The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It is not only desirable indeed in every area of thinking and life but also necessary to get to know the sources of error beside those of truth. Since one can only shelter from all obstacles which oppose the quest for truth by the knowledge of the sources of error. However, the knowledge of the sources of error is particularly necessary in the area of spiritual research because there the error lies in wait for you everywhere, so to speak. However, it is disguised in most cases so that you can hardly recognise it. In many cases it is in such a way that one can get to truth only on the paths of spiritual research if you can really defeat the error like an adversary.

I have explained the day before yesterday that the human being has no other means on the path of spiritual research than the human soul that can mediate between the human knowledge and the supersensible worlds. The usual science produces its outer instruments with which it observes its experiments. The spiritual researcher has as an instrument only what he can make of his soul, while he gets out soul forces, which are not necessary for the usual physical life and cognition, but are cognitive forces slumbering there, and enters with these cognitive forces into the supersensible world.

I have also shown that the soul—if it applies the characterised means to itself—advances first to the so-called Imaginative knowledge and how already there an error lies in wait for you against which the spiritual researcher must fight, namely the error to consider this imagery as something objective that exists outside of you in the world.

I have already said that any self-education of the spiritual researcher must tend to a strong willpower so that the pictures emerging in the soul are considered as nothing but reflections of own soul experiences. I have also said that one has to erase this Imaginative world from the soul, has to descend to unfathomable depths, and that only thereby the soul becomes able to feel the supersensible facts and beings objectively.

As a counter-image of the Imaginative knowledge, I have put the mediumship. Of course, it is not possible to repeat everything that I have said the day before yesterday; I want only to remember that I have drawn your attention to some doubtful aspects of mediumship. If I do not mention them today, you must not conclude that these doubtful aspects were not enough taken into consideration. I have already said what mediumship consists of. While with the Imaginative knowledge the inner vitality of the soul is strengthened, the consciousness is more strengthened than, otherwise, in the usual life, the ego; the usual consciousness of the medium is diminished, so that with the medium the usual thinking and feeling stop and an unconscious state takes place. Because the consciousness is expelled from the medium as it were. The forces that exist except the consciousness in the human nature are brought into the universal world being, and this world being with its spiritual subsoil and processes works immediately into the medium. The medium can thereby reveal itself, but not as an individuality, the interplaying forces and processes of the world reveal themselves. The medium becomes the revelator of the spiritual work and actions of beings of the world. Thus, the Imaginative knowledge with the strengthening of consciousness confronts mediumship where the consciousness is extinguished more or less.

Let us go first into the sources of error of mediumship. Those people who like to get knowledge by the revelations of media reject as a rule that the medium takes up some spiritual-scientific teachings, concepts, or ideas in its consciousness. That is, such researchers who want to recognise objective truth by mediumship do not like that the medium has learnt ideas of the spiritual world. From their viewpoint, they are right because the knowledge of spiritual science uses the consciousness strongly, and pushes its way into the human consciousness. Then it is difficult to blank out this consciousness of the medium, to quieten these strong forces really. Then one can experience that the medium instead of making known that which is independent of its own individuality reveals that only which has worked before as spiritual science. The investigators of this field are very much anxious as a rule to keep their media away from the influence of spiritual research.

A strong imagination of the medium is also not appropriate because it can describe various things in the world. Since every strong imagination works substantially on the individuality and pushes its way through if the consciousness is diminished. Thus, one may say, any active and creative content of the consciousness disturbs the manifestations of the medium. Yes, everybody knows who has experience in that field that people with strong imagination are just bad media. If a personality has taken up, for example, that which you can read in my Occult Science about the evolution of the planetary system, and can induce her/him to make manifestations, you will find out that that which the medium has learnt this way is mixed in her/his manifestations, while one can get, otherwise, the strangest results which are grotesque now and again. If one gets over the grotesque expression, it appears just with media of certain kind how cosmic connections of the evolution can be expressed. It is necessary for that who wants to investigate with the help of a medium above all to appropriate a certain experience to distinguish the subjective, individual consciousness contents of the medium from that which the medium cannot know and still manifests itself by it. Hence, for more trivial investigations one has to consider those manifestations of media in particular with which one knows for sure that the medium makes known something that he/she could not at all make known with her/his full consciousness.

I bring in things only which are exactly verified which everybody knows who has experience in this field, as one knows any scientific facts. If one receives a communication from a medium, for example, in a language which the medium has not learnt, then one knows that here something speaks through the medium that cannot be associated with the individuality; one knows that the medium unveils objective world contents.

Thus, everywhere we recognise the source of error by the peculiarity of the medium that the practical person has to avoid in this field. In particular, one has to consider this source of error if one deals with the observation of somnambulistic persons who make known something of the spiritual world by those methods, those manifestations to which they are enabled. There one will always find that something subjective is largely mixed in the manifestation. Someone who has experience in this area knows that a medium that is for example a Protestant receives her/his manifestations quite different from a medium that is a Catholic. One can experience that a Catholic medium whose emotional life is penetrated with Catholic views beholds certain beings in the spiritual world that appear, however, in such a way, as the person concerned imagines it, for instance, as an angel. What can be the case with such a Catholic medium will not be the case with the Protestant one. Hence, it is again urgently necessary, beside the observation of that which makes known itself by the medium to envisage the individuality of the medium exactly. Here we get to an area that can light up the sources of error to a great extent.

That who is a sceptic in this area or regards the whole story as folly will say, there you have it, there that makes known itself by such a person what he/she thinks, what he/she has in his/her consciousness.—Indeed, if one looks above all at that in its totality what the media unveil, then one will almost never escape the errors unscathed. However, the objective beholder of these things considers the contents of the manifestations less and less but it comes more into consideration that even such things can be experienced with diminished consciousness. The experience is considered.

If one appropriates the practice to ignore the contents of the manifestation and observes which processes happen in the human soul as results of this coherence of the human nature with the universal forces, then you realise why it is possible that once the manifestation is coloured Catholic and the other time Protestant. Since the experience of spiritual forces and beings matters that dress only in the described way. The error originates if one considers the sheaths as the essentials. You find truth if you can ignore the disguise and look at the fact that generally such a process takes place—no matter if and how the experience is coloured by the individuality. Since the experience is not an angel or anything else, but these are spiritual forces which you can behold only with careful investigations, but whose existence the medium can prove and express.

One cannot say easily where in the described area error stops and truth begins because really the one changes into the other. One has to characterise the matter rather in such a way that one takes a way where one approaches truth more and more if one acquires the practice to exclude the sources of error, so that probably someone who looks for truth in this area conscientiously can be very misunderstood in our present where one does not like such matters. One believes that that which he wants to tell as experiences is anyhow contestable. However, the conscientious researchers in this area, actually, do not at all mean that; they only mean the description of something that has appeared, and if they are conscientious, they themselves indicate where the sources of error are. However, it is sufficient to be able to show a path to attain knowledge of a spiritual world that is threatened by error, indeed, with every step you do. However, you can thrust aside the error, the further you advance. Hence, it is not a matter of answering the question: what is truth what is error?—but the matter is that there is a way to overcome the error gradually and get to the area of truth, so that truth is as it were like something that you approach as a distant aim. These are the essentials in this field.

Then it depends with the progress on this way whether one gets more and more to such experiments—if we like to call it so—in which the individual of the consciousness is extinguished, and that that which still remains intervenes only in the objective world processes. Thus, it is a question of decreasing the consciousness in mediumship. The more one succeeds in diminishing this consciousness and making the medium only an instrument for supersensible world processes taking place without her/him, the more one attains truth in this area. Besides, I have to call attention to one thing: if you are concerned with such a somnambulistic person who gets either by her/his nature at certain times or by certain, often rather doubtful means to such a state, you get principles of the supersensible world in their manifestations. Principles of the world express themselves; this comes strongly to light in the manifestations of the person concerned. Should beings of the supersensible world reveal themselves this way, they must take possession of the medium first, and one must have the possibility to look through the medium at the real beings that makes known itself. A trained view of such things belongs to it, which you can only acquire on one side by practice, on the other side by insight into that which spiritual science can give generally.

The Imaginative knowledge is the complete counter-image of that which I have just described. Today I tried to point sketchily to that which spiritual science has to say about mediumship, while I do not consider this, otherwise, as my task. However, that which I represent here should come from the counter-image of mediumship, from that which the human soul can explore which has made itself a tool by developing forces that are slumbering in it to behold into the Imaginative world. I have already spoken the day before yesterday, to what extent this Imaginative world is radically different from the pathological, fantastic world of hallucinations, visions, and delusions and so on. Now you may ask, do any errors ambush the esoteric also in this area like adversaries? Are there also sources of error?—This is absolutely the case. You can already receive, even before you enter into the supersensible world, an idea to what extent errors may generally originate if the soul is left to its own resources, as I have described it the day before yesterday, and takes the way into the spiritual worlds.

We have all possible worldviews or viewpoints in the usual world. There one has materialism, positivism, individualism, spiritualism and so on. Try only once to listen objectively to another person who feels pressured into alleging all logical and other reasons for materialism or spiritualism and so on by his whole education, by his whole life. Then you will convince yourself that it is never quite entitled, actually, to feel as an opponent of materialism or spiritualism and so on. You will realise that for all these viewpoints numerous reasonable arguments can be brought forward. You may mostly completely agree—if you are unbiased—with a representative of the concerning viewpoint. Even if you do not stand at all on the materialist viewpoint, you may say if you listen to a reasonable materialist: yes, nevertheless, it is well founded what he brings forward for his viewpoint. The uncomfortable begins where people are committed to any viewpoint unilaterally and attack and reject another viewpoint to the point of intolerability sometimes. It would be very well conceivable that somebody says who has experiences in this area: yes, I can be a materialist rather well, where materialism is entitled, and a spiritualist where spiritualism is entitled and so on. This possibility absolutely exists.

I wanted to give a sample in two talks that I have held here in last winter about the subjects: How Does One Disprove Theosophy? and How Does One Justify Theosophy?—a sample of how one can bring forward something positive for contrary standpoints. Reasonable people have always pointed to the fact that—considered unilaterally—no point of view shows the truth really. People, who get a feeling of this fact, often say, truth is between the contrary points of view in the middle.—However, this statement seems to someone who goes deeper into this matter in such a way, as if anybody said, if I have two chairs, I sit down not on the one or the other, but between them.—Goethe who had good experiences in this area said rightly, truth is not between two contrary opinions but there is the task in between which should lead us only to the facts.—As a rule, truth is to be found neither in the one nor in the other one-sidedness. This already becomes obvious if we have not yet entered into the supersensible world. This fact could work quite stupefying on someone who takes the knowledge seriously to whom knowledge is really a matter of life. Since you can describe everything unilaterally from a viewpoint and bring good reasons forward, and one can prove the same thing with maybe equally good reasons from the other side. This can lead in many cases to a kind of doubt about truth. However, it will not lead that who is strong enough to a doubt about truth but to an investigation about how the human being gets generally to a viewpoint.

If anybody is not committed only to materialism, but has saved so much freedom for himself to refrain from his approach and to exert some self-knowledge, then he can ask himself, how has my present life proceeded, actually? How have my habitual ways of thinking developed, what has induced me, for example, to follow more the material coherences? Thus, a follower of materialism may ask. The follower of a more spiritual view can also do that. There you already find in the usual life that one creates a subjective viewpoint. Thereby one gets to know the logical value of a viewpoint that one knows how one has got it how a certain life direction has induced one to think just in such a way. Not because one looks for truth in the middle between the different viewpoints, but because one recognises how this viewpoint has originated and why one judges in such a way, one becomes fair towards the other, and one gets around to acknowledging the value of the other viewpoint. The different viewpoints compensate each other if the followers of these different viewpoints practise self-knowledge.

Imagine once that some people of contrary viewpoints meet like in a board and quarrel about their different viewpoints. Somebody who has taken part in such a thing knows that, besides, normally nothing results. If people rise after hours-long discussion, everybody is normally still convinced fanatically of his viewpoint as before. If the attempt were done that such a board were quiet one hour and everybody checked during one hour only how he has got to his viewpoint, and if they started talking only then again, they would not start quarrelling. This possibility is imaginable. Since one would find understanding for the other viewpoint by self-knowledge, by investigation of the way which one has done to get to his viewpoint. Already in the usual life, it is obvious that self-knowledge is the way to approach truth gradually, and that then the truth positions itself in the middle that one, however, must not put his opinion between the contrary viewpoints.

This self-knowledge must take place to a much greater extent with that who wants to avoid the sources of error in the supersensible area. Here I have to say that the spiritual researcher can approach truth only if he begins to practise self-knowledge in the area of the supersensible in the extreme. He has enough opportunity if he does not surrender to that which appears as pictures in his soul at first, but if he can say to himself, you yourself are the pictures in your soul; even if they are maybe wonderful—this is no supersensible world; you yourself are all that, projected onto space.

Thus, the first step on the way to spiritual research already gives him the possibility of self-knowledge. Because you become acquainted with yourself this way, you learn only to eliminate yourself from that which can be then considered as objective. There is in the field of spiritual research no other way to avoid errors than to get to the full self-knowledge first, so that you can remove that which you yourself are from that which is left over. Here the spiritual researcher can recognise by a particular step, which he has to do, that he has advanced enough in self-knowledge. If this were not the case, one should not at all venture into the supersensible area. Since it is nothing as difficult for the human being as self-knowledge, because all interests, all inclinations, all sympathies that you have for yourself put themselves in the way and deceive us as it were while they lead us to believe that they are something real, whereas they are only reflections of our being.

One calls the step by which the spiritual researcher can know that he has the necessary self-knowledge “encounter with the guardian of the threshold.” What is this so-called guardian of the threshold? You can get an image of him only gradually. We suppose once that at a certain age we intensely look back at our development, at our favourite opinions, at everything that we have learnt, how we have felt up to now concerning sensory and extrasensory. Even if these things are very difficult—it is important to know that you have to put just such questions to yourself and to consider them as meditations beside the other exercises. This evokes the forces slumbering in the soul of which you can say that you get away by them as it were from your own being that you face yourself.

Single symptoms show this clearly in the Imaginative world at first. If you do such exercises of self-knowledge, you feel a certain change in the soul that is rather awkward at first. It consists of the fact that you grow tired of your own being in many respects. Someone is not yet a right spiritual researcher who has not strongly felt this weariness of the own being. Since strictly speaking you are everything that you have formed up to now as opinions, feelings and sensations, you hardly are something else in your consciousness. That all has now become something external to you. You are estranged from yourself. What you once regarded as your peculiarity becomes anything external to you; you feel empty, as nothing compared to that which you really are and which does no longer appear to you as something valuable as it used to be.

These feelings can be experienced so subtly that your soul life does not at all experience any danger if in so careful way the path is searched to the spiritual world, as I have described it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?.

