The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the various recent reflections that have been presented here, I have tried less to convey individual concepts and ideas to you than to characterize a certain way of relating to the world. For it must be borne in mind over and over again that the most important thing in relation to the acquisitions to be made through spiritual science is not the conceptual, the imaginative, but the whole soul disposition, the whole soul mood, which the human being of the future will be able to acquire for our development on earth through spiritual science.

Today, almost all those who engage with spiritual science still have some remnants of old attitudes and old soul moods. And this is especially the case to an even greater extent because a certain soul mood in the modern soul has only been evoked for a relatively short time, for three, four to five centuries, in the search for the unraveling of natural phenomena. This soul mood, which I would like to describe as emanating from the so-called scientific world view, is regarded in the broadest circles today as the only valid one. We know that the permeation of scientific concepts and ideas as the basis of a world view has only taken hold among a small part of the world's population today; after all, modern school education basically ensures that it is not so much science as this scientific attitude that is spreading rapidly. And since this scientific frame of mind has only taken hold for a short time, it is naturally difficult for the spiritual-scientific world-view to become established in that which has only taken hold for a short time and which must first develop in the majority of people as a transitional stage in evolution. This scientific world-view mood necessarily leads gradually to a kind of materialism, because it cannot be otherwise than one-sided. It has been acquired in a one-sided way through what may be called man's head experiences, and it also strives to exclude from the mentioned world-view conceptions everything that does not correspond to this head mood of man, that is not thought up, invented, won through experiment or observation with the help of thinking and inventing. One could say that this world-view sentiment has also really retained its one-sidedness with regard to the view of the human being, and in view of the many impulses that have entered the human soul, we can feel how difficult it will be to unfold through spiritual science the more comprehensive soul mood of the world, which emanates from the whole human being again.

If someone today who is thoroughly steeped in the scientific world view gets hold of a book such as, for example, “The Secret Science in the Outline”, he naturally regards the content of this book as a kind of crazy nonsense, because he cannot derive any special meaning from this book due to his one-sided brain and head mood. Now, something of a radical contrast between the spiritual-scientific world-view mood and the natural-scientific world-view mood is evident from one phenomenon in particular – from many phenomena, of course, but most strikingly from one phenomenon. I would like to emphasize this point first.

When we study the human being from a spiritual scientific perspective, we see that the further we go back into the distant past, as we say, into the lunar evolution of our planetary existence, the more we realize that what appears to be so significant for the human being's development on earth was not actually present in the old lunar evolution. In this ancient lunar development, what was present in today's human being was essentially – I say essentially – that which is more or less connected with the present-day development of the human brain. And what the human being has besides his head, besides what mainly belongs to the skull, to the head, his remaining physicality, that is essentially an earthly product, a product of earthly organization.

Essentially, I say again. One could also say: if one traces man back to the ancient development of the moon, then one gradually sees, the further one goes back, his outer limbs, through which he is an earthly human being today, shrink, and what remains is his head, which has of course been transformed by the development of the earth, but which essentially remains when one goes back to the development of the moon. The other has become inorganic, attached. I once explained this in more detail in the lectures on 'Occult Physiology', which I hope will be published soon, in the Prague cycle that I gave in 1911. So, essentially, we come to the conclusion that the human being has emerged from what is now compressed and concentrated in his skull organization; the other has become attached. We must therefore say that, schematically drawn, we would have man in his lunar development like this, and in his earthly development we would have him like this, with the rest of the organization attached to it.

Take what I have just said and compare it with what the one-sided natural scientific world view has achieved to date. In a one-sided way - of course there is something justified at the basis of all these things - it assumes that man has gradually developed from the lower animal stages to his present perfection. What do we see in the lower animal kingdom? We see in them precisely that which has been added to the development of the brain and head in the course of human evolution; and we see the atrophy in the animals of precisely that which is contained in the human head. In animals we see the limbs, the appendages, particularly developed, and what had already developed particularly in the head in man during the ancient lunar evolution, and what then concentrated, we see in animals still shrivelled up and stunted. But only this is seen by the scientific world view. We can say that the scientific world view actually puts the cart before the horse, because it takes what has only been added in humans as its starting point, and what was present in humans before they even had organs like those that present-day animals have, as something that is supposed to have developed from these forms themselves.

From a logical point of view, this means nothing less than concluding: First you look at a child and then at the father and find that the father is taller than the child. Since you now assume, as a result of a logical conclusion, that the larger, developing thing could only have emerged from the smaller, the father would have to have developed from the child, and not the other way around. That is how one actually concludes. The one-sidedness of the modern scientific way of thinking will one day seem as grotesque as the newer awareness of humanity. It will be known that the one-sidedly conceived Darwinian theory is logically nothing more than the assertion that the child has born its father.

Now you can imagine the efforts that will be necessary before humanity relearns about such things, as they have now been hinted at, and what is needed to truly relearn. They have happily managed to establish a world view that turns the world upside down, and now humanity will be confronted with the necessity of turning the world right side up again. But it has taken hardly three to four centuries to get used to the idea that the “upside down” position is the right one.

It is truly one of our tasks not just to acquire theoretical ideas about this or that in the world, but to acquire feelings and perceptions for the tasks that lie before us within the spiritual-scientific movement. We must be clear about how much what must follow for us from the spiritual-scientific view of the world must really differ from what surrounds us everywhere outside today. Otherwise we shall fall again and again into the error of not noticing the radical differences and of wanting to make compromises thoughtlessly, whereas we must be aware that we cannot but develop something from the earlier world-views by grafting it on, but must develop out of a new original cell of world-view life that which can more and more come to our mind as the right thing out of spiritual science. Only with this consciousness will we succeed in putting our soul into our task, and we must get used to the fact that many questions that arise outside the circle of spiritual science can only be tackled, as I showed with reference to a question yesterday, if we open ourselves to what spiritual science can trigger in our soul.

Let us consider something else that may be close to us in relation to the place where we are now standing, the place where we have built our structure. I have emphasized it often in the past, how art, science and religion are three branches of human spiritual life that spring from one root. If we go back, as I have often said, to the time of the primeval mysteries, we do not find the practices of the primeval mysteries in such a way that we could say they were art or religion or science, but they are all that together. In the primeval mysteries, science, religion and art are one unit, organically connected with each other.

What people today try to visualize with the impotent concepts and ideas I spoke of yesterday, man saw in living representation, in living contemplation in the primeval mysteries. He perceived what he can only think today. We will not approach a work of art in the future as we look at a work of art today. In the future, we will not approach the work of art by looking at it and then believing that we understand it only with our thoughts, but we will understand it by directly looking at it and experiencing it in our soul. Thus, by directly experiencing what he was looking at, the person who was initiated into the mysteries understood what he was meant to consciously grasp. What he was to grasp so consciously, what he was to understand by looking and to look at by understanding, was at the same time something beautiful, appearing in outer forms and colors, speaking in sounds and words: it was art at the same time. They were one, science and art.

Today only art, which has separated itself from what science is supposed to give us, gives us an idea of how one can be united with the object inwardly at the same time as being united with it outwardly in direct contact; and only those who want to introduce the barbarism of symbolism, of symbolizing, into art sin against this direct experiencing understanding of the work of art. For the moment one begins to interpret a work of art, one leaves behind that which one might call the experiential understanding of the work of art. It is, in fact, a real barbarism, let us say, to proceed in this way with “Hamlet”, so that the individual persons are interpreted as the principles of the theosophical view or the like. I would not like to live to see the individual forms of our structure interpreted symbolically in this way, because it is the direct, understanding experience that is at stake here!

Thus, in the primeval mysteries, the scientific experience of the world was at the same time the artistic experience of the world, and at the same time this scientific and artistic experience of the world was the religious feeling of the world. For what was experienced in this way in direct living contemplation, in experiencing understanding and in understanding experience, was at the same time that which could be venerated, to which one could lift one's whole soul with religious fervor. Religion, art and science were one; and it was because of human weakness through original sin that there had to be a separation into science, art and religion. What was originally one had to split, so that a religious current, an artistic current and a scientific current arose. What originally took hold of the whole human soul as an organism, woven from scientific, religious and artistic content, had to be distributed among the individual powers of the soul. For the intellect, for thinking, science was given to man, so that when he experiences the world in thought through science, his will and feeling can sleep, can rest.

Man became weak. One-sidedly, in thinking, he sought to experience the world scientifically, and again one-sidedly he sought to experience it artistically so that the other powers could sleep. Again one-sidedly, he sought to experience the world religiously for the same reason. Man would not be able to shape in such perfection that which he can work out intellectually, as is happening today, if a one-sided scientific trend had not developed; he would not have been able to achieve what has been accomplished artistically if art had not separated itself; and religious fervor would not have reached the heights it was destined to reach if it had not separated itself from the other powers of the soul that are devoted to science and art.

But with regard to this separation, we have indeed reached a crisis, and this crisis is clearly expressed; it is expressed very, very clearly. In what? I would say that especially in the last few centuries, humanity has had to experience more and more how this crisis expresses itself. Science, art and religion have become so divorced that they no longer understand each other, that they can no longer have any relationship with each other. Slowly we see how the “diplomatic relations” between religion, science and art are broken off. We see how such relationships still existed, say, in the heyday of the Italian Renaissance, where an intimate bond was woven between religion and art in the creations of Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. But the more we delve into more recent times, the more we find that a mutual lack of understanding has gradually developed between science, art and religion. We see – and unfortunately have to admit – how, in many cases in recent centuries, religion has even become hostile to art; we see how it has thrown out art, how there are religious movements that seek to achieve the height of religious feeling by throwing out sculptures and making churches as sober and artless as possible. We also see how another religious current has come to have sculptures, but mostly those that are no longer works of art, because what we still find in churches in the form of sculptures from past centuries is not intended to awaken the sense of art, the aesthetic sense, but to thoroughly eradicate it. And on the other hand, we see how art has increasingly lost sight of its connection with the conception of the divine-spiritual being, how everything has passed over into naturalism, how more and more people only want to depict what has a model in external nature.

Of course, art must then break off its, if I may say so, “diplomatic relations” with religion if it only wants to be naturalistic art, because that which religion must venerate cannot have a model in external nature. That is quite obvious. And how little science has maintained its relations can be seen from the slow approach of this breaking off of relations. Yes, we can see that it is approaching slowly.

We have an excellent artist in the 16th century who was also active as an anatomist and technician in the most diverse fields: Leonardo da Vinci. Anyone who studies his scientific works can still feel everywhere how these scientific works are imbued with artistic meaning. But one can see how this sense has increasingly evaporated in more recent times, how unartistic it has become, and how today it seems to be believed that the greatness of science consists precisely in being unartistic. It has almost become a dogma for a certain direction of modern times that Goethe is such a visionary physicist because the artistic sense did not allow him to become a proper physicist.

In short, misunderstanding has arisen between the three currents. But this marks the crisis. For when that which comes from one root separates in its mutual relationships in such a way that the life juices no longer come from the common root, the crisis must occur, the one-sided development must lead these currents to wither away. In recent times, we have reached a crisis in our failure to understand what a common organism, a coherent organism in human nature, is and how it separates in the outer evolution. We are in the crises. Such crises can be described in such a way that we can say that human nature demands organic unification of what has had to go separate ways in the outer world for some time. In many areas of life, the person who does not go through the evolution of the world indifferently can perceive such crisis, and such a person will observe much of what cannot remain as it is in today's development in these crises, and he will gain insight into what has to happen in order to overcome the crises.

We have already hinted at one crisis in the fact that science, art and religion no longer understand each other. Another crisis is going through the world, which is noticed only by a few, but which is terrible in its effect, a crisis that stems from the lack of understanding between two currents. The one current is that which was once breathed through the world in the infinitely deep sayings engraved in the human heart: “My kingdom is not of this world” and “You are from below, but I am from above”. Man's root is in the spiritual world.

The second current, which must develop more and more into a crisis-ridden confrontation with what is expressed in the words: “My kingdom is not of this world” and “I am from above, but you are from below,” is the word: “L'état c'est moi! The state is me!” My kingdom, the kingdom of my ego, is completely bound to this world. The right way lies in the synthesis of the two sentences. It lies in a universally conceived Christianity, expressed in the words “Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.” In correctly understood Christianity there is no false turning away from the world. But there is also not that one-sidedness in it, which can only be lived out in the attachment to the material institutions of world existence.

In speaking of this, we are touching on the very deepest tasks of anthroposophy. For anthroposophy, in the true sense of the word, must not arise one-sidedly from the mood of the head, but from the whole soul of man. And only then will this soul find the transition into anthroposophical life when it is completely seized by spiritual science, not only in its life of ideas, but when it is completely seized by it.

It is a fact that what has become the human head during the moon-life is on the way to becoming the whole human being during the earth-life. During the old moon-evolution there was a being, the ancestor of the present human being. What was then an outer organism has today become the head. The limbs have been added. When the coming Jupiter evolution is complete, this whole organism of today's human being will have become the head. What you are today as a whole human being will become the brain, the head, of the Jupiter human, just as the whole moon human has become the head of the earth human.

The task of true spiritual development consists in truly anticipating the future. Therefore, we must become aware that there is a head culture around us and that it is our responsibility to create a human culture. Our head could not think, could not reflect any ideas or concepts if it behaved like the rest of our organism; it could never truly fulfill its task. Our head reflects the world, which then becomes our world of perception, only because it can forget itself in its perception, can truly forget itself. In its feeling, the human being is - thank God - always headless. If you try to feel your way through and ask yourself: What do I feel least in my organism? - it is really the head that forgets itself most in normal life. And when it does not forget itself, then it hurts, and then it also prefers not to perceive anything, but to be left in peace and without perception. That is where it asserts its egoism. Otherwise, however, it extinguishes itself, and because it extinguishes itself, we can perceive the whole surrounding world. It is organized to extinguish itself.

If you were to forget even the slightest part of the outer periphery of the head, but instead focus on it, then you would no longer be able to perceive the external environment. Imagine that instead of perceiving the external world, you would see your eye; for example, if you were to take a step back with your perception, then you would see the cranial cavity, but with the perception of the external world it would be nothing. To the same extent and at the same moment that a person succeeds in completely switching off their organism – which, as is well known, is achieved through meditation and in initiation – to that same extent and in that same moment, this organism becomes a real mirror of the world, only that we then see not the organism but the cosmos. Just as the head does not see itself either, but what is around it, so the whole human being, when it becomes an organ of perception, sees the cosmos. This is the ideal that we must have in mind: forgetting the organism as it appears to us on the physical plane, and being able to use it instead as a mirroring apparatus for the secrets of the cosmos.

In this way we gradually expand our head-centered view to a whole-humane view of the world, and we must learn to sense, to feel, to perceive something of how truly anthroposophy human being, overcoming this head-centeredness – so I may call it in contrast to the anthroposophical centeredness – the one-sided head-centeredness that comes from modern science and so only takes hold of the head.

If you take something of what I said yesterday, when I described how man can become aware that he is a lamp for the cherubim, a heating apparatus for the seraphim, how he enters into the world of cherubim and seraphim in thinking and willing, how he means something for this world, how his self is not only there for itself, but stands in a living relationship to the weaving and life of the spiritual hierarchies - if you make that an attitude, then you will feel something of how the whole person can truly become brain, how he as a whole person can thus come into communication with his surroundings, as otherwise only the head can. Then you will feel what is actually meant by this: to perceive the world as a whole human being.

But if you perceive the world as a whole human being, then you cannot think, feel and will one-sidedly, but you become immersed in the whole of earthly existence. You immerse yourself in the whole experience of the world, and it arises by itself, I would say, the inner sense of dependence on it, not only in thoughts but also in forms, not only in the formless thoughts but in the beautiful, expressive forms. The urge arises, the need to express things in artistic forms that you understand intellectually.

And again: when a person delves into the entire spiritual life of the world, his life basically becomes prayer, and he no longer has such an urgent need to single out little minutes in which to pray. Rather, he knows: when I think, I am a lampstand for the cherubim; when I act, when I act with will, I am a heating apparatus for the seraphim. Man knows that he lives in the whole spiritual world structure. Thinking becomes a religious conviction for him, and acting becomes a moral prayer.

We see how these three areas, art, religion and science, which had to go their separate ways in the world for a while, are seeking each other out of the whole human being again. At the beginning of the development of the earth, man brought so much with him from extra-terrestrial development that he still had the living, unified feeling, the unified striving, as it expressed itself in the old days in the union of art, religion and science. One could say that in man at that time there still strove his angel, his Angelos. But man would never have become free if it had continued like this. Man had to be emancipated from this old inheritance. But he must find again in the ascending evolution what he has lost in the descending evolution.

Goethe's beautiful words about architecture have been mentioned several times. He called architecture frozen music. Let us dwell on this saying. It is truly possible to call architecture, in its previous development, a kind of frozen music. The forms of architecture are like frozen melodies, like solidified harmonies and rhythms. But we have the task, since we are in the midst of the crisis mentioned, of bringing the frozen back into motion, into liveliness, of making the frozen forms musically alive again, so to speak. When you see our building, you will see our efforts to set the old, rigid forms of construction in motion, to transform them into life, to make them musical again. This is the reason why we do not have a round building, but a single axis of symmetry, along which the motifs move.

Thus we see how the spiritual-scientific worldview, including its artistic aims, is intimately connected with all the tasks and necessary impulses of our time, which we recognize in the crises of our time. Understanding and seeing this is our task, it is of utmost importance for our task. We must gradually bring together all the details of our task from this point of view.

Today, people quickly forget how to use their entire organism like a kind of brain. He has the potential, but as soon as he has developed from a crawling child into an upright human being in the first years of life, he quickly forgets how to relate to his entire organism, just as he will then relate to his brain throughout his entire life; for this straightening up, this bringing-himself-into-the-vertical is in fact a working of the spirit on the whole human being. This is the last remnant of what we bring with us from our spiritual, prenatal life, because in our earthly life we quickly unlearn it. And then we drag the whole organism, which eats and drinks and digests, through life like a burden; we drag it through life and no longer bring it into a respectful relationship with the spiritual world, but far away from the spiritual world.

The child still has the great wisdom to know that man's task lies in the heights far from the world and has the direction towards heights far from the world in its organism. When that is over, the organism becomes a digestive and gastric sac and is separated from the relationship with the outside world.

Not even the relationship to the outside world, of which I spoke yesterday, is maintained. When we, for example, rest our head in our hand in order to express something weighty in the external organism, we hardly notice it. And if someone in their unconsciousness still retains the habit of using the whole organism and not just thinking with the brain, but also placing the hand or the index finger on the forehead or the nose, thus indicating that they are really distinguishing and judging - we do not notice that this is an instinctive effort to use the whole organism like a brain. It does not have to happen in this external way. Of course, spiritual science does not intend to turn human beings into fidgets who think with their whole bodies. But spiritually, of course, the consciousness must expand to include the whole human being in the cosmos, to know that the cosmos can be mirrored by the whole body, just as the cosmos is now only mirrored by the brain.

When consciousness is broadened in this way, when the human being really goes beyond merely dragging his organism through life, so to speak, and learns to use and handle it, then the foundation is laid for what must be laid in our time: a human, a totally human world view, as opposed to a mere cerebral view, must become what anthroposophy has to strive for.

If we try to do this, and if we try to elevate our attitudes in this way, which otherwise remain only ideas, then we will achieve what is intended with this spiritual scientific movement of ours. For we will gradually find our way as human beings, ascending in development, to the real figure of Christ, when we have become more and more familiarized with the all-human conception of the world. That this Christ-figure cannot be found is only the fault of the brain-view. The moment this is overcome, the moment spiritual science has become so strong that man's consciousness is so completely reorganized in the way described, then what has often been said about the Christ-view will really come to pass. But then our human world will be able to achieve what it can only achieve from within and which will lead it beyond many things that have now led to a crisis among the earth's human race, not only inwardly, in terms of world views, but also outwardly, in terms of people and nations.

One would like people to gradually realize, at least a small part of people, that real help is needed. Then one will also realize that the help that humanity needs can only be provided by the souls, only from within, and that everything else cannot even be a surrogate, because surrogates can no longer help against the great crises of our time, only the real and the true. And the genuine and true must be conquered by humanity in the spirit. Christmas celebration

You often hear, especially from the learned or, let's say, from the progressive side: Yes, spiritual entities are present for those who still cling to old childish beliefs, who live in their imagination and their feelings. But for people who have clear, logical concepts, such spiritual entities are not there. I would like to remind you of what the Leipzig university professor Wundt wrote, in which he fights against all spiritual facts. He says: Those people who believe in such spiritual entities from the outset see these things, but those who do not believe in them do not see them. For them, it remains something that must always be doubted. But that is the decisive factor.

Now let us ask ourselves whether those who see the world with clear logical concepts are really decisive in their statements about the phenomena of a higher world. Here we must take into account a little of what is a condition of life for a whole series of initially elementary phenomena in the higher world.

We are not only constantly surrounded by sensual things and beings, but we are also always surrounded by a world of supersensible entities. One should not think that these supersensible entities have no relation to the visible nature. Just as man consists of visible and invisible parts, of his visible physical body and of his invisible spirit and soul, so also other entities consist of a visible and an invisible part. The relationships can then, however, be very different from those in humans.

The simplest supersensible beings we have to deal with are the so-called elementary beings. These are entities that surround us at every turn. The whole space around us is filled with such entities. Just as plants, animals and people live around us, so do supersensible beings. But they are not always fully developed; they are in a more or less imperfectly developed state. If you look at the natural world around us, you will recognize the same thing in the visible world of the senses. If you have a bean here, a bean seed, and there a bean plant that has shot up, winding around the stick and unfolding bean blossoms, then you can say to yourself: In a certain respect, the bean seed and the bean plant that has shot up and is winding around a stick in many turns are basically the same from a certain point of view. If you put the bean in the ground today, it can sprout up in exactly the same way on the vine in a while, and can be exactly the same as the fully-grown bean plant standing before you today. So here in the world of the senses you seemingly have two entities. From a different point of view, however, they are in fact the same. It is the same in the spiritual world. There you actually have beings that, like beans in the seed state, exist as spiritual germs that surround us all the time in the spiritual world. Just as you give the bean the opportunity to be the expressed bean plant, you can also give these spiritual germs, which constantly surround us in the astral realm, a soil in which they can take root. If you keep the bean on the surface of the earth, on stony ground, it will never be able to develop. But if you sink it into suitable soil, it will sprout. It can be the same with a spiritual seed. There are beings around us, such seed beings, that simply grow through what we develop, that thereby have a breeding ground in which they grow and flourish. Suppose there are spiritual beings around you who, just as the bean plant needs physical soil, salts, physical light and so on to build a physical body, want to build an astral body out of astral matter.

What is astral matter? These are, for example, human passions, urges, desires. Astral matter is greed, generosity, which develops love. All this relates to a being that is not rooted in the physical in its entire nature and wants to make an astral body for itself [like the ground for seeds]. What a person emits, develops in desires and instincts, is necessary for certain entities, so that one can say: Here in the astral realm is a spiritual seed, and there a person develops a pronounced instinct for greed. That is a spiritual soil for a certain spiritual being that is in its environment; it finds an opportunity in it to grow, so you give spiritual beings the opportunity to live in it. In fact, that is present.

For example, it is also known that people seek to discharge their pain in tears. No one will deny that the tears have something that alleviates the pain. A certain pain-relieving agent is the tears. An astral substance causes this peculiar soothing effect that lies in tears. This astral substance, which comes about because the pain is discharged in tears, causes certain entities to incarnate, to embody themselves. In fact, the person who cries draws in spiritual entities from the environment. These cause the pain to become less and less.

Now, however, pain is often, when we experience it ourselves without it discharging in tears, a significant increase in strength, which can have an even stronger effect if we accumulate it as a good experience and do not seek the voluptuousness of tears. Then they are a source of wisdom. Painful experiences are a source of wisdom. Time and again, the one who knows something, who sees something in the world, will gladly give up his pleasures; but he will not gladly give up his pains, because painful experiences reveal what we should and should not do. If something has caused pain, then we know that it is not life-promoting, and we know how to behave in later times.

Great idealists in previous incarnations were often martyrs. From these painful experiences, which they bore with dignity and equanimity, an ideal sense arose. From this you can see that bitter experiences are connected with wisdom. You will also have to admit that when a person cries out the painful experiences, he then also dulls their effects. That is indeed the case. He who wants to see into higher worlds must, above all, understand how to bury pain in his soul, how to turn it into an active ferment and not let it disappear in outwardly flowing tears. In addition to all the figurative interpretations, the word in “Light on the Path” is also to be taken literally as a real truth:

Before the eye can see, it must wean itself from tears.

This is not to say anything against tears in people at a certain stage of development. So you see how this provides a breeding ground for spiritual beings who are constantly present, and from which astral beings sprout like plants from sown soil.

What then are these astral germs? Where do they exist? If you ask yourself these questions very carefully, you will understand many things in nature that would otherwise be difficult for you to grasp. For those who seek to fathom the world in this way, the things of nature are not purely physical entities, as one would usually assume, but they are permeated with spiritual life. All of nature is alive, truly alive with spiritual entities. The ancients knew this and still know it today. Paracelsus, for example, said that spiritual entities rest everywhere in plants and stones.

Now let us try to explore the nature of such spiritual entities that are different from the entities that surround us. First, I have to discuss some concepts that will help you understand the whole supersensory nature. Some of you already know these things, but I believe I can put them in a different context. Besides, it is good to hear them from time to time.

People know their environment and act out of their consciousness. What does that mean? When they are asleep, they do not act out of their consciousness, because then their actual higher self, their actual higher being, is separated from the body. The body is on its own. When you look at a sleeping person, what are you actually looking at? The human being consists of the physical body, [which you see with your eyes,] then of an etheric body, which is similarly constructed and forms a kind of model for the physical body, then of the astral body with the life of feelings, instincts, desires and passions, and finally of the I, in which I combine the higher parts.

When a person is awake, the following parts are present: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I. The physical body is in the sensory world, the etheric body, the astral body and the I are in the supersensible world. So we have a being that has its consciousness in the supersensible and only the body on the physical plane. During sleep, it discards the physical body and lives in the higher worlds. What the human being represents here in the state of sleep can be seen as a constant state in the other physical beings that surround you. With plants, you can say – and not just figuratively – that they sleep. What man is during the night – approximately – that is what the plant always is: it is a sleeper, has a sleeping consciousness. It is important to realize this correctly. You see, just as man, when he sleeps, does not have his consciousness in the physical body, so the plant also does not have its consciousness in the physical body, and therefore it is a sleeper.

