is this a serious, very serious affair for everybody who also deals with the big mental problems. On the one hand, we have the dedicated apostles of peace with their activity. We have the excellent achievements of Bertha von Suttner, who was able to portray the frightfulness of fight and war with rare grandeur. However, we do not forget that we also have the reverse. If we do not forget that also many are among our judicious fellow-men who assure us, on the other side, again and again that they consider the fight as necessary for the progress, as something that steels the forces. Only in the fight against the opposition, the forces would grow. The researcher who has attracted so many thinkers (Ernst Haeckel), how often has he pronounced that he wishes the powerful war and that only the powerful war can further the forces in nature. Maybe he has not pronounced it so radically, but many people think that way.

Even within our spiritual-scientific movement, voices were being raised that it would be a weakness, almost a sin against the spirit of national strength if one objects anything against the war that has led to national honour, to national power. Today, in any case, the views in this area are confronted still harshly, very harshly. However, the Hague peace conference has brought one thing. It has brought the votes of a range of people who lead the public problems. A big range of the representatives of the states gave their consent in those days,—that the Hague conference could take place. One should believe that a thing that has found such an approval from such places had to be promising in the most eminent sense.

In order to be able to comment this spiritual-scientifically, we have to look a little deeper into the matters. If we pursue the question of peace as an ideal question as it has developed in the course of time, and pursue the facts of fight and quarrel, nevertheless, we must probably say that how this ideal of a general peace is pursued challenges our attention and an investigation. Many of those who practised the art of war are those in whose hearts pain and maybe even aversion of the results and effects of the war exist. Such matters induce us to ask, do the wars generally come from anything that can be eliminated by principles and views? Who looks deeper into the human souls, knows that two separate, completely different ways cause the war. One is that which we call power of judgement and reason that we call idealism, the other is the human desire, the human inclinations, the human sympathies, and antipathies. Some things would be different in the world if it were possible to regulate the desires, wishes and passions according to the principles of heart and mind without further ado. This is not possible, but the reverse has always been there in humanity up to now. For that which the passion wants, which the desire requires, the reason, even the heart creates a mask with its idealism.

If you pursue the history of the human evolution, you can put the question repeatedly, if you see lighting up principles or idealism here and there: which desires and passions are lurking in the background? If we consider this, it might be very well possible that one is not yet able to make use of the nicest principles in this question, then it could be that something else is necessary because simply the human passions, impulses and desires are not yet advanced enough to follow the idealism of the singles. You see that the question lies deeper, and we must grasp it deeper. We must really have a look at the human soul and its basic forces if we want to assess the whole thing correctly. The human being does not always see enough of his development. He often sees a small span of time only, and that is why an extensive worldview must open the look for us which, on the one side, leads deeply and allows us, on the other side, to overview the bigger periods, so that we get a judgment about the forces which have to lead us into the future.

Let us have a look once at the human soul, where we may study it in a point deeply and thoroughly. Today we have something that we could touch eight days ago, from another side. There we have a scientific theory, the so-called Darwinism. Within this scientific view, a concept plays a big role. One calls this concept the struggle for existence. At the sign of the struggle for existence, our natural sciences stood completely for decades, our whole view. The naturalists said, those beings in the world that survive in the struggle for existence best of all will remain and the others pass. So that we do not need to be surprised if those beings we have round ourselves are the best fitted ones, because they have developed through millions of years. The most efficient ones have survived; the unfit ones have declined.

The struggle for existence became the slogan of the researchers. Where from did this struggle come? It did not come from nature. Darwin himself, although he looks at it in a bigger style than his successors, took it from a view of Malthus (Thomas Robert M., 1766-1834), spreading about the human history, that view that the earth produces food in such a progression that this increase is much lower than the increase of population. Those who have dealt with these matters know that one says, the increase of food rises arithmetically, the increase of population geometrically. This causes a struggle for existence, a war of all against all.

Starting from it, Darwin also assumed the struggle for existence in the organic nature. This view does not correspond to a mere idea, but to the modern ways of life. This struggle for existence has become an actual reality as the general economic competition in the conditions of the single persons. One has seen this struggle for existence in the next nearness; one has regarded it as something natural in the human realm and has then accepted it in the natural sciences.

Ernst Haeckel, who has almost regarded war as a cultural lever, starts from such views. Struggle makes strong, the weak ones should decline. Civilisation demands that the weak ones perish.

Then economics have applied this struggle to the human world again. Thus, we have great theories within our economics, within our social theories which regard the struggle for existence as completely justified and as something that cannot be separated from the human evolution. One has further gone back on these things—not without prejudice, but with these principles—to primeval times, and there one tried to study the life of barbaric savage tribes. One believed to be able to eavesdrop on the human cultural development and believed to find the fiercest principle of war there.

Huxley (Thomas Henry H., 1825-1895, biologist) said, if we look at the nature of the animals, the struggle for existence resembles a gladiator fight, and this is a physical principle. If we look from the higher animals at the lower ones and if we get ourselves into the previous way of the world evolution, the world of facts teaches us everywhere that we live in a general struggle for existence.

You understand that this could be expressed and could be represented as a universal principle. Somebody who is clear in his mind knows that words are not pronounced which are not founded deep in the human soul says to himself that the whole soul constitution of our best men starts even today always from the view that struggle in the human race, even in the whole nature is justified.

Now you may say: but the researchers may have been quite humane persons who longed for peace, for balance and wished it in their deepest idealism. However, their profession, their science convinced them that it is not in such a way, and perhaps they wrote down their theory with a bleeding heart.—This would be an objection unless anything else had entered first. We are allowed to say that among all of those who believed to think scientifically and economically, the quoted theory was quite usual in whole Western Europe and Central Europe.

The view was quite usual that war and struggle are a physical principle from which one cannot escape. One had got rid of the old view of Rousseau (Jean-Jaques R., 1712-1778, philosopher) thoroughly—one believed—that only the human perversion has brought struggle and war, opposition and disharmony to the general peace of nature. This view of Rousseau was still spread at the end of the 18th century that if one looks into the life and activity of nature, which is still unaffected from the super civilisation of the human being, one sees harmony and peace then everywhere. Only the human being with his despotism and civilisation has brought fight and quarrel into the world.

This view of Rousseau still existed and the researchers assured us in the last third of the 19th century: yes, it would be nice if it were in such a way, but it is not the case. The facts teach us in another manner. Nevertheless, we ask ourselves seriously, has the feeling spoken or have the facts spoken? We could little argue if the facts spoke this way.

There a strange man appeared in 1880, a man who held a talk in the naturalists' meeting of 1880 in St. Petersburg in Russia, a talk that is of great importance for those who are thoroughly interested in this question. This man is the zoologist Kessler (Karl Fedorovich K., 1815-1881). He died shortly after. His talk dealt with the principle of mutual help in nature. For all those who deal with such matters seriously a quite new feature emerges from the research and scientific maturity that is stimulated by it. Here for the first time in the modern times facts of the whole nature were put together, which prove that all former theories of the struggle for existence do not comply with reality.

In this talk, the phenomenon is discussed and proven by facts that the animal species do not develop struggling for existence, but that there is a struggle for existence between two species only in exceptional cases, but not within the species. On the contrary, the individuals of a species help each other and those species survive whose individuals have a certain bent of mutual help. Not struggle, but mutual help grants long existence. One got a new point of view with it. However, modern research brought about because of a strange concatenation of circumstances that a personality that stands for the present on the most unbelievable point of view, Prince Kropotkin (Pyotr Alexeyevich K., 1842-1921, Russian anarchist, philosopher), has continued the matter. He could show with animals and tribes with an enormous sum of proven facts which significance this principle of mutual help has in nature and in the human life. I can recommend to everybody to study the German translation of this book (Mutual Aid; A Factor of Evolution, 1902). This book brings in a sum of concepts and ideas to the human being that are like a school for a spiritual attitude. Now, however, we understand these facts only correctly if we light up them esoterically if we penetrate these facts with the bases of spiritual science. I could demonstrate examples speaking quite distinctly; however, you can read them in the cited book. The principle of mutual help in nature means: those advance most of all who have developed this principle best.—The facts speak distinctly and will speak more and more distinctly for us.

If we speak of a single animal species in spiritual science, we speak of it like of a single human individual. An animal species is to us the same in a lower field as in higher fields the single human individual is. I have said it already once here: you must make a fact clear to yourselves to understand which contrast is there between the human being and the whole animal realm. This contrast expresses itself in the sentence: the human being has a biography; the animal has no biography. With the animal, we are contented if we have described the type. With the human being, we say: father, grandfather, grandson, and son; with the lion, this does not differ in such a way that we should especially describe any single one. Indeed, I know that one can argue a lot; I know that somebody who loves a dog or a monkey believes to be able to write a biography of the dog or the monkey. However, a biography should not contain what the other can know about the being, but what the being itself has known. Self-consciousness belongs to a biography, and in this sense, only the human being has a biography. This corresponds to a description of the whole animal type or species. The external expression of this fact is that any animal group has a group-soul and that any individual human being has a soul in himself. I was also allowed to discuss here already that a hidden world is directly connected with our physical world, the astral world that does not consist of such objects and beings whom you can perceive with the senses but it is made out of the substance from which our passions and desires are made. If you check the human being, you can see: that he has led his soul down to the physical plane or to the physical world. In this physical world, there is no individual soul of the animal. However, you find an individual soul of the animal that is on the so-called astral plane, in the astral world hidden behind our physical world. The animal groups have individual souls in the astral world.

There we have the difference between the human being and the animal realm. If we ask ourselves now, what fights in reality if we pursue the struggle for existence in the animal realm?—Then we must say: in reality it is the astral struggle of the passions and desires behind this struggle that is fought out between the species in the animal realm. It is rooted in the species or group souls.—However, if there were a struggle for existence within an animal species, then it would be in such a way, as if the human soul fought against itself in its different parts. This is an important truth. It cannot be the rule that there is a struggle within an animal species, but the struggle for existence can only take place between the species. For the soul of the whole species is uniform, and because it is uniform, it must control the parts.

The mutual aid within the animal realm that we can study within the species is simply the expression of the uniform activity of the species or group soul. If you look at all the examples you find cited in the mentioned interesting book, then you get a good knowledge of how the group souls work. For example, if an individual of a certain cancer species is thrown on the back by chance, so that it cannot get up itself again, then a bigger number of cancers comes along and helps it up. This mutual support results from a common soul organ of the cancer species.

Study once the way how beetles support themselves to maintain or protect a common brood, to master a dead mouse etcetera, how they combine there, support themselves, carry out common work, then you see the group soul working. You can study this up to the highest animal species. It is true: somebody who has a sense of this activity of mutual aid with the animals gets an insight, a concept, a notion of the activity of the group souls, too. Just there he can appropriate the vision with the eyes of the spirit. There the eye becomes sun-like.

However, the human being has a group soul that has become individual. In every single human being such a group soul lives. Thus, the single human being is able to fight against any single other human being like an animal group soul fights against other group souls. Let us now have a look at the purpose of the fight, whether the fight is there for the sake of the fight in the world evolution. What has emerged from the struggle of the species? Those species have remained which mostly support themselves mutually, and those which are most warlike against themselves have perished. That is the natural principle. That is why we have to say that in the external nature the developmental progress consists in the fact that peace takes the place of struggle. Where nature has arrived at a certain point, at the big turning point, there is balance; there rules peace to which the whole struggle has developed.

After all, take into consideration that plants as species struggle for existence against each other. However, consider how nicely and splendidly the plant and the animal realms support themselves mutually in their common developmental process: the animal inhales oxygen, the plant exhales oxygen. Thus, a peaceful universe is possible. What nature produces this way by its strength is determined for the human being that he produces it consciously from his individual nature. Step by step, the human being has advanced and step by step that has formed with him, which we recognise as the self-consciousness of our individual soul. We must look at our international situation in such a way that we envisage its previous development and trace its future trend. Go back to former times, and then you see group souls still in the human realm ruling first. They exist in little tribes and families; there we deal also with group souls of the human beings. The farther you look back in the world evolution, the more compact, the more uniform the human beings appear who are united that way. It is like a spirit that penetrated the ancient rural community that then became the primitive state. You could study that it was a completely different matter when Alexander the Great waged war with his hosts, from waging war today with human masses of more developed individual intentions. One must light up this properly. For this is the way of the progressive culture that the human beings become more and more individual, more independent and more conscious, more self-conscious. From groups, from common characteristics the human race has developed. Even as we have group souls that guide and direct the single animal species, the great group souls guide and direct the. The human being grows out of the guidance of the group soul more and more and becomes more and more independent by his progressive education. This independence implied that he is really—while he faced his fellow men in the groups more or less inimically—in a struggle for existence penetrating the whole humanity. This is our international situation, this is the destiny of our race in particular, and this is our immediate present.

Spiritual science distinguishes five successive races, consisting of seven sub-races, in the present world evolution at first. The first sub-race developed in ancient times, in the distant India. This sub-race was penetrated with a priest culture. This priest culture gave our present race the first impulses. It had come over from the Atlantean culture that was on that ground which forms the ground of the Atlantic now. This sub-race set the tone; then other sub-races followed, and now we are in the fifth. This is no division that is borrowed from anthropology or any race theory but a view that is discussed closer in the sixth talk of this series. The fifth sub-race furthered the distinct nature, the individual consciousness of the human being most notably. Christianity prepared the human being really to attain such an individual consciousness: the human being had to gain this self-consciousness. If we look back at the time before Christ when in ancient Egypt the huge pyramids were built, there an army of slaves did the work the difficulties and efforts of which no one has a right idea today. It was just a matter of course for these workers to build peacefully for the most time. They built because at that time the teaching of reincarnation and karma was a self-evident fact. No book says this to you, but this becomes clear to you bit by bit if you penetrate into spiritual science. Any slave who worked his hands raw and was in misery knew: this is a life of many lives, and I have what I suffer now to bear as a result of that which I prepared in my previous lives. However, if this is not the case, I experience the effect of the present life in a future life; he who orders me today was on the same point of view as I am today, or he will still be on it.

However, with this attitude, the whole self-conscious life on earth would never have developed, and the higher powers who guide the destiny of the human race in the large scale knew what they did when they atrophied the consciousness of reincarnation and karma for a while, for millenniums. This was the great previous development of Christianity that it atrophied the vision of a compensating Otherworld, and has drawn attention to the immense importance of the life on earth.

It may have gone too far in its radical realisation, but this had to happen, because the matters of the world do not develop according to the logic, but according to other principles. One has deduced eternal punishments from this life on earth; the tendency of development led to it if it is also illogical. Thus, humanity has learnt to be conscious of this one earth existence. Thereby the earth, this physical plane, became infinitely important to the human being. That had to become that way. Everything that happens in material respect could develop only from an attitude that is based on an education for this earth, apart from the ideas of reincarnation and karma. We see the result of this education: the human being has entirely settled in the physical plane. For the individual soul could only develop there, there it is separated, enclosed in this body and can look out only as an isolated special existence through its senses. With it, we have more and more of human rivalry, more and more of the effect of the special existence brought into the human race. We are not allowed to wonder that the human race is not ripe by a long stretch even today to eliminate the results of this education again.

We have seen that the present species of the animals developed to their perfection because of their mutual aid and that struggle was there only from species to species. However, if the human individuality is the same as the group soul of the animals, the human soul is only able to get a self-consciousness going through the same struggle as the animals outside in nature. As long as the human being does not yet have developed complete independence, the struggle will still last. However, the human being is appointed to consciously achieve what is there outside on the physical plane. Hence, it will lead him on the stages of consciousness to mutual aid and support because the human race is one single species. Only after the whole humanity has attained the peaceableness, as it is to be found in the animal realm, an entire, all-embracing peace will be. The struggle did not further the single animal species but mutual assistance and support. What lives as a group soul in the animal species as a single soul lives peacefully with itself, this is the uniform soul. Only the human individual soul is a particular one in this physical special being.

This is the great achievement of our soul which we obtain from the spiritual development that we really recognise the common soul that penetrates the whole human race. We do not receive it as an unaware present, but we have to get it consciously. It is the task of spiritual science to develop this uniform soul in the whole human race really. This expresses itself in our first principle: to found a brotherhood on the whole earth, without taking into consideration race, gender, skin colour etcetera. This is the recognition of the soul that is common to the whole humanity. The purification has to take place down to the passions, so that everybody understands that the same soul lives in the fellow man. In the physical, we are separated, in the mental we are a unity as the ego of humanity. However, only in the real life we can grasp and adapt this. Hence, it can be only has to foster the spiritual life that penetrates us with the common breath of this uniform soul. Not the present human beings with their principles, but the future ones who develop the consciousness of this common soul more and more establish the basis of a new race that is completely merged in mutual assistance. Hence, our first principle means a completely different thing than one usually says. We do not fight; we also do not fight against war or against anything else because struggle does not lead at all to higher development. From the struggle, every animal species has developed as a special race. Leave all struggle round us to the vicious ones who are not yet ripe enough to seek for that which the common soul of the human race finds in the spiritual life.

A real society of peace strives for spiritual knowledge, and the real peace movement is the spiritual-scientific movement. It is that peace movement as a peace movement can be in practice, because it aims at that which lives in the human being and progresses to future.

The spiritual life always developed from the East. The East was the area where the spiritual life was fostered. Here in the West was the area where the external material civilisation developed. Hence, one sees to the East as an area where the human beings are dreaming and sleeping. However, who knows what takes action in the souls of those whom we call dreaming or sleeping if they ascend to worlds that the western people do not know?—We have to get out of our material civilisation considering everything that is in the physical world round us. We have to ascend to the spiritual with everything that we have conquered on the physical plane. It is significant and not only symbolical that Darwinism still found Huxley as a representative who had to say from his western view: nature shows us that the apes struggled against each other, and it was the strongest who prevailed, while the slogan went out from the East: support, mutual aid consolidates our future. We have a particular task here in Central Europe. Nothing would avail us to be unilaterally English or unilaterally Oriental. We must combine the dawn of the East and the physical science of the West to a great harmony. Then we understand how the idea of the future is combined with the idea of the struggle for the special existence.

It is more than by chance that in that basic book of theosophy from which somebody who wants to get involved deeper in the spiritual life can find light on the path the second chapter ends meaningfully with a sentence that harmonises with this idea. You can read it not like a phrase in Light on the Path (1885, by Mabel Collins, 1851-1927, theosophical author), but because the spiritual development leads the human being to the knowledge of the common soul that settles in the single soul. At the same time, the nice words agree with which both chapters of Light on the Path close. Somebody who delves completely in this marvellous little book which fulfils the soul not only with the contents which make us internally devout and give the human being real clairvoyance because of the strength of the words sees the balance in detail if he lives through what he reads in every chapter. Then the last words light up in the soul: peace is with you. This will be finally imparted to the whole humanity by the mental power, which we look for and foster. Then the human genius bends over the human race spiritually whose principal words will be: peace is with you.—This opens the right perspective for us. There we have to speak not only of peace, not only establish peace as an ideal, conclude contracts, long for decisions of an arbitration panel, there we have to foster the spiritual life, then we cause the strength in ourselves that pours out over the whole humanity as a strength of mutual aid.

We do not fight; we do something else: we foster love, and we know that with this care of love the fight must disappear. We do not confront fight with fight. We confront fight with love, while we nourish and cherish it. This is something positive. We work on ourselves pouring out love and found a society, which is built on love. This is our ideal. We carry out an ancient saying in a Christian way if we penetrate this emotionally and vividly. A new Christianity or rather the original Christianity will awake for the new humanity. Buddha gave his people a saying that envisages such a care. However, Christianity also has such a care of love in even nicer words, if one understands them properly: you do not overcome fight with fight, or hatred with hatred but you really overcome fight and hatred only with love.

One has often said that the human being himself is the best and most important study of the human being, and that the human being himself is the biggest riddle of the human being. In view of certain facts, one has to emphasise that this riddle faces the human being in manifold forms. The human riddle appears as multiplied to us and looks at us from all sides. The manifold forms of the human being, the races, are certainly such a multiplication of the human riddle. Natural sciences and spiritual science have always tried to bring in light to this variety of the human existence, in these different forms of the human being. Besides, we realise plenty of questions. We have the consciousness in ourselves that in all human beings a uniform nature and being exists. However, how does this uniform nature and being behave to the manifold forms and physiognomies, which face us as races? In particular, this question approaches us if we see which different abilities the single human races possess.