With somebody who wants to reach higher levels of spiritual knowledge the described sensations must strongly appear so that his soul is transformed quite considerably and he feels as if he has everything that he had in himself now beside himself, and, hence, feels as if he faces an abyss. What he had up to now appears to him as something that he should no longer use. If you have intensely done such an experience, you feel another experience emerging in the Imaginative knowledge very soon that consists of the fact that you become acquainted with yourself in a new way. You get to know that which you have released as your own being as it were from yourself with all possible, mostly unpleasant qualities. Besides pictures of beings appear, and now they become critics of that which you really are. You see yourself surrounded by nothing but pictures of other beings that stalk you that judge everything that is good or bad in you.

Briefly, you feel your being as it were allocated to other beings. It is really something that is well met with the picture of Dionysus whose being is split and divided. Any training as it is described in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? aims at the fact that you know how to behave in the right way at the moment when the just described occurs when, so to speak, not the own individuality perceives, but when the world perceives and judges you. However, for this moment you have to be trained first, so that you are not shocked. The fact that the human being does not behold and that he lives, actually, in a glass house and everywhere world forces and beings are there that see through him until his most secret depths would interfere in the usual life everywhere. One denotes the fact that he does not behold them that he is protected against them the encounter with the guardian of the threshold that leads into the supersensible world.

In detailed way, I tried to represent that in my mystery drama The Guardian of the Threshold where I tried to turn the truth described more theoretically into action. Now you get to know when you have experienced this encounter with the guardian of the threshold that everywhere not only the error of knowledge but also the real error lies in wait for you and that you have to take care of yourself everywhere and find the right possibility to look at the things as they are in truth.

Because self-knowledge is difficult, the risk of a substantial error arises that the spiritual researcher does not reach the point where he can place himself, so to speak, beside himself. However, you cannot say, here is truth, here is error, but only that you can wend your way to truth. The more you are able to consider yourself as an objective being, the more you approach truth. While the consciousness of a medium has to be diminished, it has to be strengthened with the spiritual researcher just in such a way that he is not mistaken about himself and about what he has in himself. While entering the spiritual world you have to target the fact as sharply as possible that you face your concentrated own self. Thus, you eliminate everything personal from the supersensible percipience.

Let us assume that a person wends his esoteric way honestly and conscientiously, he can maybe get to a certain point, then he loses his courage or desire, and he does not go further. Of course, you can suppress everything that you have experienced up to now. The spiritual researcher is not always a spiritual researcher but only at certain moments. If he were always in such a soul state, he would appear like a crazy person. That who has already transformed his soul to a certain degree and gives up the thing again can experience that he now mixes that which he has recognised up to now in the spiritual world chaotically with that which the sensory world gives him. The things intermingle, and then you are confused. The ears hear, but also something supersensible interferes, and you are confused. This can happen of course only, if you do not take the instructions into consideration which I have given in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Wrong application of the methods may appear in any science. That, however, who has got to a certain end of this way will experience the following:

He not only surveys the qualities of his mind, his prejudices et cetera and does not involve them in his objective knowledge, but also never mixes pictures of that which the senses perceive which the physical reason invents in the objective knowledge. Since he will not be able to eliminate his personality. Now here we can get to a kind of definition of error in the supersensible world. This error consists of the fact that one has insufficiently cast off the own subjectivity, and, therefore, always the own individuality intermingles in the pictures of objective reality. It is quite natural on one side if one often says that everybody portrays that somewhat different which the seer perceives, and, hence, one can count on nothing at all. One can concede such a fact, but stressing this is trivial, it is just a self-evident fact. It is natural that the ideal of the spiritual researcher can hardly completely attained and that, hence, everywhere in that which the spiritual researcher describes a subjective, individual element intermingles. He, who can compare, however, will find that if one does not only look at the pictures, but at the experiences they are more or less similar.

Concerning the moral qualities that are necessary for the seer one has to emphasise that he must be conscientious that he must practise all those qualities that I have already mentioned the day before yesterday. It is correct that one can look into the spiritual world, indeed, only by the described processes that, however, the research results of the spiritual world are to be transferred to the concepts of the physical reason. You have to search them in the supersensible world; you can understand them with common sense. It is true that someone who can think well can also properly judge that which he experiences in the spiritual world. Someone who is a fool in the sensory world and cannot think logically describes everything that he beholds wrong and caricatured. That also applies to the moral qualities of the person concerned. Somebody who wants to get with immoral attitude to the spiritual world will just get in the spiritual world to the disturbing and hampering things and beings and he recognises them distorted and caricatured because of his immoral attitude. However, someone who enters with moral attitude finds the beings of the spiritual world that show the things in their right mutual arrangement and weightiness.

Thus, the determinative of truth or error in spiritual research is not anything that you acquire to yourself as a seer only, but something that you have already acquired before in intellectual and moral respects. In particular, moral things are strongly involved in how one interprets the supersensible phenomena. Someone who is prejudiced in a certain belief who has sympathies and prejudices for the fact that something certain should be true, brings this disposition, this prejudice into the supersensible world; he interprets the phenomena after it. Everything that he fathomed and announced of the spiritual world can be an error because it is coloured with his subjective belief.

Here is the area where I have to point—after we have discussed the sources of error of spiritual research—to the sources of error by the dissemination of spiritual science. In a way, the dissemination of spiritual research resembles the dissemination of any other research. As for example not everybody can be a chemist, but everybody can accept and figure that out what the chemists have investigated in the laboratories about the substances, everybody can judge, even if he is not a spiritual researcher, what the spiritual researcher announces, namely not only up to a certain degree but to its full extent. In this respect, the things are similar; in other regard, they are dissimilar. They are dissimilar because chemistry, mathematics, or any other science is something that one can face cool and objectively if researchers announce it, even if with true thirst for knowledge.

This is not the case with spiritual research. Spiritual research touches the most intimate of our hearts, the big questions of life. As the researcher carries his prejudices, his belief, his sympathies and antipathies into the spiritual world and thereby distorts the things and beholds wrong, the audience, the confessors—let me use the term—meet the spiritual researcher with certain beliefs, certain sympathies, or antipathies. Something develops that does not lead to an objective judgement, but that is associated with all possible things which take effect from human being to human being. As strongly as the soul longs for experiencing something about these things, as the human soul is careless now and again to apply the unbiased reason to judge what the spiritual researcher brings forward, although it could be judged completely. Then belief often replaces an unbiased judgement because one likes that which the one or the other says maybe only because he brings it forward emphatically or because one finds him pleasant. The belief replaces the objective, conscientious verification; one accepts the things trusting in authority. The worst is if authority mania interposes itself between the spiritual researcher and his audience. Therefore, as with all things about which we have heard today that the spiritual researcher should follow them he keeps guard as it were beside his own self. The confessor, who listens to the spiritual researcher, should pay attention to his common sense and repeatedly carry out a kind of self-inspection to realise how much belief, prejudice, and sympathy intermingles in the facts that he accepts with the messages of the spiritual researcher.

Since in double respect accepting at mere belief causes big damage is a source of error just with the dissemination of spiritual science. The one is that the confessor does not develop healthy judgement what is the most necessary. Because common sense can be practised best of all if the results of spiritual research are thought through; you deprive yourself of the best opportunity if you accept these results at mere belief. The second one is: because the things are important which the spiritual researcher has to say, he may exercise an incorrect influence over his supporters—if the listener does not constantly keep his common sense in readiness—because one believes him because one takes up that prejudiced what one should check, actually. Thereby the spiritual researcher tries—instead of exercising an entitled influence, while he is convincing and the listeners realise what he says—, to persuade while he overpowers their common sense. Even if this ideal condition cannot yet be reached today, one has to say that if truth should prevail the confessors should make it to the spiritual researcher as difficult as possible to spread his truths and should impose the highest requirements on him if he expresses his knowledge in concepts and ideas of common sense. Then one counteracts what, unfortunately, is a fact and a forever returning source of error with the dissemination of spiritual truths that charlatanism and all possible similar mingles so easily with spiritual research. Unless just common sense is applied permanently, one does no longer know where conscientious spiritual research and where charlatanism and humbug is, and everything is thrown together.

Two oppose soul directions will throw charlatanism and conscientious spiritual research together. One soul direction is that of those who are prejudiced in authority mania, who make themselves confessors of spiritual science light-heartedly because of their sympathies and prejudices. They mingle everything and often accept the one as well as the other. There is for this kind of people who are oriented in such a way no other remedy than that there are conscientious spiritual researchers who position themselves conscientiously on the ground of truth. Only experience can teach us whether this is the case. The different people who may hardly differentiate charlatanism and conscientiousness and jumble everything up are those who do not at all want to go into the matter who judge about the matter cursorily with some concepts they have knocked together, and who—because they often succeed in uncovering fraud—not only label everything with this name, but lump everything together. The direction of the religious confessors often regards the biggest charlatanism as irrefutable highest truth, the other kind of human beings, the biased ones, the non-experts, even regards conscientious spiritual research as charlatanism and error sometimes, and one cannot bear a grudge against them because they do not better understand what they say.

Thus, it will be necessary above all, so that truth and not error can prevail with the dissemination of spiritual research, that in particular with the confessors of spiritual research critical reason, critical judgement, and common sense and not belief in authority develop. This belief in authority will already wither away if a knowledge spreads among those who like and need spiritual research, a knowledge that is not common, unfortunately, among the confessors of spiritual science that a seer is no higher animal because he can behold in the supersensible world. He does not differ from other human beings, just as little as a chemist, a botanist, a machinist, or a tailor. The possession of spiritual knowledge does not really determine the value of the human being but only that he can investigate this area and bring the acquired knowledge to his fellow men. Only his common sense determines the value of the human being, his power of judgement and his moral qualities. Just spiritual research could prove that intellectual and moral qualities of the human being already determine his value, before he enters into the spiritual world, and that if he is inferior there the results of his research will be inferior. It is exceptionally necessary to realise this. Even more than the opponents of spiritual science, its supporters should take stock of themselves in this field.

Thus, I tried today to describe not only the possibilities of error finding spiritual truth, but also the possibility of error with the dissemination of spiritual truths. I tried to evoke a sensation that conscientious spiritual research acknowledges that its opponents can often argue this or that rightly and that conscientious spiritual research can and has to argue in the same way because it is just important in this area to face the error to recognise the truth. For the confessors of spiritual science has that who wants to be conscientious, as a rule, only one consolation: truth has a strong power, and, even if error slips in because of the belief in authority, by the self-correction of truth those are cured who were supporters of this or that for a while at mere belief in authority. In most cases, such a cure takes place because one has to pay the price as it were to have had such a blind belief in authority. Often it just happened that because one did not observe the details sharply, but took one's word for it that then with a radical case it appears how little conscientiously one has gone forward. If then pain and disappointment are the more significant, the cure is just successful.

For those, however, who throw together spiritual research and charlatanism benevolently or malevolently, for those the today's consideration may offer another consolation that people can have always if they generally face truth. The truths of spiritual research if they appear as new are much more exposed to those destinies to which, however, also the other truths are exposed which appear gradually in the evolution of humanity. How, for example, did one accept the Copernican worldview! How did one treat Galilei! How did the whole world defend itself when Francesco Redi spread the truth that earthworms do not originate from river mud and other lifeless matter, but that any life arises from a living zygote! How academic organisations rose when the truth was pronounced that iron stones can fall from the air onto earth—the meteorites! How did people defend themselves against an apparently so unimportant thing like the post stamp. At that time, an authoritative person said, if really the correspondences increased to such an extent, the post-office buildings would no longer be sufficient! - I could bring in numerous other examples that truth when it entered into the world was regarded as paradoxical and was rejected.

The sight of these destinies of truth can give us the consolation and the confidence towards all those who reject spiritual science and throw it together with charlatanism, the consolation which one just had compared with truth generally in all ages and which one can dress in the words of someone who was often mistaken who tried, however, to look for truth. I am allowed to summarise just both talks that dealt with the interrelation of truth and error in spiritual research with words of the vigorous truth seeker Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) who said in his writing The Fundamentals of Moral (1839):

“During all centuries the poor truth had to blush about the fact that she was paradoxical, and, nevertheless, it is not her guilt. She cannot accept the figure of the sitting enthroned general error. There she looks up sighing to her tutelary deity, the time, that shows victory and fame to her, but her wing beats are so big and slow that the individual dies away in the meantime.”

Answer-to-Questions

Question: Some persons get a peculiar feeling sometimes, mostly after long straining thinking, as if they stood beside themselves, with a dreadful emptiness around themselves, and then the body appears as something very strange. Then one must only force himself to feel again as a body, as with E.T.A. Hoffmann. What is to be done there?

Rudolf Steiner: Above all, one has to consider that everything that appears of this kind in the world has different degrees. What I have described in the talk today shows only a more significant degree of the phenomena that can appear in weaker degrees always in the human being. The way to get away from the instrument of the body is just the way of meditation and concentration. If the interrogator says “mostly after long straining thinking”—meditation and concentration is a quite intensive degree of concentrated thinking, feeling, maybe also of willing. Hence, such phenomena are definitely possible which take place in an extraordinary measure with meditation and concentration if the single members of the human nature are in a looser balance—with every human being they are, by the way, in another balance. This was described, for example, belletristically very appropriately. Somebody errs who supposes that with a belletristic portrayal of such things always only imagination forms the basis. The serious artist describes, even if he takes unusual matters as objects, from experience. This applies to E.T.A. Hoffmann (Ernst Theodor Amadeus H., 1776-1822, jurist, poet, and composer) to a great extent. Many people would experience this if they had always observed themselves, but the degree of attention does not always reach the events, and thereby such facts remain often unnoticed. Strictly speaking, spiritual research is not something special, but only an increase of that which also appears in the usual life everywhere and always.

Question: In which regard is the knowledge of higher worlds worthwhile—apart from curiosity—, because it is dependent on common sense?

Rudolf Steiner: For someone who does not long for the answer of the higher questions of existence, spiritual science will be superfluous. However, to someone who longs for the answer of such questions one has to say: as well as the body hungers for food, the soul hungers for the answer of the big questions of life. As I have already said in the talk, you can probably take truth away from the soul, but not the hunger for truth. Its effects will become more prominent that at first the soul experiences all possible states of disorder, even of desperation that a matter of knowledge changes into a question of health. Here I only point to the close coherence of nervousness and indifference to spiritual truths. They are just a necessity of human nature.

You can learn from this question again, what I have already often touched, that people do not listen exactly enough to these things which can be presented so difficultly. If one had listened to that precisely which I have said in the talk, such a question would not have been put. One would have also heard, for example, that the value of the human being depends on the soul condition, on moral and intellectual qualities, and not on the contents of the truths, because one has to find them only by supersensible research. One will find the intellectual in the higher knowledge if one is intellectually minded and the moral if one is morally minded that you have to bring, however, your intellectual and moral abilities with you into the supersensible world.