This is how man differs from the plant, in that man has his consciousness within his body, while the plant has its consciousness outside of its body. The plant is not without consciousness, it just has it outside of its body; it has it on the mental plane. The animal has its consciousness on the astral plane, but the plant has it on the mental plane.

We now come to the description of the external sensory world, of sensory nature. I will try to present it to you schematically. When you look at this whole world, it comes to you through your senses, through your eyes, ears, through sensation and feeling. We call this the physical plane. Just as a sponge is permeated by water, so this world is permeated by the astral world; it permeates the physical world. The astral plane, however, does not have objects and entities that can be touched and seen with the eyes. The “matter that is present on it is made of the same stuff as your desires and longings.

If you have a candle here and light it, it will burn on the physical plane. The fire is therefore the result of a physical process. But if you curse your neighbor, fire will burn on the astral plane. He is in pain, and that is visible on the astral plane in a kind of flame. Lust is something similar on the astral plane.

An even more refined substance is that from which your thoughts are woven, we call that the mental substance.

Then there is an even higher plane, that is the higher mental plane. The substance on this plane is the same as that from which the thoughts consist, which are completely free of sensuality, the highest thoughts that a person can have at all.

Now we have the following beings on earth: minerals, plants, animals and human beings. When a person is awake, his consciousness is here on the physical plane; his consciousness dwells in the physical body. The animal's consciousness is not in the physical body, but on the astral plane. This means that the animal is not able to express its self on the physical plane. It lacks the ability to think for itself. There is a so-called generic soul in animals; this lives on the astral plane. The plant has its self-awareness on the mental plane. Thus man, animal, plant and finally mineral are in their duality as form and consciousness. From this we can see what mineral, plant, animal and human being are. The animal is not able to grasp the ego. There is no instrument through which it can work. On the astral plane, animals are like human beings on the physical plane; they are beginning to speak to you. And on the mental plane, plants are like human beings on the physical plane. The animal is on the physical plane and rooted in the astral plane with its consciousness. It can also be the other way around, namely, the consciousness is on the physical plane and the body is on the astral plane, which then reaches into our world with its consciousness. What would such a being mean? Such a being would move up in the astral realm, it would go for walks in the astral realm. And just as we experience the animal down here, the “animal that has its consciousness in the physical realm expresses itself in physical action, that is, in the form of an attraction.

For example, the physicist has a magnet here, and if he brings something iron close to it, it is attracted. The physicist then speaks of an attraction. Of course, that is just a word. What is the truth here? The truth is what I have described. In truth, the magnetic force that is at work and visible here is based on an astral entity. All natural forces are based on astral entities. The forces of nature are based on astral beings. There are beings walking on the astral plane, and here they express themselves as natural forces. Natural forces are nothing more than actions on the physical plane of beings that live on the astral plane!

Therefore, anyone who approaches nature with their entire sensitivity will be able to perceive such beings from the natural forces.

Take a highly sensitive person who approaches such forces. He will not only be able to say when the iron is there and is attracted: magnetic force is present here, but his eye will see the magnetic forces - and that is the same as the consciousness of the animal on the astral plane. These magnetic forces have their body on the astral plane, and this can be seen by the sensitive person in question.

A piece of sulfur is not only a piece of sulfur, but it is also a force, and this force corresponds to an astral being on the astral plane. This is a being, an organism on the astral plane.

From this you can see that we are actually constantly dealing with entities that have their being on the astral plane, as with the forces of nature. A person can find one plant lovely and another one repulsive. The clairvoyant can see that the reason for this is that one plant has forces that express themselves in a beautiful astral body, while the other has forces that express themselves in a hideous astral body. The smell that the physical human being can smell, the astral human being can perceive, you can see in an astral form. When you begin to really develop the powers to see what is not perceptible to the physical senses, you will be surrounded by light effects in the plant. We have two entities in the plant, one inside the other, belonging together. The plant sprouts from the ground. It has its consciousness on the mental plane and its physical body down here. Another entity is placed in it, which has its body on the astral plane and its consciousness down here.

Follow with me the path that the animal takes through its life. When the animal is alive, when it is born, the astral body of the animal arises first, then the etheric body, and then they clothe themselves with physical matter. The animal gets the physical body, the astral lives in the physical body. Now take this animal's life. It can only exist as long as there is oxygen in the air. The moment the air does not have enough oxygen, the animal dies. The moment you bury the animal alive, it also dies because it does not have enough oxygen. So you see that the mere physical body cannot hold the animal's astral body unless the appropriate air of life is present. If you cover the whole animal with earth, then that animal cannot live.

You can do something similar with the astral beings I have been talking about. Suppose you have the astral body of an entity that accompanies a plant that belongs to it; you are now confronting this entity. When you confront it, it is often the case for such an entity as if you were planting a bean in the ground. You offer it the opportunity to root, to grow and to flourish through your own spirit. It takes on an outwardly visible form. This is a very important process. You stand in front of a plant, it begins to be surrounded by fire sparks; a being is formed that is connected to the plant; this being's body is formed.

Now you begin to think about this being. When you think, it is really like a kind of soil in which the being is sunk. But as beneficial as the soil is for the plant when it envelops part of its organs in the right way, it is as pernicious for it when you cover the whole plant. And just as the soil kills the plant when you cover the whole plant with soil, so does the soil of thought act on such entities. If you completely cover them with thought material, it has a killing effect. They lack the air of life. This is why the elemental spirits of nature die when their life air is taken from them through thoughts.

This is one reason why caustic thinkers, people who spin out everything and want to surround everything with their thoughts, actually kill the delicate beings that surround us. This will explain to you what it means for such beings to 'die'; they actually die many times over in people. Just as a landslide buries all the plants below and causes them to die, so human thinking, by spreading, kills a whole series of nature entities.

Myth and legend have expressed this beautifully in symbolic language; you can find it expressed in the myth of the brownies: in the past, when man did not think so much, they were there. Then came the time when man began to think; then the nature spirits withdrew. This is expressed symbolically, but corresponds to a hidden reality. Just as man, in his physical body, is consigned to the earth when he dies, so these nature spirits, in their elemental bodies, are sunk into the mental earth in the upper worlds, and there they die. Man dies in the physical earth, the nature spirit dies in the “earth of the spiritual world”! There they have their grave, and it is prepared for them by the megalomaniac, clever thinking of men.

To those who have not yet been initiated into these things, the matter will seem fantastic. The one who approaches the spiritual world with doubting thoughts will not find this spiritual world. He behaves as if he were walking through a swarm of mosquitoes with a flame of fire when he passes through the spiritual world. Such is the case with a thinker who has no sensitivity. Many slain [spiritual] entities indicate the trace of such thinkers. Therefore, man is often a destroyer of elemental spirits. He is something that wants to develop higher, and these entities, which are in a reverse development, are often destroyed by people. Here you have another practical example that makes a real teaching of occultism seem understandable: that you yourself must offer the spiritual entities that which allows them to appear, which allows them to be there. Hence the ever-recurring demand: one should not think caustically, should not criticize, but should devotedly abandon oneself to one's surroundings. Then the bright spiritual elemental beings emerge from their darkness. These things are all connected with the profound laws of spiritual existence.

Now another example from which you can see how the immediate life becomes explicable through such insights that belong to the hidden worlds. Suppose a person lies to another. If I tell the truth, it means something quite different in the spiritual world than if I lie. When I tell the truth, I create a thought-form. Every thought I express is a form in the supersensible world. Now the fact that I want to communicate also corresponds to something in the spiritual world. Every fact in the external, sensory space also corresponds to something in the spiritual world. The moment I speak the truth, the thought form I have formed connects with what corresponds to the fact in the spiritual world. But if I say or think a lie that does not correspond to the fact, then my thought form will immediately rebound on me when I try to unite it with the spiritual counterpart that corresponds to the fact, and it will stick to me. Those who habitually tell lies are constantly having their lies rebound on them, and they surround themselves with a whole armor of lies. Now imagine such a person, enclosed in such an armor of lies. The forces that could develop him cannot enter, and the result is that he lags behind. Those who lie exclude themselves from the power that they must let flow in and out, and as a result they lag behind. Therefore, everything that is untruthful, that does not correspond to the facts, is an obstacle to development. All truth connects with the facts themselves, and it allows man to enter into the whole stream of facts. If you take this into consideration, you will understand what it means to be a 'truthful person'. To be a truthful person means to make yourself capable of progressing, of going further and further. Only truthful people will progress. On the physical plane, a lie can perhaps be hidden, but on the astral plane, a lie cannot be hidden. Liars are surrounded by thick crusts on the astral plane. Therefore, they cannot develop. For this reason, the biggest stumbling block in the world is the existing lie. 'Lie' in Hebrew is 'Tophel'. And if you imagine the 'spirit of lies' in the world, which wanted to make it its business to put as many obstacles as possible in the way of the world, then it would have to be a 'spirit of lies'. He would have to lie in such a way that a crust would form around all of humanity; he would be the corrupter of humanity. Corrupter is called 'Mephiz' in Hebrew. So you can call such a spirit of lies 'Mephistophel', 'spirit of lies'. His name is chosen because he is the 'father of all obstacles'. Goethe also calls him that.

So here you have something from which you can see that you can only understand the poet by looking at him from the point of view of occultism. You will find exactly the same with most really great poets. You will never find that the great world poets created out of a random fantasy, but out of the occult facts, out of the occult connections!

Now another example, which has been mentioned before. We are in the fifth root race, and within this, in the fifth sub-race. Three sub-races had a priestly culture. In the fourth cultural period, the Semitic peoples came up. From the priestly cultures, a culture developed that was quite different, that was not based on inspiration from above; namely, the priestly culture was based on that. The culture of the fourth sub-race was based on cleverness. The emergence of Greek culture thus means overcoming priestly wisdom through cunning. This is presented to us by a Greek poet and a Greek sculptor. The poet Homer presents this to us in Odysseus, who overcomes the Trojans through cunning by making a wooden horse. The sculptor has the old Trojan priest Laocoön crushed by the snake, the symbol of wisdom and prudence. Real poets have always drawn from the occult. The others are not poets, because nothing in their poetry corresponds to reality. Poetry can only flourish among spiritual peoples. The truth is handed down to people in different ways. The poets were not merely entertainers of mankind; they were seers who wanted to shine beyond our physical reality into the higher worlds. Homer is therefore the “blind seer” because he created his works from the hidden, not from the world of the senses. So you see that true great poetry can only be understood if we look at it on the basis of occult facts. Life and the creation of man only become clear to us when we look at them from the occult point of view. Consider what this means! One can rail against occultism and regard it as something that makes people fantasize. But you see: in truth, occultism leads deeper and deeper into the world. It makes the outer context of the world truly understandable. There is, as Goethe already said, no outside and no inside. “Nature has neither core nor shell, it is all at once.” Apparently the secrets are revealed when people open their minds.

This brings me to something that may seem hard to believe at first, but which is really true, namely the benefit of having an external exoteric, theosophical movement alongside the occult schools. Only those who want to live an occult life should be initiated. “What is the purpose of having a Theosophical Society?” you might ask. Those who approach this matter only with intellectual knowledge will hardly find a satisfactory answer. But those who delve into this spiritual world would have more success. It may take a long time, but what comes of it is a real insight into the world. People do not sit together for nothing. Depending on their karma, it takes longer for some and shorter for others. What one hears there awakens one's powers, leading one into the spiritual world oneself, the beginning of initiation. This must be borne in mind if one is to understand the true purpose and the true reason for the Theosophical movement. The true reason for the Theosophical movement is not only to speak in the broadest circles about the higher worlds, but also, through our words, to awaken in people the gift and ability to live in the higher worlds themselves, by infusing them with the power of the higher worlds. This is absolutely necessary. Indeed, someone who understood everything, who could grasp with his pure conceptual material everything that can be told about the higher worlds, and who approached the matter with impartiality, would have only a fine membrane to break, and the gift of clairvoyance would arise without further ado. There may be individuals who have an abbreviated process. There must always be those who develop a little further than the rest. But all of humanity can be helped in our time. What is taught today can, without fail, produce powers of vision in time, in the following way:

Today people think they are terribly clever in their critical thoughts. To what do they owe this? Suppose you are sitting in a meeting. In front of you stands a speaker who, as they say, proclaims the truth. If such a person had spoken to them in their previous incarnation, they would not have understood him. Not a bit of it! Suppose everyone sitting in such a gathering had been on earth fifteen hundred years ago or more. But then they were told fairy tales by their priests. They were not taught in the way we are today, in an intellectual way, but they were told fairy tales. And these souls embody themselves again: the power with which they have accepted the fairy tales is now coming into its own in that they can show understanding for intellectual speech. And through the understanding that has now been developed, a higher understanding will come about. It will no longer be a matter of understanding with the intellect, but of clairvoyance.

So you can see that the theosophical movement opens up a great perspective. It works in the same way as the priests of centuries ago worked into the supersensible world with their fairy tales. Just as they have sunk something into the soul that is coming forth today, so today's intellectual education will, in the next embodiment, produce the ability to penetrate the world with clairvoyant powers. That is the world mission of the Theosophical Society. That is what it wants to be and what it should be. If you look at it that way, you will realize that you cannot have that in occultist associations. There are many movements that have ethical or other purposes. But movements in which there is talk of the transcendental worlds in order to awaken the spiritual, the spirit, do not exist as popular movements outside of the theosophical movement today. That is the reason why such a current was brought into being by the theosophical movement. The theosophical movement is not something that teaches us dull theories, but leads us directly into life, giving us guidance to look around at the world with open eyes.

Throughout the world, there is a kind of blindness in those who should be taking the initiative in the outside world. Last Thursday, I tried to make this clear in the social sphere. In all areas where a knowledge of the forces should prevail, we see that blindness is actually the hallmark of those who should be awakening. Theosophy wants to bring out the underlying forces.

Man is often an enemy of the elemental beings that surround us constantly. But he becomes their friend when he recognizes them and becomes familiar with them and works in their sense. We become friends with those beings that always surround us in the spiritual world when we enter into the hidden sides of nature; then they work with us, not against us. Everything that occurs in the world and hinders progress and causes much bloodshed in the world has its reason in nothing other than in the awakened elemental beings in the world. They are enemies of man as long as man wants to work without knowing them. They transform into friends when he wants to get to know them, when he wants to face them with familiarity. Externally, physically speaking, it means: Man stands in the world, works and works, and around him things happen that arise from his actions. He sees nothing. He sees absolutely nothing. Then suddenly revolutionary movements break in because he has seen nothing, because he has not seen the hidden things that were there long before they discharged the external hostile storm. If man would see them, he would not be so careless of them as to let them degenerate into revolutionary currents. He would work with them. From this you can see that not recognizing the course of the laws, the spiritual elemental beings, destruction, turmoil and revolutions in the world, and that the more we get to know the forces around us, the more we will see what we call the calm development of people. Thus, on a large scale, knowledge of the elemental nature, knowledge of the spiritual world around us, has great practical value. It allows us to penetrate deeper into our environment and understand it.

Next time, we want to talk about a problem that can affect people very deeply. We have already heard a lot about the forces that work around people. And so we want to ask ourselves: Is a human being a being that can be said to have freedom or not? Are they on a tight rein from the elemental beings or not? These are the questions that we want to address next time.

[Dearly beloved!]

It is not possible to determine exactly when the Book of the Dead was written. In any case, it is one of the most important documents, because it shows us that in such early times in Egypt a world view, a deepening, prevailed which aimed strictly at a unified world and which, on the other hand, already had the strange urge in itself to understand death as a symbol, to understand death in such a way that it does not appear as the terrible in itself, but that it appears as that which can be seen as a symbol, as a mere allegory, which still stands high above [life]. If death is to be overcome, it is certain that death can only be overcome spiritually. It essentially deals with the transition from physical life to life after death - and that means nothing other than life in general. We can describe even more precisely what is contained in the Book of the Dead. It contains chants, hymns to the sun god Ra, to Osiris, the son of the sun god, hymns which are preferably put into the mouths of the dead. These dead who have made their way to the afterlife, these dead are to experience something, they are to gain knowledge [of what they have seen and what they are aware of from those who are no longer bound to the body. That is the first part. The second part consists of the dead person being held up to account in a kind of judgment for the debts he has incurred. He is weighed, and depending on the findings, his value appears in the overall structure of the universe. Those who have reached a high level will not - as is often said - come to Osiris, but they will become "Osiris. It is curious that the book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the [sun] god Ra, the second part deals with human destiny, the third part then shows the path to reach Osiris, the path that leads to deification. This book thus represents the path to life, the path from the individual life to the total life, which is achieved through the realization and deification of man.

The details of the Book of the Dead are important in the most diverse ways for the history of the development of world views. In the Book of the Dead, for example, we find the myth of Osiris' battle with Typhon, Osiris' enemy, hatred. Isis had to find Osiris again in the universe, and she then brings forth the younger Osiris, Horus, whom she describes as the deification of the universe. We find this in the Book of the Dead.

But then we also find the doctrine of the seven-part man in it. The Egyptians thought of man as being made up of the body, the spiritual body and the mummy.

So we have three stages:
[1.] Heart, sensation or mind,
[2-] Genius and creation,
[3-] the Holy Spirit and intelligence.

These are roughly the details of this Book of the Dead, which was in any case much better known in antiquity than in later times. In later times, the awareness of the teachings as they are expressed in the Book of the Dead has been lost. However, we often find the teachings of the Book of the Dead again in Greece, and the entire Greek spiritual life in the post-Pythagorean period can only be understood if one assumes that [its] views were the teachings of this Book of the Dead, the tripartite division of the human path of knowledge and the eventual merging into the Osiris nature. If one assumes that they were transplanted to Greece and that essentially the same views lived there. However, it must be noted that the Egyptians did not have an intermediate stage that played a greater role among the Greeks, namely the myth developed with [a certain sense of] beauty. The Greeks loved to embellish everything with beauty. We have therefore been compelled to regard the entire Greek religion, the entire Greek world view, which stands between Pythagoreanism and Platonism, as an aesthetic one. We can do this if we see it as born out of Greek myth, but in its spiritualized form.

We know the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, the myth of the Argonauts and so on. However, we can always assume - and we have to hold on to this - that the myth exists in a threefold meaning:

[1] The first meaning is that in its immediate form as the purely naturalistic conception,
2. then as a human, as a symbol and
3. thirdly as the divine.]

And the third, the divine, was the concept that was taught only to a select few, only to a few who had prepared themselves for it. We can already prove this historically. We are told of Samothrace, an island, that the deities there were nothing other than names for other deities. However, it is not to be believed that they were the same as the names of Greek or Egyptian deities. For outsiders, they had the same names. But for the insiders, they were deeper understandings of the entire myths and stories of the gods.

The best-known Greek myth is that of Demeter and her daughter Persephone and then the myth of Dionysus, which has already been mentioned several times. Demeter, one of the supreme female Greek deities, was first understood in a naturalistic sense. She had a daughter with Zeus, Persephone. She was stolen by Hades, the god of the underworld. Hades had asked to be allowed to take this daughter as his wife in the underworld. She was only to remain in the upper world temporarily. She was to remain two thirds in the upper world and one third in the underworld. This myth, which is alive everywhere in Greece in its naturalistic meaning, was also that which was to be found in certain mysteries, namely that on which the Eleusinian Mysteries were based. This myth also had a threefold meaning. The naturalistic meaning lies simply in the fact that one understands the actual as such, that one has a mythological history of the gods. The second conception would then be something that took place in [Greek] life, and that was the marriage of the Ionian spirit with the Doric.

The Greek people were divided into tribes. Among the most important were the Dorians and the Ionians. The myth of Demeter had originated among the Dorians, and the Ionians had adopted it and mixed it with the myth of Dionysus. We are interested in the Dionysus myth because it leads to an esoteric view. Dionysus is also a son of Zeus and Demeter. He was torn to pieces and only managed to save his heart. From this, Zeus had formed the younger Dionysus. But he could no longer take the limbs. It is therefore the case that the world represents the scattered limbs. This therefore represents the marriage of the Dorian Persephone with the Ionian Dionysus. The fusion of these two views has thus taken place in this myth.

But what remains to be noted is the third, the divine conception. We can only understand this historically if we stick to the sparse information we have. We are first referred to the temple in which the service of Demeter takes place. This Demeter service is a service in which we encounter the three deities mentioned. Demeter herself is one of the greatest deities of Greece, symbolically shaped, with the inscription: "I am the origin of the soul, I am the origin of the spirit." At her side, Persephone is presented to us with the inscription: "I am death and carry within me the secret of life." Her brother Dionysus is presented to us with an even stranger inscription: "I am death, I am life, I am rebirth and adorned with wings." - If we understand this, we come to the interpretation of one of the most important Greek myths. Demeter loses her daughter. She has to give her Persephone to Hades. She could return to her mother if she had not already partaken of the fruit of the pomegranate with Hades and was therefore unable to return completely. This Persephone is supposed to save her brother. Only this makes it possible - now in a deeper sense - for Persephone to return, for Dionysus to sacrifice himself. We have to look at these two in context again. We must recognize that sacrifice is what matters here. This is shown to us by the fact that Orpheus - who is originally credited with having communicated the deeper content of this to the Greek people - was also sacrificed, for he is also said to have been torn apart and to have lived on as a spirit by having flowed out into the world matter. The child of eternal life must be sacrificed to Hades, to Pluto. We can only understand this if we see the material world in Pluto. Thus, according to the esoteric view, we see in Demeter the universal spirituality, the primordial mother of intelligence, and in Hades the material world. In the whole Persephone myth we see the necessity of Persephone's falling away from her mother. The daughter must enter matter. She must partake of the pomegranate of the underworld. Now she can no longer save herself from matter and therefore a second sacrifice is necessary. Persephone's brother, Dionysus, must sacrifice himself again. He must allow his [own] spiritual nature to flow out into the gross nature, so that Persephone now enters into a spiritual marriage with her brother, but can flow back again to the original spirit of the primordial mother, Demeter. This mystery of the spirituality's necessary departure from itself, this immersion of the spirits in the material and this longing of the spirit to return to the spiritual is expressed in the Demeter myth.

This was the vivid experience that was to be taught to those who were introduced to the Eleusinian Mysteries. They were to be given the urge to find their way back from matter to the spiritual primordial mother. This is what lived in Greece in the spirit of a few chosen ones and what carried the whole world view between Pythagoras and Plato. What lived as the deeper spirit in these personalities from Empedocles through Anaxagoras to Socrates and Plato sometimes appears to be merely a logical chain of thought, as presented to us by the philosophers. But it is an exposition of Greek myth, an exposition that was cultivated wherever a deeper foundation was sought. This is what appears to them as a mere logical chain of thought.

I would like to point out another myth, which was cultivated even more frequently than the Demeter myth, which is perhaps easier to understand, and which was cultivated in order to gradually lead initiates into a deeper spiritual understanding of the world. I would like to refer to the myth of the Argonaut voyage. This shows in each of its individual sentences that it can only be understood as the symbolic clothing of a deeper wisdom. Phrixos and his sister Helle set off on the ram [...] to the barbarian king. On the way, Helle falls into the sea and Phrixos alone reaches the coast on the ram. When they reached the barbarian people, the ram was sacrificed to the king. But the ram's skin was hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and guarded by a great dragon. Jason, together with Orpheus, Heracles, Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Meleager, Peleus, Neleus, Admetus, Pirithoos and many others, undertakes to retrieve this ram's skin [- the golden fleece]. These are the great heroes of Greece. It is significant that Jason, with the representatives of the highest Greek spirituality, undertakes to retrieve the skin. He actually wins the skin and brings it back. The dragon guarding the skin is defeated by Jason. The dragon's teeth are then sown, and out of these grow fierce men who fight each other. Finally, in short, he gets the fleece with the help of the sorceress Medea. On the way back, however, Medea decides to dismember [her] little brother Apsyrtos. The father Aietes collects the pieces and therefore does not reach the fugitives. The fleece is brought back to Greece.

We must also interpret this in a threefold sense. Firstly natural, secondly human and thirdly divine. [As a human event it is of no interest, but in its divine meaning this myth perhaps leads most deeply into the Greek intellectual world.] Phrixos is divine vision, that which points us to the abyss of divine being, to the premonition of an infinite depth. Nothing else is expressed in the personality of Phrixos. [Brightness is the personality, the representative of man before his fall into sin, for whom the struggle of the spirit with materiality has not yet existed] - the undivided humanity, which is connected with nothing other than the infinite vision of infinity. [Both set out on the path to the most sacred thing they have. And the representatives of the human soul first come to the sacred grove of the gods in order to sacrifice to it and to begin the path of life with this human soul]. We have only one other person in the Argonaut train. Phrixos begins his journey through life into the realm of the barbarians on the other side of the sea. This is to be understood as the realm of passions, the realm of sensuality. The human soul is to be sacrificed to the realm of materiality. It is to be sacrificed to the waves and bustle of the world. As a result, one thing is lost, the original innocence. It is initially submerged, lost. It is initially something that has flowed out into existence. [It is something that is initially completely lost, which is why it has sunk into the Hellespont. The soul is led into life, where we have nothing but a dark urge, where we must find our way back to the higher life]. But [the soul] must be redeemed anew, just as Persephone was redeemed by Dionysus. It must be redeemed. What had to be sacrificed to life must be redeemed. It must be redeemed here by Jason, the Greek hero. The ram is sacrificed to the gods. Only the ram's skin, that which surrounds the human soul as a shell, is first hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and carefully guarded by the dragon. This is initially nothing other than what is given in the Book of the Dead. [The ram's skin] is the representative of enlightenment, of knowledge. It must first be redeemed from the fury of the terrible powers that lurk before it. The king's son Jason must overcome these forces through knowledge in conjunction with spiritual and physical forces. He must lead this ram's skin back to Greece, supported by Medea, a female figure. I have already pointed out that the female figure signifies a state of consciousness in Greek. The soul must be redeemed with the help of Medea's magical power. From this immersion she can then be led back up to her deification, her divinization. That is the deeper meaning of the Argonaut saga.

The fact that the young son of Aietes, Medea's brother, has to be killed so that Medea's father cannot reach [the fleeing Jason] also has its significance. The one who has achieved this must leave behind many things that have been in his life. He has to leave some things behind, for the reason that [he cannot be caught up] on the path to deeper knowledge. This is how the saga of the Argonauts concludes. Basically, it is nothing more than a different version, more tailored to the individuality of man, of the myth that we also encounter in the Demeter myth.