Apparently, to our consideration, the one human being is on the highest cultural level, the other on the most primitive, subordinated one. All that makes it appear strange to us that the human being who has, nevertheless, a uniform nature can appear in such a different and imperfect figure. One feels it often as an injustice of nature that it condemns one to an existence in a lower human race and raises the other to an apparently perfect race. To put a new contemplation to this mystery, to lighten up this riddle, the spiritual-scientific worldview seems to be more suitable than any other is. For this spiritual-scientific worldview does not speak in the same sense of the uniform human being as the other worldviews. It has a concept of it, which is different from that of the philosophers, religions et cetera, and it speaks of a recurrence of the human soul. It says to us that the soul, which lives in the modern human individual, was already often on this earth and will still often return. If we look at the matter even closer, we see that the souls of the human beings go through the different races. Thus, the variety of the races gets sense and reason. Thus, we see how the one is not condemned to live only in a primitive race and the other to be on the developmental levels of race existence.

Each one of us goes through the most different levels of the races, and this passage just signifies a further development of the single soul. Someone who appears as a member of the European race today went through other races in former times and will go through others than ours later. The races appear to us as levels, and this variety becomes coherent and reasonable.

However, if we want to see this sense quite thoroughly, we have to investigate the developmental basis of the different races deeper. Someone who rises above the only sensuous view to the invisible, supersensible world and tries to answer this question from such realms can really get an adequate solution of the riddle.

The usual natural sciences, which have to confine themselves to the sensuous observation in this question, were only able to bring in one leading thread in these cases concerning the human types. They are able to lead us back to the imperfect levels of human existence according to the modern Darwinist point of view. They trace the human being back to the former epochs of the earth evolution. They show us how the human being experienced stages in the former times in which he satisfied his needs with simple, imperfect tools with which he could only perform small work. To even former times the natural sciences want to lead us back in which the human being developed from the animal realm. We are led to the statement that we can no longer prove the earliest developmental stages of the human being scientifically, presumably because the areas of the earth in which the human being developed at that time are covered with the floods of the ocean. The natural sciences only point to an area repeatedly. This is the area in the south of Asia, in the east of Africa and down to Australia. Ernst Haeckel supposes that an ancient, extinct continent is to be sought there and that the interstates of animal and human being developed there. He calls this continent Lemuria.

Indeed, in the same sense in which Haeckel speaks about this continent and his inhabitants, about pithecoid human beings as the ancestors of the modern human beings, spiritual science cannot speak about this matter out of its experience. I have tried to show that there are other methods and means to find out something of the prehistoric times as those are on which the natural sciences must rely, other methods than the investigation of the leftovers, which one has found in the earth. You find everything about the origin of the human being and his classification in different races that has always been taught in the so-called secret schools out of inner mystic experience in my essays From the Akasha Chronicle (CW 11). Physical records and sensuous experience cannot lead us to the times, which can really teach us the decisive of this question. The supersensible experience only can teach us this. Today, I can only give a spare concept of this supersensible experience, and only a comparison should show us where from that is taken which we want to discuss in the main.

You know that my words I speak here are carried away by the undulations, which are stimulated in the air. The oscillatory air brings my words through your organ of hearing into your soul. While I am speaking here, this whole airspace is filled with sound waves. Imagine that these sound waves could be fixed, one could get an imprint with any means at every moment of that which is spoken here. Then you would have a recording of everything that is spoken here. Just as the word that I speak here makes an imprint on the medium around us also the other expressions of the human nature do, indeed, not on the air, which is somewhat coarse in relation to many other and subtler substances, because there are subtler substances than the air is. I point only to the ether, although our consideration deals nothing with it. However, I mean, actually, the finest matter, the akashic matter in which not only the spoken words imprint themselves, but all thoughts, feelings and will impulses of the human being.

This akasha matter with its imprints really forms a large phonograph. While these sound waves pass here in the air perpetually, last only as long as the sound is heard, the imprints that the human achievements up to the thoughts cause in this so-called akasha matter always persist. Somebody who is able to develop so far to read in this akasha matter can read the recordings, which have been put down since primeval times. From this chronicle, from the higher spiritual experiences the information comes which spiritual science announces about the human development through the different races. We are led back not only to the human beings who the natural sciences and archaeology register investigating the leftovers of human beings who had primitive tools and weapons in the caves of France or anywhere. These human beings had low receding foreheads and were backward in their intellectual development compared to the modern civilised human beings.

These researches do not lead us back to those forms of humanity that the spiritual-scientific worldview teaches us, even if the modern naturalists think that they lead us back ten to fifteen millennia, maybe even farther. All those human forms and racial forms that the naturalist can find in the earth point again back to quite differently formed human physiognomies, to races which have lived on another earth area, on Atlantis which extended between Europe, Africa and America. The idea is also no longer strange to the natural sciences that the Atlantic was once land. The resemblance of the fauna, of the animal realm and the various soil formations, also some relationships of languages, all these matters point the naturalist to the fact that we deal with a big earth subsidence, with a flood of a large land domain that took place in very early times of our development. Plato tells about an island Poseidonis which is still stated by him as an island in the ocean, it was the last rest of the past world. The spiritual-scientific view teaches us that, too.

If we go back to the inhabitants who lived in Atlantis, then something appears to us that is different from today. We get to know a race in which the most significant abilities, which make the modern civilised human being a civilised human being, did not yet exist. The Atlantean race did not yet have these abilities, the ability of combining, of counting, of logical thinking. These human beings had memory and language at that time. That had only developed in them. However, in return, they had other abilities. A progress of the human abilities takes only place if certain so-called higher levels of the human existence are purchased with the disappearance of former levels of development. Exactly the same way as the human being has a very low ability of smelling compared to certain animals, whereas the animals have less developed higher senses, the brain in particular, however, they bring the lower abilities to perfection. It is the same here on these higher levels of humanity.

The Atlantean had an almost omniscient memory. His knowledge was generally based on his memory. He did not know what we call law or rule. He did not calculate in such a way that he knew a multiplication table; indeed, he did not know this. His memory was the basis for his whole thinking. He knew if he had piled up twice five beans that this was a small heap of so and so many. He did not count, but he kept it in his memory. His language was also different from ours. I will come back to this phenomenon in the course of this talk. Because the Atlantean had developed these abilities only, a certain clairvoyant talent belonged to him inevitably which withdrew when our day consciousness, our reason, our mathematical, logical consciousness, our cultural consciousness developed. The Atlantean was able to quite different sense to work on the growth of plants out of his nature using the special magic willpower. Without sensuous mediation, the Atlantean was able to carry out certain magic effects. All that also was connected with a completely different body structure, above all with a receding forehead and with a defective formation of the forebrain. On the other side, other parts of the brain were unlike those of the modern civilised human being. This enabled him to use his big abilities of memory.

If we observe such an Atlantean according to the recordings of the Akasha Chronicle, we find that at the same time the brightness of our present consciousness was not yet achieved. It was a dream consciousness. It was brighter than this, but it did not yet have that bright clarity of the intellect, which our modern consciousness has. It was more a brooding and dreaming one. What worked with him was also not in such a way that he could regard himself as the master of that which he caused, but it was in such a way that everything that was in him was like a kind of inspiration. He felt to be connected with other forces, like with a spirit flowing through him. The spirit was something concrete to him, it was that which was in the wind, in the clouds and which grew up in the plants. The spirit was something that one could feel if one moved the hands through the air, if the trees rustled. This was the language of nature. The independence of the Atlantean was also not as great as that of the modern human beings.

If we look back farther, we come to the ancestors of this population, to those human beings who lived on a part of the world, which the natural sciences know as well as spiritual science: on Lemuria, the land between Asia, Australia, and Africa. However, spiritual science has to portray the appearance and figure of those human beings quite different from the naturalists. The portrayal of the figure of these human beings, which the spiritual researcher gives, is not so different from that which the naturalist supposes. However, it is spiritually completely different. The Lemurian was much more clairvoyant than the Atlantean. He had a gigantic willpower; he was a human being with whom language and memory were not yet developed. The language began only in the later Lemuria. However, the Lemurian could make the plants grow, he could command the wind, he could take natural forces out of the earth like with magic, briefly, what the Lemurian was able to do borders on the miraculous compared with the modern ideas. However, all that was in a vague consciousness, in a deeper dream sleep than it existed with the Atlantean. Completely conducted by higher influence, by higher spiritual beings, this Lemurian was a dependent creature in the hands of higher forces, which gave him the impulses of his intentions, of his actions.

With it, we have three successive developmental forms of our race. This Lemurian developed out of the not yet human companion of the ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, et cetera. These fabulous animals were there still before our mammals and perished because of big physical revolutions in these continents. The volcanic formations that stand out of the ocean are the remains of that old Lemurian age. In addition, those primitive constructions of gigantic size and strange form, as they are found on the Easter Island, are remains of the cyclopean constructions, extend into our time like monuments of those human beings whose soul life was completely different from ours.

Only with a few words, I would like to point to the relation between the human being and the different animal forms. The modern naturalist, accustomed to materialistic ideas, supposes that the human being developed from lower animal forms. The spiritual researcher is not able to do this. He supposes that the spiritual led the way of the material that the primal ground of the outside, of the material is founded in the spiritual that the external human body of the human being is an expression of the human soul. What the spiritual researcher describes as an astral body developed much earlier than the physical body of the human being. This astral body experienced a compression and it forms the etheric body this way, and only the compression of this etheric body forms the physical body.

The denser condition evolved only later. The thinner one, the astral one in particular, existed in much earlier times. Thus, spiritual science shows us that a being did not originate from an accidental agglomeration of physical matter, which has such impulses, passions, and instincts as the human being, but that these impulses and passions are the origin of the encasing matter. The passion did not create this matter, but the former passions created the forms of the physiognomy. Thus, the human being goes through a process of compression. Indeed, if we go back to the Lemurians, we see that their bodies become thinner and thinner, until we come back to human beings whose physical matter is very similar to the gelatinous matter of certain present animals. If we went back even farther, we would find ancient human ancestors, formed in a matter, which one cannot see with the usual physical eyes: the etheric human being. However, I do not want to go back to this very ancient time.

We want to begin our considerations with those human beings who start appearing in such a carnal cover as the present human being carries it, although the covers of the human beings who inhabited Lemuria and Atlantis were completely different from the construction of our muscles and skeletons. All that was much softer, more pliable, and flexible, and complied with the requirements of those vague, dreamlike soul forces I have described to you. Just by the fact that the physical matter of the human being becomes denser and denser; the pole of the physical matter is created on the other side, which is the tool of intelligence. With the creation of the brain, a compression of the remaining human organs took place at the same time.

Thus, the brain becomes the tool of the intellect, of the mind. If we summarise these three stages, we have them in the civilised human being. First, we have the Lemurian human being, his consciousness is trance-like, then we have the Atlantean human being who develops memory and language and then we have the actual civilised human being, the human being of our time.

If we consider the modern human beings, they developed from these former stages of existence. The primitive stage does not disappear at once when the higher one appears. It survives for the time being and changes in manifold ways. So that we can say: a part of the former Atlantean population migrated from Atlantis to Europe and farther to Asia and established colonies, a part stayed behind, so that we have the most manifold stages side by side. Every progressive part leaves behind as it were the stages of development like memories. That also applies to the human being in a similar way. He developed the most different forms of the animals from himself. Just as humanity leaves lower races behind, the human being leaves certain animal forms behind on even former stages which are like externally preserved memories of his former existence. Looking at the animals, we can say that they show the stages of our own development, from the lower animal form up to the forms of our race. However, our own forms did not look like that which stayed behind. At that time, the conditions were still different.

One normally does not imagine at all how infinitely big the changes were which took place on the earth. In the old Atlantis was no distribution of rain and sunshine, air and water as today. There was another air saturated with water. There was not yet rain at that time. Myths and legends hold on these things vividly. Hence, the Nordic legends also speak of “Niflheim,” “nebulous home.” A real fact forms the basis of that. The forms of our ancestors were different from ours, and those human beings whom they left behind got to conditions, which they did not stand. Hence, they had to develop to lower stages, they became decadent, and they degenerated.

The physical conditions of our present earth make it possible that the mind develops with a certain level of the beings. If the earth had not developed from the completely different conditions of rain and sunshine to our advantage, the human being would never have been able to develop to the stage on which we are today. We see that only the progressive race is able to develop suitably. However, what maintains the former form and is as a reminiscent sign of it, becomes degenerate because it does not comply with the later conditions. If we go back to the former times, we understand that that which we were once was completely different from the present animals. These changed because of the completely changed conditions. We also have to regard the subordinated races as stages of former human existence that were adapted, actually, to other earthly conditions according to their nature.

The matter becomes much more understandable, if we look into it that way. Then we understand that the Indian population of America, which appears to us so mysterious with its social structures and peculiar instincts must be completely different. The African race, the Ethiopian one, the black race is different in another way. There are the instincts that tie in with the lower human. We find a certain dreamlike element with the Malayans. Within the Mongolian population those qualities exist which are based on a special energy of the blood. There are also certain mental qualities, which developed quite typically. Hence, the Mongolian race always refuses to accept a pantheistic view. Its religion is a belief in demons, a cult of the dead. The population, which one calls the Caucasian race, constitutes the real civilised race, which is appointed to develop the logical thinking, to create tools for the work on nature using the mere reason of the human being who can no longer use the magic forces but has to rely on the mechanical. Everything that the human being had in the times of the old Atlantis in this way got lost, and, therefore, he manufactured tools because he could no longer work as he worked once; hence, he required tools for the mechanical effect.

The physical research tried in manifold ways to divide the different races. It tried to divide them according to the shaping of the skull in those, which have a narrow and backwards long skull, in those, which have a short and broad skull, and in those, which are between the both. One divided the human beings also according to their skin colour, into black ones: Black, Ethiopians; in yellow-brown: the Malayans and Mongols, and in white ones, the Caucasians. This division is done more according to external signs and gives certain differences, however, is not exhaustive. In the newer time, one has taken the language as a basis. However, if you consider the past spiritual-scientifically, you get quite different views. You find that our white civilised humanity originated from the fact that certain parts separated themselves from the Atlanteans and developed higher under other climatic conditions. Certain parts of the Atlantean population stayed behind just on the former stages, so that we have to observe remains of the different Atlantean races in the population of Asia and America. However, they have changed; they differ from the original Atlantean population.

We distinguish seven human sub-races within the Atlantean population. Five of these seven sub-races are in an ascending development. I only want to mention here that the Chinese are descendants of the fourth sub-race of the Atlantean population, and that the Mongolians are descendants of the seventh sub-race of this Atlantean population. Memory and language gradually developed. Only with the third sub-race, with the Primal Toltecs, language appeared clearly. There also appears a culture supported on memory. The fifth sub-race which we call the primal Semites and which had established its main residence in Ireland was the first germ of our present Caucasian or—as spiritual science also calls it—Aryan human race.

A part of this sub-race—it was very unlike the modern Jewish population but was still called Semitic rightly because of certain processes—moved to Asia and developed the intellectual culture which spread then over Europe, southern Asia and over the population of northern Africa. On the other side, around this centre is a belt of human population that had manifold remains in its character from inhabitants of former times, remains of the Atlanteans. All these inhabitants left behind descendants, and thus we can imagine that the train, of which I have just spoken surged to Asia, collided there with a population that was left from Atlantis and maybe from Lemuria, and formed the Malayan races then. With them, one can perceive a drowsy being and a prematurity concerning passions and sexuality. In such a way, the Indian-Aryan race developed from a choice branch of the Atlantean population, with mixing in of remains of the old population. It connected a certain dreamlike, clairvoyant being with a peculiar intellectual worldview. Perhaps, in no other worldview the clairvoyant view of deeper forces of nature and a system of thinking with such an architectural unity and pervasive astuteness were connected with each other. We find other new populations of quite different forms in the direction to the Middle East.

Moreover, another train of Atlanteans went to America—the spiritual-scientific worldview can prove this. There were rests of Lemurians and of Atlanteans who intermingled in many respects. This Indian population faces the European immigrants later. There two very different human developments collided. What lived in the ancient times, a completely different soul element, something clairvoyant, something of the spirit flowing through the whole world still lived in this Indian population. A speech is preserved to us that an Indian chief held at a clash of Indians and Europeans. He condemned the breach of promise by the Europeans. One had promised to the Indian population, after one had taken their residences from them, to give them other residences. He possibly said the following, oh you pale-faces, you do not understand what the Great Spirit teaches us. This comes from the fact that you pale-faces read everything that the gods say from books that the letters in your books tell you what is true. You promised us that you give us land again, but you have not kept your promise because your god does not teach you the truth and keeping your word. We know a god who speaks to us in the clouds, in the waves, in the rustling leaves, in flash and thunder. The god of the red man keeps his word. The god knows that he has to be loyal to the tribe.—This was a great speech. The Great Spirit was a rest of a human view that originated from a dreamlike consciousness, from inspirations of higher forces. Hence, at the same time it was closer to the divine, the springs of the divine.

The languages teach us something similar. If we compare the different human races, we find a quite different structure in the languages of this external belt of peoples. We find the old Atlantean structure in the Mongolian languages, and we find something of Atlantean origin expressed in the structure of certain African languages. They emphasise the nouns, and they express by prefixes what we express by inflexions. We learn from that that they originated from an excellently working memory. The Mongolian languages show that they originated at a time in which memory did no longer function in such a way, as it was the case once. There the verbs are more developed which already tend to the reason. The Atlantean did not at all talk, actually, from memory. Everything was present to him. Not before one starts forgetting, the verb forms in the language. I would like to say that a magnificent monument of the middle of the Atlantean culture has remained, and this is the Chinese language. This language has something purely composing and at the same time something original where in the sounds even something inside, mental and a certain relation to the outside world is expressed. If we studied certain parts of the population in the connection with it, we could understand this completely.

We can understand our race if we pursue it in two currents, which we can clearly, prove. There we have that current at first, which moves from the west, maybe from England to Asia. It probably gave cause for the Indian, the Near Eastern-Semitic, for the Indo-African-Semitic races as well as for the Arabian-Chaldean race. Then, however, we must imagine another current that did not progress so far which came maybe only to Ireland or Holland, or also to the area that the ancestors of the ancient Persians inhabited. There we have a belt of related population through the area of the Persians via the Black Sea to Europe.

Thus, we can verify two zones of human population. One extends from India over here and encloses the southern peninsulas of Europe; the other encloses the zones located to the north with different gradations. There we have the Aryan one and the different Semitic gradations in Asia and Africa; then in Greece and Italy the Greek-Latin population. However, we have to imagine them also in such a way that it originated from the mixture with the northern belt which also encloses the Persian population and everything that developed, like from undergrounds, the Slavic and the Germanic populations in the west, and that which provides the basis more or less of all, the ancient Celtic population. We can imagine that we had an ancient Celtic population in the west of Europe. This part of the current of peoples lies farthest to the west, while the Persian population is that part which went the farthest to the east. The Slavic and the Germanic peoples stand between; intermingled with the southern belt, these established the Greek-Latin race. You can prove it in the languages that a relationship of the population exists, which expresses itself the strongest in the deep relationship of the languages in the northern belt.

There we have languages that are completely different from that which constitutes the character of the Semitic-Egyptian culture. The structure of the Semitic-Egyptian languages express what developed in the fifth sub-race of Atlantis as a Primal Semitic culture. It is characterised by the first lighting up of the intellect in the human development. Here logic and intellect developed first. The former dreamlike clairvoyant element intermingled in the most different way, and the different religions formed. However, the Semitic language does not have an atomistic character like the Chinese one, but an analytic character. On the other hand, the Caucasian languages have a synthetic character.