Question: It is a fact that one can give the functions of the soul another direction by mental work. Where are guarantees, however, of the absolute validity of the immutability of our soul?

Rudolf Steiner: I have said twice in the talks that one cannot say, here truth stops and here error begins—that there is, however, the possibility of entering the ways to truth. Of course, it would be best if one could write all truths on a small piece of paper; one could put it into the vest pocket and look at it if necessary. However, truth is not this way. You have gradually to work your way upward. Is the question generally entitled to demand guarantees that anything is objectively valid?

Question: Is intellectual soul and mind soul the same in theosophy?

Rudolf Steiner: No, but these are two sides of one and the same being, so that one soul member is called intellectual soul once if it turns outwardly and judges the things, and the other time the same being is called mind soul if it experiences its own inside.

Question: Is there any particular moral of the spiritual researcher?

Rudolf Steiner: No other than the generally human moral which can be refined, however, as I have described it in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. However, as morality does not have double-entry accounting in other ways as well, I have to say that also the spiritual researcher is not allowed to have double-entry moral accounting. However, as I have said, he must practise certain moral qualities more intimately.

Question: Does spiritual science have the right to reveal holy laws?

Rudolf Steiner: These are just the laws of nature.

A basic quality of anthroposophy is the pursuit for ideas, for mental pictures, for concepts of the world that are rooted in reality in a much deeper sense than the concepts, mental pictures and ideas of the scientific worldview are. Indeed, this could seem very weird at first, because many people believe that these scientific mental pictures are rooted very deeply in reality.

However, even if one disregards what I have brought forward in the three talks I held here this year and only looks at that which reasonable naturalists have brought forward concerning what natural sciences have to say about the being of the events of nature, one will get the insight that also such natural scientists are clear to themselves that with the usual scientific ideas one cannot penetrate into the being of reality. How much just natural scientists have spoken about the limits of the scientific knowledge! I have brought forward the typical fact in the first talk that one of the most significant disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), published a basic book during these years where he shows that one cannot come close anyhow to the being of the life phenomena just with the scientific concepts, which celebrated the greatest triumphs in the second half of the nineteenth century.

As long as it concerns penetrating only into the being of nature, these limitations of the scientific images do not at all appear. Nevertheless, they appear if the human being wants to apply the soul forces that he uses to scientific cognition also to the moral-social life. What is maybe a mere error or a mere one-sidedness in natural sciences—if it is taken as a basis of the moral-social life—becomes injurious, causes minor or major disasters. One of the biggest disasters is that, in which we live during these years.

As peculiar as it will appear to somebody: someone who is able to grasp the things in their deeper coherence gets clear about that what happens now as such tragic events is associated with the inadequate moral-social ideas which prepared themselves since centuries and which showed to advantage in particular in the nineteenth century. The mere science, the mere knowledge, the mere theory corrects in painless way if inadequate concepts are inserted in it. Reality corrects at pains and disasters if actions are inserted in it, which arise from inadequate knowledge and penetrating reality.

Now we will get to apparently remote mental pictures if we want to apply the anthroposophic spiritual science to the moral-social life, remote only because they still appear very strange to the present habitual ways of thinking because of the prejudices with which one is coming up to meet them. I must take the starting point from calling attention to the fact that the consideration of the human being has become relatively one-sided just under the influence of the modern world view, so that, actually, also far-sighted naturalists attempt to penetrate not only into the pure physical side of the human being but into his whole nature.

Since only if his whole nature is considered, it can become reality in the social-moral life, can any influencing control work salutarily on the social-moral life.

It could now seem weird if anybody says, for the whole consideration of the human life it is necessary that one not only considers how the human being is active in the wake day life but that one has also to regard the other side of life, the dream life, to take the whole human being into account.

Reasonable naturalists even attempt today to come close to this dream life, while they want to consider the subconscious. However, already in case of the consideration of dreams it becomes obvious that such attempts work with inadequate cognitive means because they want to refrain from anthroposophy.

What spiritual science can show with its means leads us to the cognition that this sleep-dream life flows into the whole life of the human being much more intensely than one believes in the one-sided scientific consideration. I have to foreground a sentence which seems paradoxical even today to most people which will been corroborated, however, more and more if one goes over from abstractions to realistic concepts.

I could give a comparative psychology of the sleep of plants, of animals, of the human beings, it would turn out that it is more difficult to spiritual science than to the one-sided scientific consideration because it cannot take simple concepts as starting point and cannot encompass the whole world with them. As death of the plants, animals, and human beings is something else to the spiritual researcher, the sleep, the dream life of animals and that of human beings is different to spiritual science.

Spiritual science finds out for itself with its means that we can have our ego-consciousness only because we experience the sleep and the wake consciousness alternating in such a way as we experience the sleep as human beings. It is a trivial view that the human being must sleep because he is tired. However, already the consideration of a pensioner who visits a talk or a concert and who is most certainly not tired, but falls asleep after the first five minutes, proves adequately by experience that the theory of tiredness is most certainly not true. Only that will understand sleep who understands it as an internal rhythm as it must penetrate life and as we got to know such a life rhythm yesterday as one of the members which correspond as bodily tools to the soul being.

The human being has to spend his life as it were,—as well as the single tone can never be music but only in the interaction with other tones the impression of a melody or harmony can originate—in such a way that life condition interacts with life condition and an interaction takes place in time. Rhythmical events must form the basis of the soul life. Rhythmical events are also that which in the alternating conditions of sleeping, dreaming, and waking takes place fact.

One normally believes to understand this sleeping and dreaming condition if one considers it in such a way as it presents itself to the usual observation. However, just if one considers it in such a way, one will never get a real view of the nature of dream or sleep. Only if one can envisage the everlasting essence of the human being, one will also be able to recognise that—if the human being withdraws from the wake day life if he falls asleep and dreams—that then in him that is even more active which belongs to his everlasting being, than while awake. Save that the human being, as he is in the present world period, has developed little of this everlasting. If this everlasting does not have the basis of the bodily life as in the wake day life, if this everlasting is on its own as in sleep, that appears in this everlasting which points, indeed, to conditions that are different from those which proceed between birth and death, but points to them in such a way that the immediate perception, the immediate consideration cannot prove its nature at all.

Hence, spiritual science shows that the nature of dream, for example, is misunderstood in manifold way. One misunderstands it; one interprets dreams in the old way superstitiously if one considers the contents of a dream and is of the opinion that the dream may be prophetic. However, one also misunderstands the nature of the dream if one as an enlightened person smiles only at those who regarded something as prophetic in a dream.

Spiritual science shows that it is true that something prophetic is in the dream. In the dream that being works in us which is associated with our future in such a way that it still encloses that in us what we carry through the gate of death. The forces of our everlasting soul work prophetically in the dreams. The pictures of the dreams are memories of the past. One may say, the nature of the dream is falsified because the human being is not able to work really with that what works in the dream as his being. He dresses what he cannot realise in the pictures, which his body, certain sensory reminiscences, certain memories give him from the past life.

All that falsifies the dream and is a mask of the dream. As well as it is superstitious to think of the pictures, which appear in the dream, a healthy kernel is contained in the superstition that the dream has something prophetic. However, this prophetic cannot appear in the usual observation of the dream. The dream is just something exceptionally significant, considered spiritual-scientifically.

However, the important is something else; it is that one is of the trivial opinion that the human being lives and dreams at a certain time and at another time he is awake, fully awake. Spiritual science shows that this is a wrong opinion. The state of dreaming, of sleeping does not stop if we awake; these states continue into our wake day life; the wake day life drowns them only. This wake day life, the imagining, is as it were a bright light that outshines what remains subconscious. However, while we feel our wake day consciousness flowing in our soul, a continual dream life and sleep life penetrating the whole awake life flows subconsciously in us. We dream if we add feelings, affects, or passions to the clear mental pictures. I have pointed out in the first talk that that which spiritual science searches as coherent, was always found by single outstanding persons like with flashes and I have pointed to the great aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). When he wrote his article about Volkelt's book The Dream Fantasies, he pointed out that nobody who does not understand the emotions, passions, and affects understands the nature of dream. However, one called Vischer a spiritist because of this assertion. Thus, we keep on dreaming in the usual life. Save that the pictures of the dream if we have awoken do no longer appear but that what proceeds now as feelings, affects and passions appears with the same degree of reality in us as the dream does.

In the feelings, affects, and passions lives also what lives in the imagining. Nevertheless, it lives in it in such a way as the mental pictures live in the dream. However, if we develop a feeling, a passion, we do not become aware of the pictures that form the basis as they form the basis of the dreams, but we become dreamily aware of the feeling, of the passion.

Similarly, the sleep in the wake consciousness forms the basis of the will. Why were there discussions repeatedly in the course of the spiritual human development about the nature of the will, about the free will? Why have the philosophers never agreed how actually the will lives in the human being, whether as a free or as a not free one? Because the usual wake day consciousness oversleeps that which happens in the will.

Although our mental pictures are clear during the wake day consciousness, we oversleep the real process of willing. In this will, something deepest of the human being lives, but one is not immediately aware of it.

Spiritual science now shows that it sees with the beholding consciousness into the supersensible world. With the levels of Imaginative and Inspired knowledge, it penetrates into that world which exists for the usual consciousness only in the chaotic dream world. To the human being with the usual consciousness that only emerges as distorted dreams from the world of the everlasting which works beneath the outer sense-perceptible. With the Imaginative knowledge, with the Inspired knowledge spiritual science fetches the true figure of that which lives and weaves in these undergrounds. With the Intuitive knowledge it fetches what one oversleeps otherwise, what the darkness of the consciousness covers completely.

However, you learn from it that in the human life not only that prevails what one can overview with the usual wake consciousness, but that in the human life—because dream and sleep also penetrate the wake day life—that prevails what is real, what for the usual wake consciousness is not accessible what one can only grasp with the beholding consciousness as concepts, as mental pictures. Hence, let us look at the social human life as it should be enclosed with the social, moral, political concepts and we discover that something lives in the human life that is only dreamt that is even overslept.

This is the secret of the social life and of the historical life; this is the secret of the moral-social existence. With the concepts, which come up from the habitual ways of scientific thinking and which belong completely only to the usual wake consciousness, one cannot grasp history, with these mental pictures one cannot grasp the moral-social life.

Yesterday I have pointed to the fact that spiritual science should bring back something to the human being that he has lost. For centuries, for millennia there were instinctive impulses the awareness of which spiritual science has to generate. It is interesting to envisage the intervention of modern natural sciences from this viewpoint of the human development. If one asks for these modern natural sciences and their significance only in such a way as one often does today, one gets to a completely wrong concept. One always assumes that these natural sciences have originated in such a way because just the concepts that they give correspond to reality. Someone who has insight in the matters knows that the following view is true: anybody who stands firmly on scientific ground must be a sceptic at the same time because he knows that these scientific concepts correspond to truth only superficially. These scientific concepts did not appear in the human evolution because the human being was silly and childish for millennia, as many people believe, but they have originated for a quite different reason.

If one looks back in time where one recognised nature and spirit more instinctively, the human being had concepts on one side that he applied to nature in such a way that he spoke of events of nature, of the being of nature, as if these were also something mental; and if he spoke of his soul, materialist mental pictures interacted.

Even in our words “spirit” and “soul” are still materialist mental pictures if we know these concepts historically to a T. The human being has still grown together with nature so that he did not distinguish his mental exactly from nature. The recent historical development means that the human being has gone adrift from the natural existence. Just, therefore, he has formed such concepts of nature as they show the contents of the modern scientific thinking that do no longer contain anything mental. To attain such a developmental level, the human being has developed these scientific concepts for his sake. Not because this is the only saving truth to which one got finally, but because the human being could get to a certain level of freedom, of self-determination only because he has got free from nature and has formed concepts which should enclose nature and which can give the soul nothing.

If the human being has such concepts of nature, one has to draw his attention all the more to own forces of his inside to which we have pointed yesterday. Then his self-consciousness can only awake in right way. We live in a transitional condition. Natural sciences will generate a spiritualistic conception of the soul life.

The scientific materialism has the big merit, because it divests nature of any mental to lead the human being to a high level of self-reflection.

If one looks at the development of modern natural sciences in such a way, they seem to be created for an “education of the human race” in the sense of Lessing. Then the scientific concepts have been developed so that the human being has no longer to ensoul nature mystically, as in former times, but that he gets free from any mental in the view of nature, but that he has to fetch that from the depths of his being which spiritualises this mental. Then one may regard the entitled materialism of natural sciences as something great.

One only defames anthroposophy if one says that it is anyhow in conflict with natural sciences. On the contrary, it points to the big, significant role that the scientific development has in the educational process of the human race. However, what appears as scientific mental pictures is just not adapted to grasp the moral-social life, it is not adapted to form concepts, mental pictures, or ideas from which actions can arise in the moral-social life. That which the human being overviews as nature, he overviews it in the wake consciousness.

Not such impulses form the basis of the moral-social life, of the historical experience as the wake day consciousness has them for seizing nature, but such ideal impulses form the basis of it as they appear, otherwise, only in the dreams.

Thus, spiritual science gets to the weird result that the historical life, the social life of humanity cannot be encompassed by a soul being which has built up itself with natural sciences and wants to write history after the pattern of natural sciences, wants to consider sociology after the pattern of natural sciences. Which inadequate concepts has one attempted to understand the social life with the cognitive means of natural sciences!

One needs only to remember the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who wanted to enclose anything actual in which the human being lives, also the sociological configuration of humanity. He wanted to apply the concepts of embryology to the social life, to the configuration of the moral-social life: The embryo develops in such a way that one has to distinguish in its early state the ectoderm from which the nervous system evolves, the endoderm from which other subordinate organs evolve, and the mesoderm. From these three parts, the human embryo develops gradually. In the moral-social development, Spencer also distinguishes three impulses. He says, as in the natural development ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm exist, three parts exist in the social becoming of the human being. He wants to show: as the embryo has the ectoderm, the human being develops what is militarily and politically strong from the social ectoderm; that what works and practises agriculture from the endoderm; and the commercial class from the social mesoderm. There one has a parallelism between the ranks of the social-moral life and the layers of the embryo. It forms the basis of this view that because from the ectoderm the nervous system develops also from that what corresponds to the ectoderm in the social-moral life the most valuable must develop in the state. Hence, Spencer's worldview depends on considering the actually valuable class as the military one. In it the political higher life should develop. As the nervous life originates from the ectoderm, the political, the leading class should originate from the military. I do not keep characterising this strange view of the philosopher Herbert Spencer, I only want to point to it. I could still bring in many examples how one has tried to apply scientific mental pictures to the social life and to understand it with them.