This conception of the Greek myth then confronts us in a philosophically one-sided formation in a personality that represents a kind of fall from grace for the Greek world view: in Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. He first pointed out in an intellectual or rational way that sensual knowledge cannot satisfy man. He pointed out that man cannot get to the bottom of things and that the weighing up and weighing down of the world cannot be the truth, but that the truth must be something much deeper, that it can only be purely spiritual. He first put this into this form: true existence can only be achieved through pure thinking, through the deepest knowledge, while the senses only present us with a dream. - Parmenides thus divides the whole of existence into two parts, into sensual illusion on the one hand and intellectual, mental existence on the other. But there is still something that he could not find, and that is the ego. He could not find the figure of Dionysus in the figure of Persephone, in the urge to emerge from the sensual, the spirit. Parmenides did not take this [step]. He only saw that which is enchanted in the sensual world and on the other side Demeter [and Hades], the materiality. But he was unable to find the path that unites the two.

In a slightly different form, we encounter the same thing in Empedocles, who said that the primordial being had dissolved into a series of elements, into fire, water, earth and air. In these four elements he saw nothing other than individual eternal manifestations of the primordial being, the eternal world spirit. And in every single thing he saw certain mixtures of the four elements, even in man. The fact that the human being also consists of a mixture of the same elements as the world means that the human being can understand the world. The same can be recognized by the same. This is the same thing that Goethe says:

Were not the eye sun-like,
it could never behold the sun.
If God's own power were not in us,
how could the divine delight us?

This view was already held by Empedocles. He even had the view that the essence reigns in all being, [so that] he already [anticipated] the saying in Goethe's "Faust": "Exalted Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything ..." [anticipated]. Empedocles already recognized this totality of being. He believed that before it rises to the higher, it must pass through the lower stages. The spirit must pass through the stages of inorganic, elementary existence, the stages from plant to animal existence up to the form of man, and always follow them. This is why he sees love and hate as what brings the elements together. Empedocles thus describes life as a constant struggle between love and hate. In this way, the worldly sage also repeats the battle between [Osiris-Isis and Typhon] and the battle between Persephone and [Hades].

So we see in the Empedoclean doctrine nothing other than the elaboration of what [Empedocles] could get to know in the Greek mystery schools. We shall see that he does not consider anything incomprehensible that is described to the philosophers as incomprehensible.

We are told that human existence is not completed in the single individuality, but that this human existence was already there before it entered the individual personality, and that it will also be there again in other forms and shapes after it leaves this personality. In short, [Empedocles] stands on the standpoint of the transmigration of souls, of metempsychosis. He was initiated into the teachings of the Pythagoreans. The philosophers could not understand how Empedocles arrived at this doctrine if he assumed that the soul is a mere mixture of the four elements, but still ascribes to it a special existence in that it can take on different forms. We will understand that Empedocles sees in these four elements nothing other than the one eternal primordial being that has poured itself into existence, and that we therefore have to see in them only a special form of existence that flows back again to the primordial being. Thus in the spiritual conception of Empedocles we have something higher than the merely sensual. Empedoclean philosophy is nothing more than a philosophical dissection of the Argonaut legend, the legend of Demeter and Persephone and so on.

These teachings were then adopted by Socrates and Plato, and we are not to understand the historical Socrates in the figure of Socrates when we encounter him in the Platonic dialogues. Socrates appears to Plato as the master of the school, and he represents the school in his conversations. Socrates was regarded by Plato as such a leader. In the Platonic Discourses, it is not the historical Socrates who is the main subject, but the spiritual leader, the one who leads from the lowest levels of knowledge up to the highest. We cannot understand the meaning of the Platonic Conversations if we do not understand them as a mental image of mystical instruction, as instruction and guidance from the lowest to the highest levels of knowledge.

The other day I mentioned the talk about the immortality of the soul. This is usually understood as if immortality were to be proven by a logical thread. But it is not a question of proving the immortality of the soul, and what has been written about whether the proof has succeeded or failed. If it is said that the proof is no longer congenial to us today, then the person concerned only shows that he has not grasped the whole spirit of the "Phaidon". It is not a question of proving whether the soul is immortal, but of something quite different. We can assume that Plato also went through the schools of [the] Sophists. Protagoras was the founder of the "phrase: he is portrayed [in the Platonic dialog "Protagoras"] as someone who led knowledge astray. But we must not forget that Socrates was a profound [ironist]. We must not forget that the Greeks had their own conception of irony, that they understood it as something that was necessary for the illumination of the whole world view. Socrates fought the sophists with irony. What are the sophists? The sentences uttered by Protagoras characterize them:

["Man is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are - of those that are not, that they are not." And:] We cannot prove anything rigorously. One thing can be said of every thing, but the opposite can also be said of every thing. This seemed to be the destruction of all knowledge. Even today it seems as if the sophists were playing a vain game with ideas, as if they wanted nothing more than to talk about every thing. Vanity was their purpose, as the measure of all things was only purpose. The Sophists by no means took this absurd and downright frivolous standpoint. The Sophists are, if I may say so, the personalities within Greek intellectual life who wanted to reduce to absurdity the knowledge that flows purely from the intellect, but who also put into practice in a different way the old Apollonian sentence: "Man is the measure of all things", which means nothing other than that man has to rise and seek within himself. - Do not recognize yourself with random intellectual knowledge, but immerse yourself in your true self. - They adjusted themselves to pure logic on a trial basis in order to lead them all the more surely into error. You can prove the one, and you can prove the other. But the sophists only wanted to show the worthlessness of logic. It is worthless to stop at what we encounter externally, at purely intellectual knowledge. Man would have to be just as unsatisfied in this knowledge as he would have to be unsatisfied within a purely mindless sensory life.

Plato had become acquainted with this sophism, and he apparently fought it, not because he regarded it as a worthless phenomenon, but as an irony. He took the standpoint of Protagoras, and Protagoras always falls short of Socrates, who does not want to grasp the world through reason, but through immediate life and through the mind. But this is not a different point of view from the one put forward by the Sophists. The sophists wanted to be opposed because they wanted to expose the absurdity of these propositions in order to show where each proposition leads. Thus Socrates, by leading beyond sophistry, led to deeper knowledge. He liberates his students from the belief in reason. This redemption is expressed to us in all those conversations [in which the sophists, Socrates' immediate predecessors, are combated]. The Discourses are written for the sole purpose of disabusing people of the belief in the provability of higher knowledge. That is the purpose of the Platonic Discourse. No one will believe that a flower can be proved. No one will seek proof that a flower exists. It is enough if we experience existence. You cannot prove a thing. You can prove the connection between things. You can prove that some fact must be there, from a context that you have already perceived. But you can never prove a thing that you have absolutely not perceived. So it is not a question of proving something logically, but of expanding the field of experience, of opening up the field of experience into a metaphysical realm. Something should be opened up that lies behind experience. [So it should not say: Here you have experience, and you should pay attention to something that lies behind it. It should not be deduced logically, but experienced spiritually. It should not be proven, but experienced.

This is also the case in the "Phaidon". You have to experience what Socrates means by "soul". He does not want to prove that the soul is immortal, but he wants to lead his students to experience the soul in the same way as the body. The "Phaidon" is about the discovery of the soul. It is about experiencing the soul. When his students have really experienced "soul, then [its] characteristics will soon become clear to them. If you want to be shown a flower, you show him the flower and don't let him prove it.

This is what is meant by the Socratic method. The Socratic method is usually understood in a much more trivial way. The Socratic method means nothing other than the opening of a completely new field of experience, the opening of new senses, the opening of a new field of experience, and the teaching of Socrates is such that every person can be led to such higher [cognitive] powers. And the leading to such powers in the Socratic method is the conversation.

We will find in the conversations the most profound method and the truest mysticism, and we will see the form in which [Greek] mysticism has expressed itself in the most profound and experiential way. I am convinced that Plato's teaching can only be understood superficially, that the doctrine of ideas can only be seen as an emptiness of ideas, if one does not draw this doctrine of ideas from the depths of Greek spiritual life, if one does not take into account the tragedy of life that the myth of Demeter expresses by showing that the dearest thing Demeter has must first fall away in order to then seek the way back again. And in the Argonaut legend, it is depicted that man must lose himself on the path of life in order to be able to redeem himself again with the help of his new powers. That saga thus expresses to us the deep tragedy that lies in the fact that [knowledge] must first be lost, sunk into the depths of materiality, and that it can only be found again by way of complete self-denial - and only by giving up many a love. And this expresses that this rediscovery of the highest knowledge is linked with the true redemption of this knowledge, with the finding of the infinite in the finite, with the overcoming of individuality, that therefore this knowledge can only be achieved through one of the most original forces that rule in man; and this again expresses itself meaningfully through the emergence of human vision, that which Phrixos has to sacrifice first, the vision which leads us into the indeterminate and into the deepest depths, which leads us to the point that we can never be satisfied and that we can only find ourselves on the perpetual path back to Demeter. This realization means the infinite path to rediscover lost knowledge. This is expressed in the distinction between the lower and higher consecrations.

When Schelling passed from his youth to a later age, he distinguished the teachings of his youth, which express the most spiritual and profound. He later expressed this philosophy of his youth as a lower consecration compared to his later one, because the height of that vision had dawned on him, in which he recognized that there are abyss-like depths that can never be reached [with the ordinary powers of thought]. The realization of certain spiritual powers to encompass this world is what he calls [higher] consecration. To lose this faith altogether in comparison to the lower consecration and to believe and experience the omnipotence of the infinite depth, which has been lost to us, is the infinite love into which the divine principle has flowed and can be found again through this infinite. This is what he calls the "higher consecration."

Answer to the question:

Question about the sacrifice of Abraham.

These teachings of the Old Testament are a distortion. Jewish secret teachings then emerge, in which these things are then pulled together again. It is the same as in the legends of Demeter, Persephone and Dionysus. In them the doctrine of man is carried out in a tangible way. The Abraham sacrifice would correspond to the second stage of the human stages, the necessity of sacrificing one's loved one. It is undoubtedly taken from religious systems in which this school of thought lives.

It must be assumed for a whole series of Christian myths that in the year 1 there was no awareness of the esoteric side at all. Paul was the founder of Christianity, which has lived in the church right up to our time.

If I interpret the "Sistine Madonna" esoterically and someone tells me that Raphael knew nothing about it, I say: Yes, it doesn't need to be. If that is attempted, I have to be pleased and regard it as a perfectly justifiable thing. I am always pleased when people try to show this. The philosophers in the pulpits don't get involved in esotericism. The most important is Kühnemann.

In Empedocles, there is something we cannot understand. We can only present [it] as something incomprehensible; all modern research deals only with the purely natural conception of the matter and finally only with the question of its origin, with the question: How could something like this have developed?

Speaking in detail about karma, we must of course distinguish between those karmic events of life which come to a man more from outside, and those which arise, as it were, from within. A human being's destiny is composed of many and diverse factors. To begin with, it depends on his physical and etheric constitution. Then it depends on the sympathies and antipathies with which he is able to meet the outer world, according to his astral and his Ego-constitution; and on the sympathies and antipathies with which others in their turn are able to encounter him according to his nature. Moreover, it depends on the myriad complications and entanglements in which he finds himself involved on the path of life. All these things work together to determine—for a given moment, or for his life as a whole—the human being's karmic situation.

I shall now try to show how the total destiny of man is put together from these several factors. Today we shall take our start from certain inner factors in his nature. Let us observe, for once, what is in many respects of cardinal importance. I mean, his predisposition to health and illness; and, with this underlying basis, all that comes to expression in his life, in the physical strength—and strength of soul—with which he is able to confront his tasks, and so on ...

To judge these factors rightly, we must however be able to see beyond many a prejudice that is contained in the civilisation of today. We must be able to enter more into the true original being of man; we must gain insight, what it really signifies to say that man, as to his deeper being, descends from spiritual worlds into this physical and earthly life.

All that people refer to nowadays as heredity, has even found its way, as you are well aware, into the realms of poetry and art. If any one appears in the world with such and such qualities, people will always begin by asking how he inherited them. If, for example, he appears with a predisposition to illness, they will at once ask, what of the hereditary circumstances?

To begin with, the question is quite justifiable; but in their whole attitude to these things nowadays, people look past the real human being; they completely miss him. They do not observe what his true being is, how his true being unfolds. In the first place, they say, he is the child of his parents and the descendant of his forebears. Already in his physiognomy, and even more perhaps in his gestures, they fondly recognise a likeness to his ancestors emerging. Not only so; they see his whole physical organism as a product of what is given to him by his forefathers. He carries this physical organism with him. They emphasise this very strongly, but they fail to observe the following:

When he is born, to begin with undoubtedly man has his physical organism from his parents. But what is the physical organism which he receives from his parents? The thoughts of the civilisation of today upon this question are fundamentally in error. For in effect, when he is at the change of teeth, man not only exchanges the teeth he first received, for others, but this is also the moment in life when the entire human being—as organisation—is for the first time renewed. There is a thorough-going difference as between what the human being becomes in his eighth or ninth year of life, and what he was in his third or fourth year. It is a thorough-going difference. That which he was—as organisation—in his third or fourth year, that he undoubtedly received by heredity. His parents gave it to him. That which emerges first in the eighth or ninth year of his life is in the highest degree a product of what he himself has brought down from spiritual worlds.

To picture the real underlying facts, we may put it as follows—though I am well aware it will shock the man of today. Man, we must say, when he is born, receives something like a model of his human form. He gets this model from his forefathers; they give him the model to take with him into life. Then, working on the model, he himself develops what he afterwards becomes. What he develops, however, is the outcome of what he himself brings with him from the spiritual world.

Fantastic as it may seem to the man of today—to those who are completely immersed in modern culture—yet it is so. The first teeth which the human being receives are undoubtedly inherited; they are the products of heredity. They only serve him as the model, after which he elaborates his second teeth, and this he does according to the forces he brings with him from the spiritual world. Thus he elaborates his second teeth. And as it is with the teeth, so with the body as a whole.

A question may here arise: Why do we human beings need a model at all? Why can we not do as indeed we did in earlier phases of earth-evolution? Just as we descend and gather in our ether-body (which, as you know, we do with our own forces, and bring it with us from the spiritual world), why can we not likewise gather to ourselves the physical materials and form our own physical body without the help of physical inheritance?

For the modern man's way of thinking, it is no doubt an grotesquely foolish question—mad, I need hardly say. But with respect to madness—let us admit it—the Theory of Relativity holds good. To begin with, people only apply the Theory to movements. They say you cannot tell, from observation, whether you yourself—with the body on which you are—are moving, or whether it is the neighbouring body that is moving. This fact emerged very clearly when the old cosmic theory was exchanged for the Copernican. Though, as I said, they apply the Theory of Relativity only to movements, yet we may also apply it (for it certainly has its sphere of validity) to the aforesaid ‘madness.’ Here are two people, standing side by side: each one is mad as compared to the other ... The question only remains, which of the two is absolutely mad?

In relation to the real facts of the spiritual world, this question must none the less be raised: Why does the human being need a model? Ancient world-conceptions answered it in their way. Only in modern time, when morality is no longer included in the cosmic order but only recognised as human convention, these questions therefore are no longer asked. Ancient world-conceptions not only asked the question; they also answered it. Originally, they said, man was pre-destined to come to the earth in such a way that he could form his own physical body from the substances of earth, just as he gathers to himself his ether-body from the cosmic ether-substance. But he then fell a prey to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, and he thereby lost the faculty, out of his own nature to build his physical body. Therefore he must take it from heredity. This way of obtaining the physical body is the result of inherited sin.

This is what ancient world-conceptions said—that this is the fundamental meaning of “inherited sin.” It signifies the having to enter into the laws and conditions of heredity.

We in our time must first discover and collect the necessary concepts so as to take these questions sincerely, in the first place; and in the second place, to find the answers. It is quite true: man in his earthly evolution has not remained as strong as he was pre-disposed to be before the onset of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences. Therefore he cannot form his physical body of his own accord when he comes down into the earthly conditions. He is dependent on the model, he needs the model which we see growing in the first seven years of human life. And, as he takes his direction from the model, it is but natural if more or less of the model also remains about him in his later life. If, in his working on himself, he is altogether dependent on the model, then he forgets—if I may put it so—what he himself brought with him. He takes his cue entirely from the model. Another human being, having stronger inner forces as a result of former lives on earth, takes his direction less from the model; and you will see how greatly such a human being changes in the second phase of life, between the change of teeth and puberty.

This is precisely the task of school. If it is a true school, it should bring to unfoldment in the human being what he has brought with him from spiritual worlds into this physical life on earth.

Thus, what the human being afterwards takes with him into life will contain more or less of inherited characteristics, according to the extent to which he can or cannot overcome them.

Now all things have their spiritual aspect. The body man has in the first seven years of life is simply the model from which he takes his direction. Either his spiritual forces are to some extent submerged in what is pressed upon him by the model; then he remains quite dependent on the model. Or else, in the first seven years, that which is striving to change the model works its way through successfully.

This striving also finds expression outwardly. It is not merely a question of man's working on the model. While he is doing so, the original model gradually loosens itself, peels off, so to speak—falls away. It all falls away, just as the first teeth fall away. Throughout this process, the forms and forces of the model are pressing on the one hand, while on the other hand the human being is trying to impress what he himself has brought with him to the earth ... There is a real conflict in the first seven years of life. Seen from the spiritual standpoint, this conflict is signified by that which finds expression—outwardly, symptomatically—in the illnesses of childhood. The typical diseases of childhood are an expression of this inward struggle.

Needless to say, similar forms of illness often occur later in life. In such a case—to take only one example—it may be that the patient did not succeed very well in overcoming the model in the first seven years of life. And at a later age an inner impulse arises, after all to rid himself of what has thus karmically remained in him. Thus in the 28th or 29th year of life, a human being may suddenly feel inwardly roused, all the more vigorously to beat against the model, and as a result, he or she will get some illness of childhood.

If you have an eye for it, you will soon see how remarkable it is in some children—how greatly they change in physiognomy or gesture after the 7th or 8th year of their life. Nobody knows where the change comes from. The prevailing views of heredity are so strong nowadays that they have passed into the everyday forms of speech. When, in the 8th or 9th year, some feature suddenly emerges in the child (which, in real fact, is deeply, organically rooted) the father will often say: “Anyhow, he hasn't got it from me.” To which the mother will answer: “Well, certainly not from me.” All this is only due to the prevailing belief which has found its way into the parental consciousness—I mean of course, the belief that the children must have got everything from their parents.

On the other hand, you may often observe how children grow even more like their parents in this second phase of life than they were before. That is quite true. But we must take in earnest what we know of the way man descends into the physical world.

Among the many dreadful flowers of the swamp which psycho-analysis has produced, there is the theory of which you can read on all hands nowadays, namely that in the hidden sub-conscious mind every son is in love with his mother and every daughter with her father; and they tell of the many conflicts of life which are supposed to arise from this, in the sub-conscious regions of the soul. All these are of course amateurish interpretations of life. The truth however is, that the human being is in love with his parents already before he comes down into earthly life. He comes down just because he likes them.

Of course, the judgment of life which people have on earth must differ in this respect from the judgment they have outside the earthly life between death and a new birth. On one occasion, in the early stages of our anthroposophical work, a lady appeared among us who said: “No,” when she heard of reincarnation. She liked the rest of Anthroposophy very well, but with reincarnation she would have nothing to do; one earthly life, she said, was quite enough for her. Now we had very well-meaning followers in those days, and they tried in every imaginable way to convince the good lady that the idea was true after all, that every human being must undergo repeated lives on earth. She could not be moved. One friend belaboured her from the left, and another from the right. After a time, she left; but two days later, she wrote me a post-card to the effect that, after all, she was not going to be born again on earth!

To such a person, one who wishes simply to tell the truth from spiritual knowledge can only say: No doubt, while you are here on earth, it is not at all to your liking that you should come down again for a future life. But it does not depend on that. Here on earth, to begin with, you will go through the gate of death into the spiritual world. That you are quite willing to do. Whether or no you want to come down again will depend on the judgment which will be yours when you no longer have the body about you. For you will then form quite a different judgment.

The judgments man has in physical life on earth are, in fact, different from the judgments he has between death and a new birth. For there the point of view is changed. And so it is, if you say to a human being here on earth—a young human being, perhaps-that he has chosen his father, it is not out of the question that he might make objection: “Do you mean to say that I have chosen the father who has given me so many thrashings?” Yes, certainly he has chosen him; for he had quite another point of view before he came down to earth. He had the point of view that the thrashings would do him a lot of good ... Truly, it is no laughing matter; I mean it in deep earnestness.

In the same way, man also chooses his parents as to form and figure. He himself has a picture before him—the picture that he will become like them. He does not become like them by heredity, but by his own inner forces of soul-and-spirit—the forces he brings with him from the spiritual world. Therefore you need to judge in an all-round way out of both spiritual and physical science. If you do so, it will become utterly impossible to judge as people do when they say, with the air of making an objection: “I have seen children who became all the more like their parents in their second phase of life.” No doubt; but then the fact is, that these children themselves have set themselves the ideal of taking on the form of their parents.

Man really works, throughout the time between death and a new birth, in union with other departed souls, and with the beings of the Higher Worlds; he works upon what will then make it possible for him to build his body.

You see, we very much under-estimate the importance of what man has in his sub-consciousness. As earthly man, he is far wiser in the sub-conscious than in the surface-consciousness. It is indeed out of a far reaching, universal, cosmic wisdom that he elaborates within the model that afterwards emerges in the second phase of life—what he then bears as his own human being, the human form that properly belongs to him. In time to come, people will know how little they really receive—as far as the substance of the body is concerned—from the food they eat. Man receives far more from the air and the light, from all that he absorbs in a very finely-divided state from air and light, and so on. When this is realised, people will more readily believe that man builds up his second body quite independently of any inherited conditions. For he builds it entirely from his world-environment. The first body is actually only a model and that which comes from the parents—not only substantially, but as regards the outer bodily forces—is no longer there in the second period of life. The child's relation to his parents then becomes an ethical, a soul-relationship. Only in the first period of life—that is until the seventh year—is it a physical, hereditary relationship.

Now there are human beings who, in this earthly life, take a keen interest in all that surrounds them in the visible cosmos. They observe the world of plants, of animals; they take interest in this thing and that in the visible world around them. They take an interest in the majestic picture of the starlit sky. They are awake, so to speak, with their soul, in the entire physical cosmos. The inner life of a human being who has this warm interest in the cosmos differs from the inner life of one who goes past the world with a phlegmatic, indifferent soul.

In this respect, the whole scale of human characters is represented. There, for example, is a man who has been quite a short journey. When you afterwards talk to him, he will describe with infinite love the town where he has been, down to the tiniest detail. Through his keen interest, you yourself will get a complete picture of what it was like in the town he visited.

From this extreme we can pass to the opposite. On one occasion, for instance, I met two elderly ladies; they had just traveled from Vienna to Presburg, which is a beautiful city. I asked them what it was like in Presburg, what had pleased them there. They could tell me nothing except that they had seen two pretty little dachshunds down by the river-side! Well, they need not have gone to Presburg to see the dachshunds; they might just as well have seen them in Vienna. However, they had seen nothing else at all.

So do some people go through the world. And, as you know between these outermost ends of the scale, there are those who take every kind and degree of interest in the physical world around them.

Suppose a man has little interest in the physical world around him. Perhaps he just manages to interest himself in the things that immediately concern his bodily life—whether, for instance, one can eat more or less well in this or that district. Beyond that, his interests do not go; his soul remains poor. He does not imprint the world into himself. He carries very little in his inner life, very little of what has radiated into him from the phenomena of the world, through the gate of death into the spiritual realms. Thereby he finds the working with the spiritual beings, with whom he is then together, very difficult. And as a consequence, in the next life he does not bring with him, for the up-building of his physical body, strength and energy of soul, but weakness—a kind of faintness of soul. The model works into him strongly enough. The conflict with the model finds expression in manifold illnesses of childhood; but the weakness persists. He forms, so to speak, a frail or sickly body, prone to all manner of illnesses. Thus, karmically, our interest of soul-and-spirit in the one earthly life is transformed into our constitution as to health in the next life. Human beings who are “bursting with health” certainly had a keen interest in the visible world in a former incarnation. The detailed facts of life work very strongly in this respect.

No doubt it is more or less “risqué” nowadays to speak of these things, but you will only understand the inner connections of karma if you are ready to learn about the karmic details. Thus, for example, in the age when the human souls who are here today were living in a former life on earth, there was already an art of painting; and there were some human beings even then who had no interest in it at all. Even today, you will admit, there are people who do not care whether they have some atrocity hanging on the walls of their room or a picture beautifully painted. And there were also such people in the time when the souls who are here today were living in their former lives on earth. Now, I can assure you, I have never found a man or a woman with a pleasant face—a sympathetic expression—who did not take delight in beautiful paintings in a former life on earth. The people with an unsympathetic expression (which, after all, also plays its part in karma, and signifies something for destiny) were always the ones who passed by the works of art of painting with obtuse and phlegmatic indifference.

These things go even farther. There are human beings (and so there were in former epochs of the earth) who never look up to the stars their whole life long, who do not know where Leo is, or Aries or Taurus; they have no interest in anything in this connection. Such people are born, in a next life on earth, with a body that is somehow limp and flabby. Or if, by the vigour of their parents, they get a model that carries them over this, they become limp, lacking in energy and vigour, through the body which they then build for themselves.

And so it is with the entire constitution which a man bears with him in a given life on earth. In every detail we might refer it to the interests he had in the visible world—in an all-embracing sense—in his preceding life on earth.

People, for instance, who in our time take absolutely no interest in music—people to whom music is a matter of indifference—will certainly be born again in a next life on earth either with asthmatic trouble, or with some disease of the lung. At any rate, they will be born with a tendency to asthma or lung disease. And so it is in all respects; the quality of soul which develops in our earthly life through the interest we take in the visible world, comes to expression in our next life in the general tone of our bodily health or illness.

Here again, some one might say: To know of such things may well take away one's taste for a next life on earth. That again, is judged from the earthly standpoint, which is certainly not the only possible standpoint; for, after all, the life between death and a new birth lasts far longer than the earthly life. If a man is obtuse and indifferent with regard to anything in his visible environment, he takes with him an inability to work in certain realms between death and a new birth. He passes through the gate of death with the consequences of his lack of interest. After death he goes on his way. He cannot get near certain Beings; certain Beings hold themselves away from him; he cannot get near them. Other human souls with whom he was on earth, remain as strangers to him. This would go on for ever, like an eternal punishment of Hell, if it could not be modified. The only cure, the only compensation, lies in his resolving—between death and a new birth—to come down again into earthly life and experience in the sick body what his inability has signified in the spiritual world. Between death and a new birth he longs for this cure, for he is then filled with the consciousness that there is something he cannot do. Moreover, he feels it in such a way that in the further course, when he dies once again and passes through the time between death and new birth, that which was pain on earth becomes the impulse and power to enter into what he missed last time.