We distinguish five human races. I leave it undecided whether the word is used rightly or wrongly. The ancient Indo-Aryans with their marvellous visionary thinking established the first culture. This culture preceded the Vedic culture. That is why there are no recordings of it. What you read in the Vedas is only an echo of the ancient visionary Indian culture. Then the ancient Persian culture comes as the second race, that population which preferably applies the intelligence to the external work. The ancient Indian culture has something unworldly. In these northern regions, we find human beings who enclose the world who want to conquer the world who use tools and the like. Hence, we see in this culture how there the consciousness develops that humanity has to achieve something that there is good and bad. Here Ormuzd and Ahriman confront themselves. Then we come to the Near East. There develops another race. What expresses itself in the structure of the Semitic language is the combinatorial, the mathematical, and the logical-conceptual aspect. This faces us in the architecture of Egypt; this is expressed in the pyramids and in the great thought structures, then in the marvellous science, in the astrological form of astronomy.

We have three sub-races now. We come now to Europe to the southern peninsulas. There we find that which flows from the north and expresses itself in old cultural peoples. We find that something develops that looks for the inner life. While the Egyptian builds up externally, with internal symbolism, the Greek starts erecting monuments and cultivating sculpture stimulated by the mystery dramas. However, the most significant action within this fourth sub-race or culture epoch is the rise of Christianity. The southern peoples are not able to understand this Christianity in its peculiar figure. In Greece, it is Grecized, in Rome it is Romanised and becomes state church. This happened while the fifth sub-race approached gradually in the Middle Ages. This is our own sub-race. It had the task to bring the culture down to the physical plane. This indicates that sense and reason is in the succession of races.

Still in another sense, sense and reason are in this racial development. The human being consists of three members according to his lower nature: of physical body, etheric body, and astral body. The physical body is that which we see with eyes, can touch with hands. The astral body is the bearer of our desires, passions, and instincts, of our emotions, affects, of rage and hatred. The etheric body is the bearer of the vital forces. The human ego lives in them. This expresses itself differently.

I immediately want to begin with the way in which it expresses itself in our present cultural epoch. It has developed the physical body most remarkably, elaborated it most marvellously. The body, the brain became the tool of the intellectual life and thinking. Gradually the body had to be conquered. If you were able to look back, you would see that during the Lemurian age the body looks like an awkward huge thing. The astral body is not yet able to move the limbs. The ancestors of the Lemurian age were clumsy. You see this still echoing in the Native American population. On one side, the instincts still fight because the human beings do not yet have the consciousness to penetrate themselves from the inside, they work on the body from the outside, they tattoo it because it does not yet appear finished to them. If we go up to the other races, we see the human being conquering the etheric body. The functions of life and nutrition developed, so that the human being becomes a conscious and autonomous being from an unaware one.

The human being gradually starts the campaign of conquest through his own being. The Lemurians conquered the astral body, the Atlanteans the life body, and our present humanity conquers the physical body. The conquest of the spiritual-mental forces follows, which is the task of our time. Thus, the racial development gets an even higher sense and we understand that it is a training of the developing human mind. We look back to areas where the human being is structured quite differently. Our souls embodied themselves at that time and got to know the phenomena of the external world. Later they returned to the earth in another race and learnt to look into the world in another way. Moreover, it goes on that way. The human being goes through race by race. Those who are young souls reincarnate in those races that remained on their former level.

Thus, that which lives as race and souls round us fits into each other organically and mentally. Everything gets a sense, becomes transparent, and becomes explicable. We approach the solution of these riddles more and more and we can understand that we have to go through other epochs in the future that we have to go other ways than the race made them. We must be clear in our mind that mental and racial developments are different. Within the Atlantean race our own souls lived which developed then upwards to a superior human race. This gives us a picture of the human development up to our time.

Hence, we also understand the principle to found the core of a general brotherhood without taking into consideration race, colour, social rank et cetera. I shall explain this thought in particular. I wanted to show today only how in the different figures the same being exists, namely in a much more correct sense than the natural sciences teach it. Our soul steps from stage to stage, that is, from race to race, and we get to know the significance of humanity if we look at these races. We learn to understand one thing more and more, namely how deep and true the saying is, “Somebody was successful, and he lifted the veil of the goddess of Sais. However, what did he see? He saw—miracle of miracles—himself!” We see ourselves everywhere and in the manifold figures.—This is self-knowledge! The great saying in the temple of the Greek school of wisdom comes true: human being, recognise yourself.

Someone might say that the spiritual scientific reflections touching on the problem of vocation are among the least interesting. But such is not the case. This must be recognized, especially in our fifth post-Atlantean period, because in this period all human relationships will be essentially modified in comparison with those that prevailed in earlier periods of the earth. They will be so modified that man must, out of his own freedom, bring more with him than in earlier ages when his mission in the evolution of earth could be carried out almost instinctively; that is, when he received by inspiration the direction into which he had to go.

When we look back, for example, to the Egypto-Chaldean culture or to other cultures of earlier times, we shall find that the measure of freedom now given to man toward forging his external destiny—and this freedom will constantly increase—was not given him in earlier times. During the Egypto-Chaldean period, the fact that each person belonged to a certain class into which he or she was forced similar to the way an animal is forced into its species, though not so irrevocably, removed from the sphere of man's freedom much that at present belongs there. To be sure, there was a compensation for this limitation of freedom. Students of the external history of culture who are generally quite shortsighted in their thinking, usually assume that conditions in ancient times were such that those who were then guiding human affairs did so with the same impulses as the leading personalities today. But you must bear in mind that there were quite definite processes in the mysteries in ancient times whereby the guiding personalities acquainted themselves with what was willed by beings who guide life from regions outside the earth. I have told you that at certain times—we do not need now to review them—sacrificial priests carried out specified mystery rituals. As a result, certain personalities in the temples who were suited for such purposes were brought into contact with the universe, the cosmos, the extraterrestrial relationships. The consciousness of these specially qualified personalities was then inspired by beings who guided the earth from extraterrestrial regions, and what was learned from these beings determined the course of action.

I will show you through a hypothetical case how things took their course in earlier times. Suppose that today the Christmas festival was not more or less an external holiday for most people, but that in its form and time of occurrence men knew that our earth is especially fitted to receive ideas into its aura that cannot enter, for example, in summer. I have explained how the earth is awake during the winter and that Christmas time is one of the most brilliant points of this waking state. At that time the aura of the earth is permeated, interwoven, with thoughts. We may say that the earth is permeated, interwoven, with thoughts. We may say that the earth ponders the outer universe, just as we men, while in the waking state of day, reflect in our thought on what is around us. In summer the earth sleeps, so it is not possible then to find certain thoughts in it. In winter the earth is awake, and most wide awake at Christmas; then the earth's aura is interpenetrated with thoughts, and it is possible to read the will of the cosmos for our earthly events from them.

Now the sacrificial priests educated some individuals in such a way that they became sensitive and receptive to what was alive in the earth's aura. By putting these individuals into contact with the earthly thoughts that gave expression to the cosmic will, the sacrificial priests in the temples could learn it from them. What they learned was to them, in a sense, the will of heaven, and from this they were able to determine who should remain in a particularly worthy position and who should be taken into the mysteries in order that he might assume a leading position in ancient government or priestly life. Humanity has now outgrown such things and is exposed to chaos in this respect; we must simply recognize this fact. The transition from the ancient, quite definite conditions in which men learned from the will of the gods what was to happen here on earth has already occurred. During the fourth post-Atlantean period, in which the individual freed himself from the will of the cosmos, these ancient customs passed over into our present more chaotic conditions. Everything tends to be handed over more completely to man. Thus, it is all the more necessary that the will of the cosmos shall penetrate earthly conditions in another way.

It would require much time to make clear how in the third Egypto-Babylonian culture period something still lived and wove in earthly life from the various vocations of men—to use a term adapted to our present conditions—that was in large measure a reproduction of the will of the cosmos. This came about as described and was disappearing during the fourth post-Atlantean period. It has vanished completely in our fifth post-Atlantean period which began, as we know, approximately in the fifteenth century. If men would pay more attention today to what is happening and stop offering a fable convenue in place of history, they would be able to recognize, even from external conditions, how man's relation to his vocation has changed since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They would recognize from present conditions how everything will increasingly become different in the future. But a sort of anarchy would inevitably overtake mankind if no one were to grasp these deeper connections and impart to the intellectual community ideas that take into account the modifications produced by the natural course of evolution. What it has been possible to establish even from external history regarding the emergence of what we might call the modern vocational life since the fifteenth century would cause astonishment to those who are at all able to observe human life. If they would submit to the influence of all that it is possible to recognize, they would find fault with themselves, in a way, for living in such a somnolent state and for having no conception of what is connected with evolving human destiny.

Last time, I called your attention to the fact that what constitutes real vocational life is by no means so insignificant for the cosmic complex as it may at first appear. I pointed out that, as men, we have gone successively through the Saturn evolution, where the first potentialities of the physical body were prepared; the Sun period, in which the etheric man was prepared; the Moon period, in which the astral man was prepared, and that we are now passing through the earth period in which the ego develops. But other periods are to follow: The Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan times. We may say that the earth is, in a way, the fourth stage of Saturn; likewise, Vulcan is the fourth stage of the earth. The earth is, in a sense, the Saturn of Vulcan. Just as on ancient Saturn processes occurred so intimately bound up with evolution that we owe the first potentiality of our physical body to them, which still continues to work in us, so must something happen on earth that will continue to work on in our evolution. On Vulcan it will attain a fourth stage of development, just as certain processes on Saturn have reached a fourth stage of development of earth. I pointed out that those processes that would correspond to Vulcan correspond to what we have on earth from the Saturn evolution; they represent, therefore, what works and lives in the various vocations that men take up on earth. As humans pursue vocational lives, something develops on earth within their vocational activity that will be the first potentiality for Vulcan, just as the Saturn activity was the first potentiality for our physical body.

If you add to this reflection the fact that vocational life has undergone a tremendous transformation since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, you will understand how increasingly important it will become to conceive of it as a component of the entire world evolution provided you do this by means of those points of view that may be developed through spiritual science. Only by learning first to recognize the objective aspects of vocational life can we form suitable concepts regarding the karma of vocation. Of even greater interest will be the question where vocational life is going and what it will develop into from our age onward because from this we shall derive more clear-cut concepts than from today's conditions.

As can easily be recognized when we take a common sense look out into the world today, the future evolution of vocational life will consist in the ever increasing differentiation and specialization of vocations. It is not too intelligent for people to criticize the fact that, in recent times, vocations have become more specialized and that not so many centuries ago a person could find in his vocation the connections between what he was producing and what this meant for the world. He thereby would take an interest in the forming and shaping of his product because he saw clearly what his product became in life. In our times, this is no longer the case for much of humanity.

To take a radical example, a man is placed by his destiny in a factory where he perhaps makes, not a whole nail, but only part of one; this piece is then joined with another part by another man. Thus, the man who makes only part of the nail can develop no interest in how what he produced from morning until night takes its place in the relationships of life. If we compare the earlier handicraft life with the factory life of today, we are immediately aware of a radical difference between what is contemporary and what existed not too long ago. What has already come to pass in the various branches of human activity will continue to develop, and more specialization and differentiation of vocational life will necessarily occur. It is by no means especially intelligent for people to criticize this because it is a necessity in evolution; it simply will happen, and will happen more and more.

What sort of outlook is opened to us by this fact? Fundamentally, it is that men must increasingly lose interest, as we can readily imagine, in the work that occupies the greater part of their lives; in a way, they must surrender like automatons to their work in the world. But the most essential point is something else. Man's inner nature must obviously acquire the color of his outer work. Anyone who observes the historic development of humanity will certainly discover to what a large extent the men of the recent fifth post-Atlantean period have become reproductions of their vocations and how their vocational lives influence their soul lives, specializing them. This does not apply to the majority of those who live today within our Anthroposophical Society, however. They are often in the fortunate position of having detached themselves from the interconnections of life. In the fortunate position? I might just as well say in the unfortunate position! This is good fortune often only for subjective egoistic feeling. For the world, it is often bad fortune because the world will demand increasingly of men that they excel in special fields and become specialists.

But what must happen in addition to this? Their specialization will be a necessary by-product of world evolution, and this question will soon become one of the weightiest of family problems; anyone who wishes to educate children will have to understand it. To place oneself rationally within the course of evolution then will depend altogether upon an understanding of the question: How shall I place my child into the evolution of humanity? What is still possible in many cases today, even though it is only a residue left over from ancient times that people routinely cling to, will soon prove to be empty phrases; that is, the fine manner of speaking so much admired today, according to which children must be allowed to become what corresponds to their observed talents. This will soon prove to be an empty phrase. In the first place, people will see that those who are born from now on will give indications of their previous incarnations in a more complex way than was the case with people in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. They will show complex potentialities that no one would have dreamed of before since these potentialities were far simpler in earlier times. Those who consider themselves especially clever in testing the potentialities of grown children to determine whether or not they are fitted for this or that vocation may learn that the insights derived from these tests are nothing but their own fantastic imaginations.

In the near future, however, life will be so complicated that the word profession will take on an entirely different meaning. Today we still often associate something quite inward with the word, calling it “vocation,” although for most people their vocations do not at all represent anything inward. We conceive vocation (calling) as something toward which a person is called by his inner qualities. However, if we would question people about their calling, especially in our cities, many would say, “I am in my profession because I am convinced this is the only one that corresponds to my talents and inclinations that I have had since childhood.” Yet, closer inspection of these cases would reveal that the answers given did not correspond with the facts, and I imagine they are not congruent with your own observation of life. Today, a vocation is increasingly that to which a person is called by the world's objective course of development. There outside of men is the organism, the interconnection; you may call it, if you please, the machine—this is not important—that gives orders, that calls him.

All this will constantly intensify and, as a result, what humanity accomplishes through vocational activity is also detached from man himself; it becomes more objective. Through this detachment, vocational activity grows increasingly into something that, in its further development through Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan, goes through a process of development similar to what has taken place for the earth through Saturn, Sun, and Moon. It is a peculiar fact that when one speaks as a spiritual scientist it is not possible to flatter human beings if the subject is related intimately to their lives. Spiritual science will be less and less exposed, you see, to the danger of expressing itself according to the model of wisdom to be found in the words:

At best a pompous moralistic play
With wonderfully edifying quips,
Most suitable to come from puppets' lips.⁶⁷

Spiritual science will certainly not be in a position to do this. It will often be compelled to set forth as something significantly great for the evolution of the world the very thing that people would prefer not to hear. It will therefore be inevitable that some people today who consider themselves exceedingly bright because their philistinism has crept into their brains will glibly declare, “Oh, professional life is a prosaic, mundane matter.” The way vocational life appears to true spiritual science compels us to declare that through the very fact that this life becomes detached from human interests, it contains the necessity to develop relationships possessing a cosmic significance. Many people might think that a depressing view of the future results from this: increasingly people are caught in the treadmill of life and spiritual science cannot even console them that this has happened.

It would, however, be a great deception should one draw such a conclusion from what has been said since the nature of the universe requires things to be unified through polar opposites. Just consider how these polarities thrust themselves upon you in the world! It is, for example, in their mutual relationship that positive and negative electricity produce their unified effects. Positive and negative electricity are necessary to each other. Male and female are necessary for the propagation of the human race. It is from polarities that unity evolves in the evolution of the world.

Now, the same principle is at the bottom of what has been said. When vocational labor is separated from the human being, we necessarily create the first cosmic potentiality for a far-reaching cosmic evolution. Everything that happens in the evolution of the world is related to the spiritual, and in what we create within the sphere of our vocations, whether by bodily or by mental labor, there lies the possibility for the incarnation of spiritual beings. At present, during this earth stage, these spiritual beings are, to be sure, still of an elemental kind; we might say an elemental kind of the fourth degree. But they will have become elemental beings of the third degree during the Jupiter evolution, and so on. The labor in the objective vocational process is detached from us and becomes the external sheath for elemental beings who thereby continue their development. But this occurs only under a certain condition.

If it be said that we must first begin to understand the meaning of what is often belittled as the prosaic part of life, we must also understand that this meaning is not clarified until we comprehend it completely in its comprehensive cosmic connection. What we produce in our vocational life can become meaningful for the Vulcan evolution, but something else is prerequisite to this. Just as positive electricity is necessary for negative, and the male necessary for the female, so also what will be released continuously from humanity as activity will require an opposite pole. A polarity of opposites was also present for humanity in its earlier evolutionary stages. Something absolutely new, of course, does not come into existence here because something similar was already present before. But when you look back at earlier cultural periods, if only two or three centuries ago, you will find that the human being was still far more immersed in his professional life with his feelings and passions, in fact with all his emotions, than today. When you compare the joy that a human being could still experience in his or her profession even a hundred years ago with the dissatisfaction of many people today who have nothing but their profession, you will be able to form an impression of what really needs to be said.

Such things are really considered rightly far too infrequently for the simple reason that those who discuss the character and choice of vocation are those who can least afford to talk about this subject matter. Schoolmasters, literary scholars, parsons—the very people who least experience the dark side of vocational activity in the modern world—write about these things. Thus you will find in ordinary literature and even in pedagogical books that people express themselves on this subject like the blind discussing colors. Of course, someone who has finished elementary and high school, and then looked around a little in a university because that's the thing to do, may easily consider himself unusually clever with the ideas he has absorbed; that is, if he now plays the role of a reformer of humanity who can tell us how everything should be done. There are, indeed, many such individuals. A person who has gained a proper perception of life knows that they are the ones who usually talk most stupidly about what must come about. This is ordinarily not observed simply because those who have acquired such educational credentials are at present highly respected. The time is yet to come when the feeling will develop that the so-called men of letters, the journalists and narrowly educated schoolmasters, understand the interrelationships of life least of all. This must gradually develop as a general opinion.

It is important that we come to see more clearly how in earlier times man's emotional life was intricately related with his professional life and how subsequently the latter has increasingly become disengaged from man's emotional life and must continue to do so. For this reason, the polar opposite of vocational life must become something different from what it was earlier. What was this element that was added earlier to vocational life? You have it before you today when you consider what constitutes the shell of culture. The buildings in which professions are practiced and in the midst of these, the church, have become the sheath and shell of culture; the days of the week reserved for work, and Sunday reserved for the needs of the soul. These were the two poles: the vocational life and the life dedicated to religious conceptions.

It would be one of the greatest mistakes that could be made to suppose that this other pole as it is still conceived today by the religious denominations could remain as it is, since it was made to fit a vocational life still bound up with the emotions of men. All of human life will deteriorate unless understanding increases in this sphere. So long as the elemental spirit that an individual creates in his vocation, as I have described, was not separated from him, the old religious conceptions still sufficed to some extent. Today they are no longer sufficient, and they will become less so the farther we advance into the future. The very idea that is most vociferously opposed by certain people must be revived; that is, the opposite pole, consisting of the fact that men shall be able to form concrete concepts regarding the spiritual worlds, should enter into evolution.

The representatives of the religious sects will often say, “Oh, there they are in spiritual science talking about many spirits and gods, but it is the one God that is important; with Him alone we have enough.” Thus, we can still make an impression on people today if we present them with the great advantage of coming into contact with one god, especially during after-dinner coffee and family music, when contemptuous remarks are made about other more recent endeavors, and ideas are expressed in an especially egotistic and philistine fashion. But what is really important is that human horizons should be broadened; that is, that we should learn to know that everything is permeated not just by a single divine spirit conceived in the vaguest way possible, but that spirit is also omnipresent in a concrete, special sense. People must learn to know that when a workman stands at his vice and the sparks fly about elemental spirits are being created which pass over into the world process and there have their significance. Those especially clever ones will claim that this is stupid. These elemental spirits, however, will certainly come into existence even though the one working at the vice is unconscious of them. Nevertheless, they will still be created, and it is important that they shall come into existence in the right way since elemental spirits both destructive and helpful to the world process can come into being.

You will most clearly understand what I mean if you consider it in a special context because in all these things we are standing today at the threshold of new evolutionary developments. Many people already have an inkling of this. Should it be transformed into reality and people fail to have spiritual scientific aspirations, it would be the worst thing that could happen to the earth. What has come about primarily during the course of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch is that the human being has been liberated from the external, inorganic world which he embodied in his tools. Eventually, he will be reunited with what he has embodied in them.