However, the peculiar is that the old instinctive cognition that enclosed mind and body, matter and spirit at the same time was a not fully conscious cognition that bit by bit changed via the scientific purely external cognition of the dead into the higher levels of cognition to which spiritual science points today: to the Imaginative cognition of the beholding consciousness, to the Inspired cognition, to the Intuitive cognition. Scientific knowledge is only an intermediate stage between the instinctive cognition and the higher cognition that I have characterised in my books The Riddle of Man and The Riddles of the Soul. The beholding consciousness just disintegrates into the Imaginative consciousness that is the lowest level, the Inspired consciousness, a higher level, and the Intuitive consciousness, the highest level. It is typical only that for the consideration of the outer world the instinctive old cognition had to change into the scientific mental pictures. After this transition the other ways of spiritual knowledge will come. The social-moral life cannot have this transition. One has attempted it; but it cannot have it.

While skipping the scientific way of thinking the instinctive cognition of social-political ideas has directly to change into the conscious cognition of the same world, which is dreamt in the history and the social life of humanity. That which humanity dreams in history and in the social life can be only consciously recognised with the Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive consciousness. In this area is no transition from the instinctive consciousness via the scientific one to the Imaginative consciousness. It must become catastrophic if one wants to do this transition if one wants to insert such concepts that are formed after the pattern of scientific concepts into the social order. This happened in particular in the nineteenth century up to now. Scientific mental pictures work catastrophically if they transition into actions.

The transition from the old instinctive experience that used myths to the Imaginative cognition must be direct.

Thus somebody may ask mockingly: hence, one is not allowed to believe that one can master the social, moral life with the scientifically oriented concepts, but one can penetrate this social-moral life only salutarily if one realises that one has to deepen the concepts spiritual-scientifically?

Somebody may mock; he may close his eyes to the big signs of our disastrous time. However, it is in such a way. As well as already some people begin to take notice of spiritual science, which has a say if it concerns the configuration of reality, there will be more and more people who realise that one has to turn to spiritual science if one needs lively concepts for the moral-social existence. That is why, spiritual science has not appeared in our time from arbitrary agitation in favour of single people but because of deeper historical necessities.

We do not need to point to less significant personalities if we want to envisage that which we consider here. History as the science of the moral-social life is not yet very old. One believes that it is an old science. In reality it is, as well as it is practised today, hardly hundred years old. Everybody can convince himself of it. When history appeared, Schiller (Friedrich S., 1759-1805, German poet and writer) wanted to be one of the first teachers of history. Perhaps it may be good just to bring in a great personality as an example of that what is so often said that one can learn from history for the moral-social life of the human beings. How often does one hear from people, where every judgement is demanded about this and that what one has to feel under the influence of the tragic events: history teaches this, history teaches that.

Well, let us consider these teachings of history with one of the greatest: when Schiller started his professorship in Jena in 1789, he characterised a teaching of history that had arisen to him in the following way. Schiller said in his famous inaugural speech, it was the prelude of his historical lectures: “The community of European states seems to have changed into a big family. Their members may be hostile to each other, but do no longer tear each other to pieces, I hope.”

This is the lesson that even such a great man like Schiller drew from history! One has to consider that he spoke the words that should be prophetic in 1789!

How have the European peoples tortured themselves shortly after, and what does happen today again in this Europe! What a prophet was this historian, this genius Schiller?

Why is this that way? One could bring in many examples of the fact that a conception of history of such kind, as it is usual even today, gives nothing for life. Plainly and simply because one works in such a conception of history with mental pictures which are taken from the outer reality, the object of natural sciences. These concepts are not suitable to enclose history and the moral-social effectiveness what the human beings, as well as they are in life, only dream.

History is only dreamt. If we want to have concepts that can really intervene in history, in the moral-social life, they have to be scientifically clear, but the essentials should be that they grasp that clearly which appears from the usual consciousness only in the dreams of history and of the moral-social life.

I know that it is a paradoxical truth even today that people do not experience the historical development so that this experience works in concepts of the wake day life. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge that truth. Then one will recognise of which kind the concepts, the mental pictures, the ideas and ideals must be which can master this life.

The art historian Herman Grimm (1828-1901) said more often to me in conversations, if one wants to have a historical consideration that really encloses the historical, then one cannot work with such concepts as the naturalist applies them, then one has to understand history with the creative imagination of the people. He said this because he still had no concepts of Imaginative cognition.—One has to take his starting point from that what remains in the subconscious as it were; one has to bring up this only into consciousness, but into a consciousness that is different from the usual one. A notion of that what is true in this area formed the basis of Grimm's intuition.

That is why someone is very much wrong who believes to be able to encompass history or the social-political life with the concepts that developed with the scientific thinking. Since someone who figures the things out knows, for example, that the most sure means to ruin a community in relatively short time is a parliament, in which you put nothing but theorists, professors who think scientifically. Let it legislate, and then you will cause the decline of the community with such parliament. Since they will put nothing but concepts, nothing but ideas into reality that can have no reality in the historical, in the social-moral life, but must destroy this social-moral life.

Hence, the remark of Herman Grimm is very fine when he said, it is strange that the excellent historian Gibbon (Edward G., 1737-1794, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) describing the first Christian centuries did not describe the advancing, growing Christian life but that he could only describe the decline of the old life with his concepts.—One cannot encompass the growing life with mental pictures of the wake day life but with mental pictures only which originate from the dreaming consciousness.

In recent time, these things have become particularly important because just in the nineteenth century the scientific approach tried to start its campaign of conquest also in the historical, in the social-ethical life. Only few people braced themselves against it. In particular, socialism, which wanted to be scientific, supported the emergence of this thinking most consciously.

Socialism tried to put the social-moral ideas completely into the waters of scientific consideration. Just in the recent time this extreme way appeared to consider the social-moral life only from the viewpoint of material interests, class conflicts, impulses of surplus value et cetera as it happened with Marxism.

Spiritual science does not take the view that one has to deal with either—or everywhere, but that concepts show one-sidedness as a rule. I have often enough used the comparison: if the spiritual researcher advances to concepts, so that he regards them as images of the real from different sides like four photographs of a tree from four sides, one can describe the world from a pantheistic, theistic, monotheistic, or polytheistic viewpoint.

One realises the true meaning of these things only if one looks at them as one-sided images of reality that can never enter into abstractions, but only into the living oneness with itself. Hence, you must not understand what I want to say now in such a way, as if I wanted to condemn everything lock, stock and barrel that has come up under the influence of the socialist thinking. I would not dream of that. Since this view has brought much valuable things, and it has fought its way through hard enough.

Those who are the significant official bearers of the cultural life who have to keep watch that right concepts and images originate have simply rejected for decades what has come from this side until not only the scanty concepts of the older academic socialism, but the much more voluminous concepts of modern socialism have become socially acceptable.

Such things are beyond the spiritual-scientific consideration that does not advocate anything which wants only to face up objectively to the facts. However, one has to say that this approach of the recent socialism, in particular the materialist historical view, is scientifically oriented. What are they in truth?

To the spiritual researcher is that which, for example, Karl Marx (1818-1883) has shown with urgent logic an expression of that what humanity has dreamt in social-moral impulses during four centuries up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx described the impulses of the last three to four centuries. However, these impulses did not live in the wake day images, but humanity dreamt in its impulses, in its social, moral ideas. When actually the dream was already over when actually already a social-moral order had appeared as it was in the sense of the dreams of the last four centuries, Karl Marx wrote his books about what had already become a corpse from which one should awake. That what Karl Marx wanted to put as a program, lived in the time that was before, actually, even before he was there with his thoughts. However, reality demands that now—skipping the scientific way of thinking—the social-moral ideas are filled with the higher supersensible consciousness.

Once one could grasp this instinctively. Even that about which Karl Marx wrote was still dreamt instinctively. The new time can no longer venture to dream only to experience the social-moral ideas only instinctively; it must be able to immerse them into the Imaginative cognition.

One can say of any time if one wants to be trivial that it is a “transition period.” However, it concerns what transitions. In our time, the old instinctive cognition transitions into the conscious cognition.

In the area of the view of nature, our time has entered into the intermediate stage of natural sciences.

In the social it has to find the immediate transition from the instinctive social-political feeling of the old time as it existed, for example, in the Roman Law, it has to find the transition to the creative also where the moral-social ideas intervene immediately: in the area of education. With pure knowledge concepts, one can be neither a pedagogue nor a politician, nor anybody who participates in the creation of the social life at this or that place. A time will come where one will smile at the economics, at the sociopolitical theories as one smiles today if any theorist who is called an aesthetician writes how a right opera or symphony must be, a theorist who cannot compose who can only consider a symphony or an opera aesthetic-academically who cannot create out of Imagination. One would laugh if he put that as classic example.

As weird as it sounds even today: one will consider this way what appears as economics from mere concepts of the wake day consciousness, which turned out to be so inadequate. One will smile at it as an error that was comprehensible in the scientific age. However, one will overcome it if the consideration of the social-moral life is associated livingly with the supersensible reality that brings the supersensible into the legal life, into the spiritual life, which is penetrated by social love.

One can even give in detail that someone who wants to participate in the state-social design of a community can obtain a picture of a scientific consideration only which has something artistic which itself is artistic-creative. Not aestheticians, but composers have to create operas and symphonies. Not scientifically thinking theorists can find social concepts, but those who are penetrated with concepts that are out of this living that emerges, otherwise, only in the dream impulses, in the feelings, in the affects, and passions, and in the will itself.

The social design of any community can only arise from the Imaginative knowledge. That life which penetrates the social communities, that dream life, which flows from the human being in the love of a human being to his fellow man, where love becomes duty, can experience its outer configuration only in the community under the influence of Inspired concepts of the beholding consciousness.

The legal life is still the echo of old legal concepts even today and remains so dark to the scientific view about which one messes while one looks for all possible and impossible scientific psychological concepts of the recent time,. It will be able to become creative again if it is penetrated with Intuitive knowledge.

Really, it does not concern a few anthroposophic dreamers but human beings who should become able to put themselves powerfully into life. It does not concern the foundation of single colonies of a few people who want to have a good time or to be vegetarians somewhere in a mountain area and lark about there, but this is why it concerns understanding the signs of time knowing what is really historically inevitable in the developmental course of humanity. Anthroposophy is not the hobby of single groups; anthroposophy is something that the spirit of our time demands.

Many educational rules will give way to the knowledge that one can find spiritual-scientifically from nature, from the being of the human being. The future pedagogues will have no preconceived rules. However, an understanding changing into immediate, recognising love with the growing human being will penetrate the pedagogue. He will learn things quite different from theoretical education; he will learn to stand in the full life. Hence, he will also cope with any individual being. One will understand how freedom and necessity penetrate each other in life.

One understands that the moral-social life, considered scientifically, would be in such a way, as if I had three objects here. I light up the first object; then I light up the second object, the first one gets dark; now I let the second object getting dark and light up the third one. I pursue this. While I pursue this and say, the first object was lighted up, that is the cause of the light of the second one; the second one is the cause of the light of the third one. Such an illusion, as if the first body which is lighted up from the outside worked as a cause of the illumination of the second one and the second as a cause of the illumination of the third. Such an illusion forms the basis of that historical approach which looks at the consecutive facts always as effects of the preceding facts. Thus, there is no causal coherence in the consecutive historical events as in nature. However, there is the fact that a common light illuminates the consecutive facts. One has to penetrate into this light with higher, supersensible knowledge.

What is good in natural sciences: to seize the things in detail, does not apply to spiritual. However, it does also not apply to the social-political life. To spiritual science, a description of the social-political life in detail would be as if a chess player just wanted to consider which moves he wants to do. He cannot carry out them, because this depends on the moves of the opponent. Nevertheless, one can still be a good chess player if he masters the rules of chess. One can stand his ground as a chess player. The same holds true if one wants to master life. Only in the realms of nature are defined laws. If one faces life, one has to have a skill that copes with this life. Then one must be always ready that anything of the wealth of life faces you as the opponent of chess faces the player.

Any child is like an opponent of chess to the teacher. Education will accept forms by which it makes the human being capable of life, able to penetrate into the nature of any single human being.

However, such a life in the social-political can arise only from a real cognition of that what is contained in the human lives and human beings what is dreamt there as history what is dreamt as social-political impulses. How much does one miss in this direction even today!

In spiritual science one has started studying since many years what is the nature of the Western European peoples, of the Central European peoples, of the East European peoples, which impulses really exist, how the different soul expressions are distributed geographically and historically, which impulses really exist. Only by the knowledge of the available impulses that Imagination, that Inspiration can originate which can enjoy life in the moral-social ideas, as they become prominent in the social life, in the legal life. I would like to point to a very promising start just here in Switzerland. Your fellow-countryman Roman Boos (1889-1952) has published a book about The Over-all Work Contract under Swiss Law, a book that grasps the nature of certain institutions and concepts available in the legal life for the first time.

However, one has done various attempts in the recent time to recognise from the mental-social being how the laws, how the impulses gradually take place. Thus, an American has written a very interesting book in which he wants to show that the peoples split up into two groups: One group are the ambitious, the progressive peoples, the others are the descending peoples. The American, Brooks Adams (Peter Chardon B. A., 1848-1927) describes the soul life of the ascending peoples in the following way: it arises from a basic soul quality, from the imaginative-warlike; so that the peoples who have future are gifted with Imaginative fantasy life and with warlike impulses. That is not my opinion but that of the American Brooks Adams. Those peoples who become decadent are the peoples with industry and science.

This is one-sided, of course. However, even these one-sided considerations show that one has already done the attempt to master life with really moral-social ideas. However, one cannot survey life with the concepts that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences. One can survey it only if one penetrates into the supersensible depths of life. One can do this only with the beholding consciousness.

I could only give scanty indications. In single talks, I can only give suggestions, which is why one can easily disprove spiritual science. However, today spiritual science is not so happy to have countless chairs at disposal as the other sciences have. This will also come. Spiritual science can only give suggestions also concerning the social-moral ideas.

If one surveys everything at last that I have brought forward sketchily today, I would let culminate it, while I show that the community must develop under the influence of vivid moral-social ideas also in such a way that the human being can develop as a whole in this community. However, to his whole being belongs what I have explained yesterday: the independent, everlasting being about which I have said yesterday that in it the idea of freedom lives.

The highest social-moral idea is the idea of freedom. No community will realise it in itself, which does not take its starting point from supersensible ideas. Since the supersensible can only prosper where the creation of the community originates from supersensible impulses, sensations, concepts, mental pictures. The mental pictures of the usual day consciousness do not work in that life in which the social-moral ideas work. If the human being wants to work in this life, he must work into this moral-social life with another member of his being.

One may say that the great persons of the past already realised with single light flashes what it concerned. As I have pointed to Goethe in another way at the end of the last talk I would like to point again to him today at the end. He did not yet have spiritual science. However, if he looked at the historical life and wanted to figure out what this social-moral life is, which embodies itself in history, he found strange words saying, the best we can have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites.