Thus we may truly say: in all essentials, man carries health and illness with him with his karma, from the spiritual world into the physical. Of course we must bear in mind that it is not always a fulfilment of karma, for there is also karma in process of becoming. Therefore we shall not relate to his former life on earth, everything the human being has to suffer in his physical life as regards health and illness. None the less we may know: in all essentials, that which emerges—notably from within outward—with respect to health and illness, is karmically determined as I have just described.

Here again, the world becomes intelligible only when we can look beyond this earthly life. In no other way can we explain it; the world cannot be explained out of the earthly life.

If we now pass from the inner conditions of karma which follow from a man's organisation, to the more outward aspect, here once again—only to strike the chords of karma, so to speak—we may take our start from a realm of facts which touches man very closely. Take, for example, our relation to other human beings, which is psychologically very much connected with the conditions of our health and illness, at any rate as regards the general mood and attunement of our soul.

Assume, for example, that someone finds a close friend in his youth. An intimate friendship arises between them; the two are devoted to one another. Afterwards life takes them apart—both of them, perhaps, or one especially—they look back with a certain sadness on their friendship in youth. But they cannot renew it. However often they meet in life, their friendship of youth does not arise again. How very much in destiny can sometimes depend on broken friendships of youth. You will admit, after all, a person's destiny can be profoundly influenced by a broken friendship of youth.

Now one investigates the matter ... I may add that one should speak as little as possible about these things out of mere theory. To speak out of theory is of very little value. In fact, you should only speak of such things either out of direct spiritual perception, or on the basis of what you have heard or read of the communications of those who are able to have direct spiritual vision, provided you yourselves find the communications convincing, and understand them well. There is no value in theorising about these things. Therefore I say, when you endeavour with spiritual vision to get behind such an event as a broken friendship of youth, as you go back into a former life on earth, this is what you generally find. The two people, who in a subsequent earthly life, had a friendship in their youth which was afterwards broken—in an earlier incarnation they were friends in later life.

Let us assume, for instance: two young people—boys or girls—are friends until their twentieth year. Then the friendship of their youth is broken. Go back with spiritual cognition into a former life on earth, and you will find that again they were friends. This time, however, it was a friendship that began about the twentieth year and continued into their later life. It is a very interesting case, and you will often find it so when you pursue things with spiritual science.

Examine such cases more closely and to begin with, this is what you find: If you enjoyed a friendship with a person in the later years of life, you have an inner impulse also to learn to know what he may be like in youth. The impulse leads you in a later life actually to learn to know him as a friend in youth. In a former incarnation you knew him in maturer years. This brought the impulse into your soul to learn to know him now also in youth. You could no longer do so in that life, therefore you do it in the next.

It has a great influence when this impulse arises—in one of the two or in both of them—and passes through death and lives itself out in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. For in the spiritual world, in such a case, there is something like a “staring fixedly” at the period of youth. You have an especial longing to fix your gaze on the time of youth, and you do not develop the impulse to learn to know your friend once more in maturer years. And so, in your next life on earth, the friendship of youth—pre-determined between you by the life you lived through before you came down to earth—is broken.

This is a case out of real life, for what I am now relating is absolutely real. One question, however, here arises: What was the older friendship like in the former life, what was it like, that rouses the impulse in you to have your friend with you only in youth in a new life on earth? The answer is this: for the desire to have the other being beside you in your youth and yet not to develop into a desire to keep him as your intimate friend in later life as well, something else must also have occurred. In all the instances of which I am aware, it has invariably been so: If the two human beings had remained united in their later life, if their friendship of youth had not been broken they would have grown tired and bored with one another: because, in effect, their friendship in maturer years in a former life took a too selfish direction. The selfishness of friendships in one earthly life avenges itself karmically in the loss of the same friendships in other lives.

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These things are complicated indeed; but you can always get a guiding line if you see this, for it is so in many cases: Two human beings go their way, each of them apart, say, till their twentieth year; thenceforward they go along in friendship (I). Then in the next earthly life, correspondingly, we generally get this second picture (II)—the picture of friendship in youth, after which their lives go apart.

This too you will find very often: If, in your middle period of life in one incarnation, you meet a human being who has a strong influence on your destiny (these things, of course, only hold good as a general rule—not in all cases), it is very likely that you had him beside you by forces of destiny at the beginning and at the end of your life in a previous incarnation. Then the picture is so: In the one incarnation you live through the beginning and ending of life together; in the other incarnation you are not with him at the beginning or at the end, but you encounter him in the middle period of life.

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Or again it may be that in your childhood you are united by destiny with another human being; in a former life you were united with him precisely in the time before you approached your death. Such inverse reflections often occur in the relationships of karma.

I shall very briefly draw attention once more to what I presented to you here yesterday, because today I shall have further things to add that relate to the human being. What I had to say to you yesterday was as follows: We first turned our attention to the three faculties of the human soul that are more devoted to knowledge. We pointed out that there are essentially three cognitive faculties in the human soul: first, what is the faculty of memory, then what is intelligence, and finally what is sensory activity. Now I drew your attention to the fact that these three soul faculties can only be understood by looking at their development. In order to understand memory, which is relatively one of the more recent abilities of the human being, we must turn our gaze back to times when the Earth was not yet what it is today, when the Earth was undergoing its development as the Moon, which preceded the Earth. So that the first rudiments of what has now become our faculty of memory are to be sought in the ancient lunar period and there appeared, not as memory, but as the dream-like imagination that pervades the human being, which I have often described in other contexts. What was dream-like imagination in the ancient moon period in the beings from which man developed has become the faculty of memory in the earth period. This memory, as I have already mentioned, is more closely interwoven with the physical body than are the other cognitive faculties of the soul. Intelligence is less closely interwoven with the physical body. It is more detached from it, as I described yesterday. But to discover its first rudiments, one must go further back than the old moon time; one must go back to the old sun time and then find the first rudiment of what is present in us today as intelligence in dormant inspiration. As for that which is most divorced from our physical nature, as I explained yesterday, one must go back furthest, although one is least inclined to believe this from the materialistic point of view of our time: for sensory activity, one must go back to the old Saturn time. And one finds as the first origin of this sensory activity, both beings, from which man was later formed, a dull intuition.

Furthermore, we have seen that by carrying these three soul abilities within us, we are at the same time the hosts for beings of higher hierarchies in the organization that underlies these soul abilities. So that through the organization of our sensory activity, we are the hosts of the archai, the spirits of time. They live in our humanity. Through that which we have in us as intelligence, insofar as this intelligence is bound to the mirroring apparatus in us, which reflects back to us our concepts, our ideas, but which come from the spiritual world, and thus brings them to our consciousness, we are the hosts of the archangeloi. And through that which works in our organization and mediates our memory, we are the hosts of the angeloi. Thus we are related to the past through our cognitive abilities, and we are related to the beings of higher hierarchies through our cognitive abilities.

According to an old custom, these three abilities of man are called the upper abilities. And if I am to sketch the human being schematically for you, if I am to present the image of the human being to you as in a diagram, then I would have to draw the following as this diagram of the human being. I would have to start by drawing the faculty of sensory activity. I will try to do it like this, by making a white background (see drawing, hatched in white). I would first have to draw the sensory activity schematically in the human organization, and to get the right proportions, I would have to draw it like this (blue). The main sensory activity is, of course, developed in the head. Although the whole person is imbued with sensory activity, I would first like to draw the main sensory organization here (blue).

If I wanted to draw in the intelligence, I would have to draw it in the following way to make it visible: sensory activity more outward (blue); the intelligence (green) has its mirroring apparatus more in the brain. Deeper down, what underlies memory is already very much connected to the physical organization. In reality, memory (red) is connected to the lowest nervous organisms and to the rest of the organism. I could then create transitions between sensory activity and intelligence by drawing this (indigo) here as a transition. You know that we also have concepts and ideas that are, so to speak, of a descriptive nature. While I have to draw the sensory activity as such in blue, I would have to draw an indigo here as a transition. For the more abstract concepts I would have to draw green, and for that which is in us as memory-based concepts, I would have to draw yellow as a transition from green to red through orange. In this way, I would have to draw the human being in its organization in relation to the ability to perceive, going from the outside in. In the succession of these colors, if you imagine the organization of eyes and ears with blue nuances and that the activity of the senses passes over into the intelligence, the indigo towards the green, lightening through the yellow to the red towards the memory, you get a kind of scheme that, however, very strongly reflects the reality of what the human soul's cognitive abilities or cognitive abilities are.

Now, in human nature, everything plays together in a mess. That is what makes it so difficult for the materialistically thinking person, that in human nature everything plays together in a mess. You can't neatly separate one thing from another in space. In human nature, too, it is not so clearly defined, but if one wants to draw schematically, one can still get a relatively clear picture of all sorts of things. Thus, one can indeed see that the ability to remember is related to the ability to think through their inner properties in the same way that the color red relates to the color green; and just as green relates to blue, so does intelligence relate to the activity of the senses. Now, however, we have other abilities in the human soul, abilities that are more or less bound to physical corporeality in the strictest sense in us as earth people. Feeling belongs to these first. While memory, intelligence and sensory activity are bound to the awakening consciousness in stages, feeling is already something very 'dreamlike' in the human being. I have often explained this. While memory is something that developed in the distant past on the old moon, intelligence on the sun, sensory activity on Saturn, feeling, as we have it today, belongs to the human being on earth. It is essentially something that is bound to the human earthly organization. What we as terrestrial human beings received as an organization actually made us sentient beings in the first place. But just as memory is something that has gone beyond its first disposition and has come to a higher level of development on Earth, and if one has enough of a supersensible vision to recognize that memory is, so to speak, an old human ability, one recognizes that feeling is only present in its disposition. If we look at what the human being calls feeling today with the necessary understanding, we can see that in the future it will develop into something quite, quite different. Just as if, as an observer during the old moon time, we had looked at dreaming imagination and said to ourselves: This will later become the memory of man. In the same way, when we look at feeling today, we must say, understandingly: When the earth will no longer be, but something else will have come out of it, when the earth will have become the future Jupiter, then feeling will have become what it can become. Today, feeling in man is still only embryonic, something that exists as a germ. What it can become will only arise out of feeling. Thus, in feeling, we carry within us something that relates to what it becomes on Jupiter, just as a child in the womb relates to the human being born into the world. Our feeling is embryonic, and it will only later, during the Jupiter period, become that which will flourish as a complete, fully conscious imagination.

Another soul faculty that is tied to our organization is desire. This desire is still much more embryonic than feeling. Everything in our world of desire will only become what it is now germinating towards during the future Venusian age. Today our desires are very closely bound up with our physical organization. They will become detached. Just as our intelligence was bound during the old sun time to the physical organization of the sun, as I have described it in my “Occult Science in Outline”, so is the world of desires of man today bound to the physical organization. It will appear detached from the physical organization during the future Venus period, and it will then appear as fully conscious inspiration.

Among our soul abilities, the will is most embryonic. In the future, the will is called upon to become something very powerful, something cosmic, through which the human being will belong to the whole cosmos in the future, will be an individual being and yet will live out his individual impulses as a fact of the world. But this will only be during the volcanic age, when the will will be fully conscious intuition.

Upper abilities

Lower abilities: Social World

Thus, through our feelings, desires and will, we once again belong to the future. These abilities lie within us in that they prepare the human being for his future being. But here too we stand in a relationship with the world in which these abilities of the human being have their relationships to the environment. Just as, in relation to the spiritual environment, memory, intelligence and sensory activity are related to the angels, archangels and archai, so feeling, desire and will are related to the physical environment, but in such a way that our feeling is related to the world that surrounds us that during our time on earth it gradually consumes the mineral world. All that is the mineral world around us will disappear at the end of the earth's time, and the forces that will consume the mineral world from the human being are the forces of feeling. So we must assume a special relationship between feeling and the mineral kingdom (see diagram). We must assume a special relationship between desire and the plant kingdom. Just as there will be no mineral kingdom on Jupiter, which, as the future planet, will be the next embodiment of our Earth, because during its time on Earth feeling will have consumed the mineral kingdom, so during the Venus period there will no longer be a plant kingdom because human desire during the Jupiter period will have consumed this plant kingdom, and human will during the Venus period will have consumed the animal kingdom. And when the time of Vulcan comes, the future incarnation of Vulcan on our Earth will no longer contain the three kingdoms, but only that part of the present kingdoms that will have become of the human kingdom.

In response to what I have just told you, people may come from the present and say: I am not very interested in what I once was with my memory, with my intelligence and with my sense of being on the good old Saturn and the Sun and the Moon; I am pleased with my existence as an earth dweller, what do I care about what the things that I no longer know anything about went through on earlier planetary embodiments of our Earth? I am not interested in that! And I am certainly not interested in what will become of my feelings, which interest me very much now, on Jupiter or even on distant Venus, what will become of my desires there. These desires drive me now, but I am not yet interested in Lady Venus, because she is not present, and I am only interested in present ladies. And so, right, only with the will in such a distant, distant future!

Certainly, many people in the present feel this way, and culture is very, very much in favor of oversleeping everything that wants to assert this knowledge from the present, that they would not want to wake up to these insights. But human development will not be guided into the future without having such insights. For it is profoundly true that in the human organism, in the physical, in the soul, in the spiritual organism, everything works in confusion; but one must also be able to distinguish the things. Just as the higher abilities could be schematically recorded, from sensory activity to memory, so I can now draw in the lower abilities that are specifically formed on earth (see drawing on page 213). I must then do this in the following way: a somewhat deeper red (unfortunately I do not have the differences here) would correspond to our feeling. But this feeling extends into the intelligence, into the sensory activities everywhere, and also through the memory. I would then have to draw an actual red-violet when I draw the activity of desire. And if I wanted to draw the will as it is today, I would have to draw a blue-green. So that man is a dual being, an upper man (circle at the top), who is essentially a knower, and a lower man (circle at the bottom), who is essentially a desirer, feeling and willing regarded as the two poles of desire.

Now, in the earthly human being, what is the lower human being actually works its way into the upper human being, both the wanting and the desiring and the feeling work into the upper human being (arrow pointing up T). In other words, our sensory activity is such that we have in it everything that has gradually emerged from the dull intuition of ancient Saturn. But if we were to carry within us, through our eyes and ears, only that which comes from the dull intuition of ancient Saturn, we would be very dry beings. We would perceive the outer world as if through senses that worked automatically. We would think soberly and dryly about this outer world, and we would remember what we have experienced without warmth. That we experience what we have experienced as our own affair, that we do not merely look into our experiences with indifference and remember them, looking at our personal life like the individual stones of a kaleidoscope, is what makes our remembered thoughts, our intelligent being, our sensory perceptions, our feelings, desires and wills arise. When we look at things externally, we like them. We like them through our desire, through our feeling or through our will. When we think, we do not just think soberly and dryly, but we bring a certain enthusiasm into our ideas. We would not bring this into it if we only had what the sun has given us as intellectual power; we have this in our thinking because the earth has endowed us with will, desire and feeling, even if these are now embryonic. The same applies to the ability to remember. Those abilities that are called the lower abilities, because they are more closely connected with the body, always play a part in our higher soul abilities. Let us hold on to that for the time being. The lower soul faculties of will, desire and feeling shine through and glow in our higher soul faculties, which would place us in the world like dried-out intestines if they were only what they have become through Saturn, Sun and Moon, and we become warm, feeling human beings, even when we think. There are, however, a great many people today who strive for objectivity by throwing feeling and desire out of their intelligence; but this is either merely an illusion, if people believe that they can throw out the lower soul faculties from the activity of the senses, the intelligence and memory, or if they really throw them out – to a certain extent one can only do that – but then one becomes one's own lower self! It is only possible to a certain extent to expel the lower soul faculties from the higher ones. One can expel them, for example, by stepping onto the lectern and expounding to the foxes and other, later students all kinds of sciences. One can expel the lower, actually earthly soul faculties from the intellect. But one cannot expel them completely. If, after spending the day in philosophy, you do not enjoy your midday meal, then your intelligence is permeated by real desires and feelings, and you grumble about what your housewife has prepared, and in particular, your sense activity of taste, smell and so on. Thus, sometimes, the dry philistine exists in man, who has thrown out the lower soul faculties from his upper soul faculties, and the person who is quite capable of enthusiasm when something is over-peppered or over-salted or even burnt or otherwise not properly cooked in some way!

Our lower soul abilities must interact with our higher soul abilities. But there is actually a wave of development in humanity, precisely since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, since the middle of the 15th century, to make the activity of the senses, the intelligence, purer and ever purer, and later this will also come in relation to memory. This has not yet been affected. The aim is to liberate these faculties, indeed, the aim is that not only the characteristics I have just mentioned in the dry philistine - which only arises because this dry philistine is in fact more affected by what human nature in general does after all. But the physical part of the human being will dry up altogether, as I have already explained in an earlier observation, and will be less and less able to warm and illuminate the higher soul faculties. They will then actually become that dried-up part if they are not filled by what can come from spiritual revelation.

Indeed, we have to fertilize sensory activity, intelligence and memory in the following stages of the earth's development with what is revealed from the spiritual world, because the actual earthly gift that comes for these higher abilities as volition, desire and feeling gradually dries up. We do not merely want to disparage the stuffy philistine, as we have just done, but at the same time we want to admit that he is a pioneer of the drying up of our higher soul abilities in the future, that he already feels in his body what will affect all of humanity; only today he still rarely feels the necessity that this must be replaced by spiritual revelation. It must be replaced by spiritual revelation. Man, accustomed as he has been to experiencing the upward streaming (arrow up) of volition, desire and feeling in memory, intelligence and sense activity, must experience the revelations of the spiritual world through spiritual knowledge ( down arrow, top right), so that his sensory activity, his intelligence, his memory can be filled with that with which they are no longer filled, as our physical body withers more and more in the decadence of the earth.

Let us first of all realize that we are heading for a time when everything that man perceives through sense experience, through intelligence, through memory, must receive spiritual revelation within him so that human culture can progress. Let us now turn to the lower human faculties, which today are only present in embryonic form. These lower human faculties are those that primarily bring us into relationship with our environment. Even inwardly, they are related to the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms that make up our environment. By feeling, we feel about the things in our environment; by desiring, we desire the things in our environment; by willing, we directly intervene in the active nature of our environment. We are completely immersed in our environment. And what, we ask, comes of what becomes of the feelings, desires and will of the people who live together on earth?

If you take a spiritual look at everything that is called the social world, you will see that it is entirely the result of the will, desires and feelings of the people living together. And what we experience as human beings through our feelings, what people desire from each other and from nature, and what is done out of will, that is actually the outer world. By desiring, we belong to the social order much more than we realize. We are made into desiring beings by our position in the social world, and our will intervenes everywhere in the social world in such a way that what happens in the social world happens through our will. Therefore, in what we call the social order of life, what people feel, desire and will lives an independent life. Today's Social Democratic Party says: what lives outside is the result of an economy, of economic forces, and how they develop. No, what lives outside is the objectification of the feelings, desires and will of people living together in society. That which first arises in man as feeling creates conditions that then determine the social life of man; likewise desire and even more so will. But everything in human nature is connected. The colors are drawn down there, which correspond to feeling, desire and will. The intelligent properties, the sensory activity, the actual intelligence, the memory work downwards and work out into the social world through our will (arrow down, going to the right).

If, in fact, man increasingly dries up with regard to his physical organization in the direction of the future, then little would be able to flow from the bodily organization into the social order, and sensory experience, intelligence and the individual human memory thoughts would flow into the social world without first passing through feeling, desire and will. In other words: If it were to develop in accordance with the mere organization of the earth, so that our bodily organization dries up and only sensory activity, intelligence, memory remain for us, and these are not fertilized by the spirit either, then a dry intelligence, a merely external sensory perception and merely selfish memories of the individual human beings would want to dominate social life. This would give rise, in ever further development, to what is now beginning in Russia. In Russia, a social order is now beginning to take shape in Leninism and Trotskyism that stems solely from sensory experience, intelligence and the few memories of an egotistical nature of the individual human beings. One does not yet realize that this order in Eastern Europe strives to be a purely rationalistic order, an order that is to be formed only from the cognitive abilities of man on earth, as he has emerged from the Saturn, Sun and Moon man, that everything that can be taken from the spiritual world is to be consciously excluded.

The feeling that teaches one to what degree of rigidity human civilization is coming, so that man will only be a walking machine, that feeling that teaches one what would become of the world if dictators like Lenin and Trotsky were left to take care of it, that feeling must come from such an understanding of the nature of human nature as we have presented to our souls during these two days. From such a realization one sees that it is simply a necessity of human nature that the upper faculties of the soul should be enlightened and warmed by spiritual revelation, lest what intelligence and sense activity and memory would become if they did not fertilize themselves with the spiritual world should flow out into social life. Man must learn to feel what holds him together with all earthly existence, and he must learn to feel, out of spiritual knowledge, what is preparing in the East and what threatens to consume all of Asia in an ever faster and faster development. Man must learn to feel this as the great and terrible disease of present-day civilization, which must be cured. And it can only be cured if it can be diagnosed in the right way.

Practising spiritual science today means seeking out the healing process of the diseased civilization. This should be felt by a sufficiently large number of people, and it should be felt very deeply and thoroughly. Without spiritual science one will not feel this. And now all the leading events are taking place without any sense of what one is actually doing. The Versailles Treaty was nothing other than the instilling of a poison of civilization, a toxic substance that must make humanity even sicker than it was before. For everything that is created without knowledge of the future conditions of life on earth is a disease-causing substance for developing humanity.

We are accustomed to accepting such things as true, spoken from the heart, from the intuitive sense. Here they are not said from such a source. Here they are derived from the knowledge of the nature of human nature. And here it can be shown that the spiritual life of human beings, of which memory, intelligence and sensory activity are the bearers, cannot continue to exist without being fertilized from the spiritual world. This is not admitted today. But why is it not admitted? It is not admitted for a historical reason. Since the middle of the 15th century, more and more of those entities have emerged that are today perceived as the actual bearers of civilization, the modern states. But these modern states can only be in the future that which - I have explained this in another context here - relates to the life of the human being between birth and death. They must not interfere in anything that relates to the spiritual world between people. In the future, people must be able to let the spiritual world into their memory, their intelligence and their sensory activity as individuals. They can only do this as individuals, only as individuals. In the future, individuals must become mediators between heaven and earth, between the spiritual and physical worlds. And people today rightly feel this, although they have almost the wrong feelings in the way they feel it, but they still feel it as something improper when currents that should only flow into individual human beings flow into so-called public state affairs. When the Russian Czar and the Russian Czarina availed themselves of the inner experiences of a Rasputin for their governmental acts, people were right to fear it, because revelations from the spiritual world may only play into the spiritual life, they may not play into the life of the state. Only that which has become our healthy reason through spiritual revelations may play a part in it. Now, Rasputin did not go as far as healthy reason, even if he did go as far as revelation.

On the other hand, in social life outside of it, only that which is connected with the lower abilities of human beings, with the abilities that develop on earth, with desires, feelings, and will, can find expression. These develop in dealings from person to person; and they develop in dealings not with abstract humanity as a whole, but only with circles that are connected by interests, by their particularly constituted desires, by their particularly constituted feelings or by the will that they must develop.

This, however, justifies the necessity for a threefold structure of public affairs. In the future, the state, which must not allow direct spiritual life to enter into its affairs at all, will not be allowed to extend to spiritual life. Spiritual life will have to have its own independent administration because it cannot progress if it does not receive spiritual revelations. A healthy State must renounce spiritual revelations. If it interferes in spiritual matters, it is only to make things as difficult as possible. The spiritual life must be separated and made independent. But the economic life cannot be connected with the life of the state either, because this economic life must be closely rooted in the communities of interests of the individual people bound together in circles of interest, in the feeling, desire and will as it develops in the associations, in the narrower communities.

In short, just as the physicist understands the complex phenomena of physical nature from the simple experiences he makes, so today one must understand from human nature with its higher abilities: memory, intelligence and sensory perceptions, its lower abilities: will, desire and feeling - that which has to happen in the development of humanity. And anyone who today, with social willpower drawn from a strong but empty self-confidence and with the tone that is called the chest tone of conviction in many people today, presents himself and develops social ideas is like someone who stands in front of a telegraph installation, has no idea about electricity and magnetism, these simple facts, and now, out of his lack of knowledge, explains a telegraph installation. The people who talk about sociology today usually talk from a spirit like that — no matter how learned it may sound to many people — like someone who has never heard of the nature of electricity and looks at a Morse code system in a telegraph station and says: “There are just tiny little riders in there, you can't see them, they ride to the other station, you just can't see any of that.” And he explains it all very neatly. This is how Marxism explains social facts, this is how our university sociologists explain social facts. Reality only emerges when one recognizes human nature. But human nature can only be recognized from within the whole cosmic order. Because memory is connected with the extraterrestrial, intelligence is connected with the extraterrestrial, sensory activity is connected with the extraterrestrial. Feeling is something that will only become what it is supposed to be after the earth no longer exists; desire and will in an even more distant future. Just as one must know the simple fact of the thermodynamics of the organism in order to be a physicist, the simple fact of acoustics, so too, in order to have a say today, and as many people as possible must have a say with regard to social facts, one must delve into the simple, elementary connections between the human being and the world, because that which is socially grounded is carried by the human being into the social order. But here, in his own being, man brings in the whole universe. That is why it is also bad for those chatterboxes who, from all sorts of old traditions, talk about man being a microcosm, a small world compared to the macrocosm, and who stick to these abstractions. Only he who knows that there were once ancestors of man as moon people who had fantastic imaginations has a real right to speak of macrocosm and microcosm. The moon has passed away, the earth has come into being. Human memory has arisen out of that which is no longer there, but which once was there. This has no earthly origin. Only the human ego and its expression, the present physical human body with its form, have an earthly origin. One must grasp this in concrete terms, otherwise one has no right to call it anything but a microcosm.

My dear friends, the decadent civilization can only be saved if it is finally realized that man must be spoken of as a cosmic being from the institutions in which philosophy is taught today as a mere sum of expressed abstractions. What has become of humanity through abstraction, through mere abstraction, appears only in symptoms in such philosophies as those of the American William James, the Englishman Spencer, the Frenchman Bergson or the German, Königsberg Kant. These abstractions conceal from humanity what it is. But the living knowledge of the spiritual, which is to be striven for through spiritual science, can bring man to self-knowledge.