Today, machines are constructed. Of course, they are at present objective, containing little of the human element. But it will not always be so. The course of the world tends to bring about a connection between what the human being is and what he produces and brings into existence. This connection will become ever more intimate. It will appear first in those areas that furnish the foundation for closer relations between one person and another—for example, in the treatment of chemical substances that are used in medicines. People still believe that when sulphur, oxygen, and some other substance—hydrogen or something else—have been combined, the product of this combination possesses only those effects that are derived from the individual substances. Today this is still true to a large extent, but the course of world evolution is tending toward something different. The subtle pulsations lying in the human being's life of will and disposition will weave and incorporate themselves gradually into what he produces. Thus, it will not be a matter of indifference from whom a certain preparation is received.

Even the most external and cold technical development tends toward a quite definite goal. Anyone who can form a vague conception of the future of technical development knows that an entire factory will operate in a completely individual way that will be in keeping with the one who directs it. His or her attitude of mind will enter into the factory and will pass over into the way in which the machines work. Human beings will blend with this objectivity. Everything that they touch will gradually come to bear a human impression. No matter how stupid it may seem today to the clever people—in spite of St. Paul having said that what men consider to be clever is often foolishness in the eyes of God⁶⁸—people will realize that the time will come when an individual will be able to step up to a mechanism standing at rest and will know that to set it in motion he must move his hand this way, that way, and another way. Through the vibrations of the air caused by this signal, the motor,⁶⁹ adjusted beforehand to respond to it, will be set in motion.

Then, national economic development will become such that to patent machines will be quite impossible; such things will be replaced by what I have just explained. Thus, everything will be excluded that has no relation to human nature, and by this it will be possible to bring about something quite definite. Just imagine what a truly good person who has reached an especially high level of morality will in future be able to do. He will construct machines with signals that can be governed only by individuals like himself. Evil minded people will produce quite different vibrations when they make these signals, and the machine will not respond.

People already have a faint inkling of this. It is not without purpose that I have called your attention to certain individuals who study flames dancing under the influence of definite tones. Further research in this direction will reveal the way to what I have just indicated. We might, indeed, say that it is the path back to those times when an alchemist who only wished to stuff money into his pocket could accomplish nothing, whereas another, who wished only to set up a sacrament for the glory of the gods and the welfare of humanity, would be successful.

In a sense, so long as what arose from human work bore the aura of the emotions and joys that men transferred into it, it was not accessible to the kind of influence that I have just described. But to the extent that the products of vocational labor can no longer be produced with special and absolutely necessary enthusiasm, what thus flows away from men and streams forth from them can become a motor force. The truth is that through the fact that individuals can no longer unite their emotions with the world of machinery, they, in a way, restore to this world the purity that arises from or serves their labor. In the future it will no longer be possible for people to bestow the warmth gained from the enthusiasm and joy derived from their work on the things produced. But these things themselves will be purer as they are put into the world by workers. They will also become more susceptible to what will emanate from, and be predetermined by, man as a motor force, as I have described.

Such a direction to human evolution can only be given by concrete knowledge of the spiritual forces that can be discovered by spiritual science. In order that this development may occur, it is necessary for an ever greater number of individuals in the world to gradually find the opposite pole. This consists in uniting one human being with another in what rises far above all vocational labor, while at the same time illumining and permeating it. Life in the spiritual scientific movement furnishes the foundation for a united life that can bind all professions together. If there were only an external advance of vocational evolution, this would result in a dissolution of human ties; people would become less able to understand one another or to develop relationships according to the requirements of human nature. They would increasingly disregard one another, seek only their own advantage, and have only competitive relationships with one another. This must not be permitted to come to pass lest humanity thereby fall into complete decadence. To prevent this from happening, spiritual science must be propagated.

It is possible to describe truly what many people are today unconsciously striving for, even though they deny it. There are many today, you know, who say, “This talk about the spiritual is ancient twaddle! The true advance that will really bring about human progress is to be found in the development of the physical sciences. When men get beyond all this twaddle about spiritual things, we will then, in a way, have a paradise on earth.”

Should nothing prevail in humanity except competition and the compensatory acquisitive instinct, however, it would not be paradise on earth but hell. After all, there would have to be another pole if real progress were to take place. If a spiritual pole were not sought for, there would have to be an ahrimanic pole. Then the following argument would prevail: “Should vocations continue to be specialized, there would always be a certain unity in that one person would be this, another that, but all would have the common characteristic of acquiring as much as possible through their jobs.” True, all would be made alike, but this is simply an ahrimanic principle. It is incorrect to think that the world can reach its goal through such a one-sided evolution, proceeding purely in the external sphere as we have described it. To follow this line of thinking would be tantamount to a woman's arguing that men had gradually become worse, were really utterly unfit for the world, and should be completely exterminated, and that then we would get the right evolution of the physical world.

It would require a weird person, indeed, to hold such a view since nothing whatever could be achieved by getting rid of all the men. Because this applies to the sensory world, people understand it, but they do not understand such foolishness in reference to the spiritual world. Yet, it is the same for spiritual relationships as if someone were to suppose that mere external evolution could continue to progress; it cannot. Just as the earlier evolutionary periods required the abstract religions, so this new stage requires a more concrete spiritual knowledge as it is striven for in the spiritual scientific movement. The elemental beings that are created and released through the vocational labor of men must be fructified by the human soul with what it takes into itself from impulses striving upward to the spiritual regions. Not that this is the only mission of spiritual science, but it is the mission related to the advancing and changing vocational life. Therefore, world evolution demands that as professions become more specialized and mechanized, people feel the need for the opposite pole to become proportionately more intensely active in them. This means that each human being should fill his soul with what brings him close to every other human being, no matter what their specialized work may be.

All this leads to much more. As we will hear in due course, a new age will emerge from what we may describe as our own time's indifference to and withdrawal from life, which is frequently the experience of working people these days. In the new age, human beings will again perform their work from different impulses. These will really be no worse than those good old vocational impulses that cannot be renewed, but must be replaced by others of a different sort. In this connection we can already point today, not merely abstractly but quite concretely, to a human ideal that spiritual science will develop. This will show what even a vocation may become to human beings when they understand how to observe the signs of the times in the right manner.

We shall continue our reflections regarding the significance of these matters for the individual, and for karma.

• 67. Kaufmann's translation. See footnote 21.
• 68. I Corinthians, 1:20: “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?“
• 69. Rudolf Steiner says in the third lecture of “Weltwesen und Ichheit“ [The Essence of the World and Selfness], Bibl.-No. 169, CE (1963) that the American Keely invented such a motor in the 19th century.

We have been considering the emergence of a search for knowledge with inadequate means, and this has opened up wide historical perspectives. Now with regard to these matters, and also to what I said with the same intention when I last spoke here, I must ask you to realise that we are concerned not with a theory or with a system of ideas but with the communication of facts. That is the point to keep in mind; otherwise these matters will not be clearly understood. I am not setting out historical laws or ideas, but stating facts—facts that are connected with the plans and purposes both of certain personalities who are held together in brotherhoods and of other beings who work on these brotherhoods and whose influence is also sought. They are beings who are not incarnated in the flesh, but are embodied in the spiritual world. It is essential to keep this in mind when you hear what I told you yesterday. For where these brotherhoods are concerned, we have to do with various parties (as indeed you will have learnt from explanations given in earlier lectures, e.g. The Occult Movement in the 19th Century (See p. 71)). Thus there is one party which stands for keeping certain higher truths absolutely secret; and again, allowing for various shades of opinion, there are brothers, particularly since the middle of the fifteenth century, who hold that certain truths, if only those called for by the needs of the moment, should be carefully and pertinently disclosed. Besides these two main parties there are other variations; hence you will see that whatever influence is finally exerted on human evolution from the side of these brotherhoods will very often reflect some kind of compromise.

Early in the 1840s, those brotherhoods who have knowledge of the spiritual impulses that play into history saw coming on that battle of certain spiritual beings with higher Spirits which terminated in 1879, when certain Angel-beings, Spirits of Darkness, were cast down, an event symbolised by the victory of Michael over the dragon. When therefore, in the middle of the nineteenth century, these brotherhoods felt that this event was approaching, they had to decide what attitude to take towards it and to consider what should be done.

Those brothers who wished above all to reckon with the demands of the moment were actuated up to a certain point with the best intentions, but they were mistaken in their approach to the materialism of the time; they thought that men who were prepared to accept only what could be known in physical terms should be offered something from the spiritual world in a materialistic form. So it was with good intentions that Spiritualism was launched on the world in the 1840s.

Since at that time a critical mentality, concerned solely with the external world, was due to prevail on earth, it was necessary to give people at least some inkling, some feeling, that a spiritual world existed around them. And so now this compromise, as is the way with compromises, was put into effect. Those brothers who were altogether against communicating spiritual truths to mankind found themselves outvoted, one might say; they had to give in and agree. Even so, it was not their original intention to introduce the phenomena connected with Spiritualism into the world. Where collective groups of people are concerned one always gets compromises, and naturally, when a collective decision has been reached, not only those who favoured it will be looking for results, but those who at first opposed it will be expecting something or other from it.

Thus the well-meaning members of these brotherhoods took the mistaken view that through the use of mediums people would be convinced of the presence around them of a spiritual world; then on the basis of this conviction it would be possible to impart higher truths. This could indeed have happened if the phenomena that came through the mediums had in fact been interpreted in the intended way, as evidence for the presence of an interpenetrating spiritual world. But—as I explained yesterday—something quite different resulted. The mediumistic phenomena were interpreted by those who took part in the seances as coming from the dead. Hence the experiment was a disappointment for all concerned. Those brothers who had allowed themselves to be outvoted were very grieved that the séance manifestations could be spoken of—sometimes correctly—as coming from the spirits of the dead. The well-intentioned progressive brothers had not expected any mention of the dead, but rather of a general elemental world, so they too were disappointed.

These activities, however, are pursued above all by persons who have been in some way initiated. And besides the brotherhoods already mentioned, we have to reckon with others, or with sections of the same brotherhoods, wherein a minority of members, or even a majority, consists of initiates who within their brotherhoods are known as “brothers of the left;” they are those who treat every impulse that enters into human evolution as a question of power. Naturally, these brothers expected all sorts of things from Spiritualism.

As I told you yesterday, it was these brothers of the left who were specially responsible for dealing in the way I described with the souls of the dead. Their interest was centred on observing what came out of the seances, and by degrees they got control of the whole field. The well-intentioned initiates gradually lost all interest in Spiritualism; they felt in a certain sense ashamed, because those who had all along opposed Spiritualism said they might have known from the start that nothing would come of it. But the result was that Spiritualism came under the power of the brothers of the left. Yesterday I said that these brothers had been disappointed in the following way. They saw that Spiritualism could bring to light what they had set on foot, and they were above all anxious that this should not happen. Since the persons attending the seances believed they were in touch with the dead, communications from the dead might reveal what the brothers of the left were doing with the souls of the dead. The very souls which they were misusing might manifest in the course of a séance.

You must please once more keep in mind that I am not expounding theories but relating facts—facts that go back to particular individuals. And when individuals are united in brotherhoods, they will differ in what they expect from the same event. When one speaks of facts that belong to the spiritual world, it is always a question of looking for the outcome of individual impulses. In ordinary life one action will often contradict another. If theories are discussed, the rule of contradiction must be observed. But when one is speaking of facts, then—just because they are facts—we shall very often find that facts in the spiritual world agree just as little as do human actions on the physical plane. Therefore I ask you to keep this in mind. One cannot talk of realities in these matters unless one talks of individual facts. That is the point. Therefore we must keep the various streams apart and distinguish between them.

This is connected with something very important, which must be kept clearly in view by anyone who hopes to arrive at a more or less satisfying outlook on the world. It is a fundamental point, and we must bring it before us, even though it is somewhat abstract.

A person who tries to build up a world-picture rightly endeavours to bring its separate elements into harmony. He does this from habit—a thoroughly justified habit, connected for many centuries with the dearest possession of our souls: with monotheism. He tries therefore to lead back the whole range of his experience of the world to a unitary principle. This is valid enough in its own way—not, however, in the sense in which it is usually applied, but in quite another sense of which we will speak next time. To-day I will deal only with the essential principle.

If we approach the world with the preconceived idea that everything must be explicable without contradiction, as though it came from a single source, we shall be disappointed again and again when we look without prejudice at the world and the experiences it affords. We have acquired the habit of treating everything we perceive in the light of the didactic concept which says that everything leads back to a unitary divine origin—everything derives from God and so must admit of a single mode of explanation.

But this is not so. The experiences we encounter in the world do not spring from a single ground, but from diverse spiritual individualities, who all play a part in producing them. That is the essential point. We will speak tomorrow of the sense in which monotheism is justified. Up to a certain stage, and indeed up to a high stage, we must think of independent individualities as soon as we cross the threshold of the spiritual world. And then we cannot expect to explain everything we experience in unitary terms. Take any series of events—let us say the experiences encountered from 1913 to 1918. A diagram will naturally show them taking their course from two directions at once ...

An historian will always try to reduce the whole process to the working of a single principle, but that is not how things happen. Directly we cross the threshold of the spiritual world, whether downwards or upwards—it is one and the same—we find that different individualities, relatively independent of each other, are working into these events. We shall never understand the course of events if we assume a single source for them; we shall see them rightly only if in the turbulence of events we reckon with the activities of individualities who are working either with or against each other.

This is something that belongs to the deepest secrets of human evolution. For centuries, even for millennia, it has been obscured by monotheistic feeling, but you must take it into account. If to-day we are to come closer to ultimate questions, we must above all not confuse logic with abstract freedom from contradictions. In a world where independent individualities are simultaneously at work, contradictions are bound to occur, and to expect them not to occur leads to an impoverishment of ideas; to ideas which cannot embrace the whole of reality. The only adequate ideas will be those that are able to grasp a world replete with contradictions, for that is the real world.

The realms of nature that lie around us come into being in a very remarkable way. In all that we call nature, the nature we approach through science on the one hand and through aesthetic perception on the other, various individualities are at work. But in the present phase of human evolution a wise Providence has ordained an arrangement which is a great blessing for mankind. We can lay hold of nature with ideas that assume a monistic dispensation, because sense-perception allows us normally to experience only as much of nature as is in accord with that principle. Behind the tapestry of nature there lies something different which is sustained from a quite other direction; but sense-perception shuts it out, admitting only as much of nature as can pass through its sieve. Everything contradictory is strained out, and nature is communicated to us in the guise of a monistic system. But directly we cross the threshold and bring the true facts to bear on the interpretation of nature—the facts concerning the elemental spirits or the influence of human souls, which can also act on nature—then we are no longer able to speak of a monistic system applicable to nature. Once again we see clearly that we have to do with the workings of individualities who may either oppose or reinforce one another.

In the elemental world we find earth-spirits, gnomes; water-spirits, undines; air-spirits, sylphs; fire-spirits, salamanders. They are all there, but they do not form a single united band. Each of the four kingdoms is in a certain sense independent; they do not work only in rank and file as a single system, but they oppose one another. Their purposes are, to begin with, entirely distinct; the outcome reflects the interactions of their purposes in the most varied ways. If we know what these purposes are, we can discern in a given phenomenon the working together, let us say, of fire-spirits and undines. But we must never suppose that behind them is a single authority which gives them definite orders. This way of thinking is widespread to-day; and philosophers such as, for example, Wilhelm Wundt (whom Fritz Mauthner described with some justice as “an authority by the grace of his publisher”—yet before the war he ranked as an authority almost everywhere)—these philosophers are out to force into a unity all the manifold life of the soul, its concepts, its feeling, its willing, because they say that the soul is a unity, and therefore all this must belong to a unitary system. But that is not so, and the strongly conflicting tendencies in human life, which psycho-analysis indeed brings out, would not occur if our conceptual life did not lead back beyond the threshold into regions where it is influenced by individualities quite different from those that influence our feeling and our willing.

Really it is strange! Here (drawing on blackboard) we have in the human being a conceptual life, a life of feeling and a life of willing—yet a systematiser such as Wundt cannot get away from the idea that all this must form a single system. In fact, the life of concepts leads into one world, the life of feeling into another world, and the life of willing into another again. The function of the human soul is precisely to bring together into a unity activities which in the pre-human world—and therefore in the still existing pre-human world—are threefold.

All these things must be taken into account as soon as we study the impulses which have played into human evolution. I have already said that each post-Atlantean epoch has a special task, and I have described the task for mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch as that of coming to terms with evil as an impulse in world-evolution. We have spoken of what this means from various points of view. The indispensable need is that the forces which manifest as evil when they appear in the wrong place shall be overcome by human endeavour during this epoch, so that men can begin to make out of these forces something favourable for the whole future of cosmic evolution. Hence the task of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch is quite specially arduous, and many temptations lie ahead. And as the powers of evil make their appearance in gradual stages, men are naturally much more inclined to give way to them in all realms instead of battling to place what appears as evil in the service of the rightful course of world-development. This, nevertheless, is what has to come about—up to a certain point evil must be turned to good ends. Failing that, we shall not be able to go forward into the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, which will have a quite different task. Its task will be to enable men, while still connected with the earth, to have the spiritual world continually in view and to live in accordance with spiritual impulses. It is precisely in connection with the task of opposing evil during our own epoch that a certain darkening of the human personality can occur.

We know that since 1879 the Spirits of Darkness who are nearest to man, belonging as they do to the realm of the Angels, have been roaming about in the human world, because they were cast down into it from the spiritual world. Hence they are present in human impulses and work through them. Just because these beings are able to work invisibly, so close to man, and by their influence to hinder him from recognising the spiritual with his reason—which is also a task for our epoch—so in this epoch there are many opportunities for surrendering to all sorts of errors and observations that belong to the darkness of evil. During this epoch man has to learn by degrees to grasp the spiritual with his reason; for this possibility has been offered to him by the vanquishing of the Spirits of Darkness in 1879, as a result of which more and more spiritual wisdom has been able to flow down from the spiritual worlds. Only if the Spirits of Darkness had remained up there in spiritual realms would they have been able to obstruct this flow. Henceforward they can do nothing to hinder it; but they can continue to create confusion and to darken human souls. We have already described in part the opportunities they have for doing this, and the precautions they have taken to prevent men from receiving spiritual wisdom.

All this, of course, gives no occasion for lamentation but for a strengthening of human energy and aspiration towards the spiritual. For if men achieve what can be achieved in this epoch by taking hold of the forces of evil and turning them to good ends, then they will at the same time achieve something tremendous: this fifth post-Atlantean epoch will gain for human evolution grander conceptions than those of any other post-Atlantean epoch, or indeed of any previous epoch. For example, the Christ appeared and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, but only in our fifth epoch will it be possible for human reason to encompass the meaning of this event. In the fourth epoch men could comprehend that in the Christ Impulse they had something which would carry their souls beyond death: this was made sufficiently clear through Pauline Christianity. The fifth epoch will bring an even more important development: men will come to recognise the Christ as their helper in the task of transforming the forces of evil into good. But connected with this characteristic of the fifth epoch is a fact we must inscribe daily in our souls and never forget, although we are readily inclined to forget it. In this epoch we have to be fighters for the spirit: we must realise that our forces grow slack unless they are kept constantly in training for the conquest of the spiritual world. In this fifth epoch man is in the highest degree dependent upon his freedom, and he has to experience it to the full. And the idea of human freedom should be the criterion of whatever he encounters in this epoch. For if human energies were to grow slack, everything might turn to evil. Man is no longer in a condition to be guided like a child. If the aim of certain brotherhoods is to treat him in this way, as he was in the third and fourth epochs, they are far from doing right and are not advancing human evolution. Anyone who in this epoch speaks of the spiritual world must constantly remind himself to do so in such a way that acceptance or rejection of it is left to the freedom of the individual. Therefore certain things can only be—said; but the saying is just as important as any other way of presenting them was in other epochs. I will give you an example.

In our time the communication of truths—or, if I may use a trivial phrase, lecturing on them—is the most important thing. People should then be left to a free choice of attitude. One should go no further than the lecture, the communication of truths; the rest should follow out of free decision, just as it does when someone takes a decision on the physical plane. This applies also to the things which can in a certain sense be directed and guided only from the spiritual world.

We shall understand one another better if we go into details. During the fourth post-Atlantean epoch it was still necessary to consider other things, not only the spoken word. What were these other things? Let us take a definite instance. The island of Ireland, to use its modern name, has quite special characteristics which distinguish it from the rest of the world. Every part of the earth has some distinguishing characteristics—there is nothing unusual in that—but the point here is that Ireland has them to an exceptional degree.