How wonderful is such remark! I said that Friedrich Theodor Vischer stated that one could not understand the emotional life if one did not understand the dream.—Goethe looks at the history of humanity, at the historical dream. He knows instinctively, intuitively that humanity is dreaming, while it lives history that the historical impulses do not enjoy life in the mental pictures but in that which enjoys life in the dream sphere of the historical experience. That is why, the best we have from history is not that “fable convenue” which you read in the history books and which we regard usually as history which gives, however, nothing but the corpse of that which develops as the stream of humanity in the social-political development.

Goethe knows: not that which you read in the history books is that which the human being has as best from history, but that which can be associated with this dream of history, as a creative quality: enthusiasm. With it, he pronounced a big truth from one side apprehensively, which must work reforming if humanity wants to overcome the catastrophic events of the present.

However, this truth can be complemented on the other side, while one points out that one cannot intervene with sophisticated concepts after the pattern of scientific mental pictures anyhow fruitfully in the social-moral life, but with concepts which are connected with life much more intimately, as the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science intends them.

One needs something stronger than the not creative ideas in history: one needs enthusiasm. Everything that should cause that the social-moral life can develop must arise from enthusiasm. However, from a right enthusiasm which originates if one can recognise by the connection of the single human being with the supersensible human by Imagination, by Inspiration, and by Intuition.

As Goethe could say on one side that the best we have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites, the spiritual researcher would like to add that anthroposophy attempts to penetrate into the supersensible; it tries to recognise the everlasting, the immortal, and the elements of freedom in the human life. However, the best it wants to give humanity will be that it gives enthusiasm that can develop the moral-social life.

In this direction, I wanted to give some indications and suggestions with this last talk to show that spiritual science does not want to be only a theory, but a force that co-operates from the innermost impulses of life with the energetic human life that we need in this catastrophic time.

This lecture is also known as The Human Soul and the World of Nature.

It will be clear, I think, from what has been said on earlier occasions that the Spiritual Science cultivated at the Goetheanum has nothing sectarian about it, nor does it set out to found a new religion. It gives full recognition to the progress of natural science in modern times, drawing indeed, in a certain sense, the ultimate necessary consequences of the whole trend and spirit of modern science. This will be particularly evident when we come to consider questions concerning our inner life and our knowledge of the world; and to-day I will ask your attention for one such specific question. It embraces a very wide realm, and all I can do here is to give a few indications towards its solution. I shall try to give these in such a way as to throw light on what we consider to be the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach.

The subject before us is concerned with two ideas that man can never contemplate without on the one hand feeling an intense longing awaken within him, and on the other being brought face to face with deep doubts and riddles. These two ideas are: the inner being of Nature and the inner being of the human soul.

In his knowledge man feels himself outside Nature. What would induce him to undertake the labour of cognition, were it not the hope of penetrating beyond the immediate region within which he stands in ordinary life, of entering more deeply into the Nature that presents herself in her external aspect to his senses and his intellect? It is, after all, a fact of the life of soul, and one that becomes more and more apparent the more seriously we occupy ourselves with questions of knowledge, that man feels separated from the inner being of Nature. And there remains always the question—to which one or another will have a different answer according to his outlook on the world—whether it be possible for men to enter sufficiently deeply into the being of Nature to allow him to gain some degree of satisfaction from his search. We have at the same time the feeling that whatever in the last resort can be known concerning the being of Nature is somehow also connected with what we may call the being of man's soul.

Now this question of the being of the human soul has presented itself to human cognition since very early times. We have only to recall the Apollonian saying: “Know thyself.” This saying sets forth a demand which the conscientious seeker after knowledge will feel is by no means easy of fulfillment.

We shall perhaps be able to come to a clearer idea of the tasks of the present day in this connection if we go back to earlier ages and remind ourselves of conceptions that were intimately bound up, for the men of olden times, on the one hand with the knowledge of the inner being of Nature, on the other with the self-knowledge of man. Let us then look for a little at some of these conceptions, even though they will take us into fields somewhat remote from the ordinary consciousness of to-day.

In olden times, these two aims—knowledge of Nature and knowledge of self—were associated in the mind of man with quite strange, not to say terrifying, conceptions. It was indeed not thought possible for man to continue in his ordinary way of life if he wanted to set out on the path to knowledge; for on that path he would inevitably find himself in the presence of deep uncertainties before he could come to any satisfying conviction. In our day we are not accustomed to think of the path of knowledge as something that leads us away from.the natural order of our life; it leaves us free to go forward in everyday life as before. And one must admit that the knowledge offered to us in our laboratories and observatories and clinics is not such as to throw us “right off the rails,” in the way attributed to the path of knowledge that the pupils of wisdom in early times had to tread.

They beheld a kind of abyss between what man is and can experience in ordinary life, and what he becomes and is confronted with when he penetrates into the depths of world-existence, or into the knowledge of his own being. They described how man feels the ground sink away from under his feet, so that only if he be strong enough not to succumb to giddiness of soul can he go forward at all into the field of ultimate knowledge. To tread this path of knowledge unprepared would involve man in a harder test than he is able to meet. Serious and conscientious preparation was necessary before he dare bridge the abyss. In ordinary life man is unaware of the abyss; he simply does not see it. And that, they said, is for him a blessing. Man is enveloped in a kind of blindness that protects him from being overcome by giddiness and falling headlong into the abyss. They spoke too of how man had to cross a “Threshold” in order to come into the fields of higher knowledge, and of how he must have become able to face without fear the revelations that await him at the Threshold. Again, in ordinary life man is protected from crossing the Threshold. Call it personification or what you will, in those ancient schools of wisdom they were relating real experiences when they spoke of man being protected by the “Guardian of the Threshold,” and of undergoing beyond it a time of darkness and uncertainty before ultimately attaining to a vision of reality, a “standing within” spirit-filled reality.

It is inevitable that in our day all manner of confused and hazy notions should connect themselves with such expressions as “Threshold,” “Guardian of the Threshold.” Let me say at once that mankind is undergoing evolution; nor is it only the outer cultural renditions that change and develop, but man's life of soul is changing all the time, moving onward from state to state; consequently the expressions which in olden times could be used to describe intimate processes in the life of soul, cannot bear the same meaning for present-day mankind. What man meant in olden times when he spoke of the Threshold and the Guardian of the Threshold was something different from the processes that take place in man to-day, when he resolves to go forward from ordinary knowledge to super-sensible knowledge; and it is only with a view to making more comprehensible what I shall have to say regarding these latter that I bring in a comparison with ancient conceptions.

What was it of which the men of olden times were afraid? What was it for which the pupil in the School of Wisdom had to be prepared by means of an exact and thoroughgoing discipline of the will—a discipline that should make the will strong and vigorous, able to stand firm in extremely difficult and perplexing situations in Life? Strange though it may sound, it becomes clear to us if we are able to survey the course of human evolution, that what men feared in those times was actually none other than the condition of soul which mankind in general has reached to-day. They wanted to protect the pupil from coming all unprepared to the condition of mind and soul to which we have been brought by the scientific education of the last three or four centuries. Let me illustrate this for you in a particular case.

We all accept to-day the so-called Copernican view of the universe. This view places the sun in the centre of our planetary system; the planets revolve round the sun, with the earth as a planet among the other planets. Ever since the time of Copernicus, this is the picture men have had. In earlier times, quite another picture of the world lived in the general consciousness of mankind. The earth was seen in the centre, and the sun and stars revolving round the earth. Man had, that is to say, a geocentric picture of the world. Copernicus replaced it with a heliocentric picture of the world. Man has now no longer the feeling of standing on firm ground; he sees himself being hurled through space, together with the earth, at a terrific speed. As for how it all looks to the eye, that, we are told, is a mere illusion, induced by relations of perspective and the like, to which human vision is subject.

Now, this heliocentric picture of the world already existed in earlier ages. Plutarch is a writer from whom we can learn a great deal concerning the men of olden times, and how they thought about the world. Let me read you a passage translated from his writings. Plutarch is speaking of Aristarchus of Samos, and he describes the way in which Aristarchus conceived the world. We are therefore taken back into early Greek times, into an epoch many centuries before the Middle Ages, and before Copernicus. In the opinion of Aristarchus, says Plutarch, the universe is much bigger than it looks; for Aristarchus makes the assumption that the stars and the sun do not move, but that the earth revolves round the sun as centre, while the sphere of the fixed stars, whose centre is also in the sun, is so immense that the circumference of the circle described by the earth is to the distance of the fixed stars as is the centre of a sphere to its entire surface.

We find thus in Greek times the heliocentric conception of the world; we find the very same picture as we have to-day of man's place in the planetary system and his relation to the heaven of the fixed stars. In olden times, however, this heliocentric conception of the world was a secret known only to a few, who had undergone a strict training of the will before such knowledge could be imparted to them.

It is important to grasp the significance of this fact. What is common knowledge to-day, freely spoken of by everyone, was in earlier times a wisdom known to a select few. What such a wisdom-pupil knew, for example, concerning the sun and its relation to the earth was considered a knowledge that lay “beyond the Threshold”; man must needs first cross the Threshold before he can come into those fields where the soul discovers this new relationship to the universe. The very same knowledge that our whole education renders familiar and natural to us to-day, was for them on the other side of a Threshold that must not be crossed without due preparation.

What we have shown with regard to the astronomical conception of the world could quite well be worked out for other spheres of knowledge. We should again and again find evidence of how the whole of mankind has in the course of evolution been pushed across what was for Olden times a Threshold on the path to higher knowledge. The apprehension that was felt in those times about the condition of soul evoked by such knowledge, has shown itself frequently in later centuries in the attitude of the churches, which preserve and tend to perpetuate the traditions of the past. Again and again the churches have rejected knowledge that has been attained in the progress of civilisation; and when, for example, the Roman Church refused to acknowledge the teaching of Copernicus (as it did until the year 1827), the reason was the same as [that which] in ancient times prevented the priests from giving out Mystery knowledge to the masses—namely, that the knowledge would bring man into uncertainty if he were not duly prepared beforehand.

Now it is well-known that no power on earth can withstand for long the march of progress; and we in these days have to think in an entirely new way about what one may call the “Threshold of the Spiritual World.” Spiritual Science is no “warming up” of Gnostic or other ancient teaching, but works absolutely on the principles of modern natural science, as I think will have been evident from the example we have been considering.

How was it that men of olden times feared knowledge which today is the common property of all mankind? In my book Die Ratsel der Philosophie¹, I have described the changes that have come about in man's mind and soul since early Greek times. The Greek had not a self-consciousness that was fully detached from the external world. When he thought about the world, he felt himself, so to speak, “grown together” with it; he was as closely united with it as we are to-day in the act of sense-perception. For him thought was also, in a manner speaking, sense-perception. Red, blue, G, C sharp—these are for us sense-perceptions; but thought we ourselves produce by inner activity. For the Greek this kind of inner activity did not yet exist. Just as we get red, green, G, C sharp from sense-perception, so did he get the thoughts too from the external world. He had not yet the independence that comes from the comprehension of self. Only quite gradually has the perception and understanding of the self developed to what it is to-day. Self-consciousness has grown steadily stronger in the course of time, and man has thereby detached himself from surrounding Nature. He has learned to look into himself, inwardly to comprehend himself as something that acts independently. In doing so he has placed himself over against Nature; he stands outside her, that he may then contemplate her inner being from without. And with this detachment of thought from external objective life is connected also the birth of the feeling of freedom, that sense of freedom which is in reality a product only of the last few centuries.

We have come to regard history more and more in its purely external aspect; but if we were to consider it, as we try to do in spiritual science, in a more inward way, we should discover that the experience we have to-day when we speak of “freedom” was not there for the Greek. Although we translate the corresponding word in their writings with our word “freedom,” the feeling we associate with the word was quite unknown to the Stoic, for example, and other philosophers. A careful and unbiased study of Greek times will not fail to make this clear.

I laid stress in my Philosophie der Freiheit² which was written in the early nineties, on the connection of the experience of freedom with what I called “pure thinking”—that thinking which is completely detached from the inner organic life, and which (if the expression be not misunderstood) becomes, even in ordinary life, cognition on a higher level. For when we permeate pure thinking with moral ideas and impulses—that is, with ideas and impulses that are not associated with desires, or with sympathies and antipathies, but solely with pure, loving devotion to the deed that is to be done—when we do this and allow the impulse to quicken in our soul to action, then the action we perform is truly free.

One cannot really put the question concerning freedom in the way that is frequently done, when it is asked: Is man free or unfree? All one can say is that man is on the way to freedom. By cultivating self-evolution and self-knowledge, by achieving inner liberation from his accustomed attitude of mind and soul, man is treading a path that will enable him to rise to pure thinking; and on this path he becomes increasingly free. It is thus not a matter of “either—or,” but rather of gradual approach, or, shall we say, of both. For we are at once free and unfree; unfree where we are still governed by our desires, by what rises up out of our organism, out of the life of instinct; free, on the other hand, where we have grown independent of the instinctive life, where we are able to awaken within us pure love for the deed that has been envisaged in pure thinking.

The condition of mind that leads to the experience of freedom—the condition, namely, of pure thinking, to which man is able to surrender himself—must necessarily, for present-day man, remain an ideal; an ideal, however, that is indissolubly bound up with his worth and dignity as man.

We are on the way to such an ideal, and it is natural science that has set us upon the path. In all the development of natural science in modern times—and the results of this natural science carry authority in the widest circles and tend more and more to become the groundwork of our whole education and culture—one thing stands out clearly. Study the development of natural science and you will be struck with the growing recognition of the value and importance of the thought—the thought that is elaborated by man himself inwardly. This is true in the realm of the inorganic, from physics up to astronomy, as well as in the realm of the organic, and in spite of the fact that scientists base their results everywhere on observation and experiment. And through the work he does in thinking, man develops an enhanced self-consciousness; which means, that his detachment from the inner being of Nature grows.

We can here take once more the example of Astronomy. What Copernicus did, fundamentally speaking, was to reduce to calculation the results of observation. In this way one arrives at a world system that is completely detached from man. The world systems of ancient times were not so; they were always intimately connected with the human being. Man felt himself within the world; he was part of it. In our time man is, so to speak, incidental. He sees himself hurled through universal space together with the planet Earth, and his picture of the whole structure of the world is completely divorced from himself; that which lives in his own inner being must on no account be allowed to play a part in his conception of the universe. Man becomes filled, that is to say, with a thought-content that is the means of detaching him from himself. True, he thinks his thoughts, and in thinking remains always united with his thoughts; but he thinks them in such a way that they have no sort of connection with what rises up out of his organism, out of his life of instinct. He is under necessity so to think that, although the thought remains united with him, it nevertheless wrests itself free from the human-personal in him, so that in his thoughts he becomes, in effect, completely objective.