More on this tomorrow.

Yesterday and the day before, I tried to explain how necessary it is for the future development of humanity that people come to a real self-knowledge, that is, to a knowledge of humanity. But how it is impossible to come to a knowledge of humanity without finding the connection of the human being with the extra-terrestrial worlds. Of all that the human being carries with him in his essential being through his journey through life, the physical organization is only the smallest part. But only this physical organization, as it is found in the human being today, is fundamentally an earthly product. That which otherwise belongs to the human being's essential being is not an earthly product in the sense that I have discussed it from a certain point of view in these two lectures.

But the present physical human organization already indicates that man as such is a being that points beyond the immediate present. Although the physical organization certainly points to the earthly, in the earthly, man's physical organization points us beyond the immediate world-historical moment into the past and into the future. Among the abilities of man, we have had to emphasize cognitive abilities: sensory activity, intelligence, memory, and we have had to emphasize feeling, desire and will: abilities that are more of a nature of desire.

Now, when we ask ourselves: What must man have in his physical organization in order to develop cognitive abilities? — we must turn our attention to the human head organization and everything connected with it. It is only in the way I explained it yesterday and the day before — but in that way — that the main organization is necessary to develop cognitive abilities for the ego, for earthly human consciousness. It is wrong to believe that the eye is the absolute creator of the visual sensation; but it is right to know that the eye is the mediator of the visual sensation for the consciousness of the I. And the same applies to the other senses, especially the higher ones.

In this way, and with many variations, the human bodily organization points to the earthly; but at the same time it points beyond the present moment, so that we can say: The human being, as we see him before us in his head organization, points to the previous earth life. Just as our intelligence points to the distant, very distant past solar life, so our present physical head organization, with the earthly nature of the cognitive abilities, that is, for the organization of the cognitive abilities towards the I-consciousness, points back to our earlier earth course. I have already pointed out what the human head actually is. You can say the following schematically: The human being consists of the head and the rest of the organization. — Let us say (see drawing), this is the present course of life (center), this is the previous course of life (left), this is the following course of life (right). So we can say: the head of our present life originated through the metamorphosis of our remaining bodily organization in the previous life, and we have lost our head from the previous life. — Of course, I do not mean the physical organization — that is obvious — but the forces, the formative forces that the physical organization really has. What we now carry in us, as the rest of the human organization, the trunk with limbs, in addition to the main organization, the carrier of the cognitive abilities for the I, will become the main organization of our future life on earth.

You already carry within you the powers that will be concentrated in the head in your later life on earth. What you accomplish today with your arms, what you accomplish with your legs, will become part of the inner organization of the head in your next life on earth. And the powers that emanate from your head in your next life on earth will become your karma, your destiny for that life. But that which will be your fate in your next life on earth will pass indirectly through the rest of your organization, through which you will enter into human life today, into your future life as a head.

If today, let us say, you behave lovingly towards another person through an earthly walk, then that is something that your extra-head organism has carried out. That will be a head power that your destiny brings about in your next earthly life. So then, our head with its abilities always points to the earlier course of earthly life, namely to the organization of the limbs. Man is subject to this great metamorphosis. His head is a metamorphosed organism from a previous incarnation, and his present trunk and especially limb organization underlies the organization of the head in the next life on earth.

This is something that must, in a sense, have practical significance in the coexistence of people. For when a person knows that he is integrated into the development of humanity, only then does he feel that he is truly standing in this earthly life, and he will understand many things that are otherwise incomprehensible. We now live, as I have often explained, in the fifth post-Atlantic period. It began in the middle of the 15th century, that is, in the middle of the 15th century, new conditions of existence were given for European civilization with its American extension, insofar as it arose later. But the consequences of these new conditions of existence have not yet occurred. The people of the civilized countries often live in habits, even in thought-habits, which correspond more to the earlier, the fourth post-Atlantic period. We have educated our intelligentsia not in the things that belong to the present, but we have had them learn Latin and Greek and so on. A Greek would have had different views in this regard. He would have looked askance at the time when Greek culture was at its zenith if his son had been taught Egyptian or Persian or something similar instead of Greek. But the time when this was still permissible, when we could still cling to the remnants of the Greco-Latin period, is past. For people born after the mid-15th century are all rebirths, in essence, of those physical human beings who lived in the Greco-Latin period. What did they bring with them, these people? The heads of the bodies they had in the Greco-Latin period. So if someone was born, let us say in the 16th or 17th century, he came into the world with a head, that is, with cognitive abilities, insofar as the head is the mediator of cognitive abilities for the sense of self, which arose from his body from the Greek-Latin period. Therefore, he still came into the world with tendencies that originated in this Greek-Latin period. But this is now partly exhausted or is in the process of being exhausted. Very soon not many people will be born with minds from that time, but more and more people will be born who had their previous embodiment in the fifth post-Atlantic period, not all of them, but many, especially those who set the tone, or at least those who, towards the end of the fourth post-Atlantic period, lived with their bodies doing completely different things than those in the prime of the fourth post-Atlantic period.

This must be taken into account if we want to consciously place ourselves in the development of humanity: you have your head from your previous incarnation and you have your body so that you can prepare a later head for the following incarnation. And the time must come when the lack of awareness of this connection with previous and subsequent incarnations is just as much a sign of stupidity in people as it would be stupidity if one did not know how old one was, if one believed that he was only born last week, although he is already an adult, or if he believed or was made to believe, when he is a ten-year-old boy, that he would always remain a ten-year-old boy, that he would not even become an old man. Today man only lives selfishly in his one life on earth. At the most, he believes that there are a number of earth lives, but it becomes faith, it does not become practical wisdom of life, as this feeling of being in between the incarnations must be; as it must become practical wisdom of life when one has reached the age of forty, that one knows that the forty-year period is the continuation of childhood and youth and is the beginning of growing old and becoming an old man. What human consciousness encompasses must expand. It will not expand in a living way if it is not fertilized by insights from spiritual science. Otherwise it remains a mere abstract belief, otherwise people will continue to say: Yes, I know, I have already been on earth countless times, and I will come back to earth countless times again. But this belief does not matter; only the living feeling of being part of the development of humanity, the feeling: With your head you are actually quite an old fellow, because that is only the fully grown body of a previous incarnation, with the rest of your physical organization you are a baby, because that will only grow into a mature head in the next incarnation – this feeling of the human being as a real duality placed in time is something that must become a part of living consciousness. And just as today one tries to determine, by means of all kinds of skull measurements and similar interesting stuff, how the individual human beings, human nations, human races differ on earth, so in the future, according to soul-spiritual knowledge, which, however, cannot be gained without such foundations as we have developed in these days, one will have to recognize the people who inhabit the earth in their differentiation. We will have to ask about the spiritual and psychological peculiarities of humanity scattered across the earth. And salvation cannot come until our university sciences in particular are completely imbued with the kind of attitude and approach that we have come to know in these days. Our universities will ride humanity into decline if they are not fertilized in all their parts by that cosmic knowledge that can only be gained today through spiritual science. Likewise, in the future, people's religious feelings must be based on what man can know about the spiritual and soul. Otherwise we will not get ahead. For if we direct our attention to the spiritual and soul life, we shall become accustomed to characterizing human groups throughout the world according to their own soul and spiritual qualities, and not merely according to their physical characteristics, as is often done in present-day anthropology. Anthroposophy must take the place of mere anthropology. But the matter has a very serious, practical side. Certain things that are happening in the present, that underlie the serious events of this present, cannot be understood at all if one does not have the opportunity to focus one's attention on the spiritual qualities of the members of humanity. And here I would like to draw attention to something that seems to me to be extraordinarily important. During these terrible war events, well-meaning people have often emphasized one thing for Europe, and actually Ernest Renan, the French writer who described the “Life of Jesus” and the apostles, emphasized this one thing for Europe as early as 1870; during this war period it has been repeated many times. Renan said that for the salvation of Europe it is absolutely necessary that a peaceful coexistence should occur between the French nation, the English state and the German people. In particular, this has often been emphasized during the war by many well-meaning and unbiased people who have not been beguiled by what was officially commanded as opinion or what was spread as opinion by people interested in this or that cause. Now one can say: the development of Europe in recent decades has been so contrary to what reasonable people must regard as a basic condition for the progress of civilization in Europe. Without this peaceful cooperation, these unbiased people said, Europe cannot continue. But this peaceful cooperation never really came about in recent years; at most, a semblance of such peaceful cooperation emerged.

Now, if we look at European conditions from the outside – but also with a mind to examine the spiritual and soul – we can see the essential differences between these three parts of humanity. We must not forget that since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period and then during the course of that part of the fifth epoch that has just expired, Europe has developed and the French nation has increasingly become a unified nation whose members felt themselves to be a unified nation. One could say that the entire spiritual life of the French nation was directed towards feeling itself to be a unified nation, towards bearing in consciousness something of the feeling: I am a Frenchman. One can study how, in the course of the centuries, what is summarized in the four words: I am a Frenchman, has gradually come about. If one is attentive to such a thing as the development of: I am a Frenchman! we must look at the parallel phenomenon within the German development. For example, the expression “I am a German” did not develop in the same way within the now defunct German Empire, nor could it always be expressed with: “I am a German”! — To say “I am a German” with full intensity “I am a German!” meant imprisonment and incarceration. It was the worst political crime. People have forgotten. The worst political crime was to feel German. Because in this Germany, the territorial principality had engulfed everything, and it was forbidden, forbidden internally as a way of thinking, to perceive the territory inhabited by Germans as a single entity. It was only in 1848 that the idea arose among some people that those who belong to the German people could somehow be regarded as a unity. But even then it was still considered something heretical, it was seen as heretical. And then it happened that actually only the people who were historically linked to the development of the German people felt it as something very intimate, that they regarded it as their intimacy. Read about how people like Herman Grimm, who really thought about and talked about such things, looked back on their own youth, which still fell in the years before the 1950s, and how they describe how they had no way of expressing the judgment of feeling, the judgment of the mind: I am a German. There is a huge difference here. But look at this huge difference inwardly. Consider the fact that, although it was a political and police crime to call yourself a German as late as the first half of the 19th century, the unified spiritual culture of Germany had long been established by then. Goetheanism, with all that belonged to it, was there; one did not read Goethe, but he had worked; one did not understand Goethe, but he had said great things for all Germans. But these “all Germans” were never allowed to admit to the outer life that they somehow belonged together. At least it could not be a thought that could lay claim to reality, that is, something lived in the German people, as in the depths of consciousness, which of course had no external political reality. In its historical development, everything that the French felt inwardly, that which constituted their unity, became an external state reality. In Germany, everything that existed in the form of external institutions was in contradiction to the inner spirituality of the German people. This is a very significant distinction that exists between Central Europe and Western Europe. If you take that and describe these things in detail, you would get the history of the 19th century. And if these details were to live in the minds of the people of Europe, who are dependent on living and feeling together, then the feelings of horror that led to today's decline would very soon come to an end. But it will not be possible to develop such feelings in an international way without considering the human being in his entirety and knowing how to look at him in terms of his knowledge and his ability to desire; for it is only by directing human consciousness to these mysteries of the human existence that one becomes aware of the need to engage in such reflections. For these reflections, which we have now undertaken, only then teach the right thing, the thing that matters. Why has the French people become such a compact mass, in which everyone feels French, as it was forbidden for the Germans to do until the German Reich of Bismarckian coloration came into being? What is the reason for this? It is because in France the old Latin-Roman nature has been preserved, the nature which I described to you here weeks ago as being that which is primarily the juridical-national nature. From Egypt, through Romanism, the national-juridical nature entered into Latin. The French nation has taken it over. No other nation on earth understands better than the French people, from their own feelings, what the legal system is and what the state is. But if one really wants to find the right way to penetrate through that, one might say, oppressive thing that the German development still has in the 19th century, this contradicting of the external state development, which made it necessary to be imprisoned if one felt German and not Prussian, not Württemberg, not Bavarian or Austrian, if one looks closely at what , and if one studies it in detail, one really does not study it in the way that the unscrupulous school tradition today inculcates in people, which has become German intellectual life from the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. One studies how Goetheanism flows into the great spirits, who are no longer even mentioned, while the spiritual antipodes are celebrated as great celebrated as great men, one studies how Goetheanism flows into people like Troxler, like Schubert and so on, then one finds out that it was precisely the lack of talent for the state, the drowsiness for the state, the danger of being imprisoned if one wanted to be a citizen of German coloration that now predestined the German people to develop a good understanding for the spiritual, for the life of the mind. It has only been repulsed for the time being by the industrial and commercial development that has taken place since the 1870s. This has thoroughly dispelled the German spirit in Germany, and, as an invasion from abroad, has taken away all that was left of German spirituality. Goetheanism has been forgotten. The fact that a mind like Leibniz's lived among the Germans, for example, is something that high school students should know better than what Cicero wrote, but they hardly know that Leibniz lived.

These are things that come into consideration and that are deeper than anything that is cited today for the differentiation of the European center from the European West. And when one speaks of the need for peace between the European center and the European West, one must be clear about the fact that the whole historical development shows that such a peace can only come about when the Germans themselves feel: they are not predisposed for the external legal state life, they are predisposed to cultivate spiritual life. But it must be made possible for them; today it is made impossible for them, today they also no longer have any responsibility for it. One must know that the actual state people is the French people, because they understand best how the individual human being feels as a citizen. Thus we have spread the spiritual life and the legal and state life over the main civilization of Europe. These things are at the same time, I might say, distributed among the peoples as gifts. And economic life, the actual field of the more recent development of humanity, has been given to the English-American people. All that belongs to the understanding of economic life has therefore found its best expression in England and America. The French understand nothing of economics; they are better as bankers. The Germans have never understood economics; they have no talent for it. And when they have tried to manage the economy in recent decades, always talking about an upswing and a “place in the sun” or something similar, it meant that they were talking about something that was completely beyond their abilities and which they were failing to grasp. Because even all that emerged as economic parliamentarism in the second half of the 19th century originated in England. Those who were good parliamentarians in the economic sense are England's disciples as far away as Hungary. If you look at the people who have best mastered the art of parliamentarism in parliaments, such as in the Austrian parliament for a while, but especially in the Hungarian parliament for a long time, and if you look at where these people have learned, then you will see: In England they have learned economic parliamentarism. — And if you ask: Where did German Social Democracy come from? — then you will find: Marx and Engels had to go to England in order to distill from English economic conditions that which was then theoretically incorporated into German intellectual life and worked through to its logical conclusion. And where are the very first roots of Leninism and Trotskyism? They are to be found in English economic ideas; except that the English will take care not to think through these economic ideas of theirs to their ultimate consequences.

Thus these three fields, which I have often said must be compatible with each other, stand in a threefold relationship: German, spiritual; French, state-legal; and English, economic. How can we find a way to achieve international cooperation? By pouring the threefold structure over all these fields. For then what one person is talented for can be passed on to the other, otherwise there is no way. This is the historical impulse. This is actually how history should be studied, especially in the 19th century.

You cannot study history if you are only taught what is taught in today's schools. This history is only there to be forgotten, because you cannot use it in life. History teaching only makes sense if you can use it in your life. But you will only develop such history teaching if you understand the whole nature of the human being. And so it is with the other branches of our higher education today. The way in which these are cultivated at universities today leads to destruction. Only the fertilization of spiritual science can lead up to a new beginning. What is to happen today has in fact already been prepared by historical circumstances. But do not think that these historical circumstances can be properly understood by anyone who does not first know enough about anthroposophy to become familiar, for example, with something like the three 'beautiful' figures (see drawing on p. 229) in their mutual relationship, or with what we developed here yesterday and the day before. For only by soaring to such thoughts can one then consider the other in its deeper essence. Otherwise one has no interest in this other, otherwise one is satisfied with what school science gives one. And if one is satisfied with what school science gives one, then one is compelled to spend one's free time on the things that today's people spend their free time on.

Such things should truly be known far and wide today, so that there would be a sufficiently large number of people who would have an understanding for these things. Because today it really can't be about anything else but finding a sufficiently large number of people who, to begin with, have an understanding for such things. Until there is a sufficient number of people who have an understanding for such things, nothing can be done with them. One cannot go directly to institutions, one cannot immediately cultivate new institutions, but it is a matter of finding as many people as possible in whose cognitive abilities these things are present, then one will be able to form institutions with these people. But then even the opposing powers will never be able to resist.

Today, one discovers something remarkable when one looks at what people think about European life, about the way in which this European life should unfold from person to person. I must always share with you the details of what is happening. Today I would like to give you just a small sample of what we have had to deal with as important matters. Mr. Ferriere, who I told you about, who spread the defamation that I was the advisor of the former German Emperor, was even called the “Rasputin” of the German Emperor and the like, has been exposed by Dr. Boos has been shown up in an “open letter”, and in a parenthesis in this letter from Dr. Boos, I also stated what I once explained here about my relationship - or rather, lack of relationship - to the German Kaiser. Now the man had to admit that he had lied. But he confesses in a very peculiar way, and this way is characteristic. I will try to reproduce the French sentences in German as clearly as possible. I am actually quite happy to reproduce them in German, because it is only through this that they acquire a certain character that I would like to give them. So, after Dr. Boos's letter, it says here:

“We [the editorial staff] have communicated the above letter from Dr. Roman Boos to our correspondent” — that is, Mr. Ferrière —, “who answers us as follows: 'The above document is typical of the psychologist. Here it shows what Latin irony becomes under Germanic eyes. Truly, these people' — he means those who have Germanic eyes — 'take everything seriously. But my readers, they, they have not been put off! My article contains jokes — de la plaisanterie — but no malice — méchancetés. And if I was badly informed — I declare this as my fault, in the conviction that my interlocutor will not hold it against me. — Elegantly, it is assumed that 'he will not hold it against me'! — 'By interlocutor, I mean the sociologist, of whom I spoke as a sociologist [Dr. Steiner], and not the signatory of the above letter, whose name I did not mention in my article [Dr. Boos]. In fact, au fait, what can you do about this affair?"

So a man is capable of apologizing with such uselessness after not just lying, but slandering in the worst possible way. But one exposes oneself to the danger of being taken 'klobig' again if one takes things so 'seriously', if one maintains that slander is not a 'plaisanterie' but a 'méchanceté'.

Then it continues, and now comes something particularly beautiful:

"At the time I wrote my article, I knew Mr. Rudolf Steiner only from his printed works. Since that time, I have come to know him through people who know him well. My opinion has changed completely, and I had prepared an article in which I express my respect for the moral significance of his personal work. I admit that the letter from M. R. Boos has somewhat cooled my ardor.

Cute, isn't it? Very cute! He would have written the most beautiful article of praise if he hadn't been given such a telling-off! But I cannot bring myself to agree that this is a characteristic of the Latin race (compare “Germanic” above), because it would be somewhat insulting if lying and slander were considered something elegant and praiseworthy in the Latin race, something that is only “plaisanterie”. It cannot be a peculiarity of the Latin race... Now the gentleman continues:

"I could answer this letter a lot of things, but what would be the use of that? - à quoi bon? - One of the Latin qualities is to be brief. I was wrong to leave the terrain of verifiable facts. I withdraw my erroneous assertions and I conclude that the rumors that are circulating, even if they come from several different sources and from people who are well informed, may be false. I take note of this.

So, firstly, the man is so naive that he believes he has to believe all the rumors that are going around, because he is only now taking note of them. But secondly – yes, one again exposes oneself to the danger of being “clunky” in one's thinking or, as Ferriere says, “Germanic”: if one tries to think such “elegant” thoughts through, it is impossible, because, one is obviously not allowed to do so, otherwise one belongs to those people of whom it is said here: “Vraiment, ces gens-là prennent tout au sérieux.” But you just can't help but wonder: so the man is taking action to ensure that people don't believe all the rumors that are going around; but if people are like him, then they are precisely the ones who spread the rumors the most into the most diverse milieus. Only, you can't look for the thought behind the words in the case of such people.

They see from such a document that it is truly not a matter of teaching such people reason. One has only to make the other public aware of what kind of disgraceful people are walking around in the world and writing articles and slandering. Because it is not at all a matter of refuting these people, but merely of rendering them harmless, because the fact that these people exist is the harm.

If nothing is done on the part of spiritual wisdom, we shall go more and more rapidly towards the time when such a mentality will spread more and more. For in the end the materialists of all colours and all environments will say more and more of those who take things spiritually: Oh, those people, yes truly, they take everything so seriously! — It will soon be serious to even speak of the spirit. It is serious, yes; but one should not be serious! As long as such an attitude spreads - and it is spreading - there will be no ground for improvement in Europe. These are the people who have made Europe what it is. But we must work to ensure that a sufficiently large number of people develop an understanding for the need for change. Today, this should really be obvious, at least to those who have in some way come into contact with humanities.

Next Friday I will speak in particular about the development of imperialism in the world, that is, I will give an episodic lecture, a historical consideration of the development of imperialism from the earliest times, from Egyptian imperialism up to today's imperialisms. I would like to give a brief overview of the historical development of imperialism.

To understand the world without understanding Man is impossible. That is the net result to be derived from our studies here. And for that very reason I wish today to contribute a little more to the understanding of Man. Let us then start from the disparity between the organisation of the head and that of the limb man—a subject on which we have already frequently spoken here.

First of all I would remind you that the head-organisation, as it meets us in the life between birth and death, is the outcome of all those formative processes which have been undergone from the last death to the earthly embodiment of this present life. From this we must conclude that everything connected with the head-organisation does not, in its conformity to law, follow those rules and forces to which we are adapted as earthly beings. Through the bodily organisation which we receive in this particular incarnation we are adapted to Earth-life. We have spoken a little of how this is manifested. We complete one revolution, of taking nourishment and digesting it, every 24 hours. Thereby we are adjusted with respect to the cycle of nourishment and digestion to the movement of the Earth in 24 hours. Something is accomplished in us, as it were, resembling what takes place in the processes of the Earth within the Universe. Our head, however, we virtually bring with us in its organisation at birth; therefore the head is primarily adjusted not to earthly relationships, but to such as are really from beyond the Earth. The head therefore is in a peculiar position in relation to the rest of man. A comparison may serve to make clear the position of man's head during the early epochs of his Earth-life.

Suppose we were on board a ship. The ship makes various movements in different directions. If we have a compass, we see that the set of the magnetic needle does not follow the movement of the ship, but points always to the magnetic North Pole. It is independent of the movements of the ship. The ship's movements can indeed be themselves regulated by the constant position of the magnetic needle. In a sense it is the same with the human head. Man does many things in the physical world with the rest of his organism: the head in a sense has no part in what he does in earthly life. It is always organised with its inborn forces in accordance with the extra-earthly. It is a very important fact that we have in the human head something organised in this way for the extra-earthly. Nevertheless there is always an interaction between the organisation of the head and that of the rest of man. This interaction is only gradually brought to completion in the course of the time that passes between birth and death. The head, as we receive it from the super-earthly worlds at birth, is organised primarily for the life of ideation. It is in a sense so constructed that the life of ideas can use it as an instrument. If it were to develop only on the basis of the forces which it receives on leaving the super-earthly worlds, it would develop solely as an organ of ideation or thought; our connection with the world through the head-organisation would in course of time be entirely lost. We should, as it were, so pass through earthly life with our consciousness as to develop by means of the head ideas only—that is, no more than pictures of earthly life. We should become more and more conscious of extending beyond our organisation which is connected with the Earth-being, of extending beyond it with our head; as though through our head we were beings who were strange to the Earth and developed only pictures of all that is connected with earthly life.

This is not so, and precisely for the reason that the rest of the organism sends its forces into the head. If we enquire into the quality of these forces, which from childhood onwards are more and more directed from the rest of the organism into the head, if we wish to describe them, we must look for them particularly in the forces of the Will. The rest of the organism is continually impregnating the Thought-nature of the head with Will-forces. Thus we can say, in effect, speaking diagrammatically, that we acquire the head as the bearer of ideas, as the result of the foregoing incarnation; while the Will-forces are sent into it from the rest of the organism. What has just been said takes place not only in the life of soul, but shows its effects in the bodily life also.

As head-man we are born in this earthly world as beings of thought and ideation, and the forces of ideation are at first very powerful. They ray out from the head into the rest of the organism, and it is they which during the first seven years of life enable the forces which manifest in the second dentition to work out of the rest of our organism, these same forces consolidate in us also the life of Thought, which is not consolidated until we acquire the second teeth. They are the actual forces which produce the teeth; so that when we have the teeth, these forces are set free, and can assert themselves in the life of ideas. They can then form ideas, and in a corresponding way build the power of memory. Clearly outlined ideas can begin to find a place in our thought. As long however as we are employing the forces in the formation of the teeth, they cannot show themselves as true consolidating forces in the life of ideas.

As we grow beyond the seventh or eighth year, the Will which is essentially bound up with the lower man and not with the head, begins to manifest, and now comes the time when it would, as it were, shoot its forces up into the head. This cannot however come about so easily; for our head, which is organised for the extra-earthly, would not be able to receive these strong forces which the metabolic system, as vehicle of the Will, wishes to send forth to it. These forces must first be stemmed; they must make a halt until sufficiently filtered, toned down, given more of a ‘soul’ character, to make their influence felt in the head. This halt is made at the end of the second septennial period. When the Will-forces are arrested in the organisation of the larynx—for that is the way they manifest; in the male organisation they suddenly break forth in the change of voice. In the female organisation they manifest differently. These are the Will-forces coming to a standstill, as it were, before they reach the head. Thus we may say that at the end of our second septennial period, the Will-forces are arrested in the speech organisation. At that time they are sufficiently filtered and “souled” to make their influence felt in the head-organisation. Having reached the age of puberty, and the change of voice which runs parallel with it, we have reached the point when the faculty of thought and ideation can work together with the Will in the head.

Here we have an example of how with our Spiritual Science we can point concretely to events. The abstract philosophies which make their influence felt in modern times—Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea for instance—all remain in the abstract. Schopenhauer took pains to describe the world in its ideal character on the one hand, and its will character on the other; but he remains, as it were, in the mere abstract. So also does Eduard von Hartmann. They all remain in the abstract. To be concrete is to observe how, through these two halts—at the first and second septennial periods—in quite definite and distinct ways Idea and Will meet in the cosmic system of the human head. The essential thing is that we can point to that which is of the soul and spirit and show how it manifests and reveals itself in the outer physical world. So too, we see the forces of the head, which are sent forth to the body and manifest therein in the forming of the teeth, work together with the forces of the body sent to the head, which prepare themselves, by what they undergo in the formation of speech, to become true soul-will. In the formation of speech they are arrested and held back and only then do they press forward into the head.