You know from my Occult Science that it is possible to look back and discern various influences which have flowed from the spiritual world into the evolution of the earth. You have heard also what things were like in the Lemurian Age and of the various evolutionary developments since then. Yesterday I called attention to the fact that the whole earth must be regarded as a living organism, and that the various influences which radiate out to the inhabitants of particular territories have a special effect on the “double,” also mentioned yesterday. In ancient times people who knew of Ireland gave expression to its peculiar characteristics in the form of myths and legends. One could indeed speak of an esoteric legend which indicated the nature of Ireland within the whole earth-organism. Lucifer, it was said, had once tempted mankind in Paradise, wherefore mankind was driven out and scattered over the earth, which was already in existence at that time. Thus a distinction was drawn—so the legend tells us—between Paradise, with Lucifer in it, and the rest of the earth. But with Ireland it was different. Ireland did not belong in the same sense to the rest of the earth, for Paradise, before Lucifer entered it, had created an image of itself on earth, and that image became Ireland.

Let us understand this clearly. Ireland is that piece of the earth which has no share in Lucifer, no connection with Lucifer. The part of Paradise that had to be separated, so that an earthly image of it might come into being, would have stood in the way of Lucifer's entry into Paradise. According to this legend, therefore, Ireland was conceived as having been first of all that part of Paradise which would have kept Lucifer out. Only when Ireland had been separated off, could Lucifer get in.

This legend, of which I have given you a very incomplete account, is a very beautiful one. For many people it explained the quite individual task of Ireland through the centuries. In the first of my Mystery Plays you will find what has been often described: how Europe was Christianised by Irish monks. After Patrick had introduced Christianity into Ireland, it came about that Christianity there led to the highest spiritual devotion. In further interpretation of the legend I have just described, Ireland—Ierne for the Greeks and Ivernia for the Romans—was even called the island of the saints, because of the piety that prevailed in the Christian monasteries there. This is connected with the fact that the forces which radiate from the earth and lay hold of the “double” are at their very best in the island of Ireland.

You will say: then the Irish should be the best of men. But that is not how things work out in the world! People immigrate into every region of the earth and have descendants, and so on. Human beings are thus not merely a product of the patch of earth where they live; their character may well contradict the influences that come from the earth. We must not attribute their development to the qualities found in a particular part of the earth-organism; that would be merely to succumb to illusions.

But we can say, more or less as I have said to-day, that Ireland is a quite special piece of land and this is one factor among many from which should come a fruitful working out of social-political ideas. Ireland is one such factor, and all these factors must be taken account of in conjunction with one another. In this way we must develop a science of human relationships on the earth. Until that is done, there will be no real health in the organisation of public affairs. That which can be communicated from out of the spiritual world must flow into any measures that are taken. For this reason I have said in public lectures that statesmen and others concerned with public affairs should acquaint themselves with these communications, for only then will they be able to control reality. But they do not do this, or at least they have not done it so far; yet the necessity for it remains.

This speaking, this communication, is the important thing to-day, in accordance with the tasks of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, for then, before speaking leads to actions, decisions have to be taken just as they are taken in relation to impulses on the physical plane. In earlier times it was different; other methods could then be employed.

At a particular time in the third post-Atlantean epoch a certain brotherhood took occasion to send a large number of colonists from Asia Minor to Ireland. These settlers came from the region where much later, in the fourth epoch, the philosopher Thales was born. It was from this same milieu and spiritual background that the initiates sent colonists to Ireland—why? Because they were aware of the special characteristics of a land such as Ireland, as indicated by the esoteric legend I have told you about. They knew that the forces which rise from the earth through the soil of Ireland act in such a way that people there are little influenced towards developing intellectuality, or the ego, or towards a capacity for taking decisions. The initiates who sent these colonists to Ireland knew this very well, and they chose people who appeared to be karmically suited to be exposed to such influences. In Ireland there still exist descendants of the old immigrants from Asia Minor who were intended to develop no trace of intellectuality, or of reasoning power or of decisiveness, but were on the other hand to manifest certain special qualities of temperament to an outstanding degree.

So, you see, preparations were made a very long time in advance for the peaceful interpretation of Christianity which eventually found scope in Ireland, and for the glorious developments which led to the Christianising of Europe. The fellow-countrymen of the later Thales sent to Ireland people who proved well suited to become those monks who could work in the way I have described. Such plans were often carried through in earlier times, and when in external history written by historians who lack understanding—though of course they may be intelligent enough, for intelligence to-day can be picked up in the street—you find accounts of ancient colonisations, you must be clear that a far-reaching wisdom lay behind them. They were guided and led in the light of what was to come about in the future, and the local characteristics of earth-evolution were always taken into account.

That was another way of introducing spiritual wisdom into the world. It should not be adopted to-day by anyone who is following the rightful path. To prescribe the movement of people against their will, in order to partition parts of the earth, would be wrong. The right way is to impart true facts and to leave people to decide their actions for themselves.

Hence you can see that there has been a real advance from the third and fourth post-Atlantean epochs up to the present; and this is something we must grasp quite clearly. We must recognise how this impulse for freedom must penetrate all the dominating tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. For it is precisely this freedom of the human mind that is opposed by that adversary of whom I have told you—the “double” who accompanies man from shortly before birth until death, though just before death he has to depart. If someone is under the influence which proceeds directly from the “double,” he may bring about all sorts of things which can appear in this epoch but are not in harmony with it. It will then not be possible for him to fulfil his task of fighting against evil in such a way that to a certain extent the evil is changed into good.

Just think of all that really lies behind the situation of humanity in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch! The detailed facts must be seen in their true colours, and understood. For wherever the “double” is strongly active, he will be working against mankind. In this fifth post-Atlantean epoch people have not reached the stage of being able to judge the facts correctly; particularly during these last three sad years they have not been at all inclined to form true judgments.

Take a fact which seems to be far removed from our immediate subject. In a large ironworks, 10,000 tons of cast iron were to be loaded into railway trucks. A definite number of workmen—75—were assigned to the job, and it appeared that each man could load 12½ tons a day.

There was a man named Taylor in whom the influence of the “double” prevailed over the needs of the human soul in our epoch. He first asked the managers if they did not think a man could load a good deal more than 12½ tons a day. They said that in their opinion a workman could load 18 tons a day at the utmost. Taylor then called for some experiments.

So, you see, Taylor proceeded to experiment with human beings! Machine standards were to be carried over into social life. Taylor wished to find out whether it was true, as the managers believed, that 18 tons a day was the utmost a man could load. He ordered rest-periods, calculated in physiological terms to be just long enough for a man to make good the energy he had previously expended. Naturally it turned out that the results varied with individuals. This does not matter with machines—you simply take the arithmetical mean—but it cannot properly be done with human beings, for each individual has his own justified capacity. All the same, Taylor did it—that is, he chose those workmen whose need for rest corresponded to the period he had calculated; the others were simply thrown out. The outcome was that the selected workmen, by dint of fully restoring their energies during the rest-periods, were each able to load 47½ tons a day.

Here we have the mechanics of the Darwinian theory applied to working life: the fit were kept on and the unfit discarded. The fit in this case were those who, with the aid of the given rest-periods, could load 47½ tons, instead of the 18 tons previously regarded as the maximum. In this way the workmen also could be satisfied, for such enormous economies were effected that wages could be raised by 60 per cent. Thus the chosen workmen, who had proved themselves fit in the struggle for existence, were very well pleased. But—the unfit could go hungry!

This is just the beginning of a far-reaching principle. Such things are little noticed, because they are not seen—as they must be seen—in the light of the great issues involved. So far we have not gone beyond the application of faulty scientific ideas to human life; but the underlying impulse remains. The next step will be to make similar use of the occult truths which will be disclosed in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Darwinism contains no occult truths, but its application to direct experiments on human beings would have horrible results. But if occult truths are brought in, as and when they become available, it will be possible to use them for obtaining enormous power over men—if only by a continual selection of the “fittest.” But things will not stop there. There would be an endeavour to use a certain occult discovery for making the fit ever fitter and fitter ... and by that means a tremendous power for utilising human beings—a power directly opposed to the good tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch—would be achieved.

I wished to give you these inter-related examples in order to show you how such far-ranging intentions begin, and how these matters must be illuminated from higher standpoints. Next time we will turn our attention to the three or four great truths which the fifth post-Atlantean epoch must arrive at, and how they could be misused if, instead of being brought into line with the rightful tendencies of the epoch, they were placed in the service of the “double,” represented by those brotherhoods who wish to set up another being in place of the Christ.

The question as to the meaning and purpose of existence frequently arises in life and in the sphere of philosophy. Study of Spiritual Science will certainly produce a kind of humility in regard to this question, for although we know that investigation of the spiritual worlds leads thought and perception beyond the material world of sense, we also realise that it is not possible to speak forthwith about the primal origins or the ultimate and highest meaning of life. The retort of superficial thinking here will certainly be: “What, then, do we know, if knowledge of the meaning and purpose of life is beyond our reach? ”

An analogy that is entirely in line with the attitude of Spiritual Science and indicates what is permissible or not permissible in regard to this question, can be put in the following way: Suppose a man wants to journey somewhere—In his home town he can only get information as to how to reach a much less distant place, but he is sent off with the assurance that once there, further help will be available. Although he makes inquiries here and there as he goes along, he cannot know the exact path which will bring him to his final destination; nevertheless he is sure of arriving eventually because he is always able to find his way from place to place.

As students of Spiritual Science, we do not ask about the “ultimate goal” but about the one lying immediately ahead, in other words, about the goal of the Earth. We realise that it would be senseless to inquire about the “ultimate goal” for we have recognised that “evolution” is a reality in the life of man. It must therefore never be forgotten that at the present stage of our existence it is not possible to understand the goals of much later phases of evolution and that a higher vantage-point must be reached if we are to understand the meaning of a far distant goal. And so we ask about the goal lying immediately ahead, realising that by keeping it before us as an ideal and striving with the right means, we shall eventually attain it, thereby reaching a further stage in development. At that stage it will be legitimate to ask about the “next” goal, and so on. Thus if it were ever suggested that Spiritual Science might tend to make a man arrogant because his outlook extends beyond the ordinary world into a spiritual world, in reality his attitude will be one of humility towards these sublime matters about which superficial questions are so often asked.

We inquire, to begin with, about the goal of the Earth. In other words: What is it that man adds, essentially, to the fruits of the preceding periods of Saturn-, Sun-, and Moon-evolution, by developing on the Earth through repeated physical incarnations? We will here recall certain matters which will help us to associate concrete and definite ideas with what may be called the “meaning and purpose of Earth-evolution.” Let me speak, to begin with of the following.

When intellectual thinking, based upon reason, came to birth during the Graeco-Latin epoch—it would actually be true to say, in the sixth century B.C.—a certain thought found frequent utterance, namely, that all philosophy, all deeper contemplation upon the secrets of existence, proceeds from Wonder, Amazement. In other words: As long as the human being can feel no wonder at the phenomena of life around him, so long is his life vapid and thoughtless, and he asks without intelligence about the why and wherefore of existence. “All philosophy begins with wonder” was a much quoted saying during the ancient Graeco-Latin epoch. What, in reality, does it signify in man's life of soul?

It would be difficult today to find anyone in civilised Europe who has never set eyes on a locomotive in motion; not so very long ago, however, there were such persons—although nowadays they would, of course, only be found in very remote districts. If such a person sees a train moving along, he will feel wonder and amazement at the sight of an object going forward without any of the means with which he is acquainted. It is a known fact that many such people, in their astonishment at seeing a locomotive in movement, asked if the horses pulling it along were inside! Why were the people cast into amazement and wonder by what they saw here? It was because they were looking at something which in a certain sense was known, and at the same time unknown to them. They knew that things move forward, but whatever they had seen had always been provided with quite a different means of movement. Now they were looking at something on which they had never set eyes before. And this gave rise to wonder.

If during the Graeco-Latin epoch, men could only become philosophers when they were capable of wonder, they must have been persons who perceived, in everything taking place in the world, something at once known and unknown, in so far as the happenings and phenomena seemed to contain more than appeared on the surface—something unknown to them.

Why had the attitude of the philosophers to be that the primary causes and certain attributes of things in the world lay in a sphere unknown to them? As it will be admitted that philosophers are at least as clever as people who give no thought at all to what goes on around them, it cannot be supposed that philosophers are capable of accepting only what is to be perceived by means of the ordinary senses. Therefore they must find something lacking—or rather, they must surmise the presence of something which sets them wondering—something that is not present in the world of sense. And so, before the days of materialism, the philosophers always sought for the Supersensible in the phenomena presented to the senses. The wonder felt by the philosophers, therefore, is associated with the fact that certain things are not to be comprehended through what presents itself to the eyes of sense. They said to themselves: “What I there perceive does not tally with what I picture it to be; I must therefore conceive that super-sensible forces are present within it.” But in the world of sense the philosophers perceived no super-sensible forces. That alone is enough to make a thinking man realise that a subconscious memory, not reaching into consciousness, has persisted in the human being since times when the soul perceived something more than the actual phenomena of the sense-world. In other words: Remembrance arises of experiences undergone before the descent into sense-existence. It is as though the soul were to say: “I discern things and their effects which can only call forth wonder in me, because they are different from what I have seen before; enlightenment on them can only be found by means of forces which must be drawn from the super-sensible world.” And so all philosophising begins with wonder, because in reality man approaches the phenomena of existence as a being who comes into the world of the senses from a super-sensible world and finds that the things of the sense-world do not tally with what he perceived in the super-sensible world. Wonder arises in him when the form in which the things of sense are made manifest, can only be explained by knowledge he once possessed in a super-sensible world. And so wonder points to the connection of man with the super-sensible world, to something belonging to a sphere he can only enter when he transcends the world in which his physical body encloses him. This is one indication of the fact that here, in this physical world, there is a continual urge within the human being to reach out beyond himself. A man who can only remain shut up in himself, who is not driven by wonder beyond the field of the “I,” of the ordinary Ego, remains one who cannot reach beyond himself, who sees the sun rise and set without a thought and with complete unconcern. This is the kind of existence led by uncivilised peoples.

A second power which releases the human being from the ordinary world, leading him at once away from material perception into super-sensible insight, is Compassion, Fellow-feeling (Of this, too, I have spoken). Those who go heedlessly through the world do not regard compassion as having any great mystery about it; but to the thoughtful, compassion is a great and mysterious secret. When we look at a being only from outside, impressions come from him to our senses and intellect; with the awakening of compassion we pass beyond the sphere of these impressions. We share in what is taking place in his innermost nature, and transcending the sphere of our own “I”, we pass over into his world. In other words: we are set free from ourselves, we break through the barriers of ordinary existence in the physical body and reach over into the other being. Here, already, is the Supersensible—for neither the operations of the senses nor of the reasoning mind can carry us into the sphere of another's soul. The fact that compassion exists in the world bears witness that even in the world of sense we can be set free from, can pass out beyond ourselves and enter into the world of another being. If a man is incapable of compassion, there is a moral defect, a moral lack in him. If at the moment when he should get free from himself and pass over into the other being, feeling, not his own pain or joy but the pain or joy of that other—if at that moment his feelings fade and die away, then something is lacking in his moral life. The human being on Earth, if he is to reach the stature of full and complete manhood, must be able to pass out beyond his own earthly life, he must be able to live in another, not only in himself.

Conscience is a third power whereby the human being transcends what he is in the physical body. In ordinary life he will desire this or that; according to his impulses or needs he will pursue what is pleasing and thrust aside what is displeasing to him. But in many such actions he will be his own critic, in that his conscience, the voice of his conscience sounds a note of correction. Final satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what he has done also depends upon how the voice of conscience has spoken. This in itself is a proof that “conscience” is a power whereby the human being is led out beyond the sphere of his impulses, his likes and dislikes.

Wonder and Amazement, Compassion or Fellow-feeling, Conscience—these are the three powers by means of which the human being, even while in the physical body, transcends his own limitations, for through these powers, influences which cannot find entrance into the human soul by way of the intellect and the senses, ray into physical life.

It is easy to understand that these three powers can only unfold through incarnations in a body of flesh. Man must, as it were, be kept separate by a body of flesh from what pours into his life of soul from another sphere. If a body of flesh did not separate him from the spiritual world and present the outer world to him as a sense-world, he would be incapable of wonder. It is the material body which enables wonder at the things of the world of sense to arise in man, compelling him to seek for the Spirit. Compassion could not unfold if the one human being were not separated from the other, if men were to live an undivided existence in which a single flow of spiritual life pervaded the consciousness of them all, if each soul were not separated from other souls by the impenetrable sheath provided by the physical body. And conscience could not be experienced as a spiritual force sending its voice into man's world of natural urges, passions and desires, if the material body did not hanker after things against which warning must be given by another power. And so the human being must be incarnated in a physical body in order that he may be able to experience wonder, compassion and conscience.

In our time, people concern themselves little with such secrets, although they are profoundly enlightening. But in a past by no means very remote, a great deal of attention was paid to these things:—

Think only of the world of the Greek Gods, the Gods of Homer; think of their actions and activities; try to understand the nature of the impulses working in Achilles, a being who stands there like a last survivor of an earlier generation on Earth. He, too, was born of a divine mother. Read through the Iliad and the Odyssey and ask yourselves whether this being, standing halfway between Gods and men, was ever stirred by anything like “conscience” or “compassion”? Homer builds the whole of the Iliad around the fury of the “wrath” of Achilles—and wrath is a passion. Everything in the Greek legend centres around this; the Iliad tells of what came about as the result of a passion—the wrath of Achilles. Consider all the deeds of Achilles described in the Iliad and see if you can say of a single one that Achilles is here moved by anything like compassion or conscience. Neither is there a single example of the stirring of wonder. The very greatness of Homer lies in his power to depict these things with such sublimity. When Achilles is told of some terrible happening, his behaviour is far from that of a man filled with wonder. And then turn to the Greek Gods themselves: they give vent to all kinds of impulses which are certainly of the nature of egotism when they manifest in a human being enclosed in a physical body. In the Gods they are spiritual impulses. But among the Greek Gods there is no compassion, no suggestion of conscience, nor anything like wonder. Why not? Because Homer and the Greeks knew that these Gods were Beings belonging to a period of evolution preceding that of the Earth—a period when the Beings who were then passing through their “human stage” under the conditions prevailing in existence, had not yet received into the life of soul the powers of wonder, compassion and conscience. It must be constantly remembered that the earlier planetary conditions through which the Earth has passed and in which such Beings as the Greek Gods underwent their human stage, were not there for the purpose of implanting “Wonder,” “Compassion,” and “Conscience” in the life of soul. That is precisely the mission of Earth-evolution! The purpose of Earth-evolution is that there may be implanted into the evolutionary process as a whole, powers which could otherwise never have come into existence: Wonder, Compassion and Conscience.

I have told you how the birth of conscience can clearly be traced to a certain period of Greek culture. In the works of Aeschylus, what we call “conscience” played no part; there were only remembrances of the avenging Furies, and not until we come to the works of Euripedes is there any clear expression of “conscience” as we know it now. The concept of conscience arose only very gradually during the Graeco-Latin epoch. I have told you that the concept of wonder arises for the first time when men begin to philosophise in the world of Graeco-Latin culture. And a remarkable fact in the spiritual evolution of Earth-existence throws far-reaching light upon what we know as compassion, and also, in the true sense, love. In the age of materialism it is exceedingly difficult to maintain in true and right perspective, this concept of compassion or love. Many of you will realise that in our materialistic times this concept is distorted, in that materialism associates the concept of “love” so closely with that of “sexuality”—with which, fundamentally, it has nothing whatever to do. That is a point where the culture of our day abandons both intelligence and sound, healthy reason. Through its materialism, evolution in our time is veering not only towards the unintelligent and illogical but even towards the scandalous, when “love” is dragged into such close association with what is covered by the term “sexuality.” The fact that under certain circumstances the element of sexuality may be associated with love between man and woman is no argument for bringing so closely together the all-embracing nature of love or compassion, and the entirely specific character of sexuality. So far as logic is concerned, to associate the concept of, say, a “railway engine” with that of a man being “run over,” because engines do sometimes run over people, would be just about as intelligent as it is to connect the concept of love so closely with that of sexuality—simply because under certain circumstances there is an outward association. That this happens today is not the outcome of any scientific hypothesis but of the irrational and, to some extent, unhealthy mode of thinking prevailing in our time.