And this experience brings man to greater consciousness of self. The strenuous efforts required for finding one's way to clear conceptions in the field of astronomy or physics or chemistry to-day, or even only for following in thought the results of others' work, are bound to lead to a strengthening of the consciousness of self.

In the ancient civilisations—and herein lies the great difference between them and our own—education was not directed to the strengthening of self-consciousness. Rather had it the tendency to make man's thinking correspond with what he saw with his eyes. So arose the Ptolemaic conception of the world, which in all essentials is a reproduction of what we perceive with the external senses. Man was not thrust so far out of himself as he is by the modern scientific outlook; hence his self-consciousness did not grow. He remained more within his body—held there, as it were, by enchantment. Consciousness of self he derived from his instincts, and from the feeling of life and vitality within him. Although in our age we have drifted into materialism, this living in the body has been overcome by the development of thinking; and the consciousness of self has grown correspondingly. The very fact that we have become materialists, and lost our awareness of the spiritual in the objects perceived by the senses, has contributed to the achievements of thought. In olden times it was feared that if a man were brought unprepared to the kind of thinking such as is necessary, for example, to grasp the heliocentric system, he would “faint” in his soul; his consciousness of self would not be strong enough to sustain him.

This accounts for the emphasis on the training of the will; for a strong and vigorous will strengthens also the consciousness of self. The preparation of the pupil in the Wisdom School was therefore directed primarily to the will, in order that he might grow strong enough to endure, beyond the Threshold, that picture of the world for which a highly-developed consciousness of self is required.

We see, then, what it was men feared in olden times for the pupil who was to be guided into the inner being of the things of the world, into the inner being of Nature. They were afraid lest he be hurt in his soul, through falling into a condition of uncertainty and darkness, a condition comparable, in the realm of soul, with physical faintness. This danger they hoped to avoid by a thoroughgoing discipline of the will. In ordinary life, they said, man must remain on this side of the realm where the dangerous knowledge is to be found; a Guardian holds him back from the region for which he is unfit, thus protecting him from being overcome by faintness of soul. And their description of the experiences the pupil had to undergo if he wanted to cross the Threshold and pass the Guardian correspond exactly to inner experiences of the soul.

It was told how, when the pupil draws near the Threshold, he immediately has a feeling of uncertainty. If he has been sufficiently prepared, he is able to stand upright in the realm which would otherwise make him giddy; he passes the Guardian of the Threshold and, by virtue of the powers of his soul, enters into the spiritual world—which the Guardian would otherwise not allow him even to behold. But he must be able also to stay in the spiritual world with full consciousness. For the tremendous experiences that await him there call for strength and not for weakness, and if he were to let go, these experiences would have a shattering effect on his whole organisation; he would suffer grievous harm.

And now the strange thing is that in course of evolution a knowledge that could be attained by pupils of the ancient Wisdom Schools only after most careful preparation has become the common property of all mankind. We stand to-day in our ordinary knowledge beyond what the men of old felt to be a Threshold. The purpose they had in view in the ancient Wisdom Schools was that the pupil, when he looked into his own inner being, should feel himself united there with the inner being of Nature. And believing that if he did so unprepared, he would sink into a kind of spiritual faintness, they would not allow him to attempt this exploration until he had received the right discipline and training. And yet in our age everyone penetrates into this region utterly unprepared!

As a matter of fact man is experiencing to-day precisely what the ancients took such care to avoid. He acquires his knowledge of Nature; and he acquires also a strong consciousness of self that enables him to stand upright amid all the knowledge that is current to-day in astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. He imbibes this knowledge and can remain steadfast without losing his balance. Nevertheless there is a quality in his life of soul that the men of old would deeply deplore. Because in the course of evolution we have acquired thought and the feeling of freedom and a stronger selfconsciousness, therefore we do not lose ourselves when we study the results of natural science; but we do lose something, and the loss is only too manifest to-day in the soul-life of mankind everywhere.

In this matter we labour under great illusion; we dream, and we cling to our dreams, and will not let them go. I have often spoken of how natural science brings conscientious students to a recognition of the boundaries of knowledge, boundaries man cannot pass without taking his power of cognition into forbidden—nay, into impossible—regions. A very distinguished scientist of modern times has spoken of the “Ignorabimus,” reading into the word a confession that however far we go in the knowledge we acquire from sense-observation and the intellect, we never penetrate to the inner being of Nature. I here touch on a subject that at once lands us in conflict, as was felt even at a time when natural science was far less advanced than it is to-day. It was Albrecht von Haller who expressed the “Ignorabimus” in the well-known lines:

To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.
Thrice happy he
To whom she shows
Even her outer shell.

Goethe, who used constantly to hear these words on the lips of those who shared Haller's attitude towards Nature, labeled such thinkers “Philistine.” For him they are men who do not want to rouse themselves to inner activity of soul; for by dint of inner activity the soul of man can kindle a light within—a light which, shining upon the heart of Nature, shall carry the soul into her innermost being. Goethe proclaims this in forcible and trenchant manner in his poem Allerdings, quoting to begin with the words to Haller:

‘To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.’
O Philistine,
To me and mine
What use in such a speech?
We think, through every part
We enter into her heart.

Still the cry goes,
‘Thrice happy he
To whom she shows
Even her outer shell.’

For sixty years I have heard that cry;
I curse it, but secretly, silently,
Say to myself a thousand times,
Gladly she gives and she gives us all!
Nature is neither kernel nor shell,
She is both in one; she is one and all.

Look in your own heart, man, and tell
If you yourself are kernel or shell!³

Out of an instinctive feeling that was conscious and yet at the same time unconscious, Goethe rejected utterly the separation of the being of man's soul from the innermost being of Nature. He saw clearly that if the soul becomes conscious, in a healthy manner, of its own real being, then that consciousness brings with it the experience of standing within the innermost heart of Nature.

This conviction it was that kept Goethe from accepting Kant's philosophy. They make a great mistake who assert that at one time of his life Goethe came very near to the philosophy of Kant. In contradistinction to what Kant recognised as the human faculty of cognition, Goethe postulated what he called “perceptive judgment.” This means that in order to form a judgment we do not merely pass in abstract reasoning from concept to concept; rather do we use inwardly for thought the kind of beholding we use outwardly in sense perception. Goethe says he never thought about thinking; what he set himself continually to do was to behold the living element in the thought. And in this beholding of the thoughts he saw a way to unite the human soul with the very being of Nature.

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science would go further on the same path. This perceptive judgment—which, as presented by Goethe, was still in its beginnings—it sets out to develop in the direction indicated in my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Faculties of cognition, which in ordinary life, and in the pursuit also of ordinary science, remain latent in man, are led up to “vision,” to a “new beholding.” Just as man perceives around him with the physical eye colours, or light and darkness, so with the eye of the spirit does he now behold the spiritual. By the practice of certain intimate exercises of the soul, he calls forth and develops within him powers that usually remain hidden, and so lifts himself up to a higher kind of knowledge which is able to plunge into the very heart of external Nature. You have frequently heard me speak of the successive stages of this higher knowledge, and I would like here to say a little about their evolution from a particular point of view.

We are accustomed to think of the course of our life as divided between waking and sleeping. These two conditions must, we know, alternate for us if we are to remain healthy in mind and body. How is it with us from the time of awakening to the time of falling asleep? The experiences of the soul are permeated with thoughts; the thoughts receive a certain colouring from the life of feeling; and there is also the life of will, which wells up from dim depths of our being under the guidance of the thoughts, and accomplishes deeds. In the other condition, that of sleep, we lie still; our thoughts sink into darkness; our feelings vanish and our will is inactive. The ordinary normal life of man shows these two alternating conditions. The picture is, however, incomplete; and we shall not arrive at any satisfactory idea of the nature of man if we are content to see the course of his life in this simple manner.

We take it for granted that between waking up and falling asleep we are awake. But the fact is, we are not awake in our whole being. This is overlooked, and consequently we have no true psychology; we come to no right understanding of the soul. If, ridding ourselves of all prejudice, we try to observe inwardly what we experience when we feel, We discover that our feeling life is by no means so illumined with the light of consciousness as is the life of thought and ideation. It is dim, by comparison. For a sense of self, for an experience of self, the life of feeling is undoubtedly every bit as real as—even perhaps in some ways more real than—the life of thought: but clarity, light-filled clarity, is enjoyed by thought alone. There is always something undefined about the life of feeling. Indeed, if we examine the matter carefully, comparing different conditions of soul one with another, we are led finally to the conclusion that the life which pulsates in feeling may be compared with dream life. Study the dream life of man; consider how it surges up from unknown depths of his being; how it manifests in pictures, but in pictures that are vague and indeterminate, so that one does not see all at once exactly how they are connected with external reality. Has not the life of feeling the same quality and character?

Feelings are, of course, something altogether different from dream pictures, but when we compare the degree of consciousness in both, we find it to be very much the same. The life of feeling is a kind of waking dream; the pictures that appear in the dream are here pressed down into the whole organic life. The experience is different in each case, and yet the experience is present in the soul in the same manner in both. So that in reality we are awake only in the life of ideation; in the feeling life we dream even while we are awake.

With the life of the will it is again different. We do not as a rule give much thought to the matter, but is it not so that the impulse of will arises within us without our having any clear consciousness of its origin? We have a thought; and out of the thought springs an impulse of will. Then again we see ourselves acting; and then again we have a thought about the action. But we cannot follow with consciousness what comes between. How a thought becomes an impulse for the will and shoots into my muscle-power; how the nerve registers the movement of the muscles; how, in other words, that which has been sent down into the depths of my being as thought, comes to be carried out in action, afterwards to emerge again when I perceive myself performing the action—all this lives in me in no other way than do the experiences of sleep.

In deep sleep we have in a sense lost our own being; we pass through the experiences of sleep without being aware of them; and it is the same with what comes about through the activity of the will-impulse in man. We dream in our life of feeling, and we are asleep in our willing; dreaming and sleeping are thus perpetually present in waking life. And in these unknown depths of being where the will has its origin, arises also that which we eventually gather up—focus, as it were—in consciousness of self. Man comes to a recognition of his full humanity only when he knows himself as a being that thinks and feels and wills.

Ordinary life, therefore, embraces unconscious conditions. And it is just through the life of ideation becoming separated from the rest of the soul life and lifted up into consciousness, that a way is made for the development of the experience of freedom. Here, in a sense, we divide ourselves up. We are awake in a part of ourselves, in the life of ideation, whilst in relation to another part of us we are as unconscious as we are in relation to the inner being of Nature.

It is at this point that Anthroposophical Spiritual Science steps in with its methods for attaining higher knowledge. This spiritual science is very far removed from any dreamy, obscure mysticism, nor does it support itself, like spiritualism, on external experiment. The foundation for the whole method of spiritual scientific research lies in the inner being of man himself; it can be evolved in full consciousness and will manifest the same clarity as the most exact material conceptions. The world of feeling, which generally, as we have seen, leads a kind of dream life, can become hooded with the same light that permeates thoughts and ideas—which, according to some schools of philosophy, themselves originate in the feelings. By means of exercises described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. this lighting up of the world of feeling is brought about, with the result that the region which is usually dreamlike in character now lives in the soul as “imaginative” consciousness. The moment man gives himself up to this imaginative consciousness, something is present for him in consciousness that remains generally beneath the Threshold. He thinks pictures, knowing, however, quite well that he is not dreaming them, but that they correspond to realities.

Spiritual Science then leads on further, to “inspired” consciousness, and here we are taken into the realm of the will. Little by little, we are brought to the point of being able to behold clairvoyantly—please do not misunderstand the expression—how the whole human organisation functions when the will pulsates in it. We see what actually takes place in the muscle when the will is active. Such a knowledge is “inspired” knowledge. Man dives down into his own inner being and acquires a self-knowledge which is generally veiled from him. We come to know more of man than stands before us as “given” between birth and death. Feeling and willing being now also flooded with the light of consciousness, we can know man not only as a created being, perceiving in him that which wakes up every morning and enters again into a body ready-made; we can recognise in him also the creative power which comes down from spiritual worlds at the time of birth or conception, and itself forms and organises the body. In effect, at this further stage man comes to know his own eternal being which lives beyond birth and death; he attains to a direct beholding of the eternal and spiritual in his soul.

As man learns in this way to know himself, not merely as natural man, but as spirit, he finds that he is also now within the inner being of Nature; in the spirit of his own nature he recognises the spirit of the Nature that is all around him. And at this point a fact of deep significance is revealed—namely, that with our modern knowledge of Nature we are already standing on the other side of the Threshold, in the old sense of the word. The men of olden times believed they would lose their self-consciousness if they entered this region unprepared. We do not lose our self-consciousness, but we do lose the world.

The full clarity of thought and idea, to which man owes his consciousness of self, has been achieved by him only in modern times; and now this consciousness of self needs to be carried a step further. The men of old paid particular heed to the training of the will; we have now to press forward, as I emphasised in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,” to pure thinking. We must develop our thinking; it must grow into Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. And this will bring us once again to a Threshold, a new Threshold into the spiritual world. We must not remain in the world that offers itself for sense-perception and leaves the inner being of Nature beyond the boundaries of knowledge. We must cross another Threshold, the Threshold that lies before our own inner being.

At this Threshold we shall no longer let our imagination run away with us and conjure up all manner of atoms and molecules to account for the impressions of colour and sound and heat; for when we come consciously to recognise, and be within, our own spirit, then we shall find we are also within the spirit of Nature. We shall learn to know Nature herself as spirit. In the region where to-day we talk of an atomistic world (we are really only postulating behind Nature a second equally material Nature), in the very region where to-day we are losing the world, we shall find the spirit. And then we shall have the right fundamental feeling towards the inner being of Nature and, also, the being of the human soul.

It is, as you see, a different attitude we have to attain from that of olden times. We must be conscious that we are living in conditions the men of old wanted to avoid. This does not mean, however, that we are in danger of losing ourselves; our world of thought has been too strongly developed for that. And if we develop the world of thought still further, then we shall also not lose what we are in danger of losing. The men of olden times were threatened with the loss of self, with a kind of faintness of the soul. We are faced with the danger of losing the world for our ego-consciousness; of being so surrounded and overborne by purely mathematical pictures of the world, purely atomistic conceptions, that we lose all sense of the “whole” world in its infinite variety and richness. In order that we may find the world again—in order, that is, that we may find the spirit in the world—we must cross what constitutes for modern man the Threshold.

We may even put it this way: if the men of olden times feared the Guardian of the Threshold, and needed to be fully prepared before they might pass him, we in our day must desire earnestly to pass the Guardian. We must long to carry knowledge of the spirit into those regions where hitherto we have relied only on external sense-perception in combination with the results of intellectual reasoning and experiment. Knowledge of the spirit must be taken into the laboratory, into the observatory and into the clinic. Wherever research is carried on, knowledge of the spirit must have place.