Thus we must understand Man in his process of formation, and look at what actually goes on with him. I have said that the human head is no more adjusted to the earthly relations of man than is the magnetic needle to the movements of the ship. The needle is independent of them, and the human head is in the same way independent of the earthly connection.

Here we have something which gradually leads to the physiological concept of freedom. Here we have the physiology of what I have set forth in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, namely, that one can only understand freedom by grasping it in sense-free thinking—that is to say, in the processes taking place in man when he directs pure thinking by his Will and orientates it in accordance with certain defined directions.

We see how man comes step by step to study rightly the mutual relationship of the soul-and-spirit and the physical-corporeal, and how the process of speech-formation can be really understood by conceiving of it as a product of two sources from which the human being is supplied—the sources which are in the head-man on the one hand and in the limb-man on the other.

We can now experience more fully how impossible it is to say that some kind of communication of the will is carried from the brain through the motor nerves. The brain only derives its full power of volition from the rest of the organism. Of course you are not to imagine this as if you could draw it in a diagram, for the process of speech-formation not only was prepared earlier, but is something which goes through the whole of life and only appears in its most characteristic feature in the special time of transition. Thus we must understand clearly how man is adapted to an earthly as well as an extra-earthly life.

He is so adapted to earthly life that certain forces which the animal brings to their conclusion, man does not bring to a conclusion in his purely natural organisation. The animal is, as it were, born ready-equipped for all its functions. Man has to be taught to acquire these functions for himself. What thus takes place in man is really only an outer expression of something that takes place in him organically If we study the metabolism of the animal correctly, we find that it goes further than that of man. The metabolism of man must be held back at an earlier halting place. What in the animal is carried to a certain stage—must in man be arrested at an earlier stage. Superficially expressed, man does not carry digestion so far as the animal; the digestive process ceases earlier. He retains, through the arrested digestion, forces which become the vehicle for what he sends to the head through the Will.

As you see, human nature is complicated; and if one does not wish to take the trouble really to study its complications—why then, one arrives at a science such as we have in the external science of today! One does not arrive at the real nature of Man. The essential nature of Man will only be revealed when Spiritual Science is allowed to illuminate natural science. If however, it is with Man as I have described, and the connection between Man and the extra-human world outside him is as we have described it in these studies, then you will see that the extra-human world can only exist for Man if it has a certain resemblance to him, to his organisation. We have seen that as limb-men we are adapted to earthly relationships, but that through the head-organisation we have removed ourselves as it were out of earthly relations, like the ship's compass on the ship. Now something of this kind must take place also in the extra-human world. There must, for instance, be adaptation to the human limb-nature. Something must lift itself out beyond, there must be something that does not belong.

How does modern natural science study Man? It studies him as though he had no head. Of course it studies the head too, but how? As a kind of appendage to the rest of his organism. What natural science produces for the comprehension of human nature is only calculated to explain the part outside the head, not the human head itself; that must be explained from the spiritual world.

I might have used the following comparison. I might have said—I have already spoken of it recently—that the human head sits upon the rest of the human organism as people sit in a railway carriage. They take no personal part in the movement. They sit still and allow the carriage to move. In the same way, the human head sits at ease. It regards the rest of the organism which is adapted to the outer world, as its coach, and allows itself to be carried. It is itself organised for a very different world. And this is how it must be in the outer world also. A natural history of man, such as we have today, really speaks of a headless man, it does not understand his true nature at all. And an astronomy constructed on the same principles would not correspond to the whole extra-earthly world, but only to a certain part of it; the other part that is withdrawn from this main part, is not considered at all. As a matter of fact the trend of natural science for the last three or four centuries has been such that it has developed the movements of the Universe, disregarding a certain content of this Universe, just as the rest of natural science disregards the human head. Therefore astronomy has derived forms of movements such as ‘The Earth revolves in an elliptical path round the Sun’, which are as little correct for the Universe as the natural science of today is for the whole being of Man. They do not correspond to the actual facts. Hence we must so often point out that the Copernican view must be fructified by Spiritual Science. Many mystics, and theosophists too, are fond of preaching: ‘The world of senses around us is Maya.’ But they do not draw the ultimate logical conclusion, otherwise they would have to say: ‘Even the world of the Copernican system, this movement of the Earth around the Sun is maya, is an illusion, and must be revised.’ For we must realise that within it is something which can no more be recognised on the basis of the hypothesis employed by Copernicus, Galileo—or even Kepler—than the whole nature of Man can be understood from the principles of modern science.

Now when we come to treat of a subject like this, we must at the same time point to something which has already taken place in human evolution. If we call to mind what we have often said—that in olden times there was a kind of primeval wisdom of which man had but a dreamy atavistic consciousness, but which in its content far surpassed what we have since acquired—if we remember all this, we shall not find it difficult to bear in mind also that the idea of the world which was held in olden times was quite different from any cosmology possible today. For what was the cosmology of our forefathers—that is, of ourselves in our former Earth-lives? What was it?

The cosmology that man had in those times consisted far more than it does now in what man brought into the world at physical birth. We may still find in children, if we understand how to observe them aright, something like a picture of the world in which man lived before descending to physical life. In later life however, and indeed very early in later life, this picture vanishes. In olden times this picture endured. What existed in earlier epochs of spiritual evolution as an astronomical description of the solar or planetary system and its relation to man, was something man felt within him, although he experienced it in a dream-like state. Today we look back upon those times of our ancestors with a certain arrogance, yet they were times when we really knew there was something within ourselves that had connection with Mars, Mercury, and so on. That was part of the inner consciousness of the human being. It disappeared however as man developed further. In primeval times he saw only the outer constellation, but felt within himself an inner constellation, an inner cosmic system. Not only did he perceive a cosmic system outside him; but in his own head, which today is merely the vehicle of the—shall I say—indefinite life of ideas, there within, shone the Sun, with the planets circling round. In his head man carried this cosmic picture, and it had an inner force which worked upon the rest of the organism and influenced what he received at birth, or rather at conception, from the Earth-forces; that too was influenced, so that the rest of man was also drawn into this adaptation to the planetary forces.

And now we can carry the thought a little further. Man is born into this world, and as a heritage he receives—let us say—in the first place, the power to acquire his teeth, the milk-teeth. These are completed approximately in the circle of the first year. The second teeth need seven times as long; they are brought forth by the human organism itself. This points in the deepest sense to the fact that a certain rhythm which we bring with us at birth and which relates to the yearly revolution is slowed down by seven times in our earthly life. By seven times is the yearly revolution slowed down, and this is expressed in the fact that man has introduced into his division of time the relation of one to seven—day and week. The week is seven times as long as the day. This is an expression of how something takes its course in man which goes seven times slower than what he brings into physical existence at birth. Man will not understand the actual processes in the human being until he is able to see quite clearly and exactly how something within him which, as it were, was brought in from conditions outside the Earth, has to be slowed down by seven times during the earthly period.

The ancient Mystery teaching spoke much of these facts. If I were to express in our language what the old Mystery teachings—the ancient Hebrew Mystery teaching, for example—said from their atavistic knowledge of these matters, I should have to put it in this way.—The old Hebrew teachers explained to their pupils: Jehovah, who is the true Earth God, who added the Earth-organisation to that of Saturn, Sun and Moon—Jehovah has the tendency to slow down seven times what comes from the Moon-organisation. In relation to the course of the Earth something in the human being wants to go at accelerated speed. I might even say that the old Hebrew Mystery teacher said to his pupils: Lucifer runs seven times as fast as Jehovah. This points to two movements, two currents in human nature. These two currents also exist in extra-earthly nature—only there they are present in a somewhat different form. The thought however, which we here approach, is one not very easy to understand. We can perhaps gain insight into it by starting from social relationships, and then coming back to the cosmic-tellurian relationships.

I have often spoken in public lectures of something I should like to express here. When we contemplate the misery of the present time, we find the peculiar fact that the whole intelligence of modern humanity has developed in a way that is quite estranged from reality. It is a peculiar fact that, in practical life, we find more inefficient people than efficient. This is patent, for instance, as I have shown, in the fact that in the nineteenth century there was much discussion concerning the effect of the gold-standard upon international economic relations. You can go through the Parliamentary reports of that century, and try to form an idea from them of what people then thought would be the result of mono-metalism, the gold-standard. They regarded it as something which would make free trade possible unhindered by imposition of duty. Throughout the united economic domains of the world this was predicted wherever the gold-standard was extolled. What has actually come about? The imposition of duty. Little by little the actual relations have developed in such a way that everywhere duties have been imposed. That is the actual outcome.

Judging superficially one might say: Well, those people must have been very stupid! But they were not at all stupid; among those who had pledged themselves to the promotion of free trade by the gold-standard, were very able and clever persons, but they had no sense of reality, they reckoned only according to logic. They could not dive into the true relationships, any more than can our modern scientists comprehend the organisation of the heart, liver, spleen and so on. They make abstract theories and hold on to them; although they are materialists they remain rooted in the abstract. That is why such an occurrence is possible as that related in the following anecdote, which is founded on fact and is really very illuminating.

In a certain Academy of science there was a physiologist, a learned man, who developed a theory as to the varying length of time particular birds can fast. He made out a beautiful schedule. He had large cages of birds placed in his corridor and he starved those birds to ascertain how long they could live without food. He registered the times and obtained some lovely big numbers as a result. He elaborated these in a paper which he read at an Academical Meeting. Now in the same house there lived on the floor above another physiologist who did not apply the same methods. After the learned treatise had been read, he rose and said: ‘I must unfortunately object that these figures are not correct, for I had such pity on the poor birds that I fed them in passing.’ Now things do not always have to happen just like this! This is an anecdote. But it is founded on fact; and really much of the material underlying our exact science has been obtained in a like way. Someone in the background has ‘fed the birds’ instead of their having starved as long as the schedule showed. If one has a sense for reality, one cannot very well work with statistical methods of that kind; they do not hold out much promise. But this sense for reality is wholly lacking in modern humanity. Why is this so? It is due to a certain necessity of the evolution of humanity; and we can understand the matter as follows:

Picture it to yourselves in this way. The man of ancient times looked into this outer world. By means of all that he bore within him, he viewed the relationships and connections of the world outside. He formed also his theory of the stars from out of his own inner stellar system. He had ‘a sense for reality’ and he carried it in his senses. This sense for reality has disappeared in the course of man's evolution. It will have to be developed again, it will have to be developed to the same degree inwardly as it formerly was outwardly. We must really cultivate this sense for reality in our inner being by the training we receive in Spiritual Science; only then shall we be able to develop it in the world outside. If man were to keep straight on in the path in which he has been evolving with modern intellectuality, he would at length be quite unable to perceive what is going on around him, and then it could easily happen that while the cry is heard, ‘Free Trade is coming!’ in reality it will be Customs restrictions that are being established. This is continually happening in the various domains of so-called practical life. What happened then in a big thing happens today in small things everywhere. The ‘practical’ man predicts one thing, the opposite happens. It would be interesting to keep an account of what ‘practical’ men have predicted as ‘certain to happen’ during the last years of the war. Always the opposite came about, especially in the later years, precisely because there was no longer any sense for reality among the people. This sense however, can arise in no other way than by developing it first within. In future times no one will be considered a practical man or a thinker attuned to reality, who disdains to educate himself in his inner being through Spiritual Science, in a manner that cannot be done through the outer world today. We must carry into the world outside what we develop within. Hence the necessity for Spiritual Science; for people cannot arrive at the relation of the heart to the liver if they do not first acquire the method for it by means of a training in Spiritual Science. In earlier times people could say: the heart is related to the liver somewhat as the Sun to Mercury in the outer world; and man knew something of how this relationship of Sun to Mercury was drawn from the super-sensible world into the sense world. This is now no longer understood, nor can it ever be thoroughly understood if the foundation, the basic impulse for this comprehension, be not acquired from within. It is not through clairvoyance alone that man can make it his own. By clairvoyance the facts of Spiritual Science are investigated; but man acquires this sense when he enters with his whole thought and feeling into what has already been discovered by clairvoyant methods, and regulates his life accordingly. That is the essential point. What is of moment is to study the conclusions of Spiritual Science, not to satisfy a curiosity for clairvoyance. That must be emphasised again and again. For in the whole development of human culture, this application of the methods of Spiritual Science to outer life and to the knowledge of the great world, the world outside man, is of quite special importance.

When we consider what we thus have to look upon as the original head-organisation, when we consider it in the course of our life, we see how it gradually becomes permeated with all in our organisation that is adapted to the world outside. Thus we must learn to understand the world outside man from man's own organism, from the human limb-organisation; and there, only such things as I have already hinted at can help us. I have shown the contrast that exists between the waking and sleeping conditions of man. These are contrasting conditions, and when one condition is passing over into the other, that is to say, when we wake up and when we go to sleep, then we pass through a zero-point of our existence. The moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep must have something to do with one another.

This indicates that if we try to turn the day-course of man into a geometrical figure, we can employ neither a circle nor an ellipse; for if we were to ascribe to the sleep condition one part of the ellipse, the conditions of awaking and falling asleep should fall apart; and this they cannot do. We shall see how even in outer appearance they present a similarity; they cannot fall apart. Thus we cannot draw the geometrical figure which is to correspond with man's daily round in a circular form nor in an elliptic form. We can only draw it as a looped line, a lemniscate. When we say: Man falls asleep out of the waking condition into the sleep condition, then with the lemniscate it is possible to show him coming out of sleep again through the same condition; and we have a curve, a line which truly corresponds to the daily course of human life. There is no other line for the daily course of life than the lemniscate, for no other line would lead the awaking through the same point as the falling asleep.

There is more than this. If we give attention to human evolution in childhood especially, we have to say: we wake up virtually the same as we went to sleep. We wake up the same in respect of the principal alternating conditions of

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waking and sleeping. But if we rightly observe life, we cannot exclude the sleeping condition from human life as a whole. We instruct our children during the day. Out of all we bring to the child, much of it is not his at once, but becomes so only the next day, after the Ego and astral body have passed through the night-condition; only then does the child duly receive what we have given him by day. We must always have this in mind and regulate our teaching and education accordingly. Thus in regard to the alternating condition of day and night, we can say: we sleep, and on awaking come to the same place where we fell asleep; but in regard to human evolution, we shall have to say: we press forwards a little. We progress in another direction.

Hence we may not draw the line quite as a lemniscate; but in such a way that we come out a little further on, and so attain a progressive lemniscate. (A).

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Thus when we observe the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, and continue the evolution, we obtain a spiral. This spiral is ultimately connected with our evolution, and our evolution again is connected with the whole cosmic system. Therefore we must seek this same line as the basis of the movements of the Universe. If, instead of abstract geometry, man had applied concrete geometry to celestial space, the concrete geometry that proceeds from a study of the whole man, he would have arrived at something different. For in the ancient wisdom one had this line (A). And one did not speak of Mars as moving along any other kind of line than this one. Gradually it was all forgotten. Man calculated instead of knowing. What was the result? It was a line which goes forward like this (B). But in that line one can get no further.

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So man took this line and set circles upon it (C) and acquired the epicycloid theory.

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The Ptolemaic theory is the last remnant of the old primeval wisdom. On its foundation Copernicus made a further simplification, and modern astronomy still speculates on that today—but in such a way that it much prefers to consider ellipses and circles than that inwardly curving line which presents a continuous spiral. Then people wonder that the observations do not agree with the calculations, and that fresh corrections have to be made continually.

Reflect how the whole theory of Relativity has been constructed on an error in Mercury's time of rotation. Only, the correction was attempted in a different way than would have been the case if one had gone back to Man's relation to the whole Cosmos. Of this more in the next lecture.

Our consideration during my presence this time will be to contemplate the vital earnestness embedded in anthroposophical knowledge needed for the great task of our time. When we say “with regard to the great task of our time” we don't need to think of something drifting over our heads which has been organized by some person in authority but we should be clear today that whatever weaves between people in everyday life contains, or is permeated to some extent, with something which belongs to the great task of our time. This should obviously be one of the primary implications of the Anthroposophic world view moving through our souls. This Anthroposophic world view directs us towards recognizing the existence of the spirit within everything, not existing somewhere in abstract heights, but living within the existence surrounding our everyday lives. This is what we must learn to apply to the great task of life and to every small daily experience and action.

When we consider life today from this angle we can ask ourselves: what are the components of life surrounding us from the reference point of spirituality? We have the remnants of ancient knowledge in various forms which was passed traditionally by word of mouth to adherents gathered in communities and their faith in the everlasting nature of the human being. In the most varied forms, most differentiated nuances, this most varied knowledge of this faith was brought to people. Humanity lived within this faith with the belief that all their soul needs were satisfied through this way. Besides this belief of confessions respective to their followers of that time, we have a popular addition today which originated from science, attributed to the present educational institutions. This science was gradually skilled by only considering sense-physical matter, at most penetrating it with inadequate spiritual suggestions, the latter now on the wane. The tendency is increasing towards regarding science as the only physical sense perceptible observation which at best can be combined with the mind.

Wherever we look at today's civilized world we get the impression that people create from two sources: on the one hand out of what is taught as so-called serious, exact knowledge, accepted on authority because on authority everyone accepts knowledge if they have not themselves worked within the subject of the knowledge in question, and therefore this knowledge is mostly accepted. Besides this, people surrender to their popular publications regarding how they should think about facts regarding astronomy, physics and chemistry, about biology, zoology, mineralogy, botany, history and so on, and more besides, submitting to it all and agreeing to be informed in such a way that they can say: All this must be true because it originates from the people who are in control of things through familiar instances of authority and so we accept whatever else flows from their various declarations. Proposing the creation of a bridge between the two is kicked out, because these declarations mostly instruct people to keep knowledge and faith separate and in no way try and merge them. Rising out towards a conscious penetration of these facts is rarely found. Efforts are necessary throughout to recognize scientific authorities arriving through the usual channels to presenting exact knowledge. However, one is inclined not to research these things in order to prove how they really relate to their creation through their scientific methodology.

On the other hand one is disinclined to research the origins of knowledge propagated through tradition which today is offered by official representatives. Awakening fully consciously towards what actually is presented rarely happens. When it does happen it very seldom results in seeing the issue in its true light. Should we accept it offends someone if we oppose what is termed dogma within the Catholic or Protestant denomination, regarding this dogma as “nonsense,” then we are opposing it for the sake of it and at the same time rejecting traditional confession, without finding the possibility to replace it with an alternative.

An example of dogma—I want to refer to a central dogma—is for instance that of the Trinity, the threefold personality of the godly Being. Whoever finds a dogma such as this presented through the denominations, finds it easy to some extent to oppose it according to today's scientific way of thinking. This expression can easily be revealed as “nonsense” in such a dogma. Whoever does go back to the way such a dogma was created will find that dogmas of common confessions have for a long time been propagated within humanity and that the point of origin of these dogmas, often characterized as humanity's earlier evolutionary steps according to instinctive clairvoyance, atavistic clairvoyance, are there, by looking into the spiritual world. Out of such clairvoyance these dogmas have emerged and one can say that something like the Trinity dogma has emerged out of deep, thorough insights within the structure of world existence. At one time this dogma of the Trinity was a deeply recognized truth. It presented a deep insight into the relationship of reality. However this was during ancient times when within the soul's abilities the powers of an instinctive clairvoyant knowledge fitted within such a dogma. This dogma then spread itself. It no longer fits into the current teachings of human soul forces. As a rule each person who has experienced this dogma from its origins has since then gone through several earthly incarnations. Souls had various experiences during these incarnations. In the outer world this dogma has been retained, transmitted from one generation to the next. Today it has taken on a form through words used to proclaim it which no longer can be understood. Now these souls are born again and come across this dogma in church. There is no human relationship between on the one side what the confession of the human soul is met with and on the other side what the soul from within itself strives to experience and to know. What works so badly at present is not that the dogmas are false but that the dogmas are in a form trapping the truth which in today's time are obsolete and thus the dogmas no longer offer what the soul of today needs. Thus we can say: these dogmas are preached today as if breathed by the wind.—Even those who inwardly confess to them do not apply these confessions as soul truths because they don't understand them for the most part. By accepting something which is not understood, creates an inner falsehood. As a result of this inner untruth so much damage has been done through the falsehoods in the world.

The results of untruthfulness within humanity in the last few years have really been immeasurable. Basically it shouldn't surprise us that this is so, from the simple basis that when the soul lives in falsehood the ego can be recognised as not having any sense of truthfulness in outer life. This should be kept in mind by all those who believe today that they should uphold traditional declarations. This is quite a serious situation with which we need to deal in this area.

Regarding dogmas, one could say the souls who have experienced various earthly lives where these dogmas were current, have grown out of them since they were formulated. Just as I have mentioned in the last two lectures that we need to be serious about these things, so we must during the examination of repeated earthly lives be serious. Vitally serious.

Just look from the same point of view at what humanity is given today through physical science. Here knowledge is being formed from purely physical sense perceptions. This has to be joined with what lives in the soul which has to fill itself with something which is merely sense perceptible material.

Examine how a living person stands within his or her life. They carry within them a soul which has gone through earthly lives and now don't find any connection to outer religious declarations. They connect however in certain areas of their life with what today is recognized as scientific. The question must be asked: What happens in the human soul when it connects with this recognised, merely physical sensory aspect of observable science? The soul, now integrated in the physical organism, had during an earlier incarnation incorporated quite a different relationship to nature, to the environment and the relevant world which cannot today be found in this knowledge. Only relatively few presently incarnated souls can be discovered who were not sufficiently incorporated in their former life in such a way as to relate to a definite knowledge containing spiritual imaginations, as I mentioned about natural phenomena, by incorporating a spiritual element. The sheer abstract science which has developed over the last three to four centuries didn't exist before. Not so very far back the kind of natural science existing then was such, even though it contained a sense perceptible element, it also contained within it something permeated by the spiritual. As a result many people who don't accredit it with anything special, presently with physical sense perceptible science don't find anything satisfactory about science, so they leave it lying and don't bother about it, or go digging and researching all kinds of tomes, what Basilius Valentinus or some or other person had handed out for natural science. It is true that all kinds of spirituality lived within the imagination about nature it at that time, but today, deep respect is only stirred within those who engage with it and just because it is not understood it is regarded most profound.

The important thing here is that even today's incarnated soul has no real relationship with ancient wisdom and with what goes on through the rest of life which is already fed, even grafted in school, in some or other form coming from sense perceptible observations. What is really presenting itself here if one considers the inner aspect?

Within our body we have the soul which has been in previous lives yet we come to some extent into our body without having any relationship to what the soul had experienced in a previous life. Throughout various earthly lives—as a necessity for the development of freedom—the soul developed in such a way that it was emptied of all it had absorbed before, in order not to have a relationship any longer to anything taken up earlier and thus have available capacity for what is actually living in the world at present. Our soul no longer brings with it anything from former earthly lives. We do bring results of our moral qualities with us but basically not what has lived in us from earlier earthly lives from which any kind of innate knowledge of world secrets could result. Today souls do not enter bodies in the same way it happened in Greek times. Souls who incarnated during the Hellenistic time entered life with still some old empowered knowledge which enlivened the body with soul spiritual life forces. Today this is not the case. Today the soul enters the body in a way which is consumptive. To an ever increasing degree this is the case; the souls which are born today has some destructive influence and lame the body, gradually dragging death forces through it. If evolution is to continue this way it will lead to the undermining and decline of earthly life. People would become weaker and weaker in their will forces. People will appear less and less able to have a grasp for detecting active impulses. People will gradually go through life like automatic detectors. How sad this is that we have to see the future in this way, and how seldom it happens that people are inwardly fired up through lively ideas. How often we find that people at present can be said to suffer from a soul sclerosis, turning out dead ideas and only allowing their minds to accept tradition and thus becoming machines.

It is really like this: if we go with an unprejudiced attitude through life and observe how people are placed in life, we can basically not differentiate, one person from another, amongst dozens of them. We can actually not tell them apart. We talk to A, to B, and then with C and they all say the same thing. Each one individually believes in having said something particular, but we can't find any particular difference between them, they all say the same thing. We actually only have one kind of human being in a variety of copies, and we can ask ourselves: Are we not being deceived—isn't what we talked about today the same as yesterday's conversation?—This corresponds completely to the observation of consecutive earthly lives in relation to our present earthly life. The soul no longer brings with it what it had in earlier lives, which went from one earthly life to the next and ever again appear, although with a decreasing power which is like an innate wisdom. That is no longer there. When we consider such souls and their connection to the external, sense perceptible scientific observation, then we see they are packed with transitory wisdom; with a wisdom which when expressed in imaginative ideas, is regarded as transitory. In order to conceal this fact by a terrible illusion, the old “Law of conservation of matter” in the nineteenth century was reinvented by the “Law of the conservation of energy.” This law was made up to conceal that there is nothing which can be conserved in nature, that everything is transient, even matter and energy. Nothing is left over for the soul when it is reincarnated in the future as a human machine; the soul being crammed with sensory observation and scientific material, because this fails to exercise anything alive and gives no fructifying power to the soul.

The soul born today comes over from an earlier earthly life, eager to be fructified by something which in turn will help it progress in its next earthly life. However the absorption of knowledge stemming only from the perishable offers a soul death; murders the soul. This is something which must be considered in all earnestness today, when the idea continues that non-understanding can relate to obsolete dogma, that only laming, deadening can come through non-spiritually penetrated scientific knowledge, and that the soul must experience a second death, suffer a soul death. It depends on individuals and on humanity, to rejuvenate their souls. Humanity dare not choose some comfortable passive attitude and say: I am an everlasting being, and the everlasting kernel of my being will preserve me forever through all circumstances.—This doesn't correspond to the effect of reality. The everlasting kernel within human beings exists of course but it has to be fructified in this decisive age if it doesn't want to be destroyed. There is no other way to keep the soul alive than to break free of mere sensory scientific observations and to justify a true spiritual science and to see how in all sensory observations the spirit is alive even in relation to physical facts. It comes down to not only registering purely sensory material but to promote what lives in everything that is sensory and penetrate it with spiritual imagination which actually lives within it and must not be excluded. As a result the souls coming out of a previous earthly life can take up this spirit-filled natural science, become fructified and thereby enable their vitality to be carried forward to the next incarnation. The continued existence of the soul, its health, in fact the continued existence of the soul life itself, the aversion to the soul death of humanity depends upon the spiritualization of our natural knowledge!