On the other hand, another telling fact points to the significance inherent in the concept of love and compassion. At a certain point in the evolution of humanity, and among all the peoples, something is made manifest which, while differing in many essentials, is identical in one respect all over the Earth, namely in the adoption of the concept of love, of compassion. It is very remarkable that six or seven centuries before the inpouring of the Christ-Impulse into humanity, founders of religion and systems of thought appeared all over the Earth, among all the peoples. It is of the highest significance that, six centuries before our era, Lao-tse and Confucius should have been living in China, the Buddha in India, the last Zarathustra (not the original Zarathustra) in Persia, and Pythagoras in Greece. How great the difference is between these founders of religion! Only a mind abstracted from reality and incapable of discerning the differences can suggest, as is often mischievously done today, that the teachings of Lao-tse or Confucius do not differ from those of other founders of religions. Yet in one respect there is similarity among them all; they all teach that compassion and love must reign between soul and soul! The point of significance is this: six centuries before our era, consciousness begins to stir that love and compassion are to be received into the stream of human evolution. Thus whether we are thinking of the birth of wonder, of conscience or of love and compassion in the stream of evolution ... all the signs point to the fact that in the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture, something was imbued into mankind which we may recognise as the “meaning and purpose of Earth-evolution.”

It is so superficial and foolish when people say: “Why was it necessary for man to come down from the worlds of Divine Spirit into the physical world, only to have to reattain them? Why could he not have remained in the higher worlds?” Man could not remain in those worlds because only by coming down into the physical world of Earth-evolution could he receive into himself the forces of wonder, love or compassion, and conscience or moral obligation.

We look at the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture and perceive, during its course, the dawn of impulses which—in reality only from that time onwards—spread more and more widely among mankind. It is very easy today to emphasise how seldom humanity is ruled by compassion and love, how seldom by conscience. But in pointing to these things, we must also be mindful of the fact that in the Graeco-Latin age, slavery was still an accepted custom, and that even a philosopher as great as Aristotle still regarded the existence of slaves as a necessary principle of human life; we must also remember that since those days, love has so far gained ground that even if today inequalities still persist among men, there is already present in their souls something like a feeling of shame that certain conditions exist. This in itself indicates that the forces which entered at that time into evolution are unfolding within the souls of men. Nobody would dare nowadays—if he is to avoid the tragic fate of Nietzsche—(the “followers” of Nietzsche can be ignored altogether, for in his right mind Nietzsche would have repudiated them)—to stand openly for the introduction of slavery as it was in Greece. Nobody will deny that the greatest of all forces in the human soul is that of love and compassion, and that it must be man's task to make the voice that sounds out of another world into the soul, more and more articulate.

Holding firmly in our minds that the unfolding of the three powers described constitutes the meaning and purpose of Earth-evolution, we turn to the greatest of all Impulses—the Christ-Impulse which poured into evolution during the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch. Even outer circumstances indicate that this Impulse is given at the very time when the Earth is ready for the development of the three powers of wonder, compassion or love, and conscience, or moral obligation, as intrinsically human qualities. Many studies have given us a picture of how the Christ-Impulse made its way into the evolution of humanity.

I want here to refer to one aspect of the Christ-Impulse. I have told you that certain spiritual, superhuman forces were held back in the spiritual worlds at the beginning of the evolutionary process on the Earth. This Impulse streamed into the Earth at the time of which an indication is given in the Bible, namely, at the time of the Baptism in the Jordan. It was an Impulse, therefore, untouched by the Luciferic forces as it had been kept back until the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch; in that epoch it streamed into humanity. And now think of this in connection with certain things we have ourselves experienced.—If people are incapable of giving any concrete explanation of how the spiritual world plays into the physical world, it is really out of place for them to come out with crude and unreal ideas like that, for example, of the “Three Logoi.” I have said many times that the word “Logoi” can convey to the ordinary intelligence nothing more than its five letters. When it is alleged in certain quarters outside that here we speak of Christ as the “second Logos,” we do well to realise that misrepresentation and distortion are the order of the day. We ourselves are quoted as the source of statements which have actually originated somewhere else! Our constant endeavour is to deepen, to widen and to gather from every side, knowledge that can shed light on the Christ Idea. Yet outside our field of work, by talking round an abstract concept, people allege that we speak of the Christ as the “Second Logos.” In the Theosophical Society, conscience ought to be too sharp to permit such allegations. So long as sheer misrepresentation of other people's views is possible, the Theosophical Movement cannot be said to have reached any particularly high level, and while this sort of thing goes on, it is futile to boast about freedom of opinion in the Society. This is an empty phrase as long as people allow themselves to spread false ideas of the views held by others. Certainly there must be freedom to spread every shade of opinion—but not freedom to misrepresent the views of others! Spiritual conscience must be sharpened in this respect; otherwise all feeling for truth would in the end be driven out of the Theosophical Movement and then it would not be possible to cultivate the true spiritual Movement within the framework of the “Theosophical Movement.” These things must not be glossed over but taken really seriously. Certainly, there may be fewer publications, if the aim is to print only those things which are founded upon genuine, reliable knowledge. But after all, what harm will be done if there is less printing? What does it matter if less is said, so long as what is said is true and in accordance with reality? It was recently stated in periodicals abroad that the Christ is spoken of by us as the “Second Logos” and that we are said to be cultivating a “narrow” Theosophy, suitable for Germany, but not for any other country; we are said to be cultivating a “narrow” Theosophy, whereas a really “broad” Theosophical Movement is being conducted from a certain centre in Leipzig of which you have heard. When things of this kind are to be read, it can only be concluded that there does not exist in the Theosophical Movement the sharpness of conscience that is the pre-requisite of a spiritual movement. And if we lack this sharpness of conscience, if we do not feel, the most intense responsibility to the holiest truth, we shall make no progress on any other path. These things have had to be said. And within the Theosophical Movement it will above all be necessary to have eyes for the quality of love and compassion.

If we conceive the Christ Impulse to be the down-pouring of that spiritual power which was kept back in the ancient Lemurian time in order to flow into evolution during the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch at the point marked by the Baptism in the Jordan, reaching its culmination in the Mystery of Golgotha—then it is clear that He Who is known as the “Christ” was not, even at that time, incarnated in the ordinary sense, in a physical human being. We know what complicated processes were connected with the man “Jesus of Nazareth” in order that for three years of his life the Christ Impulse might live within him. We are therefore able to understand that for three years the Christ Impulse lived on the Earth in the three sheaths of a human being, but we realise, too, that even at that time, the Christ Impulse was not “incarnated” on the Earth in the ordinary sense but that He “pervaded” the body of the Being “Jesus of Nazareth.” This must be understood when it is said that it is not possible to speak of a “return” of Christ, but only of an Impulse which was present once, during the time of the events in Palestine beginning with the Baptism in the Jordan, when there remained only the physical body, the ether-body and the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth; within these sheaths the Christ was then present on the very soil of the Earth. From that time Christ has been united with the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth and can there be found by souls who are willing to receive Him. From that time onwards—and only from that time onwards—He has been present in the spiritual atmosphere of the Earth. The great turn given to Earth-evolution lies in the fact that from that time forward there was a power in the Earth which it did not previously contain.

We know that what we actually see in the kingdoms of Nature around us is not reality, but “Maya,” the “Great Illusion”. In the kingdom of the animals we see the individual forms coming into being and passing away; the Group-Soul alone endures. In the plant kingdom, the individual plants appear and disappear, but behind them there is the Earth-Spirit which does not pass away. So it is, too, in the kingdom of the minerals. The Spiritual endures, but the Physical, whether in the animal, plant or mineral kingdom, is transient, impermanent. Even the outer senses discern that the planet Earth is involved in a process of pulverisation and will at some future time disintegrate into dust. We have spoken of how the Earth-body will be cast off by the Spirit of the Earth, as the human body is cast off by the individual human Spirit. What will remain as the highest substance of the Earth when its goal has been reached? The Christ Impulse was present on the Earth, so to say as “spiritual Substance.” That Impulse endures and will be received into men during the course of Earth-evolution. But how does It live on? When the Christ Impulse was upon the Earth for three years, It had no physical body, no ether-body, no astral body of Its own, but was enveloped in the three sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth. When the goal has been reached, the Earth, like man, will be a fully developed being, a meet and fitting vehicle for the Christ Impulse.

But from whence are the three sheaths of the Christ Impulse derived? From forces that can be unfolded only on the Earth. Beginning with the Mystery of Golgotha, whatever has unfolded on the Earth since the Fourth Post-Atlantean period as the power of wonder, whatever comes to life in us as wonder—passes, finally, to the Christ, weaving the Astral Body of the Christ Impulse. Love or Compassion in the souls of men weaves the Ether-Body of the Christ Impulse; and the power of conscience which from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha until the goal of the Earth is attained, lives in and inspires the souls of men, weaves the Physical Body—or what corresponds with the physical body—for the Christ Impulse.¹

The true meaning of words from the Gospel can only now be discerned: “Whatsoever ye have done to one of the least of these My Brethren, ye have done it unto Me.” (Matt. 25. 40). The forces streaming from man to man are the units integrating the Ether-Body of Christ: love, or compassion, weaves the Ether-Body of Christ. Thus when the goal of Earth-evolution is attained, He will be enveloped in the threefold vesture woven from the powers that have lived in men—and which, when the limitations of the “ I,” have been transcended, become the sheaths of Christ.

And now think of how men live in communion with Christ. From the time of the Mystery of Golgotha to the attainment of the goal of Earth-evolution, man grows more perfect in that he develops to the stature that is within his reach as a being endowed with the power of the “ I.” But men are united with the Christ Who has come among them, in that they transcend their own “ I ”—and through wonder, build the Astral Body of Christ. Christ does not build His own Astral Body, but in the wonder that arises in their souls, men share in the forming of the Astral Body of Christ. His Ether-Body will be fashioned through the compassion and love flowing from man to man; and His “physical body” through the power of conscience unfolding in human beings. Whatever wrongs are committed in these three realms deprive the Christ of the possibility of full development on the Earth—that is to say, Earth-evolution is left imperfect. Those who go about the Earth with indifference and unconcern, who have no urge to understand what the Earth can reveal to them, deprive the Astral Body of Christ of the possibility of full development; those who live without unfolding compassion and love, hinder the Ether-Body of Christ from full development; and those who lack conscience hinder the development of what corresponds with the Physical Body of Christ ... but this means that the Earth cannot reach the goal of its evolution.

The principle of Egotism has to be overcome in Earth-evolution. The Christ Impulse penetrates more and more deeply into the life and culture of humanity and the conviction that this Impulse has lived its way into mankind, free from every trace of denominationalism—as, for example, in the paintings of Raphael, this conviction will bear its fruit. How Christ may truly be portrayed is a problem still to be solved. Men on Earth will have to be greatly enriched in their life of feeling if, after the many attempts made through the centuries, another is to succeed to some slight extent in expressing what the Christ is as the super-sensible Impulse living on through Earth-evolution. The attempts made hitherto do not even suggest what form such a portrayal of Christ should take. For it would have to express how the enveloping sheaths woven of the forces of wonder, compassion and conscience are gradually made manifest. The countenance of Christ must be so vital and living that it is an expression of the victory won over the sensory, desire-nature in men of Earth—victory achieved through the very forces which have spiritualised the countenance. There must be sublime power in this countenance. The painter or sculptor will have to express in the unusual form of the chin and mouth, the power of conscience unfolded to its highest degree. The mouth must convey the impression that it is not there for the purpose of taking food but to give utterance to whatever moral strength and power of conscience has been cultivated by men through the ages; the very structure of the bones around the teeth in the lower jaw will seem to form themselves into a mouth. All this will have to be expressed in the countenance. The form of the lower part of the face will have to express a power whose outstreaming rays seem to shatter the rest of the way that certain other forces are vanquished. With a mouth like this, it will be impossible to give the Christ Figure a bodily form similar to that possessed by the physical human being today. On the other hand, all the power of compassion will flow out of His eyes—the power that eyes alone can contain—not in order to receive impressions but to bear the very soul into the joys and sufferings of others. His brow will give no suggestion of thought based upon earthly sense-impressions. It will be a brow conspicuously prominent above the eyes, arching over that part of the brain; it will not be a “thinker's” brow which merely works upon material already there. Wonder will be made manifest in this projecting brow which curves gently backwards over the head, expressing wonder and marvel at the mysteries of the world. It will be a head such as is nowhere to be found in physical humanity.

Every true representation of the Christ must be a portrayal of the Ideal embodied in Him. When man reaches out towards this highest Ideal and strives through Spiritual Science to represent it in Art, this feeling will arise in greater and greater strength:—If you would portray the Christ, you must not look at what is actually there in the world, but you must let your whole being be quickened and pervaded by all that flows from contemplation of the spiritual evolution of the world, inspired by the three great impulses of Wonder, Compassion and Conscience.

• 1. See also: Christ and the Twentieth Century (25.1.12). Published in the volume entitled: Turning Points of Spiritual History.

For many years past we have been studying anthroposophical truths, details of anthroposophical knowledge, trying to approach them from different sides and to assimilate them. In the course of the lectures now being given, and those yet to come, it will be well to ask ourselves what Anthroposophy should and can give to the men of our time. We know a good deal of the content of Anthroposophy and we can therefore approach the question with a certain basis of understanding.

We must above all remember that the anthroposophical life, the anthroposophical Movement itself, must be clearly distinguished—in our minds at any rate—from any kind of special organisation, from anything to which the name “Society” might be given. The whole character of modern life will of course make it more and more necessary for those who want to cultivate Anthroposophy to unite in a corporate sense; but this is made necessary more by the character of life outside than by the content or attitude of Anthroposophy itself. Anthroposophy in itself could be made known to the world in the same way as anything else—as chemistry, for instance—and its truths could be accessible just as in the case of the truths of chemistry or mathematics. How an individual assimilates Anthroposophy and makes it a real impulse in his life could then be a matter for the individual himself. A Society or any kind of corporate body for the cultivation of Anthroposophy is made necessary because Anthroposophy as such comes into our epoch as something new, as entirely new knowledge, which must be received into the spiritual life of men. Those who have not entered the sphere of anthroposophical life need a special preparation of their souls and hearts as well as the constitution of soul belonging to the present age. Such preparation can be acquired only through the life and activities in our groups and meetings. There we adapt ourselves to a certain trend of thinking and feeling, so that we realise the significance of matters which people in the outside world who know nothing of Anthroposophy will naturally regard as fantastic nonsense. It might, of course, be argued that Anthroposophy could also be made more widely known through public lectures given to entirely unprepared listeners; but those who belong to our groups in a more intimate sense will realise that the whole tone, the whole manner of delivering a lecture to an unprepared public must necessarily be different from that of a lecture given to those who through an inner urge and through their whole attitude, are able to take seriously what the general public would not yet be able to accept. Quite certainly this state of things will not improve in the immediate future—on the contrary, the opposition will become stronger and stronger. Opposition to Anthroposophy in every domain will increase in the outside world, just because it is in the highest degree necessary for our age, and because what is the most essential at any particular time always encounters the strongest resistance.

It may be asked: Why is this so? Why do human hearts resist so vehemently just what is most needed in their epoch? An anthroposophist should be able to understand this, but it is too complicated a matter to be made even remotely clear to an unprepared public.

The student of Anthroposophy knows of the existence of Luciferic forces, of Luciferic beings who have lagged behind the general process of evolution. They work through the hearts and souls of men and it is to their greatest advantage to launch their fiercest attacks at times when, in reality, there is the strongest urge towards the spiritual life. Because the opposition of the human heart against the progressive impulse in evolution originates from the Luciferic beings, and because these beings will launch their attacks when as it were they already have men by the throat, the resistance of human hearts will inevitably be strongest at such times. Hence we shall understand that the very reason why the most important truths for humanity have lived on from earlier times is that the strongest opposition had to be contended with. Anything that differs only slightly from what is customary in the world will rarely encounter fierce opposition; but what comes into the world because humanity has long been thirsting for but has not received it, will evoke violent attacks from the Luciferic forces. Therefore a “Society” is really nothing more than a rampart against this understandable attitude of the outside world. [1] Some form of association is necessary within the framework of which these things can be presented, with the feeling that in those to whom one speaks or with whom one is in contact there will be a certain measure of understanding, whereas others who have no link with such an association are oblivious of it all.

Everyone believes that what is given out in public is his own concern and that he has to pass judgment upon it; he is instigated, of course, by the Luciferic forces. From this we realise that it is indeed necessary to promulgate Anthroposophy and that Anthroposophy is bringing something essential into our age, something that is longed for by the present thirst and hunger for spiritual nourishment and—whatever the circumstances—will come in some form or other; for the Spiritual Powers who have dedicated themselves to the goals of evolution see to it that this shall happen.

We can therefore ask: What are the most important truths that should be implanted in humanity at the present time through Anthroposophy? Those for which there is the most intense thirst are the most essential. The answer to such a question is one that can very easily be misunderstood. For this reason it is necessary, to begin with, to make a distinction in our minds between Anthroposophy as such and the Anthroposophical Society. The mission of Anthroposophy is to bring new truths, new knowledge, to humanity, but a society can never—least of all in our age—be pledged to any particular tenets. It would be utterly senseless to ask: “What do you anthroposophists believe?” It is senseless to imagine that an “anthroposophist” means a person who belongs to the Anthroposophical Society, for that would be to assume that a whole society holds a common conviction, a common dogma. And that cannot be. The moment a whole society, according to its statutes, were pledged to a common dogma, it would cease to be a society and begin to be a sect. Here is the boundary where a society ceases to be one in the true sense of the word. The moment a man is pledged to hold a belief exacted by a society, we have to do with pure sectarianism. Therefore a society dedicated to the principles described in these lectures can be a society only from the aspect that it is under the right and natural spiritual impulse. It may be asked: “Who are the people who come together to hear something about Anthroposophy?” To this we may reply: “Those who have an urge to hear about spiritual things.” This urge has nothing dogmatic about it. For if a person is seeking for something without saying, “I shall find this or that,” but is really seeking, this is the common element which a society that does not wish to become a sect must contain. The question: What does Anthroposophy as such bring to humanity? is quite independent of this. Our reply must be: Anthroposophy as such brings to humanity something that is similar to all the great spiritual truths that have been brought to humanity, only its effect upon the human soul is more profound, more significant.

Among the subjects we have been studying in our lectures there are many that might be considered less distinctive from the point of view of something entirely new being presented to modern humanity. Nevertheless they are fundamental truths which do indeed penetrate into humanity as something new. We need not look very far to find this new element. It lies in the two truths which really belong to the most fundamental of all and bring increasing conviction to the human soul: these are the two truths of reincarnation and karma. It may be said that the first thing a really serious anthroposophist discovers along his path is that knowledge of reincarnation and karma is essential. It cannot, for example, be said that in Western culture, certain truths—such as the possibility of becoming conscious of higher worlds—present themselves through Anthroposophy as something fundamentally new. Anyone who has some knowledge of the development of Western thought knows of mystics such as Jacob Boehme or Swedenborg, or the whole Jacob Boehme school, and he knows too—although there has been much argument to the contrary—that it has always been considered possible for a man to rise from the ordinary sense-world to higher worlds. This, then, is not the element that is fundamentally new. And the same applies to other matters. Even when we are speaking of what is absolutely fundamental in evolution, for example, the subject of Christ, this is not the salient point as regards the Anthroposophical Movement as such; the essential point is the form which the subject of Christ assumes when reincarnation and karma are received as truths into the hearts of men. The light thrown upon the subject of Christ by the truths of reincarnation and karma—that is the essential point.