Otherwise, since all the results that are arrived at in such institutions come from beyond the Threshold, man is thereby cut off from the world in a manner that is dangerous for him. He feels himself in the presence of an inner being of Nature which he can never approach on an external path, which he can approach only by becoming awake in his soul and pressing forward to the immortal part of his own being. As soon, however, as he does this, he is at that moment also within the spirit of Nature. He has stepped across the Threshold that lies in his own being, and finds himself in the presence of the spiritual in Nature.

To point out to man this path is the task of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. It has to give what the other sciences cannot give. And it may rightly claim to be Goethean, for to those who say:

To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.

Goethe replies:

Nature is neither kernel nor shell,
She is both in one, she is one and all.
Look in your own heart, man, and tell
If you yourself are kernel or shell!

We are “shell” as long as we remain in the life of ideas alone. We sever ourselves from Nature, and all we can do is to talk about her. But the man who penetrates to his own inner “kernel,” and experiences himself in the very centre of his soul—he discovers that he is at the same time in the very innermost of Nature; he is experiencing her inner being.

Such, then, is the kind of impulse that Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is ready to give to the whole of human life, and in particular to the several sciences. These several sciences need not remain the highly specialised fields that they have been hitherto; rather shall each be a contribution to that quest which man must ever follow if he would rise to a consciousness of his true dignity—the quest for the eternal in the human being. All that the individual sciences can teach to-day is still only a knowledge that looks on Nature from without. But if those who are working in them tread, as well as the outer, also the inner path of knowledge, then the knowledge acquired in the different fields can grow into a knowledge of man, a comprehensive knowledge of mankind. We need such a knowledge in our time if we are to guide the social problems of the future into paths where right and healthy solutions can be found—as I have explained in my book, “The Threefold Commonwealth.”

One who carries deeply enough in his heart the development of spiritual science will find himself continually face to face with this question of the connection between the being of man and the inner being of Nature. The specialised sciences cannot help us here; they only spread darkness over the world. The darkness is to be feared, even as the men of olden times feared the region beyond the Threshold. But it is possible for man to kindle a light that shall light up the darkness; and this light is the light that shines in the soul of man when he attains to spiritual knowledge.

• 1. The Riddles of Philosophy
• 2. Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
• 3. English translation from Goethe and Faust; an Interpretation by F. M. Stawell and G. L. Dickinson. G. Bell & Sons, 1928.

The materialistic world view has led the modern thinking to the absurd assertion that the marvellous tragedy Hamlet is nothing else than the transformed foodstuffs which the great poet Shakespeare had eaten.

Now, such an assertion could be understood at first as an ironic, as a humorous one. Nevertheless: somebody who thinks the view of the soul which has developed within the so-called materialistic world view through to the end must finally come to this assertion. However, this view makes nonsense of the materialistic view of the soul. But if it is true that we have to understand the soul phenomena also as outflows of the mechanical activity of our brain like we have to understand the processes of a clockwork, then nothing else is left over to us than to see the causes of the soul phenomena, the causes of the highest manifestations of the human mind finally in the mechanical processes in the brain.

The German philosopher Leibniz found the right answer to this assertion. He said: imagine once that this whole human brain would be understood, one would know in details how these cells and the cell surroundings function, one would know all single movements and could register what takes place in the brain if a thought, a sensation, a feeling takes place in the human being. Let us assume that this final goal of natural sciences would be achieved.—Then Leibniz goes on: now imagine this human brain endlessly extended, so that one can go for a walk calmly in it, can observe calmly which movements take place. You have a complete machine before yourselves. What do you see? You see movements, you see spatial processes. But you will not see: feelings of sympathy or antipathy, feelings of joy and pain, these or those ideas. No observer of this big cerebral machinery will see what the human being has to consider as his innermost processes and experiences. A totally different kind of experience is necessary to observe the experiences of feelings, sensations and ideas. Human inner experience is necessary to refrain from any spatial consideration and to immerse ourselves in our soul to get the explanatory reasons from the soul of that which takes place in it.

I may light up this question still in another way. I was present once, as two young students discussed this question. One was right in the middle of the materialistic thinking. He was clear to himself about the fact that the human being is nothing else than a mechanism that we have understood the human being if we know how his cerebral functions and his remaining physical functions work. The other replied: but there is a simple fact which only needs to be expressed that you realise that here is something else than a mechanical process. Why does the human being not say: my brain feels, my brain senses, my brain imagines?

The human being would have to accept this fact as a distortion of his innermost soul experience. We can never explain the soul processes like external phenomena using spatial observation. This is just the typical difference between physical processes and soul processes that if we see anything taking place in a machine we can say to ourselves that these or those parts of the machine are in movement, are effective, and because these are effective, the machine carries out this or that. One cannot argue that we do not yet know all movements, all performances of our cerebral mechanism. For this is just the sense of Leibniz’s answer that even if we had understood this whole mechanism the real soul-life would have been absolutely disregarded. There is only one thing: to look into our inside, to ask us what do we discover there if we let our own ego speak? What do we discover if we do not see with eyes and hear with ears, but if we observe the own soul?

If we have got this standpoint clear in our mind, we have also to realise that all questions which refer to the soul and its processes must be treated as academically and impartially as the questions of natural sciences. No naturalist admits that one can find out anything about the life of this brain, anything about the form of this brain directly by mere chemical analysis of a cerebral part. Other methods are necessary for that. It is necessary to study the shape of any organic member to consider its connection with the remaining organic world. In a word, we are not able if we keep to mere chemistry, to mere physics to describe the life processes. Just as little we are able to recognise the facts of the soul-life if we observe the external phenomena.

Which are now these facts of soul-life? The basic fact of soul-life is desire and pain. For what we feel as a desire and pain, as a joy and listlessness this is our very own soul experience. We pass objects round ourselves. The objects make their impressions on us. They say something about their colours and shapes to us, also about their movements; they say to us what they are in space. But we can take nothing from the objects themselves if we want to know anything about the processes which take place in the human being passing these objects. The colour of an object has an effect on the eye of the one and has an effect on the eye of the other. The desire or maybe also the pain which one can feel with this colour can be different, completely different from the desire and pain of the other. What one feels as a desire may be due to the fact that this colour reminds him of an especially dear experience that he often felt joy when he saw this colour. Another thinks of a sad experience if he sees this colour, therefore, he maybe feels pain. These colour experiences are the very own experiences of the human being.

These belong only to him. In joy and in pain, which take place in the inner life, a particular entity of the human being expresses itself, that entity by which the one differs from the other, that being in which nobody is the same as the other. Already this should make it clear to us that it cannot depend on that which goes forward in the sensory world how desire and pain turn out. But it shows us that in our inside something answers to impressions of the outside world that is different in every human being. That means that as many people stand before us as many inside worlds are before us which we can only understand from their deepest inner nature which are something particular, something that really exists for itself, compared with everything that expresses itself in space and time before our eyes and ears.

Desire and pain take place in the human inner life. Something is connected with them that penetrated the human breast through all times, since human beings have thought, like a big question, like a tremendous riddle. The human destiny is connected with this, this human destiny which the sensitive Greek spirit felt as something superpersonal, like something that floats above the human being that befalls the human beings like something that has nothing to do with the individual human being what the individual human being has deserved, what he has worked and has striven for. With feeble words, we can outline the view of the Greek people. That is soul which endures the huge destiny, while it only quashes the human being too often. As different desire and grief of the human beings are as different are the human destinies, and these human destinies have nothing to do with that which the human being as a person works and acquires for himself—as a simple trivial observation can show it.

What one calls destiny in the proper sense is something that is beyond the personal merit, beyond the personal guilt. If we speak of guilt and merit, we select what befalls the human being and what is independent of his own work. There is the one who is determined by his birth to live in poverty and misery, maybe not only by the surroundings in which he was born, but simply by the gift, by the dowry of nature which he received at his birth. There is the other who appears as a child of luck whom desire and grief can lead to the highest summit, simply because he is equipped at his birth with bigger, more excellent talents than another. How destiny and the individual human life are connected, this is the big anxious question of the thinking human being through all times. The interrelation of human destiny and human soul has occupied the poets and the researchers. How does the human destiny look compared with the individual human soul experience?
We find a complete metaphor of the interrelation of soul and destiny in nature. We find a metaphor in that which faces us in nature as a type, as a type of the living beings. A living being is not formed arbitrarily. Any living being is formed according to its embryo. According to its embryo the lion is a lion, the frog a frog because the strength of the special figure is in the embryo, and because the embryo inherits this strength from its ancestors. That is why the animal is formed as a particular type or genus. These laws of heredity prevail in the botanical and animal species; they prevail in accordance with the members they have passed on to them, so that they can be active. A life is determined by the formation of the organs which have been left to the being. This law of heredity is the big law which determines the species and genera in the animal and plant realms and also in the physical human world. This law of species and genus, this law of heredity and development is the law of fate for the species and genera. Only as well as the law of heredity works, the single being can be active. Concerning desire and grief towards his destiny it is quite similar for the single human being. As well as the animal has inherited the figure of its species from its ancestors, we find the human being particularly equipped with dispositions, with characteristics which determine the measure of his desire and his pain, which measure out his life to him.

As well as the law of species and genera prevails in the animal realm, destiny controls the individual human being. If the naturalist asks himself honestly researching according to the law of development why this animal has a longer or a shorter grasping organ, a more or less sharp eye, he is not content to consider these phenomena as miracles but compares this animal with other animals and observes how these organs came into being by the big iron law of heredity. Also the researcher of the human being, the soul researcher, has to ask himself if he wants to understand the individual human life: How is the big law of destiny connected with these individual human lives, how is it possible that destiny rules the individual life, so that it has determined this or that measure of desire and grief?—This question is quite analogous to the question of the naturalist. A quite analogous consideration clarifies us about the questions which occupy the human beings in this direction.

There is a fact which speaks so clearly concerning this question that we have to think through it only in all directions that we have only to become engrossed completely in it to get an answer. This fact is not observed in the same style and in the same sense as the naturalist observes if he studies the relationship of the species and genera. But not because this fact does not speak clearly, but it is simply because modern humankind got used to neglecting this fact; it got used to not accepting the clear evidence of this fact. However, it is not as raw and coarse as the facts are which speak to our outer senses. But can we hope that the subtle soul-life clarifies the intimate processes in our own inside as well as the coarse and remarkable facts of the sensory world? Have we not rather to assume that the questions which arise in our soul-life are finer, more subtle? It is in such a way as once Galileo discovered the great pendulum law when the sense dawned on him watching a swinging lamp in the church, so that this natural law revealed to him at this moment? He got this success only because he could hold together the facts correctly. However, the facts also have to inform us about destiny and soul-life if we correctly get them clear in our mind.

Examine the whole range of the animals. You find a variety of different species and genera. As a modern naturalist you explain these species and genera by means of their relationship among each other and origin from each other. You are satisfied if you have understood that a higher, more perfect animal has received its character of species because it is descended from its ancestors whose organs were transformed gradually to the organs of the animal which stands before us.

What interests you in the animal? It can never be the question that we are interested in the animal more than in its character of species. We are completely satisfied if we have described a lion or another animal species according to the character of its species. We are completely informed about a lion if we have understood how the lion species lives and is active generally; then we know that the same applies to the father, to the son and to the grandson within the lion species. We realise that the single differences which exist also in the animal realm do not interest to such an extent that we would have to study any single lion for itself. We realise that it is decisive for the animal what father, son and grandson have in common with each other. The researcher is content when he has understood any specimen of the lion species. This fact must be thought through to the end and be understood absolutely clearly in its significance. If one compares it with the other fact that this is completely different with the human beings, then the difference between the human character and the animal character can be given in few words; a difference which by no naturalistic researcher can be denied if it is understood once; a difference, so big and immense, that it spreads light on the real being of the human soul. This basic fact can be expressed with the words: the human being has a biography, the animal has no biography.

Indeed, everything exists in nature only by degrees, and nothing should be argued against this sentence, because it is clear to us that one can register single characteristics of an animal and achieve something similar as a life-history. But, nevertheless, the fact remains that we have a real biography only in the human realm. That means that we show the same interest which we show for the animal species for the human individual. While we are not indifferent whether we describe the father, the son or the grandson of a human being, we call a related group of animals a species because they have the same characteristics and we have understood them scientifically if we have understood their creation as a species. We have to express the important fact: any human being is a species for himself. This is a sentence which does not make sense to anybody immediately which maybe appears to anybody as something sophistic.

But even if this sentence cannot be understood in its whole range immediately, it will appear to anybody who thinks it through to the end only in that light which I have meant. We have also overcome the assertion that for the soul researcher only the excellent individual is a proof that something particular appears in the human being, while most people would be similar and would basically have the same characteristics as the animals—only higher developed.

O no, you can distinguish the simple human being, the savage from the animal realising that he has a life-history that with his character as a human being his being is not exhausted, that it concerns that we grasp his single individuality; that it is not indifferent whether the father, the son or the grandson stands before us. If we want to proceed scientifically, we have to apply the same rules, the same principles to the human beings which we apply to the animal with regard to its species. We would have to look at the single animal, which stands in perfect creation, in particular form before us, as a miracle if we did not understand it in its relationship and origin of other beings.

However, we would have to look at the single human being as a miracle who is a whole, a species for himself, with his particular experiences of grief and desire if we put him simply in such a way as he appears before us. Somebody who leaves the single human being, that what expresses itself in the biography, without wanting to explain him without distinguishing him from the other beings who leaves this being unexplained is just like a believer in miracles. If we stick to evolution, we must say: as well as in the animal realm the single animal form is related to the species, we have also to lead back the individual human soul in its particular manifestation to something differently psychic. As clear as the natural sciences has become, since they have recognised that life cannot develop from the lifeless but that every living being comes from germ cells, as it is true that it would be today a scientific superstition if anybody believed what was believed in the 16th century that fish, frogs and the like could develop from mud.

It would be that way if anybody wanted to state that anything psychic does not originate from anything psychic but from anything soulless. As something living can only originate from something living, in the sense as the natural sciences accepts it, one has to recognise that something psychic can originate only from something psychic. As well as natural sciences regard it as a childish belief that life does not arise from germ cells but from something lifeless, a true science of the soul has to regard as an absurdity that something psychic could arise from something mechanical. This would be the same, as if anybody stated that something psychic can arise from any agglomeration of mud.

If we base on this, we have to say to ourselves: somebody who does not want to believe in a miracle in the fields of soul-life has to put the question to himself concerning every single soul: where does it come from, where are the causes that it is like it is? We have to ascend from the soul of a human being to its psychic ancestors as we ascend from the body of an animal to its bodily ancestors to understand the origin of its species.