From of these facts and not out of any kind of prejudice today we are required to spiritualize natural science. When so many human beings turn against this spiritualization then this attitude, while ignorant about the actual meaning of these facts, are spurred on by minds we all well know about, in order to assert themselves so much more in their human nature, thus reducing what souls bring with them from earlier incarnations. Out of the entire grain of our present lives where the spiritual is being composed out of not only spiritual science but also sense perceptible knowledge, it is apparent in the most absurd sense that repeated antagonistic acts are against the intention to spiritualize natural science. It can't be stressed often enough how necessary it is in our time to deeply and inwardly understand such things—and if I dare use such a word—modify such facts. We can't take this seriously enough that today there's a rejection of spiritually permeated scientific knowledge, whether it comes across in the manner which I've heard mentioned—I don't know to what extent it is connected to the truth—through a decision by colour supporting students who boycotted lectures in the last weeks or if it appears in some other form. Today one can collect a whole jolt of writings opposing spiritual science. Dark, unsavoury streams validate that these things like to slumber and yet relatively soon they will become strongly apparent. Today it is much more comfortable to be unaware of things than being aware of them. However we no longer stand at a point where we can undo the past and remain uncommunicative to the world. This can no longer be allowed. The only way now is forwards. However this forward striving is connected to an active participation which can take on ever more evil forms—one can no longer call them discussions, but let us do so—“discussions” of the time. Only if we succeed from a strong basis, only if each one does his or her part and can come together, representing spiritual science and not be shy, everywhere unreservedly characterize it in an unconcealed manner where hidden aspects let hostility rise against spiritual science, only then can we hope to survive. It deals far less with only the literal interpretation of hostility against spiritual science, being caught up and acting defensively against it. It is certainly in one way or another necessary but it is not enough. Ultimately it is only a secondary appearance—when out of foolish misleading or misunderstanding ill-willed hostility rises against spiritual science. This is to some extend something secondary which naturally needs to be placed in the right light. Secondary it's obvious—I have recently mentioned it in an open lecture—what such people like Frohnmeyer have to say regarding the main statue group in Dornach, which can be experienced as a Christ figure: “In Dornach can be found a `Statue of the ideal human being' with above a `luciferic' trait and below one with animal characteristics.”—It is certainly necessary to point this out but ultimately not only to merely defend spiritual science but from a far deeper, more meaningful foundation. Whoever is capable of presenting such a terrible falsehood in the world, damages humankind in everything which is written and spoken, where it works instructively on mankind. Not only is it most significant that such a bludgeon of a lie is spoken but it is most significant that a person today is capable of such a strong lie as a symptom of paths mankind followed earlier. Attacks on spiritual science are recognisable according to how today's sense of truth is grasped. As a result, wider field work should be carried out in the spiritual realm. This is what it comes down to. We dare not shrink back from encountering this lack of a sense of truth on all fronts. Humanity must learn to understand that only with a real sense of truth can one work into the future when the soul has to find the way through this incarnation into the incarnation of the next age. Today this doesn't involve some kind of formality but actually the real life of the soul through consecutive earthly lives. If you search you will find the connection between every earlier characterized falsehood in thinking—in outer encountered confessions of the soul, without an inner connection with the truth—and the falsehood of the outer world. Actually it is quite an amazing phenomenon that such falsehoods come to the fore so strongly particularly in those—which doesn't mean I want to say they are not present in colleagues of other faculties—who pose as teachers of mankind, who should be the great Keepers of the Seals of religious truths.

This is the primary responsibility of today's humanity who strives for some kind of relationship with a spiritual life: to seek out cultural historical falsehoods. It is extraordinary how deeply these cultural historical falsehoods are taken up. They are a characteristic of our time. From out of politics where it has sown its foul marsh plants it has finally penetrated into other areas. Already the condition has arisen that people can hardly differentiate between truthfulness and falsehood in relation to certain phenomena of life. You see, step by step a certain life phenomenon plays into falsehood in daily life which plays a role in both daily life as well as in the greater affairs of life. Finally falsehood today itself has sprung from the same tendency, unconcerned whether it appears amongst enlightened men—certainly lit by a strange light—who gather in Geneva, or whether it appears in various bourgeois and proletarian coffee-gossipers. Whatever has lived as spirit in Geneva's various bourgeois and proletarian coffee-gossiping found it a popular falsehood, and I might mention in parenthesis—those present should not take it as evil—those who are within the Anthroposophical movement haven't quite been ratted out. This untruthfulness is a cultural phenomenon of the present and needs to be examined. Above all it should in no circumstances be excused but should be characterized before the contemporaries are revealed. We repeatedly experience that when something appears out of a pressing urgency and point to these things, that individuals within the anthroposophical movement, while finding these things uncomfortable, while they must live within this falsehood and as a result experience the characteristics of falsehood and find if highly uncomfortable some way or another, always take this characteristic of untruth as evil.

These things I have spoken about today should be thought about in relation to my two or three previous lectures related to the reincarnation of souls into today's civilised world, as well as to the interests present in part of humanity, that decisive element which wants to connect with humanity in the present age, and not to allow it to come close to humanity, can give an understanding of the immense seriousness of the task of our time within which we stand.

These present tasks are permeated with the deepest earnestness. Because of this, because it is so essential to examine these points of view on our home ground, I had spoken about things in conclusion and how painful it is for me that today so much time is taken into account without the simultaneous possibility of continuing the earlier anthroposophical work, as it was accessible just before this need—a requirement it is indeed—to work through these things which have often been spoken about and even today do actually exist. If we should want to place ourselves really in the right relationship with these things then it is necessary, imperative from out of the spiritual beings of present tasks.

Today we must make it increasingly clear: Our friends have engaged themselves in the anthroposophical movement in manifold ways since its inception at the start of the twentieth century. The anthroposophical movement is something which is not only a reality on the physical plane but which forms an uninterrupted ingredient of the spiritual worlds, a direct part of the spiritual world. Obviously outer practical participation is also a part of the spiritual worlds but not in the sense as it is within the anthroposophical movement. Regarding this, I want to say a few words.

The anthroposophical movement continues in its spiritual aspects whether the people representing it are hardworking or lazy; whether they make the effort to work progressively or against progress, going forward quicker or slower, yet they remain present in their spiritual reality. Because it has become necessary to bring about practical things in life which have grown out of the demands of the present, it appears different with these things. These things must be done at their allotted time, because it is impossible to cope with them when they are not completed at the right time. For things in practical life it can be so that when done in a slow trot, they simply happen too late. Within the anthroposophical movement one has in many cases become accustomed to things happening slowly or quickly. It is becoming more often the practice that what has been acquired here is being applied to things where the same practice is unsuitable. This is precisely what lies at the foundation of what I have recently wanted to characterise, by my indication to create a renewed possibility for that from which everything finally flows namely the anthroposophical movement, and maintaining it as such. How long have I already pointed out that it is not possible to have personal interviews now? Yes my dear friends, we have in the last days of the past week—very few people really work in practical matters—we have filled our days until three in the morning. People still turn indignant when their wishes are not taken into account after a personal meeting. However I'd like to know where the time should come for that. It has to be understood. For this reason no kind of casual manner should exist in anthroposophical life—just the opposite—a life enforcing strength comes from the anthroposophical life. As you are guaranteed that such empowerment comes from anthroposophical life, then other necessities will impact on practical life by themselves. Above all else this re-strengthening must come. This empowerment must come in such a way as to drive out all dreaminess from the soul. Whatever is brewing in some or other island of life, not bothered by what is going on in life today, is exactly what lames the pursuit of real tasks. These tasks are paralyzed when people on the one hand remain blind, sleepy towards what is happening in outer events around them and on the other, their salvation, even though this is more the lust of their soul becoming involved in all kinds of alien mystical problems on their island of life.

I'm touching on something extraordinarily important, something which is a direct application of ideas regarding the great tasks of our time and our own movement.

Every one of us must work together towards the enlivening of the anthroposophical movement. We can only work towards the strengthening of the anthroposophical movement when we cultivate a free and open insight for what causes decline in the greatest part of our cultural life. Anthroposophists for the most part don't worry about the appearances of decline. They don't get anything out of turning to the force permeating our civilization today which steers it towards the abyss. Despite it not wanting to be heard on the one side, on the other side it is again forgotten, I have to ever again point out that things do not improve on their own. Today's contemplative brooding, which is a kind of transcendental demonstration with many, is something which harms us tremendously. Instead of shaking up the will and saying to yourself: `I will do this'—contemplation persists whether here or there the relationships are such that something could be done.

My dear friends, at the beginning of the (20th) century the way the anthroposophical movement was thought about is not the way you would think about it today. Clever people who appeared at that time would have stipulated how things must work, and the cleverer ones would have distinguished between Schwabing and Munich, and everyone could hear the grass grow which indicated who could procure which area. Then some came who had discovered extraordinary relationships in Hannover and Frankfurt. This was encountered all over the place. If someone had really listened then no one would have taken a single step. At the time it was already a wicked thing but today, where much is dealt with in everyday practical life, it is even more evil because today it is not about tracking down such grass growing but that we engage our will forces to do something, to really work. It is of course tremendously easy to say: `I sense the transcendental atmosphere of this or that place, that one could do this or that ...' It is much easier than doing something. One should hardly ever apply the external and as far as possible bring about the inner approach. This is something which of course can't be stressed enough.

With anthroposophical seriousness encouraged, the real power can be cultivated in our relationship to external things and these must be encountered with real interest. We need to know after all what is going on in the world—and there are many things that do advance. Yet in our circles it is amazing how few are concerned with what is happening.

I want to highlight a deplorable fact. This fact has many causes but there is only enough time today to list a few. Clearly the subscription to our magazine for three-foldness hasn't increased by a single one. In addition our membership comprises thousands and thousands of members. It is really very sad that such a fact must be recorded. Yet this is a fact and this is only one of them. Do you believe that it is quite true to say that the opponents are the other guys and they are at their posts everywhere? These machinations are spreading around us. I say these things not without care and not without caution for what we should incur today, when we don't summon all the individual strengths we have. We need them. We must be steeped in so much anthroposophy that we can get to it or we will be too late. On the other hand I don't see that what has to be undertaken is being done, to then only lapse by saying that we got to it too late.

There is much beauty in the advancing, above all in the participation, of some students in our striving. From this very area the most fruit can develop when these things are met with real, true understanding but we must be clear about how these things should be met. Nebulous mysticism is out of the question. It depends on how something is met out of one's inner life's diligence.

So this and much more can be said today but I think that whatever else you need can be discover within yourselves when you develop a train of stimulated thought and take it further. In order for you to develop further is the issue I want to pose as my preliminary wish at the conclusion of this last agreement. Now the times are such that I can't express such a wish in what is to be fulfilled in years to come but that I can only look for the weeks when I can be here again. Basically the situation is like this, that we really use our time, that actually not a single week can be lost because we have not used it.

Therefore my dear friends, I would like to say two things in conclusion: first I want to express the wish that what I have said today must be understood until our next meeting, and secondly, that our next meeting can take place as a result of things which have been aligned with this wish. With this in mind I wish you farewell!

Also known as: The Ego as Experience of Consciousness, lecture 4 of 5, or Pythagoras, Galileo and Goethe. Lecture 10 of 11 from the lecture series: Human Evolution, Cosmic Soul, Cosmic Spirit.

The views which have to be developed in anthroposophical Spiritual Science in order to comprehend man and the world are more easily understood if we study the changes that have taken place in the mental outlook of man through the centuries. If we tell people to-day that in order really to know something about the nature of man, quite a different outlook is necessary from that to which they are accustomed, their first reaction will be one of astonishment and, for the moment, the shock will make them put aside all such knowledge. They feel that one thing at least remains constant, namely, man's spiritual or mental attitude to the things of the world. This is very evident in the outlook of many teachers of history at the present time. They declare that, so far as his mental attitude is concerned, man has not fundamentally changed throughout history and that if this were otherwise there could really be no history at all. They argue that in order to write history it is essential to take the present mental attitude as the starting-point; if one were obliged to look back to an age when human beings were quite differently constituted in their life of soul, it would be impossible to understand them. One would not understand how they spoke or what they did. Historical thought, therefore, could not comprise any such period. From this the modern historian infers that human beings must always have possessed fundamentally the same frame of mind, the same mental outlook as they possess to-day.—Otherwise there could be no history.

This is obviously a very convenient point of view. For if in the course of historic evolution man's life of soul has changed, we must make our ideas plastic and form quite a different conception of former epochs of history from that to which we are accustomed to-day.

There is a very significant example of a man who found it inwardly and spiritually impossible to share in the mental attitude of his contemporaries and who was forced to make such a change in his whole outlook. This significant example—and I mention his name to-day merely by way of example—is Goethe.

As a young man Goethe necessarily grew up in the outlook of his contemporaries and in the way in which they regarded the world and the affairs of human beings. But he really did not feel at home in this world of thought. There was something turbulent about the young Goethe, but it was a turbulence of a special kind. We need only look at the poems he composed in his youth and we shall find that there was always a kind of inner opposition to what his contemporaries were thinking about the world and about life.

But at the same time there is something else in Goethe—a kind of appeal to what lives in Nature, saying something more enduring and conveying much more than the opinions of those around him could convey. Goethe appeals to the revelations of Nature rather than to the revelations of the human mind. And this was the real temper of his soul even when he was still a child, when he was studying at Leipzig, Strassburg and Frankfurt, and for the first period of his life at Weimar.

Think of him as a child with all the religious convictions of his contemporaries around him. He himself relates—and I have often drawn attention to this beautiful episode in Goethe's early life—how as a boy of seven he built an altar by taking a music-stand and laying upon it specimens of minerals from his father's collection; how he placed a taper on the top, lighting it by using a burning-glass to catch the rays of the sun, in order, as he says later—for at seven years he would not, of course, have spoken in this way—to bring an offering to the great God of Nature.

We see him growing beyond what those around him have to say, coming into a closer union with Nature, in whose arms he first of all seeks refuge. Read the works written by Goethe in his youth and you will find that they reveal just this attitude of mind. Then a great longing to go to Italy seizes him and his whole outlook changes in a most remarkable way.

We shall never understand Goethe unless we bear in mind the overwhelming change that came upon him in Italy. In letters to friends at Weimar he speaks of the works of art which conjure up before his soul the whole way in which the Greeks worked. He says: “I suspect that the Greeks proceeded according to those laws by which Nature herself proceeds, and of which I am on the track.”—At last Goethe is satisfied with an environment, an artistic environment enfilled with ideas much closer to Nature than those around him in his youth. And we see how in the course of his Italian journey the idea of metamorphosis arises from this mood of soul, how in Italy Goethe begins to see the transformation of leaf into petal in such a way that the thought of metamorphosis in the whole of Nature flashes up within him.

It is only now that Goethe finds a world in which his soul really feels at home. And, if we study all that he produced after that time, both as a poet and a scientist, it is borne in upon us that he was now living in a world of thought not easily intelligible to his contemporaries, nor indeed to the man of to-day.

Those who embark upon a study of Goethe equipped with the modern scholarship acquired in every kind of educational institution from the Elementary School to the University, and with habitual thought and outlook, will never understand him. For an inner change of mental outlook is essential if we are to realise what Goethe really had in his mind when, in Italy, he re-wrote Iphigenia in Greek metre, after having first composed it in the mood of the Germanic North. Nor is it possible to understand Goethe's whole attitude to Faust until we realise the fundamental nature of the change that had taken place.

After he had been to Italy, Goethe really hated the first version of Faust which he had written earlier. After that journey he would never have been able to write the passage where Faust turns away from the

... heavenly forces rising and descending,
Their golden urns reciprocally lending,

where he turns his back upon the macrocosm, crying: “Thou, Spirit of the Earth art nearer to me.” After the year 1790 Goethe would never have written such words. After 1790, when he set to work again upon his drama, the Spirit of the Earth is no longer ‘nearer’ to him; he then describes the macrocosm, in the Prologue in Heaven, turning in the very direction from which, in his younger days he had turned away. When he speaks in suitable language of heavenly forces ascending and descending with their golden urns, he does not inwardly say: “Thou Spirit of the Earth art nearer,” but he says: Not until I rise above the earthly to the heavenly, not until I cease to cleave to the Spirit of the Earth can I understand Man.—And many other passages can be read in the same sense. Take, for instance, that wonderful treatise written in the year 1790, on the Metamorphosis of the Plants (Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erkennen). We shall have to admit that before his journey to Italy Goethe could never have had at his command a language which seems to converse with the very growth and unfolding life of the plants. And this is an eloquent indication of the place of Goethe's soul in the whole sweep of evolution. Goethe felt a stranger to the thought of his time the moment he was obliged inwardly to ‘digest’ the result of contemporary scientific education. He was always striving for a different kind of thinking, a different way of approaching the world, and he found it when he felt that he had brought to life within him the attitude of the Greeks to Nature, to the World, to Man.

The modern physicist rejects Goethe because he lives in the very world which was so alien to Goethe in his youth. But, when all is said and done, it is more honest to reject than to express hollow agreement. Goethe could never fully find his way into the view of the world which had grown up since the fifteenth century. In his youth he was opposed to it, and after his Italian journey he let it pass, because he had gained something else from his intimacy with Greek culture.

What, then, is it that has permeated man's conception of the world and his view of life since the fifteenth century? It is, in reality, the thought of Galileo. This kind of thought tries to make the world and the things of the world comprehensible through measure, number and weight. And it simply was not in Goethe to build up a conception of the world based upon the principles of measure, number and weight.

That, however, is only one side of the picture. There is a certain correlative to what arises in man when he views the world according to measure, number and weight. It is the abstract concept—mere intellectualism. The whole process is quite evident: The application of the principles of measure, number and weight in the study of external Nature since about the middle of the fifteenth century runs parallel with the development of intellectualism—the bent towards abstract thinking, the tendency of thought to work chiefly in the element of reason. It is really only since the fifteenth century that our thinking has been so influenced by our partiality for mathematics, for geometry, for mechanics.

Goethe did not feel at home either with the principles of measure, number and weight as applied to the world, or with purely intellectualistic thought.

The world towards which he turned knew little, fundamentally speaking, of measure, number and weight. Students of Pythagorean thought will easily be misled into the belief that the world was viewed then just as we view it to-day. But the characteristic difference is that in Pythagorean thought, measure, number and weight are used as pictures—pictures which are applied to the cosmos and in close relation always with the being of man. They are not yet separated from man. And this very fact indicates that their application in Pythagorean thought was not at all the same as in the kind of thought that has developed since the middle of the fifteenth century. Anyone who really studies the writings of a man like John Scotus Erigena in the ninth century will find no trace of similarity with our method of constructing a world out of chemical and physical phenomena and theorising about the beginning and ending of the world on the basis of what we have learnt by measuring, counting and weighing. In the thought of John Scotus Erigena, the outer world is not so widely separate from man, nor man from the outer world. Man lives in closer union with the outer world and is less bent upon the search for objectivity than he is to-day. We can see quite clearly how all that unfolded in Greek culture since the age of Pythagoras manifested in later centuries and above all we can see it in a man like John Scotus Erigena. During this era the human soul lived in a world of absolutely different conceptions, and it was precisely for these conceptions that Goethe was driven to seek by a fundamental urge connected with the deeper foundations of his life of Soul.

We can have no clear idea of what this really means unless we consider another historical fact to which little attention is paid to-day. In my book Ratsel der Philosophie I have spoken of this historical fact in one setting and will approach it to-day from a different angle.

We men of modern times must learn to make a clear distinction between concept and word. Not to make this distinction between what lives in abstract reason and what lives in the word can only pervert our clarity of consciousness. Abstract reason is, after all, a universal principle, universal and human. The word lives in the several national tongues. It is not difficult to distinguish there between what lives in the idea or concept, and in the word.

We shall not succeed in understanding such historical records of Greek culture as still remain extant, if we imagine that the Greeks made the same distinction as we make between the concept and the word. The Greeks made no sharp distinction between concept or idea, and word. When they were speaking it seemed to them that the idea lived upon the wings of the words. They believed that the concept was carried into the word itself. And their thinking was not abstract and intellectualistic as our thinking is to-day. Something like the sound of the word—although it was inaudible—passed through their souls, sounding inaudibly within them. The word—not by any means the abstract concept—was imbued with life. Everything was different in an age when it would have been considered altogether unnatural to educate the minds of the young as we educate them to-day. It is characteristic of our civilisation—although we seldom give any thought to the matter—that a large majority of our boys and girls between the ages of ten and eighteen are engaged in absorbing Latin and Greek—dead languages. Can you imagine a young Greek being expected to learn the Egyptian or Chaldean languages in the same way? Such a thing is absolutely unthinkable! The Greek not only lived in his speech with his thinking, but to him speaking was thinking. Thinking was incarnate in speech itself. This may be said by some to have been a limitation, but it is a fact nevertheless. And a true understanding of the legacy that has come to us from Greece can only consist in a realisation of this intimate union between the concept or idea, and the word. The word lived in the soul of the Greek as an inward, inaudible sound.

When the human soul is constituted in this way, it is quite impossible to observe the world after the manner of Galileo, that is to say, in terms of measure, number and weight. Measure, number and weight simply are not there, they do not enter into the picture. As an external symptom only, it is significant that the physics, for example, taught to nearly every child to-day would have been regarded as miracle by the Greeks. Many of the experiments we explain to-day in terms of measure, number and weight would have been looked upon as pure magic in those days. Any history of physics tells us as much. The Greek did not enter into what we call ‘inorganic Nature’ in the way we do to-day. The very nature of his soul made this impossible because he did not pass on to abstract thoughts as we have done ever since the time of Galileo.

To live in the word as the Greeks lived in the word meant that instead of making calculations based on the results of experiments, they observed the changes and transformations taking place unceasingly in the life of Nature. Their attention was turned not to the world of minerals but chiefly to the world of the plants. Just as there is a certain affinity between abstract thought and the comprehension of the mineral world, so there is an affinity between the Greek attitude to the word and the comprehension of growth, of life, of constant change in living beings. When we conceive of a beginning and an ending of a mineral Earth to-day and build up our hypotheses, these hypotheses are an image of what we have measured, counted, weighed. We evolve a Kant-Laplace theory, or we conceive of the entropy of the Earth. All these things are abstractions, derived from what we have measured, counted and weighed.

And now, by way of contrast, look at the Greek cosmogonies. One feels that the ideas here are nourished and fed by the very way in which the vegetation shoots forth in spring, by the way it dies in autumn—growing up and then vanishing. Just as we construct a world-system out of our concepts and observations of the material world, so did the Greeks construct a world-system from observation of all that is revealed in vegetation. In short, it was from the world of the living that their myths and their cosmogonies originated.

The arrogant scientist of modern times will say: ‘Yes, but that was all childish. We are fortunate in having got beyond it. We have made such splendid progress.’ And he will look upon all that can be obtained by measuring, counting and weighing as something absolute. But those who are less prejudiced will say: Our way of viewing the world has developed out of the Greek way of looking at the world. The Greeks formed a picture of the world by contemplating the realm of the living. We have intellectualism—which is also a factor in the education of the human race—but out of our way of viewing the world, based as it is on the principles of measure, number and weight, another must unfold.

When Schiller had conquered his former dislike of Goethe and had become closely acquainted with him, he wrote a characteristic and significant letter in which he said: Had you been born as a Greek, or even only as an Italian, the world for which you are really seeking would have been about you from early youth.—I am not quoting literally but only according to the sense. Schiller perceived how strongly Goethe's soul longed for Greece. Goethe himself is an example of the change that can be wrought in a mind by entering into the spirit of Greece with understanding. Goethe's attitude to the thought of Greece was quite different from his attitude to the period since the fifteenth century, and this is the point in which we are more interested to-day. In our age, men live in the intellect and, their knowledge of the world is derived, for the most part, from the intellect; the phenomena of the world are measured, numbered and weighed. But this age of ours was preceded by another, when the intellect was far less such that the word was alive within him; he heard the word inwardly as ‘soundless’ tone. Just as an idea or a concept arises within our minds to-day, so, in those times, the word lived as inward sound. And because the content of the soul was itself living, men were able to understand the living world outside.

We can, however, go still further back than this. Spiritual Science must come to our aid here, for ordinary history can tell us nothing. Any history written with psychological insight will bring home to our minds the radical difference between the mental attitude of the Greeks and our own, the nature of the human soul before, say, the eighth century B.C. outer history can tell us nothing. Such documents as exist are very scanty and are not really understood. Among these documents we have Iliad and the Odyssey but they, as a rule, are not considered from this point of view. In still earlier times the life of soul was of a nature of which certain men, here and there, have had some inkling. Herder was one who expressed his views on the subject very forcibly but he did not ever work them out scientifically. In short, the period when men lived in the word was preceded by another, when they lived in a world of pictures. In what sense can speech, for example, and the inner activity of soul revealed in speech, be said to live in a world of pictures? Man lives in pictures when the main factor is not so much the content of the sound, or the nature of the sound, but the rhythm, the shaping of the sound—in short the poetic element which we to-day regard as something quite independent of speech itself. The poet of modern times has to give language artistic form before true poetry can come into being. But there was an age in the remote past when it was perfectly natural to make speech poetic, when speech and the evolving of theory were not so widely separated as they were later on, and when a short syllable following a long, two short syllables following a long, or series of short syllables repeated one after the other, really meant something. World-mysteries were revealed in this poetic form of speech, mysteries which cannot be revealed in the same fulness when the content of the sound is the most important factor.

Even to-day there are still a few who feel that speech has proceeded from this origin and it is worthy of note that in spite of all the confusing elements born of modern scholarship such men have divined the existence of something which I am trying to explain to you in the light of Spiritual Science. Benedetto Croce was one who spoke in a most charming way of this poetic, artistic element of speech in pre-historic or practically pre-historic times, before speech assumed the character of prose.

Three epochs, therefore, stand out before us.—The epoch beginning with Galileo, in the fifteenth century is an age of inner intellectual activity and the world outside is viewed in terms of measure, number and weight. The second and earlier epoch is that for which Goethe longed and to which his whole inner life was directed, after his Italian journey. This was the age when word and concept were still one, when instead of intellectuality man unfolded an inwardly quickened life of soul, and in the outer world observed, all that lives in constant metamorphosis and change. And we also look further back to a third epoch when the soul of man lived in an element by which the sounds of speech themselves were formed and moulded. But a faculty of soul functioning with quickened instinct in a realm lying behind the sounds of speech perceives something else in the outer world. As I have already said, history can tell us little of these things and the historian can only surmise. But anthroposophical Spiritual Science can understand thoroughly what is meant, namely, the Imaginative element of speech, the instinctively Imaginative element which precedes the word. And when he possesses this faculty of instinctive Imagination man can perceive in outer Nature something higher than he can perceive through the medium of word or idea.