The West has been profoundly concerned with the subject of Christ. We need only be reminded of men in the days of the Gnosis, and of the time when esoteric Christianity was deepened by those who gathered under the sign of the Grail or of the Rose Cross. This, then, is not the fundamental question. It becomes fundamental and of essential significance for Western minds, for knowledge and for the needs of the religious life only through the truths of reincarnation and karma; so that those whose mental horizons have been widened by the knowledge of these truths necessarily expect new illumination to be shed on old problems. With regard to the knowledge of reincarnation and karma, however, all that can be said is that tentative indications are to be found in Western literature, for example, at the time of Lessing, who speaks of the subject in his essay, The Education of the Human Race. There are also other examples of how this question has dawned upon minds of a certain profundity. But for the truths of reincarnation and karma to become an integral part of human consciousness, assimilated by the hearts and souls of men, as in Anthroposophy—this is something that could not really happen until our own time. Therefore it can be said that the relation of a man of the modern age to Anthroposophy is characterised by the fact that certain antecedents have enabled reincarnation and karma to become matters of knowledge to him. That is the essential point. Everything else follows more or less as a matter of course if a man is able to acquire the right insight into the truths of reincarnation and karma.

In considering this aspect of the subject, we must also realise what it will mean for Western humanity and for humanity in general when reincarnation and karma become matters of knowledge which take their place in everyday life as other truths have done. In the near future, reincarnation and karma must pass into the consciousness of men far more deeply than was the case, for example, with the Copernican view of the universe. We need only remind ourselves of how rapidly this theory penetrated into the human mind. Only a comparatively short period in world-history has elapsed since the Copernican view of the universe first became generally known, yet it is now taught even in the elementary schools. As far as the effect upon the human soul is concerned, however, there is an essential difference between Copernicanism and the anthroposophical world-conception, in so far as the latter is based on the fundamental principles of reincarnation and karma. To be able to characterise the difference, one really needs a group of anthroposophists, of people who come together with good will to understand, for things would have to be said that would cause too great a shock to those outside the anthroposophical Movement.

Why is it that the Copernican view of the universe has been accepted so readily? Those who have heard me speak of it or of modern natural science in general know well that I pass no derogatory judgment on the modern scientific mode of thinking. Therefore in characterising the difference I shall not be misinterpreted when I say that for the acceptance of this world-picture, limited as it is to the presentation of external relationships and conditions of space, an epoch of superficiality was necessary! The reason why the Copernican theory took root so rapidly is none other than that for a certain period of time men became superficial. Superficiality was essential for the adoption of Copernicanism. Depth of soul—that is to say, the exact opposite—will be necessary for acceptance of the truths of Anthroposophy, especially of the fundamental truths of reincarnation and karma. If, therefore, the conviction grows in us to-day that these truths must become a much stronger and more widespread influence in the life of mankind, we must realise at the same time that we are standing at the boundary between two epochs: one, the epoch of superficiality, and the other, the epoch when the human soul and human heart must be inwardly deepened. This is what must be inscribed in our very souls if we are to be fully conscious of what Anthroposophy has to bring to humanity at the present time. And then comes the question: What form will life take under the influence of the knowledge of reincarnation and karma?

Here we must consider what it really means for the human soul and heart to recognise that reincarnation and karma are truths? What does it mean for the whole of man's consciousness, for his whole life of feeling and thinking? As anyone who reflects about these things can realise, it means no less than that through knowledge the Self of man grows beyond certain limits to which knowledge is otherwise exposed. In past times it was sharply emphasised that man could know and recognise only what lies between birth and death, that at most he could look up with faith to one who penetrates into a spiritual world as a knower. Such conviction grew with increasing strength. But this is not of very great significance when regarded merely from the aspect of knowledge; the subject becomes really significant when we pass from the aspect of knowledge to the moral aspect. It is then that the whole greatness and significance of the ideas of reincarnation and karma are revealed. A very great deal could be said in confirmation of this but we will confine ourselves to one aspect.

Think of the people belonging to earlier epochs of Western civilisation and the great majority of those living at the present time. Although they still cling to the belief that the being of man remains intact when he passes through the Gate of Death, it is imagined—because no thought is given to reincarnation and karma—that man's spiritual life after death is entirely separate from earthly existence. Apart from exceptional phenomena to which credence is given by those with spiritualistic leanings, when the dead are alleged to be working into this world, the current idea is that whatever takes place when a man has passed through the Gate of Death—be it punishment or reward—is remote from the earth as such, and that the further course of his life lies in a quite different sphere, a sphere beyond the earth.

Knowledge of reincarnation and karma changes this idea entirely. What is contained in the soul of a man who has passed through the Gate of Death has significance not only for a sphere beyond the earth, but the future of the earth itself depends upon what his life has been between birth and death. The earth will have the outer configuration that is imparted by the men who have lived upon it. The whole future configuration of the planet, as well as the social life of men in the future, depends upon how men have lived in their earlier incarnations. That is the moral element in the ideas of reincarnation and karma. A man who has assimilated these ideas knows: According to what I was in life, I shall have an effect upon everything that takes place in the future, upon the whole civilisation of the future! Something that up to now has been present in a limited degree only—the feeling of responsibility—is extended beyond the bounds of birth and death by knowledge of reincarnation and karma. The feeling of responsibility is intensified, imbued with the deep moral consequences of these ideas. A man who does not believe in them may say: “When I have passed through the Gate of Death I shall be punished or rewarded for what I have done here; I shall experience the consequences of this existence in another world; that other world, however, is ruled over by spiritual Powers of some kind or other, and they will prevent what I have within me from causing too much harm to the world as a whole.” A man who realises that the ideas of reincarnation and karma are based upon reality will no longer speak like this, for he knows that men's lives will be shaped according to what they have been in earlier incarnations.

The important point is that the fundamental ideas of the anthroposophical conception of the world will pass over into the souls and hearts of men and arise as moral impulses undreamed of in the past times. The feeling of responsibility will be intensified to a degree that was formerly impossible, and other moral insights will necessarily follow. As human beings learning to live under the influence of the ideas of reincarnation and karma we shall come to know that our life cannot be assessed on the basis of what has taken expression in one life between birth and death, but that a period extending over many lives must be taken into account.

When we encounter another human being with the attitude that has prevailed hitherto, we feel sympathy or antipathy towards him, strong or moderate affection, and the like. The whole attitude of one man to another in the present age is in reality the outcome of the view that life on the earth is limited to the one period between birth and death. We live as we should after all be bound to live if it were true that man is on the earth only once. Our attitude to parents, brothers, sisters, friends, is coloured by the belief that we have only one life on the earth.

A vast transformation will take place in life when the ideas of reincarnation and karma are no longer theories held by a few people as is the case nowadays—for they are still largely matters of theory. It can truly be said that there are numbers of people to-day who believe in reincarnation and karma; but they act as if there were no such realities, as though life were actually confined to the one period between birth and death. Nor can it be otherwise, for habits change less quickly than ideas. Only when we introduce into our lives right and concrete ideas of reincarnation and karma, only then shall we find how life can be fertilised by them.

As human beings we begin life in the circle of our parents, brothers and sisters, and other relatives; in our early years those around us are there owing to natural factors such as blood-relationship, proximity and the like. Then, as we grow up, we see how these circles expand, how we enter into quite different connections with human beings, connections that are no longer dependent on blood-relationship. These things must be seen in the light of karma and then they will illumine life in an entirely new way. Karma becomes of significance only when we grasp it as a concrete factor, when we apply to life itself the facts brought to light by spiritual-scientific investigation. These facts can, of course, be discovered only by such investigation, but then they can be applied to life.

An important question in connection with karma is the following: How does it come about that at the beginning of the present life, for example, we are drawn to certain others through blood-relationship? Spiritual-scientific investigation of this question discovers that as a rule—for although specific facts come to light there are countless exceptions—the human beings with whom we came to be associated involuntarily at the beginning of our life, were close to us in a former life—in most cases the immediately preceding one—in middle life, in the thirties; then we chose them voluntarily in some way, drawn to them perhaps by our hearts. It would be quite erroneous to think that the people around us at the beginning of our present life are those with whom we were also together at the beginning of a former life. Not at the beginning, not at the end, but in the middle of one life we were associated, by our own choosing, with those who are now our blood-relations. It is frequently the case that a marriage partner whom someone has chosen deliberately will be related to him in the next life as father or mother, or brother or sister. Spiritual-scientific investigation shows that speculative assumptions are generally incorrect and as a rule contradicted by the actual facts.

When we consider the particular case just mentioned and try to grasp it as a finding of the unbiased investigations of Spiritual Science, our whole relation to life is widened. In the course of Western civilisation things have reached the point where it is hardly possible for a man to do otherwise than speak of ‘chance’ when thinking about his connection with those who are his blood-relations. He speaks of chance and in many respects believes in it. How indeed could he believe in anything else if life is thought to be limited to one period only between birth and death? As far as the one life is concerned a man will of course admit that he is responsible for the consequences of what he himself has brought about. But when he leads the Self beyond what happens between birth and death, when he feels this Self to be connected with other men of another incarnation, he feels responsible in the same way as he does for his own deeds in this life.

The general view that a man has himself karmically chosen his parents is not of any special significance, but we gain an idea of this ‘choosing’ which can actually be confirmed by other experiences of life when we realise that those whom we have chosen so unconsciously now, were chosen by us in a former life at an age when we were more conscious than at any other, when we were fully mature.

This idea may be unpalatable to some people to-day but it is true nevertheless. If a person is not satisfied with his kith and kin he will eventually come to know that he himself laid the basis of this dissatisfaction and that he must therefore provide differently for the next incarnation; and then the ideas of reincarnation and karma will become really fruitful in his life. The point is that these ideas are not there for the sake of satisfying curiosity or the like, but for the sake of our progress. When we know how family connections are formed, the ideas of reincarnation and karma will widen and enhance our feeling of responsibility.

The forces which bring down an individual human being into a family must obviously be strong. But they cannot be strong in the individual now incarnated, for they cannot have much to do with the world into which he has actually descended. Is it not comprehensible that the forces working in the deepest depths of the soul must stem from the past life when he himself brought about the connections by the strong impulse of friendship, of ‘conscious love,’ if it may be called so? Conscious forces prevailing in one life work as unconscious forces in the next. What happens more or less unconsciously is explained by this thought. It is most important, of course, that the facts should not be clouded by illusions; moreover the findings of genuine investigation almost invariably upset speculations. The logic of the facts cannot be discovered until afterwards and nobody should allow himself to be guided by speculation, for that will never bring him to the right vantage-point. He will always arrive at a point of view that is characteristic of a conversation of which I have already spoken. In a town in South Germany a theologian once said to me: “I have read your books and have realised that they are entirely logical; so the thought has occurred to me that because they are so logical their author may perhaps have arrived at their content through pure logic.” So if I had taken pains to write a little less logically I should presumably have gone up in the estimation of that theologian, because he would then have realised that the facts presented were not discovered through pure logic! Anyone, however, who studies the writings thoroughly will perceive that the contents were put into the form of logic afterwards but were not discovered through logic. I at any rate could have done no such thing, of that I assure you! Perhaps others might have been capable of it.

Regarded in this way, these things bring home to us the deep significance of the idea that the most important impulses proceeding from Anthroposophy must necessarily be moral impulses. Emphasis has been laid to-day upon the feeling of responsibility. In the same way we might speak of love, of compassion and the like, all of which present different aspects in the light of the ideas of reincarnation and karma. That is why through the years it has been considered of such importance, even in public lectures, always to relate Anthroposophy to life, to the most immediate phenomena of life. We have spoken of “The Mission of Anger,” of “Conscience,” of “Prayer,”² of the different ages in the life of the human being, approaching all these things in the light in which they must be approached if we assume that the ideas of reincarnation and karma are true. The transforming power of these ideas in life has thus been brought home to us. In reality the main part of our studies has been to consider the effect of these fundamental ideas upon life. Even if it is not always possible in abstract words to convey the significance of reincarnation and karma for the heart, for conscience, for the character, for prayer, in such a way that we are able to say: “If we accept the ideas of reincarnation and karma, it follows that ...”—nevertheless all our studies are illumined by them. The important thing for the immediate future is that everything—not only the science of the soul but the other sciences too—shall be influenced by these ideas.

If you study a lecture such as the last public one on “Death in Man, Animal, and Plant,” you will see that it was a matter of showing how men will learn to think of death in plant, animal and man when they discern in themselves that which stretches beyond the single human life. It was made clear that the Self is different in each case. In man there is an individual Ego, in the animal there is a group-soul, and in the plant we have to do with part of the whole planetary soul. In the case of the plant, what we see outwardly as dying and budding is to be conceived of simply as a process of falling asleep and waking. In the animal there is again a difference; here we find a certain degree of resemblance to man inasmuch as in a single incarnation a self comes into some kind of evidence. But in man alone, who himself brings about his incarnations, we realise that death is the guarantee of immortality and that the word ‘death’ can be used in this sense only in the case of man. In using the word ‘death’ in the general sense, therefore, it must be emphasised that dying has a different signification according to whether we are speaking of man, or animal, or plant.

When the anthroposophist is able to accept the ideas of reincarnation and karma in the form in which we must present them, as distinct from earlier conceptions such as are found, for example, in Buddhism, his studies will lead him quite naturally to other things. That is why our work has been mainly devoted to studying what effect the ideas of reincarnation and karma can have upon the whole of human life. In this connection it is obvious that the work of any anthroposophical association or society must be in conformity with the mission of Anthroposophy. It is therefore understandable that when we speak about questions which may seem to those outside Anthroposophy to be the most important, the fundamental truths are the basis upon which we speak of matters closely concerning every Western soul. It is quite conceivable that a man might accept from Anthroposophy those things that have been described to-day as fundamentally new and not concern himself at all with any of the differences between the various religions, for the Science of Comparative Religion is by no means an essential feature of modern Spiritual Science. A great deal of research is devoted to the subject of Comparative Religion to-day and in comparison with it the studies pursued in certain societies connected with Spiritual Science are by no means the more profound. The point of real importance is that in Anthroposophy all these things shall be illumined by the ideas of reincarnation and karma.

In another connection still the feeling of responsibility will be essentially enhanced under the influence of these ideas. If we consider what has been said to-day about blood-relationship and companions once freely chosen by ourselves, a certain antithesis comes into evidence: What in one life is the most inward and intimate impulse, is in the next life the most outwardly manifest. When in one incarnation our deepest feelings of affection go out to certain human beings, we are preparing an outer relationship for another incarnation—a blood-relationship, maybe.

The same principle applies in another sphere. The way in which we think about some matter that may seem to us devoid of reality in one incarnation will be the most determinative factor in the impulses of the next; the quality of our thinking, whether we approach a truth lightly or try to verify it by every means at our command, whether we have a sense for truth or a tendency to fanaticism—all this, as the result of assimilating the ideas of reincarnation and karma, will have a bearing upon our evolution. What is hidden within our being in the present incarnation will be most in evidence in the next. A person who tells many untruths or is inclined to take things superficially will be a thoughtless character in the next or a later incarnation; for what we think, how we think, what attitude we have to truth, in other words what we are inwardly in this incarnation, will be the standard of our conduct in the next. If, for example, in this incarnation, we too hastily form a derogatory judgment of someone who if really put to the test might prove to be a good or even a moderately good man, and we carry this thought through life, we shall become unbearable, quarrelsome people in the next incarnation. Here is another illustration of the importance of widening and intensifying the moral element in the soul.

It is very important that special attention should be paid to these things and that we should realise the significance of taking into our very soul what is really new, together with everything else that with the ideas of reincarnation and karma penetrates as a revitalising impulse into the spiritual development of the present age . . .

My aim has been to bring home to you the importance of reflecting upon what constitutes the fundamentally new element in Anthroposophy. This of course does not mean that an anthroposophical society is one that believes in reincarnation and karma. It means that just as an age was once ready to receive the Copernican theory of the universe, so is our own age ready for the ideas of reincarnation and karma to be brought into the general consciousness of humanity. And what is destined to happen in the course of evolution will happen, no matter what powers rise up against it. When reincarnation and karma are truly understood, everything else follows of itself in the light of these truths.

It is certainly useful to have considered the fundamental distinction between those who are interested in Anthroposophy and those who oppose it. The distinction does not really lie in the acceptance of a higher world, but in the way thoughts and conceptions change in the light of the ideas of reincarnation and karma. And so to-day we have been studying something that may be regarded as the essential kernel of anthroposophical thought.

• 2. See: Metamorphoses of the Soul. Vol 1 and Metamorphoses of the Soul. Vol 2

During the last few days, we have spoken about many things connected with the existence of hidden depths in our soul-life; and we should now do well to consider various other aspects of this subject, which may be useful for the Anthroposophist to know. On the whole, it must be said that a complete clarification of these things is possible only when we work them through in the light of what Anthroposophy is able to give.

Now, we have already considered, from the most varied aspects, all that might be termed the organisation of man. Hence, it should be quite easy for each one of us—if we direct our attention in some measure, to the hidden depths of the soul to connect in the right way what thereby appears from a new standpoint, with the organisation of man as it is known to us through the more or less elementary presentation of the Anthroposophical world-conception. It has been repeatedly stated, during the last few days, that everything comprising our conceptual thoughts, our perceptions, the impulses of our will, our feelings and sensations—in short, everything that takes place in our soul during its normal state, from the moment of waking to the moment of falling asleep—may simply be termed the activities, the peculiarities, or the forces, of ordinary consciousness.

Let us now summarise graphically—by enclosing it between these two parallel lines (a—b)—everything that is included in the ordinary human consciousness: that is, everything that a human being knows, feels, and wills, from the time he awakes, till he falls asleep.

We then find—do we not—that our thoughts, and also every one of our perceptions, belong within this sphere enclosed by these two parallel lines. Thus, when we enter into relationship with the external world through our senses, and thereby form an image of this external world through all sorts of sense impressions—an image which is still in connection, or in contact, with the external world—this also forms part of our ordinary consciousness. At the same time, our feeling-life and our impulses of will belong here also—in short, everything that constitutes our ordinary consciousness. We might say that this sphere represented by these parallel lines (a—b), includes everything which the normal, every-day life of the soul makes known to us.

Now, the important thing is that we should know, quire clearly, that this so-called soul-life is dependent upon the instruments of the physical body -- that is upon all those instruments comprised by the senses and the nervous system. If we now draw two other parallel lines beyond the first two, we may say that the sense-organs and the nervous system in our physical organism serve as the instruments of this ordinary consciousness—the sense-organs being the more important, although the nervous system may also be included, to a certain extent.

And, below the threshold of our ordinary consciousness, lies all that may be enclosed between these other two parallel lines (b—c)—and which may be termed the hidden side of the soul's life, or the sub-consciousness. We obtain a clear conception of what is imbedded, as it were, in this sub-consciousness, when we remember, on the one hand, that the human being acquires, as we have learned, through spiritual training, imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Thus we see that, just as we have to include our conceptual thoughts, our feelings, and our will-impulses, in the ordinary consciousness, so we have to include imagination, inspiration, and intuition, in the subconscious life. But we know, also that the sub-consciousness is active, not only when such a spiritual training is carried on, but that it may also become active in the form of an ancient inheritance—as an original primitive state of human consciousness, or a kind of atavism. In this case, something arises which we may call visions; and these visions, arising—let us say—in the naive consciousness, correspond, in this primitive state of consciousness, to the Imaginations acquired by means of the right training. Moreover, forebodings may arise; and these would be the primitive inspirations. A significant example will at once show us the difference between a foreboding and an inspiration.

We have often mentioned the fact that, in the course of the 20th century, an event will occur, in human evolution, which we may call a kind of spiritual return of the Christ; and that there will be a number of people who will experience the influence of the Christ upon our world—when He enters it in an etheric form, from out the astral plane. A knowledge of this fact can be attained if we learn to know, through the right sort of training, just how evolution takes its course, and we then come to see—as a result of this training—that such an event must indeed take place, during the 20th century. It is also quite possible, on the other hand—and indeed this often happens, in our days—that certain people will be gifted with a natural, primitive clairvoyance, a mysterious kind of inspiration, which we may describe as a foreboding of the approaching Christ. These people will not even know, perhaps, exactly what is taking place; yet, nevertheless, an important inspiration such as this may quite well appear as a foreboding, if something takes place within the primitive consciousness which is more than a vision, more than a foreboding. A vision is experienced when the image or counterpart of a spiritual occurrence arises before us. Let us suppose, for instance, that someone has lost a friend—so that the Ego has passed through the portal of death and is now dwelling in the spiritual world. A kind of connection may be established, in this case, between the one living in the spiritual world, and the one dwelling on the earth; and yet, the one who is living in this world may not know, at all rightly, just what the dead friend desires of him—indeed, he may have a false idea of what the departed friend, yonder, is experiencing in his soul. Nevertheless, the very fact of such a condition may be experienced in the form of a vision; and—even if it should be wrong, as far as the picture is concerned—the vision may be based upon the true fact: namely, that the departed friend wishes to establish a connection with the one who is still alive. And this assumes the form of a premonition. Thus, one who has premonitions knows certain things concerning either the past or the future, which are not accessible to ordinary consciousness. Let us suppose, on the other hand, something arises before the human soul in the form of a clear perception (not merely as a vision which may, under certain circumstances, be misleading, but as a clear perception); and let us suppose that it represents either some event which takes place in the physical world—although not in a sphere which renders it accessible to the ordinary senses—or an event taking place in the super-sensible world. Such an appearance is usually designated by occultism as “deuteroscopy,” or second sight. And with this I have described to you something, whether it be described through regular training or whether it appears in the form of natural clairvoyance, that takes place in human consciousness—in the sub-consciousness, to be sure; yet at the same time in the human soul itself.

Now, when we speak of sub-consciousness, in contrast to ordinary consciousness, we find that everything that takes place here in the human soul differs very greatly from all processes in the ordinary consciousness. These processes of ordinary consciousness—with respect to those things with which they are connected—are in reality such, that we must speak of the impotence of this ordinary consciousness. The eye sees the rose; but this eye, which acts, to be sure, in such a way that the image of the rose arises in us, is quite powerless to picture to the ordinary consciousness—even with all its perception and its capacity to imagine the rose—such a thing as the growth, the growing and fading of the rose. The rose grows and dies again through its inherent natural forces; and neither the eye, nor the ordinary consciousness, can go beyond the sphere which is accessible to their perception. This is not the case, however, with the facts belonging to the sphere of the sub-conscious. And this is what we must bear in mind first of all; for it is extremely important. If we perceive something with our eye, during the normal act of vision—whether it be coloured pictures, or anything else—we are not only unable, through our perception, to change anything in the objective facts, but something else indeed arises, if our sight is normal. If nothing else takes place, for the eye, than the mere act of vision, the eye in this case remains unchanged by this process. Only when we go beyond the natural limits, by sometimes passing from a normal light to a blinding light, do we injure the eye. So that we may say: facts and processes of ordinary consciousness do not enable us even to react upon ourselves, if we simply remain in this ordinary consciousness. Our organism is indeed constructed in such a way that facts accessible to ordinary consciousness do not even cause any particular changes within us.

It is quite different, however, with those things which arise in the sub-consciousness. Let us suppose that we form an imagination, or that we have a vision. And let us now suppose that this Imagination, or this vision, corresponds to some good Being. This good Being, in that case, is not in the physical, sense-world, but in the super-sensible world; and let us now suppose that the world, inhabited by these Beings which we perceive through imagination or vision, lies enclosed, here, between these two parallel lines. Let us try to find in this world everything which may become object, or perception, for our sub-consciousness (b—e)—we shall refrain from writing anything in this space, for the time being. On the other hand, if we have an imaginary picture, or a vision, of some sort of evil or demoniacal Being in this super-sensible world, we are not powerless, as far as this Being is concerned, in the way the eye is powerless with regard to the rose. If, during the imagination or vision of an evil Being, we call forth the feeling that it should retreat from us—if we do this while seeing perfectly clearly this visionary, or imaginative, picture, such a Being in this other world, must actually feel as if it were pushed and driven away by a force proceeding from us.

The same thing happens, if we have the corresponding imagination, or vision, of a good Being. In this case, also, if we develop a feeling of sympathy, this Being will feel within itself a force which compels it to approach us and to connect itself with us. All Beings—whatever may be their place in this world—sense the forces of attraction, or repulsion, coming from us, whenever we form visions of them. Our sub-consciousness is therefore in a situation similar to that of an eye that would not only see a rose, but would develop, through the mere sight of the rose, the desire that the rose should approach it—could attract it to itself. Or, if upon seeing something repulsive, the eye were not only to come to the opinion, “This is repulsive,” but could eliminate this repulsive thing through mere antipathy. Our sub-consciousness is therefore connected with a world in which the sympathy and antipathy arising in the human soul can be active. It is necessary to place this quite clearly before our minds.

But sympathy and antipathy—and, generally speaking, all the impulses in our sub-consciousness—are not only active in this sphere, in the way already described; they are also active in what is more especially within ourselves, and which we must now think of as a part of man's etheric body—not only as a part of the etheric body, however, but also as certain forces of the physical body—enclosed, here, within these two parallel lines (b—c). We must imagine here, that is to say, first of all what lives in man as a force pulsating through his blood, or: the force of warmth in the blood. And then, we must imagine within this space still another force: namely, that force which is present in our healthy or unhealthy breathing depending, as it does, upon our entire organism in short, the more or less healthy force of breathing. We may also call it the constitution of the force of breathing. Furthermore, a great part of what we must term man's etheric body belongs to all that upon which the sub-consciousness is actively at work within us. Hence, sub-consciousness, or the hidden forces of the soul-life, work within us in such a way that they influence, in the first place, the temperature of our blood. Since the entire pulsation, the vitality, or lack of vitality of our circulation is dependent upon the temperature of our blood, we can realise that this whole circulation must be connected in some way with our sub-consciousness, Whether or not a human being has a more rapid, or a less rapid, circulation is essentially dependent upon the forces of his sub-consciousness.

Now, if the influence man has on all that exists in that other world, in the form of demoniacal of good Beings, takes place only when there arise out of his sub-consciousness with a certain clearness visions, imaginations, or other sorts of perceptions—that is if, things really stand clearly before him; and if, then, certain forces become as it were magically active in this world, through sympathy and antipathy, this clear way of facing himself, subconsciously, in his own soul, will not be necessary for the influencing of that inner organism which consists of what we have indicated here (b—c). Whether man knows, or fails to know, exactly what imaginations correspond to this or that sympathy within him—in either case, this sympathy works upon the circulation of his blood, upon his breathing-system, upon his etheric body. Let us now suppose that, for a certain period of time, someone is inclined to have only feelings of repulsion. If he were able to see visions, or if he were endowed with imaginative knowledge, he would have the kind of vision, or imagination, described day before yesterday, in the form of perceptions of his own being. These would be projected out into space, to be sure, but they would nevertheless belong only to his own world; these visions and imaginations would reveal what lives within him in the way of forces active in feelings of repulsion. Yet, even if he simply has these feelings of repulsion, so that they live within him—they nevertheless work upon him all the same. And they work in such a way, indeed, that they actually influence the force which warms his blood, and also the force in his breathing. Hence, if we now pass on to the other aspect, we find that the human being has a more or less healthy breathing—depending upon the feelings which he experiences in his sub-consciousness; and that he has a more or less healthy circulation, depending upon his sub-conscious experiences. It is especially the activity of the etheric body, and all its processes, that are dependent on the world of feeling that lives in man.

When the facts of sub-consciousness are really experienced by the soul, we can see, not only that there exists this connection (of the world of feeling—with the breathing, the circulation, and the activity of the etheric body), but that owing to it, there is a continual influence upon the entire constitution of man, with the result that there are certain feelings and sensations which reach down into the sub-consciousness. And because these call forth certain forms in the force of warmth in the blood, and a certain disposition in the force of breathing and of the etheric body, their influence upon the organism is either a furthering one, during the whole of a man's life; or it is one that retards and hinders it. Thus there is always something arising or passing away in man, through these forces which play into his sub-consciousness. He either diminishes his vital forces, or he increases them, through what he sends down into his sub-consciousness out of his ordinary conscious state. If a man takes pleasure in the thought of lies which he has told; if it does not fill him with repulsion—for this would be the natural feeling toward a lie—or if he is lazy and indifferent toward lies, and even takes pleasure in telling them, this feeling which accompanies the lie, is in that case sent down into his sub-consciousness. Whatever enters the sub-consciousness, in this way injures the circulation of the blood, the constitution of breathing, and the forces of the etheric body; and the consequence of this will be that the human being, when he passes through the portal of death with what then remains to him, will be stunted—will become impoverished in his forces—because something has died in him, which would have come to life had he felt abhorrence and repulsion toward lying—in accordance with the normal human feeling. If the feelings of aversion toward lying had dived down into his sub-consciousness they would then have been transferred to those forces indicated here, in our drawing, and the human being would have sent down into his organism something beneficial—something in the nature of forces of birth.

Thus we see how, in the first place, the human being works from out of his sub-consciousness upon his own growth and decay, because of the fact that forces are continually passing from his upper consciousness—from his ordinary consciousness—down into his sub-consciousness. Man, as he is constituted today, however, is not yet strong enough to cause injury through his soul-nature, as it were, to other parts of his organism also—besides his circulation, his breathing, and his etheric body. He cannot harm the coarser and firmer parts of his physical organism, as well. Thus, we may say that man is in a position to harm only a part of his entire constitution. What has thus been injured appears with especial clearness, when that part of the etheric body which has remained (for the etheric body is continually connected with the force of warmth in the blood, and with the constitution of breathing) has been influenced in the way we have mentioned; for in this case it deteriorates through wrong feelings. On the other hand it acquires fruitful, strengthening and beneficent forces through good, normal, true feelings. We may therefore say that what takes place in his sub-consciousness enables man to work directly upon the growth and decay, that is, upon the true processes, the reality, of his organism. He plunges down from the sphere of impotence of his ordinary consciousness, into the sphere where there is constant growth and decay, in his own soul, and consequently in his whole human constitution.

Now we have seen that, through the fact that our soul has more or less experience of our sub-consciousness—knows something concerning it: through this fact, the sub-consciousness also acquires an influence over that world which may be termed (according to an expression which was used for it throughout the Middle-Ages)—the elementary world. Nevertheless, man cannot enter into direct relationship with this elementary world, but only by the circuitous road, of experiencing, first of all in himself, the effects of his sub-consciousness upon his organism. If, after a period of time, the human being has learned sufficient self-knowledge to say to himself: “When you have this feeling within you, and when you send the one or the other result of your conduct down into your sub-consciousness, you destroy certain things in yourself, thereby, and cause them to be stunted; and when you experience other things, and send down certain accompanying experiences, you further your development,” if, for a certain period of time, he experiences within himself this fluctuation between destruction and furthering forces, he will then become more and more mature in self-knowledge. This is, in reality, the true self-knowledge; and it can be likened only to a “picture” with may be obtained as follows:—

Self-knowledge, attained in this way, may actually bring it about—through a lie, and through a wrong feeling toward the lie, which arises in our instincts—that we feel as if a scorpion were biting off one of our toes. We may be sure that, if human beings were to perceive some real effect of this sort, they would never lie as they do. Thus, if we were to experience at once, in the physical world, a crippling of our physical organism this would correspond to what actually happens in connection with things that usually remain invisible—through what we send down into sub-consciousness, out of our daily experiences. Any sort of lazy indifference toward a lie, which is sent down into the sub-consciousness, has the effect of biting off something within us, as it were—taking away something which we then no longer possess, so that we are stunted and must acquire it again, in the later course of our karma. And if we send down a right feeling into our sub-consciousness (of course, we must imagine an infinite scale of feelings which may plunge down in this way) we grow in ourselves thereby, and form new life-forces in our organism. The first thing which appears in a man who attains true self-knowledge is this ability to become a spectator of his own growing and fading.

I have been told that my listeners did not understand quite clearly, day before yesterday, how we may distinguish between a true vision or imagination which forms an objective experience, and one which is merely projected into space and belongs to our subjective life. Now, we cannot say—“Write down this or that rule, and then you will be able to distinguish the one from the other.” Such rules do not exist; on the contrary, we learn only gradually, in the course of our development. And we are able to distinguish between what belongs only to ourselves, and what arises as exterior vision and belongs to a true Being, only when we have passed through the experience of being continually devoured, inwardly, by sub-conscious processes that kill. This will equip us with a kind of certainty, and will be followed also by a state in which we shall always be able to face a vision or an imagination and say to ourselves: “If we can see into the vision through the force of our spiritual sight, the vision will remain; for, if we develop the active force of spiritual sight, this corresponds to an objective fact. If, on the other hand, the active force of spiritual sight obliterates the vision, this proves that it was merely a part of our own self.”

Thus, a human being who is not careful with regard to this may even see thousands and thousands of pictures from the Akasha Chronicle; yet, even so, if he does not apply the test as to whether or not these pictures are obliterated through an absolutely active sight, these Akasha pictures, in that case—no matter how many facts they may reveal—can be looked upon only as pictures of man's own inner life. It might happen, for instance—I repeat, it might happen—that someone who sees nothing more than his own interior, projected in very dramatic pictures, imagines these to be events, let us say, which extend over the entire Atlantean world, through whole generations of humanity. ... And, all the while—no matter how seemingly objective—this might, under certain circumstances, be merely a projection of his own inward being. Now, when a human being passes through the portal of death, it always comes to pass that whatever might hinder his subjective life from being transformed into visions or Imaginations now disappears. In the ordinary human life of our day, as we know, what man experiences within himself sub-consciously, what he sends down into his sub-consciousness, does not always become vision or Imagination. It becomes an Imagination if he undergoes the regular and necessary training; and it becomes a vision if he still possesses an atavistic clairvoyance. When the human being has passed through the portal of death, his entire inner life becomes immediately an objective world, and is there before him. Kamaloka is in its essence nothing else than a world erected around us out of all that we have experienced within our own souls. Only in Devachan does the reverse of this take place. Thus we can easily realise that what I have said regarding the activity of man's sympathy and antipathy, as contained in visions, Imaginations, Inspirations, and also premonitions, etc.—that this activity always, under all circumstances, influences the objective elementary world. And I said, in connection with this activity, that, in the human being who is incarnated in the physical body, only that which he brings as far as vision or Imagination can influence this elementary world. In the case of the dead, those forces also which existed in the sub-consciousness and which always accompany the human being when he crosses the portal of death, are active in the elementary world; so that everything which he experiences after death is in reality exceedingly active in the elementary world.

Just as certainly as we create waves in the river, when we lash its waters—with the same certainty do the experiences of the dead continue to influence the elementary world. Just as certainly, I repeat, as waves arise and ripple out from whatever point we happen to strike, in the water; and just as surely as a current of air continues to create itself, just so surely do these forces continue their influence in the elementary world. Hence, this elementary world is continually filled with forces which have been called into being through what human beings take with them, out of their sub-consciousness, when they cross the portal of death. The important thing, therefore, is always to be in position to create such circumstances as will enable us to see—to perceive—the things in the elementary world. It need not surprise us, when the clairvoyant rightly recognises the things that occur in the elementary world as Beings brought about through the activity of the dead. At the same time—and under certain specific conditions to be sure—we can pursue these activities, resulting from the experiences of the dead (and influencing, first, the elementary world) even as far as the physical world. For, when a clairvoyant has himself passed through all those experiences which I have described, and has attained the ability to perceive the elementary world, he will arrive at the point, after a certain length of time, when he has the most extraordinary experiences.

Let us suppose that a clairvoyant passes through the following process:—To begin with, he looks at a rose, let us say. He looks at it with his physical eye. Now, when he looks at it in this way, he will receive a sense-impression. And let us suppose, further, that this clairvoyant has trained himself to experience quite a definite feeling, with a certain definite nuance, when he sees the colour red. This is necessary; otherwise the process would not go any further. Unless we experience quite definite nuances of feeling, when we see colours, or hear sounds, we cannot progress in a clairvoyance that is directed at exterior objects. Now, let us suppose that the clairvoyant gives away the rose. If he were not clairvoyant, his perception would sink down into his sub-consciousness and would carry on its work, there—making him ill or healthy, as the case might be. If on the other hand, he is clairvoyant, he will now perceive just how his Imagination of the rose works upon his sub-consciousness. That is, he will have a visionary picture—an Imagination of the rose. At the same time, he will perceive how the feelings which the rose called forth in him have either a furthering or a destructive effect upon his etheric body—as well as upon what we have here described as the physical body. He will perceive in everything, the effect upon his own organism. And if he has now formed an Imigination of the rose, he will be able through this to exercise a force of attraction upon that Being which we may call the Group-Soul of the rose, and which is always at work in the rose. Thus, he will be able to look into the elementary world, to see the Group-Soul of the rose, in so far as it lives in that world. Now, on the other hand, if the clairvoyant goes still further—that is, if he has started by looking at the rose; has then given it away; and, finally, has pursued the inner process of his surrender to the rose, and of the effect resulting therefrom; and if he thus reaches the point of seeing something of the rose in the elementary world, he will then see, in the place where the rose appeared to him, a wonderfully luminous sort of picture, belonging to the elementary world. And then, if he has followed the process as far as this point, something new will take place. He may now ignore what is there, before him, and may command himself not to look with the inner eye at what appears before him as a living etheric Being, extending out into the world—he must not see this! An extraordinary thing then takes place: namely, the clairvoyant sees something which goes through his eye and which shows him the activity of the forces that construct his eye—those forces, that is, which build up the human eye out of the etheric body. He sees which are the constructive forces of his own physical body. He actually sees his physical eye as if it were an exterior object.

This is actually what may take place. He may follow the path leading from an exterior object to that point—otherwise a space containing absolute darkness—where, without allowing any other sense-perception to enter, he now perceives what his own eye looks like, in a spiritual picture. Thus he can see the interior organ itself; and he has now reached this region, here)—the region of what is truly creative in the physical world, or the creative physical world. Man perceives it first, by perceiving his own physical organisation. Thus he retraces the path and returns to himself. What is it that has sent into our eye forces which, in reality, cause us to see this eye, as if rays of light went out from it, corresponding completely with the nature of vision? As a next step, we then see the eye surrounded by a sort of yellow luminosity, we see it enclosed within ourselves. All this has been effected by the process of those forces which have brought man up to this stage.

The same course is followed by those forces which may proceed from a dead person. The dead man takes with him, into the world in which he lives after passing through the portal of death, the content of his sub-consciousness. As soon as we reach the interior of our own physical eye, we experience there the forces sent out by the dead, and coming from the elementary world back into the physical world. The one who has died may perhaps experience a special longing for someone he has left behind. This special longing was contained, at first, in his sub-consciousness; but it now immediately becomes a living vision; and through this he influences the elementary world. In the elementary world, what at first was only living vision becomes, now at once, a force. This force takes the path indicated by the longing for the one living on earth; and if it is in any way possible, there will be knocking and other noises in the physical world, in the neighbourhood of the living. One may hear these sounds of rapping, etc., or perceive them, just as one perceives any other physical thing. These very things, which are due to connections and circumstances of this sort, would be noticed far more often in the world than is generally the case, if people would only pay attention to the times most favourable for such influences. And the most favourable times are the moments of falling asleep, and of waking in the morning. People simply do not pay sufficient attention to such things—for, indeed, there cannot really be any human beings, anywhere, who have not, at some time or other, received messages from the super-sensible world, in the transition state between falling asleep and awaking again—messages that come in the form of rapping noises, or even of spoken words.

I wished to allude to this today, my dear friends, because I wished to point out the true reality of the connection between Man and the Universe. What man obtains from the objective sense-world, in his ordinary consciousness, is powerless, and devoid of any real connection with this sense-world. But, as soon as his experiences pass into his sub-consciousness a connection with Reality is established. The impotence of his preceding state of consciousness is transformed into a fine, imperceptible, magic force. And when man has passed through the portal of death, and is unhampered by his physical body, his experiences are such as to play into an elementary world; and, under favourable circumstances they may work down as far as the physical world—where they may be perceived even by the ordinary consciousness.

I have indicated the simplest sort of thing which can take place; because, after all, we must always begin with the simplest things. Naturally, in the course of time—for we have always allowed ourselves time to work out gradually whatever we need to know—we shall pass on to the more complicated things, which may lead us, in turn, into the more intimate connections, so to speak, existing between the Universe and Man.