We know that even to-day, when it has become thoroughly decadent, oriental civilisation points to former conditions of life in its heyday. We realise this when, for example, we study the Vedas or the Vedanta philosophy. Moreover we know that this age, too, was preceded by others still more ancient. The soul of the oriental is still pervaded by something like an ethereal element, an element that is quite foreign to the Western mind and which, as soon as we attempt to express it in a word, is no longer quite the same. Something has remained which our word ‘compassion’ (Mitleid) can only very poorly express, however deeply Schopenhauer may have felt about it. This compassion, this love for and in all beings—in the form in which it still exists in the East—points to a past age when it was an experience of infinitely greater intensity, when it signified a pouring of the soul's life into the life of feeling of other sentient beings. There is every justification for saying that the oriental word for ‘compassion’ signifies a fundamental element in the life of soul as it was in the remote past, an element which expresses itself in an inward sharing in the experiences of another, having a life of its own, manifesting not only in a process of metamorphosis as in the plant, not only in a process of coming-into-being and passing away, but as an actual experience in the soul.

This inward sharing in the experiences of another is only possible when man rises beyond the idea, beyond the sound as such, beyond the meaning of the word, to the world where speech itself is shaped and moulded by Imagination. Man can have a living experience of the plant-world around him when the word is as full of life as it was among the Greeks. He shares in the life of feeling of other beings when he experiences not only the world of the living but the sentient life of other beings and when he is inwardly sensitive not only to speech but to the artistic element at work in the shaping of speech.

That is why it is so wonderful to find reference in certain mythological poems to this primeval phenomenon in the life of the soul. It is related in connection with Siegfried, for example, that there was a moment when he understood the voice of the birds—who do not utter words but only bring forth a consequence of sound. That which in the song of birds ripples along the surface like the bubbling of a spring of inner life, is also present in everything that has life. But it is precisely this element which imprisons the living in an interior chamber of the soul and in which we cannot share when we are merely listening to a word that is uttered. For when we listen to words, we are hearing merely what the head of another being is experiencing. But when we inwardly grasp what it is that flows on from syllable to syllable, from word to word, from sentence to sentence in the imaginative shaping of speech, we grasp that which actually lives in the heart and mind of another. As we listen to the words uttered by another human being, we can form an opinion about his capabilities and faculties; but if our ears are sensitive to the sound of his words, to the rhythm of his words, to the moulding of his words, then we are hearing an expression of his whole being. And in the same way, when we rise to a sphere where we understand the process wherein sound itself is moulded and shaped—although it is a process empty alike of concept and of word, unheard and simply experienced inwardly—we experience that from which feeling itself arises. When we thus begin to realise the nature of an entirely different life of soul in an age when audible speech was accompanied by living experience of rhythm, measure and melody, we are led to an epoch more ancient than that of Greece. It was an epoch when the mind of man was not only capable of grasping the process of metamorphosis in the world of the living, but of experiencing the sentient life connected with the animal creation and of beholding in direct vision the world of sentient being.

If we study the civilised people in the age which stretches back from the eighth century B.C. to about the beginning of the third millennium B.C., we find a life of soul filled with Imaginative instinct, prone by its very nature to experience the sentient life of all beings.

Modern scholarship, with its limited outlook, tells us that the ancients were wont to personify the phenomena of Nature. In other words, a highly intellectual element is attributed to the human soul in olden times and, the comparison often drawn is that a child who knocks himself against the corner of a table will strike the table because he personifies it, thinks of it as being alive.

Those who imagine that a child personifies the table as a living being which he then strikes, have never really gazed into the soul of a child. For a child sees the table just exactly as we see it, but he does not yet distinguish between the table and a living thing. Nor did the ancients personify the phenomena of Nature in this sense; they lived in the element by which speech is shaped and moulded and were thus able to experience the sentient life of other beings.

This, then, has been the way in which the souls of men have developed during the period beginning about the third millennium B.C. and lasting until our own time: from super-speech, through speech, to the age of intellectuality; from the period of experience of the life of feeling in other beings, through the age of sharing in the processes of growth and ‘becoming’ in the outer world, to the time when attention is concentrated on the principles of measure, number and weight. Only when we picture this process quite clearly shall we be able to realise that in order to penetrate into the nature of things in an age when we try to probe everything with the conscious mind, we must deliberately adjust ourselves to an entirely new way of viewing the world around us. Those who imagine that the constitution of the human soul has never fundamentally changed but has remained constant through the ages, regard it as something absolute, and think that man would lose himself irretrievably if the essential nature of his soul were in any way to undergo change. But those who perceive that changes in the constitution of the soul belong to the natural course of evolution will the more easily realise that it is necessary for us to transform our attitude of soul if we are to penetrate into the nature of things, into the being of man and into the nature of the relation of man to the world in a way fitted to the age in which we are living.

The fact we have so repeatedly set forth from different points of view: that the alternation of waking and sleeping has a more profound significance in human life than appears to outer observation—should form a subject for a comprehensive study of the universe and a practical grasp of the world in the ideal sense. To ordinary observation the apparent fact is that man with his consciousness alternates between the conditions of waking and sleeping. We know that this is only apparent, for we have often agreed from various points of view that the so-called sleep-condition lasts not only from falling asleep to waking, but that in a certain part of our being it also continues from waking to sleeping. We must really say that we are never completely, thoroughly ‘awake’ with our whole being. Sleep extends into our waking hours. With one part of our being we are always asleep. We might ask ourselves: With what part of our being do we really keep awake during the so-called ‘waking’ time?

In the world of sense we are awake as regards our perceptions, as regards all that we perceive by means of our senses from waking to falling asleep. The characteristic of ordinary perception is precisely that from a condition of detachment from the external sense-world we pass over on waking to one of amalgamation with it; then our senses soon begin to be active and this wrests us from that dull condition which we know in ordinary life as ‘sleep.’ Thus with our sense-perception we are awake in the true sense of the word. We are already less awake in respect of our life of ideas, as accurate self-observation will prove, but sufficiently so to call it being awake. We must distinguish the life of perception from that of actual thought and ideas. When withdrawn from sense-perception, that is, not outwardly related to it, we meditate, we are thereby awake, both in the ordinary sense of the word and the higher; although this ‘being awake’ purely in the life of ideas has always a shade of dreaming—in the case of one man, more, of another, less. Although with many people dreaming may well be intermixed with the life of ideas, yet, taken as a whole, we can say that, when we form concepts, we are awake.

We are not ‘awake’ when we feel. Certainly, feeling wells up from an undefined, undifferentiated soul-life, and because we ‘realise’ feeling, because ideas, that is, waking activities, are mingled with it, we suppose that we are awake in our feeling; yet this is not really the case. In reality, the activity of our feeling is exactly the same as in ordinary dreaming. There is a profound relation between the dream-condition and the actual condition of feeling. If we were always able to illumine with ideas what we dream (the greater part of our dream-life is lost to us), we should be as well acquainted with the dream-life as with the life of feeling; for, indeed, feelings and passions are actually present in the soul in the same manner as the dream. No one can tell by his waking life what actually takes place when he feels, or in that which he feels. It surges up, as I said, from the undefined, undifferentiated life of the soul and is illumined by the light of the concepts, but it is a dream-life. This relationship of emotion and feeling to dreaming is well known even to those who are not occultists; for example, the prominent philosopher, Frederick Theodor Vischer, has often emphasised the profound relationship between dreaming and feeling in the soul-life of man.

Still ‘deeper down’ in the soul-life is the real life of will. What does man know about what actually takes place in his inner being when he says, ‘I will take up a book,’ and, stretching out his arm, does so? Of what takes place between muscle and nerve, of what goes on in the organism and even in the soul, by which an impulse of will passes into movement, into action, man is even less conscious than he is of the events of deep, dreamless sleep. It is a fact that the actual essence of our life of will is, in its turn, illumined by the life of ideas; thus it appears to us as though we were conscious of it, but the real entity of the will remains, even from waking to falling asleep, in a condition of profound sleep.

Thus we see that, in the true sense of the word, we are really ‘awake’ only as regards our perception in the world of sense and in our life of ideas; even in the waking condition, as regards the life of feeling, we are actually asleep, we really dream; and as regards the life of will we are always fast asleep. Thus the sleep-condition extends into that of waking. Let us picture to ourselves how we pass through the world: what we experience with our waking consciousness is but the perception of the sense-world and our world of ideas; and, imbedded in this experience, is a world in which our impulses of feeling and will float, a world which surrounds us like the air, but does not enter the ordinary consciousness at all. Anyone who thus approaches the matter will, indeed, not be very far from recognising a so-called super-sensible world around him.

Now all this has more pregnant consequences. Behind what has been related are significant facts of life as a whole. Anyone who knows the life of the human soul between death and rebirth (made known in a more abstract form by the lectures on ‘The Inner Nature of Man, and Life Between Death and Rebirth,’ given in Vienna in the spring of 1914) will see that in this world through which we wander in a sleeping condition, we are living together with the so-called dead. The dead are always present. They move and have their being in a super-sensible world. We are not separated from them by our ‘real being,’ only by our condition of consciousness. We are only separated from them as in sleep we are separated from the things around us; we sleep in a room and do not see the chairs and other things. Though we do not describe it thus, yet as regards our feeling and will, we ‘sleep’ in the so-called waking condition among the dead, just as we do not perceive the physical objects around us when we sleep. Thus we do not live separated from the world ruled by the forces of the dead, we are together with them in one common world. In our ordinary consciousness we are only separated from them by the state of that consciousness.

This knowledge of our common life with the dead will be one of the most important elements which Spiritual Science is to implant in the general human consciousness, in the general civilisation of mankind for the future; for those who believe that what takes place around them occurs only through the forces perceived in the life of the senses, know nothing of the reality; they do not know that the forces of the dead are always at work, always present. Bearing in mind what I said in the first lecture—that, in this material age, man has really quite a false view of historical life because history in its actual impulses is only dreamt or slept away,—we shall be able to form an idea that the forces of the dead may live in what we dream or sleep away of historical life. In a future time a study of history will come which will reckon with the forces of those who have passed through the gate of death, whose souls live in the world between death and rebirth. A consciousness of the unity of all mankind, including the so-called ‘dead,’ will have to give human civilisation quite a new colouring.

The method of observation employed by the spiritual investigator, who can make a practical application of what has been said, will disclose many concrete details of this joint life of the living and the so-called dead. If by his thoughts a man could throw light upon the nature of his feeling and impulses of will, he would have a continuously living consciousness of the existence of the dead. This he does not at present possess. The ordinary consciousness does not possess it because these things are remarkably distributed within our conscious life. We might say that for the ‘conception’ of a higher cosmic relationship, there is a third consciousness, much more important than the perception of the waking condition or the sleep condition. What is this?

It is something lying between these, and for the man of to-day is only momentary and passes him by; it is the moment of waking and that of falling asleep. To-day, man does not pay attention to his waking and falling asleep; yet in the general human consciousness they are extremely important. How important they are is disclosed when the unconscious experiences of the ordinary consciousness are illumined by the experiences of clairvoyant consciousness. Having studied in this way though many years of preparation, we can quite impartially illumine such things by super-sensible facts.

It is quite possible for clairvoyant consciousness not only to become acquainted ‘in general’ with the facts of the super-sensible world, in which, for instance, we abide between death and rebirth, but also to come in contact, into correspondence with individual souls of the dead (although this is not so easy as the former). This we know. I shall only add that this observation is more difficult (to the ordinary scientific understanding of super-sensible relations), merely because there are more obstacles to overcome. Although few to-day succeed in attaining general scientific results of the super-sensible world, it cannot be said that it is extremely difficult to do so, for it is not beyond the ordinary capacities of the human soul. It is more difficult to come into individual relations with souls of the dead because those who strive for it overlook the fact that in the spiritual world the lower impulses of man can be wakened. I have often described the reason. The higher faculties of the super-sensible beings are connected with the lower human impulses (not with the higher impulses of incarnate beings), as the lower impulses of super-sensible beings are related to the higher spiritual qualities of man. I described this as a significant mystery in the intercourse with the spiritual world, a mystery by contact with which a man may easily be shipwrecked; but if he can steer safely past this rock, if he is able to have intercourse with the super-sensible without being diverted from the world of spiritual experiences, such intercourse is quite possible. It proves, however, to be very, very different from what is usually regarded as ‘intercourse’ here in the world of sense. Speaking quite in the concrete: if we talk to one another here in the world of sense, we speak and the other answers. We know that we produce our words through the vocal organs, the words come from our thoughts. We feel that we are the creator of our words; we know that we hear ourselves speaking, and when some one answers we hear him; we listen and we hear him. We are profoundly accustomed to such a connection because we are only conscious of having intercourse in the physical world with other human beings. Intercourse with discarnate souls is not like this. Strange as it may sound, intercourse with discarnate souls is exactly reversed. If we impart our own thoughts to the discarnate, we do not speak, but he speaks. It is exactly as though when talking with some one, he were to say what we were about to communicate; we do not say it, but he does. The reply of the so-called dead does not come to us from outside, but arises from our inner being, we experience it as inner life. Clairvoyant consciousness has to get accustomed to this. We have to get accustomed to the idea that we ourselves are in the other as the questioner, and the one who replies is in us. This complete reversal of the entities is necessary.

Anyone acquainted with such things knows that this reversal is not easy; it contradicts everything to which man is accustomed; for habits are formed in course of life. Not only that;—it contradicts all that is inborn in man, for it is inborn in us to believe that we ourselves speak when we ask a question, and that the other is silent when we answer him. Yet what has been said is the case in intercourse with super-sensible beings. From this reversal of one's being which clairvoyant consciousness experiences, we shall be able to observe that a good proportion of the non-perceptibility of the dead rests upon the fact that they have intercourse with the living in a way which appears to the living as quite impossible, but to which they are only unaccustomed. The living simply do not hear what the dead say to them from the depths of their own beings and they do not pay attention when another being says what they themselves are thinking, what they themselves desire.

Now, it is a fact that of the two conditions of consciousness which rush so quickly past the man of to-day—those of waking and of falling asleep—the one is adapted for the question only, the other only for the reply. The peculiarity is that the moment of falling asleep is specially favourable for putting the question to the dead; that is, for the hearing of the question which we put to him. As we fall asleep, we are in a receptive condition to put the question to the dead, that is, to hear from him the question we wish to ask. We specifically disposed for this on falling asleep. In our ordinary consciousness we fall asleep immediately after, the consequence of which is, that we ask the dead hundreds of questions and talk with them of hundreds of things, but know nothing of it, because we immediately fall asleep. This fleeting moment of falling asleep is of tremendous consequence for our intercourse with the dead. So, too, the moment of waking especially disposes us to receive the answers of the dead. If we did not immediately pass over into sense-perception, but were able to linger through the moment of waking, we should be specially adapted to receive their messages. These messages would appear as though arising from our own inner being.

Thus, there are two reasons why in both cases the ordinary consciousness does not pay attention to intercourse with the dead. The first is that immediately on awaking or falling asleep we meet a condition which is calculated to obliterate what we have experienced; the second, that when we fall asleep, let us say, unusual, really ‘impossible’ things occur. The hundred questions we can put to the dead—and do put—vanish in sleep-life because we are quite unaccustomed to ‘hear’ what we ask instead of ‘uttering’ it. Again, what the dead say to us on awaking, we do not judge as coming from them, because we do not recognise it; we take it as something arising within ourselves. This is the second reason why people are not familiar with intercourse with the dead.

These general phenomena are, however, sometimes broken through in the following way. What a man experiences on falling asleep, as putting the question to the dead from himself, continues, in a sense, during sleep. During sleep we look back unconsciously to the moment of falling asleep, and through this fact, dreams can be regulated. Such dreams can really be a reproduction of the questions we put to the dead. Far closer than we suppose do we approach the dead in our dreams, although what was experienced in the dream was said at the moment of falling asleep. The dream draws it up from the undifferentiated depths of the soul. A man may, however, easily misconstrue this; he does not take the dreams—if later he recollects them as dreams—for what they really are. Dreams are really always a previous companionship with the dead springing from our life of feeling. We have moved towards them and the dream often gives us the questions we have put to them. True, it gives us our subjective experience, but as though coming from outside. The dead speak to us, but we really utter what they say ourselves. It only appears as though they spoke. As a rule, it is not messages from the dead that come to us in our dreams, but the expression of our need of being with them, of our need of coming to them at the moment of falling asleep.

The moment of waking conveys to us messages from the dead. This moment is obliterated by the subsequent life of the senses; but the fact does occur that, in waking, we have something rising, as it were, from the inner being of the soul, of which we could well be aware if our self-observation were more accurate; it does not come from our ordinary ego, it is often a message from the dead.

We shall succeed in understanding these ideas if we do not form wrong thoughts about a connection I shall now bring before your soul. You will say: The moment of falling asleep is adapted for putting the question, that of waking for receiving the answer from the dead; they lie far apart! We can only judge rightly of this when we keep in view the relations of time in the super-sensible world. There the saying is true, spoken with remarkable intuition by Richard Wagner: ‘Time becomes space.’ In the super-sensible world, time really does become space, one point of space here, another there. Time is not past, but only a point of space, near or far; time actually becomes supersensibly space. The dead only gives his answer when he stands somewhat further from us. That, again, is an unaccustomed thought; but the past is not ‘past’ in the super-sensible world. It is there, it remains, and with respect to the present, it is only a question of placing oneself in another place as regards the past. In the super-sensible world, the past is just as little done away with as the house we left to come here to-night. It is in its place; so, too, in the super-sensible world, the past is not gone but is in its place. It depends upon ourselves, and upon how far we got with them, how near or far we are from the dead. We can be very far or very near.

Thus, because we not only sleep and wake, but wake up and fall asleep, we are in a continuous correspondence and contact with the dead. They are always among us, and we do not only act under the influence of those living around us as physical men, but under that of those connected with us who have passed through the gate of death. I shall to-day bring forward facts which from a certain point of view, may lead us farther and farther, into the spiritual world.

We can distinguish between various souls who have passed through the portal of death, as soon as we have understood that there is such continuous contact with them. Since, really, we always pass through the field of the dead, either on falling asleep, when we ask them questions, or on awaking, when we receive answers from them, our connection with them must also be affected according as they died young or old. The facts underlying the following are only evident to clairvoyant consciousness. That, however, is only the ‘knowledge’ of it, the reality always takes place. Every man is related to the dead, as shown by clairvoyant consciousness. When the young—children or juveniles—pass through the gate of death, it is seen that the connection between the living and the dead is different from that of older people, those dying in the twilight of their life. There is a decisive difference. When we lose children, when the young are apparently taken from us, they do not really leave us at all, but remain with us. This is seen by clairvoyant consciousness by the fact that the messages we receive on awakening are forceful and vivid when the dead concerned died as children or young people. The connection between those remaining behind and the dead is then such that we can only say that a child or young person is not lost at all; he really remains present. The young remain above all, because after death they show a forceful need to work into our waking moments and to send us messages. It is very remarkable, yet true, that human people who died young have a very great deal to do with all connected with waking. To clairvoyant consciousness it is specially interesting that it is due to those who died in youth that a man in outer life feels a certain devoutness, a certain religious inclination. A tremendous amount in respect of devoutness is effected by the messages of those who died early.

It is different with the souls of the old, those advanced in physical years. What clairvoyance shows us concerning these can be described differently. We may say that they do not lose us; our souls remain with them. Observe the contrast. The souls of the young we do not lose, they remain with us; the souls of the old do not lose us, they take something of our souls with them, as it were;—if we may use such a comparison. The souls of the old draw us more to themselves, whereas the souls of the young draw, rather, to us. Therefore at the moment of falling asleep we have much to say to the souls of those who died old, and we can weave a special bond with the spiritual world by adapting ourselves to address the souls of the old. We can really do something with regard to these things.

Thus we see that we stand in continuous relation to the dead; we have a sort of ‘interrogation and reply,’ a mutual intercourse with the dead. To qualify ourselves for questioning and, as it were, to approach the dead, the following is the right course: Ordinary abstract thoughts, those taken from materialistic life, bring us but little in relation to the dead. The dead, if they belong to us in any way, even suffer through our distraction in purely material life. If we stand firm against it and cultivate what will bring us in relation to them in conformity with our life of will and feeling, we prepare ourselves well to put the appropriate questions at the moment of falling asleep. These connections are particularly available in so far as the dead were related to us in life. The relationship in life forms and establishes what follows as relationship after death. There is, of course, a difference whether I speak with another with apathy or with sympathy, whether I speak as one who loves him or as one who does not care. There is a great difference whether I talk with someone as at a five o'clock tea, or whether I am specially interested in what I know of him. When intimate relations are formed between soul and soul, based on impulses of feeling and will, and if one can retain such interest after the one has passed through the gate of death, such eagerness to know what answer he will give, or if one has the impulse to be something to that soul, if one can live in these reminiscences of the other soul, reminiscences which do not flow to it from the content of the life of ideas but from the relations between one soul and another, then one is specially fitted for putting questions to that soul at the moment of falling asleep.

On the other hand, for the reception of answers, messages, at the moment of waking, we are specially adapted if we were capable and inclined to enter consciously into the being of the dead person during his life. Let us reflect how, especially at the present time, one man passes another by without really learning to know him. What do we know of one another? There are striking examples of marriages lasting for ten years, without either knowing the other. This is so; yet it is possible (not depending on talent but on love) to enter the being of another with understanding, and thereby to bear within one a real world of ideas from the other. This is a specially good preparation for receiving answers from the dead themselves at the moment of waking. That is why we are even sooner able to receive answers from a child or young person, because we more easily learn to know a young person than those who have become more individualised and grown old.

Thus we can do something towards establishing a right relation between the living and the dead. Our whole life is, in reality, permeated with this relation. We, as souls, are imbedded in the same sphere in which the dead live. The degree to which we are religious is very strongly connected, as I have said, with the influence of those who have died young; and were it not that such work into life, there would probably be no religious feeling at all. The best relation to the souls of those who died young is to keep our thoughts of them more on what is general than individual. Funeral services for children or young people should have a ritualistic, universal character. The Roman Church, which colours everything with the youthful, the child-life, and which, generally speaking, would have liked to have only to do with children, to guide child-souls, therefore, does not, as a rule, give ‘individual’ addresses for the young life closing with death. This is specially good. We mourn for children in a different way than we do for older people. Our grief for a child I should prefer to call a sympathetic sorrow, for the sorrow that we feel for a child that has passed from us by death is really in many respects the reflection of the attitude of our own soul towards the being of the child, which remains near us. We share in the life of the child, the child itself takes part with his entity in our sorrow; it feels a sympathetic sorrow. Our grief for an older person is different, it cannot be called a sympathetic grief, it is ‘egoistic;’ it is best borne by the reflection that an older dead person really ‘takes us with him;’ he does not lose us if we try to prepare ourselves to join him. Hence we form more ‘individualised’ memories of our older dead, we bear them rather in thought, we can remain united with them in thought, in the thoughts we shared with them if we try not to behave as an uncomfortable companion. When we have thoughts which he cannot accept, our dead friend retains us, but in a peculiar way. We remain with him, but we can be a burden to him if he has to drag us along without our entertaining any thoughts in which he can unite with us, which he can perceive spiritually.

Let us reflect how concrete our relations to the dead appear in the light of Spiritual Science, if we are able to have in view the whole relationship of the living to the dead. This will become very important to the humanity of the future. Trivial as it may sound, for every age is a ‘time of transition,’ yet our own age really is a period of transition. It must pass into a more spiritual age. It must know what comes from the kingdom of the dead, it must know that we are surrounded by the dead as by the air. In time to come there will he a real perception that when an older person dies we must not become an incubus to him, as we shall be if we have thoughts which he cannot entertain. Just think how rich our times may become, if we accept this life with the dead as real. I have often said that Spiritual Science does not wish to found a new religion, or to introduce anything sectarian into the world; to think otherwise is entirely to misconstrue it. On the other hand, I have often emphasised that the religious life can be deepened by it, because it provides real foundations. Certainly, remembrance of the dead, the service for the dead, has a religious side. On this side a foundation for the religious life will be created, if that life is illuminated by Spiritual Science. When seen in the right light, these things will be lifted out of the abstract. For instance, it is not a matter of indifference to life whether a funeral service held is the right one for a young person, or whether it is more suited for an old one. It is of far greater importance for the general life of man whether right or wrong funeral services are held than all the regulations of town councils or parliament—strange as that may sound,—for the impulses working in life come from the human individuals themselves when they are in right relation to the dead. To-day people wish to regulate everything by an abstract structure of the social order. They are pleased when they do not need to think much over what they are to do. Many, even, are glad if they are not obliged to reflect upon what they ought to think. It is quite different when one has a living consciousness, not merely of a vaguely pantheistic connection, but of a concrete one with the spiritual world. One can foresee a permeation of the religious life with concrete ideas when it is deepened by Spiritual Science. ‘Spirit’ was eliminated (as I have often related) from Western humanity in the year 869 at the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople. The dogma was then drawn up that Christians must not regard man as consisting of body, soul and spirit, but of body and soul only, though certain spiritual qualities were to be ascribed to the soul. This abolition of the spirit is of tremendous significance. It was dogma,—that in the year 869 in Constantinople, it was decided that man must not be regarded as endowed with ‘anima’ and ‘spiritus,’ but only ‘unam animam rationalem et intellectualem.’ The dogma that ‘The soul has spiritual qualities’ was spread over the spiritual life of the West in the twilight of the ninth century. This must be overcome. Spirit must again be recognised. Trichotomy—body, soul and spirit,—regarded as heresy in the Middle Ages, must again be recognised as the true and exact view of man's nature. Several things will be necessary to this end for those who to-day naturally challenge all ‘authority,’ yet swear that man consists of body and soul alone. Such are not only to be found in particular religious persuasions, but also among the ranks of those who listen to professors, philosophers, and others. Philosophers, as can everywhere be read, distinguish only body and soul, omitting the spirit. This is their ‘unprejudiced’ philosophy of life; but it rests upon the decision of the Church Council in the year 869 not to recognise spirit;—that, however, they do not realise. A well-known philosopher, Wilhelm Wundt—a great philosopher by favour of his publisher, but at the same time renowned,—of course divides man into body and soul, because he regards it as ‘unprejudiced’ science to do so—and does not know that he is simply following the decision of the Council of 869. We must look into the actual facts if we wish to see what takes place in the world of reality. If a man looks at the actual facts in the domain especially mentioned to-day, his consciousness will be opened concerning a connection with that world only dreamed of and slept away in history. History, historical life, will only be seen in the right light when a true consciousness of the connection of the so-called living with the so-called dead can be developed.