In the last lecture I have called the summit of Aristotle’s psychology the disaster of the western psychology. I have shown that Aristotle stood with regard to our physical world completely on the standpoints of the modern theory of evolution that he lets develop the beings up to the highest ones in natural way. However, where Aristotle speaks of the highest soul, he rightly says completely the same as we have explained now. The soul is inexplicable from mere physical processes. One can never understand the soul as a mere physical process. Therefore, Aristotle as an honest researcher and thinker resorts to an explanation which openly admits the miracle of the single origin of any soul. That is why he appears as an honest thinker, but as somebody who denies a scientific principle towards the soul. If a human being has developed so far that its body has taken on a human form, then the creator works the soul into this human form; this is the only consistent point of view which one must take if one does not resolve to explain the soul in the same sense as the modern natural sciences do with the species of the animal realm. If anybody does not want to search for the psychic ancestor like anybody searches for the animal ancestor explaining the animal, then one must say that a soul is created into any single human being. There is only one other way, and this other way out is only an apparent one. It is the way which Herbert Spencer, the recently deceased great English philosopher, has shown. He realised—what we have also said—that it is impossible to leave the single soul-being for itself, to accept it as a miracle. Hence, he says, we must go back with regard to this soul-life to the physical ancestors of the concerning human being. Because he has inherited his psychic qualities from the ancestors as well as he has inherited the shape of his face, his hands and feet from his physical ancestors. Thus Herbert Spencer equates the soul development completely with the bodily development. However, this is only an apparent way out which can never be harmonised with the facts. What should be explicable from another area must be derived from the qualities of the other area. Indeed, Goethe says:

From my father I got the stature
And the serious conduct of life,
From mummy I got cheerfulness
And the desire of telling stories.

But nobody wants to state if he checks the facts impartially that the very own being of the human being, that the result of his destiny is determined in the same way by his physical ancestors as his external form and figure is determined by his ancestors, because, otherwise, the development of the spirit must follow the same laws which the development of the physical follows. But where could we derive the spiritual qualities of Newton, Galileo, Kepler, and Goethe from their ancestors? Where from could we derive the qualities of Schiller? From his father? Indeed, Schiller received the external figure, belonging to the species, from his father; for the physical heredity determines the general figure like it determines the physical figure of the animal. But if we want to explain the real internal qualities of the single individuality—and it does not need to be Schiller, it can be any Mr. Miller from this or that place—if we want to explain what takes place in his deepest soul why he is this particular human being where his biography results from, then we can never understand this human being studying his origin from his physical ancestors.

Study a lion and describe the father or grandfather of this lion instead of this: you will be completely satisfied scientifically. If you describe, however, a human being, you must describe his very own life. The biographies of the grandfather or father are completely different from his own. As different as the species of the animal realm are as different are the biographies of the single human beings.

Somebody who thinks through these thoughts completely can never regard the spiritual development as analogous to the physical one. We have rather to accept if we want to explain the spiritual development that we must ascend in the same way to the spiritual ancestors as we ascend to the explanation of the physical nature of the physical ancestors. The physical forefather cannot be the spiritual forefather at the same time. The development of the soul is totally different from the developmental course of the physical. If I want to explain a soul, I have to search for its origin somewhere else than in the physical organism. It must have been there already once; it must have a soul forefather like the animal species has a physical forefather. Thus we get the ideas which the deeper soul researchers of all times have accepted as theirs and which look at the being of the soul scientifically, in the true sense of the word. Who penetrates with any urge of research into this being of the soul—you can see it, for example, in the transparent discussion of Lessing’s The Education of the Human Race—comes to the assumption that any soul must be traced back to another soul. Thus we come to the developmental law of the soul; we come to the law of reincarnation.

As well as in the animal realm species after species incarnates itself and a transformation of the species takes place, a transformation of the soul takes place in the human being. Nothing else than this thought must be connected with the spiritual-scientific teaching of reincarnation. It is no fantastic thought, it is a thought which is crystal clear and arises inevitably from the preconditions of nature. As inevitable as the thought of the reincarnation of the species is, the transformation of the species in the animal realm, the thought of the reincarnation of the individuality is. We have the reincarnation of the animal; we have the reincarnation of the individuality on the level of humankind. If, however, this is the case, then our view of the single personal human soul—which stands with its private life of desire and pain usually inexplicably before us—extends beyond its soul predecessor and from that to previous predecessors. As well as we understand a species if we trace it back to its ancestors, we understand the soul if we trace back it as a reincarnating individuality. What prevails apparently as an inexplicable destiny in me what is apparently unprepared in my birth, this is not to be considered as a miracle as something that arose from nothing; this is an effect as everything is an effect in the world, but an effect of the soul processes in my psychic ancestors.

We cannot occupy ourselves in detail here how the incarnations take place. Here should be shown simply in scientifically analogous way how the thought of the theosophical science of the soul is absolutely compatible, yes, in spiritual area exactly the same is as the modern theory of evolution in the animal realm. Just the naturalist should ascend from his teaching of physical reincarnation to this teaching of the reincarnation of the soul. The Buddhist to whom this teaching of soul reincarnation is as important as to us the scientific theory of evolution does not know the mysterious development, the mysterious course of destiny in the individual life in the sense as the West knows it. He says to himself: what I experience is an effect of the soul-life from which my soul-life has developed; I have to accept it as an effect. What I myself carry out today is a cause and does not remain without effect. My soul embodies itself again and again, and that will determine the destiny of this soul, it forms a whole with this soul. Thus destiny and soul-being are connected with each other like in a string of pearls. As on the string of pearls of destiny the single levels of the development of the human soul-life, of the whole human life are lined up. What is inexplicable in a human life becomes explicable if we accept it not as a miracle in itself, but if we look at it in its reappearing phenomena.

However, considering the soul development this way, we get beyond the disaster of Aristotle's soul doctrine. Who does not profess himself to the theory of evolution must profess himself to the creation which takes place at every single birth of a human being. He must assume a particular miracle of creation at any birth. The scientific doctrine of creation is a belief in miracles, is superstition. Still in the 18th century, one said that there are as many species side by side as have been created originally. There are also in the field of psychology only these two ways: the miraculous act of creation at the origin of a human being, or development of the soul. The first one is impossible. But, nevertheless, there are honest researchers who cannot decide to join the standpoint of soul development. If an honest researcher cannot decide to do that, he will also profess himself to the creation of any single human being even today. This is thought not scientifically but honestly. Those who want to think scientifically and are able to look at the soul-life scientifically come by themselves from the standpoint of modern research to this teaching of soul reincarnation like the modern philosopher Baumann in Göttingen. These will be the two ways which we must pursue in clear thinking: either soul creation as a miracle in any case, or soul development according to scientific thinking and return of the soul.

From this science of soul development a bright light is thrown on the big question which has occupied modern philosophy and the modern way of thinking in particular, the question of the value of life. This question was negatively answered, as you know, by the newer philosophers, by Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann and similar philosophers. A value has been denied life simply because life offers more listlessness than desire. If really life within the single personality was exhausted between birth and death, the question of the value of life would be justified, in so far as one would have to estimate this value of life according to desire and listlessness. These philosophers simply say that experience teaches us in every single case that listlessness outbalances desire by far that life is painful and grievous. Already for this reason, Schopenhauer assumes, we have to profess ourselves to this pessimistic view. We take desire for granted, as something which is due to us. Who does not consider—and Schopenhauer is right—desire as a matter of course for us? Where is no slight cause which the human being feels as pain, while he takes any desire for granted more or less?

Hence, it is natural, the pessimists say, that the human beings do not feel the desire as intensely as they feel the reduction of desire as pain and listlessness. The pessimists take stock of the desire of life that way and state that this shows that listlessness controls life far stronger than desire. Without question, if one wants to solve this riddle within the single human life, one gets to no other solution. For somebody who has an overview of a human life in its personal details says to himself: if the amount of listlessness by which this life has been concerned is ever so insignificant, it exists as something that has been held in front of this human being as it were. Try once to draw up this balance sheet of desire when a person has died. If one draws up it, one assesses the desire value of life as negative according to Hartmann. If life ends, it ends with a negative value. However, then this single life seems to be absolutely inexplicable.

Something different results if we look at the result of the single life as a cause for the following life if we consider it as that which can be reproduced onto another level of existence. Then that which appears as pain, listlessness in one life looks like something favourable in the next life. Why? Simply because the sensation of listlessness, which we experienced in this single life, is not the only decisive factor but also the effect of this listlessness. If I feel listlessness today, then this listlessness gives my life a negative sign.

This listlessness can be most valuable for me tomorrow. Because I have felt listlessness or pains with any experience today, I learn for tomorrow. I can learn to avoid this listlessness or pain at a similar occasion. I can learn to regard this listlessness, this pain as a lesson to make the performances more perfect tomorrow which prepared listlessness to me. Hardships appear to us from this point of view in a certain connection that has a far-reaching significance. Assume that a child learns walking. It falls perpetually and hurts itself, it causes pain to itself. Nevertheless, it would be wrong if a mother surrounded her child with nothing but India rubber bales, so that it would have no pain if it fell. Then the child would never learn walking. Pain is the lesson. It prepares us to a higher level of development. We learn only because the life of the single human being is not merged in nothing but desire but prepares pain and listlessness out of imperfect performances. If life ends with a surplus of listlessness, it ends at the same time with a cause which has an effect for the next life. We get to a higher level of the next life because of the listlessness of this life.

Our view is widened that way if we look at the life of the human being beyond birth and death. The balance of desire and listlessness is necessary to learn something from the single life and carry it to another life. If we did not experience pain, we would get on like a child that cannot learn walking if one spares it pain. Hence, we regard the listlessness balance of the pessimist as a developmental factor. Like an engine it drives the development forward. Then the sentence comes back into favour, gets a higher sense: pain is a developmental factor.

We understand the single life as an effect, as a result of the preceding causes that way. If we understand it as an effect, we understand the levels of perfection existing side by side among the human beings as we understand the levels of perfection existing side by side among the animal species. It does not seem miraculous to us according to the theory of evolution that the perfect lion lives beside the imperfect amoeba, and we understand this imperfect formation on account of the theory of evolution. We also understand the developmental level of the soul from the highest genius to the undeveloped level of the savage on account of the law of soul development.

What is a genius to us? It is a higher developmental level, a higher level of perfection of the soul-being which lives in the savage on a lower level. As well as the higher animal species differ from the lower animals in the physical realm, the soul of the genius differs from the soul of the savage in the psychic realm. This explains to us that basically the ingenious talent is nothing radically different from the usual human talent, but it is only a later level of development.

Let us compare the psychology of Franz Brentano. It emphasises that the genius does not differ basically from the developmental level of the imperfect soul, but only by degrees. Have a look at a genius like Mozart. He showed already as a boy a talent which seems quite strange. He wrote down a complete mass—which he heard once and which he could never have heard before because one was not allowed to write down it—immediately after he had heard it. What an achievement of memory that this soul of Mozart encompasses a big range of ideas with one look which the imperfect soul cannot encompass, but it can only get them bit by bit. It is only the particular development of that soul capacity which connects and links the ideas. This soul capacity can be so small that it is not possible to have an overview of five to six ideas for some time. But the human being can improve his power of imagination, extend his overlooking. If now we see the genius appearing with outstanding dispositions which can be attained, however, gradually by exercise, we should not consider the genius as a miracle. We have to look at it as an effect. Because the genius is already born with these qualities, we have to search for the cause in a preceding developmental level of his soul, in a preceding life.

You get an explanation of brilliant dispositions only that way. You can understand any degree of soul development. You can pursue the human being from the highest ingenious talents down to the saddest phenomena of human life which we call madness. One has to ignore the scientific point of view here; one has to point to these people only from the standpoint of the soul researcher. We know that there are deformed, crippled people. If we expand these concepts from the scientific field to the field of psychology, we come to the abnormal phenomena of the soul-life. You can recognise clearly that the soul-life has temporal connections like the physical life outside has spatial ones. Those who state that such thoughts are contradictory to the scientific facts have not completely worked through the whole range neither of the scientific thoughts nor of this psychology. They have not developed their capacity of observation so far that they have learnt to use the methods of psychology as the scientists use the methods of the external natural sciences. If anybody states that the teachings we have reported here appear fantastically, then we are allowed to put the question: what do those say who laid the bases of these natural sciences? They must have recognised the range of the scientific thoughts, just as those who investigate a country directly know it more exactly than those who have got a report or a description only. The naturalist who finds out the scientific bases from the depths of his research is more justified than anybody who comes afterwards and wants to persuade us that the soul researchers speak about soul-beings and spirit-beings existing apart.

I give still some examples how the basic naturalists thought about the researchers of soul and mind. One states again and again that such a psychology as it was shown now is contradictory to the principle of energy conservation. This is the great principle which controls all physical phenomena. This means that in nature no energy originates, but any energy is transformed to energy, and that we can measure the amount of energy by the energy which is its cause. If we convert heat into vapour in the steam boiler, we have the cause and effect before ourselves, and we measure the effect in the measure of the cause. Now the adversaries of our psychology say: this principle is contradictory to the presupposition that particular soul processes happen inside. Measure the external impressions which a human being receives, measure what takes place in him, measure what takes place in the brain, and one is not able to state: there is a soul-force. However, then this force would be born out of nothing and this is contradictory to the basic principle of energy transformation. Julius Robert Mayer is the discoverer of this basic law of energy conservation about which one says that it is contradictory to our psychology. Listen to the discoverer of this principle, one of the greatest naturalists and thinkers of all times.

In 1842, in the age of natural science, he discovered the most important physical law of the 19th century. Those who are materialistic naturalists—you can see that in their books, say and want to lead us to believe that all investigation of soul and spirit would be removed by this law. We hear these naturalists speaking in such a way that somebody who still adheres to internal psychology, which does not understand natural sciences, which express themselves in the principle of energy conservation. Julius Robert Mayer, however, says: if superficial heads which regard themselves as geniuses want to accept nothing higher, then one cannot accuse such arrogance to science nor it is to its benefit.

The discoverer of this principle says this. Ask yourselves whether the second-rate scientists have a right to call up his principle against that which he himself recognised.

Another basic researcher of our modern natural sciences who laid the basis of the world of living beings on account of his geologic investigations of the transformations of the earth layers and prepared Darwin is Lyell, the great English geologist. With regard to geology he expressed as the first the sentence that we do not operate scientifically if we assume miraculous disasters in nature if we assume that revolutions have taken place in former periods which should not be explicable still today by external strength. This researcher Lyell whom the materialistic natural science refers to says the following: wherever we research, we find a creative intelligence, providence, power and wisdom everywhere.

Materialistic researchers say to us that since the law of the so-called vital force is overcome, since one is able to produce substances in the laboratory from which one believed that they can originate only in the living human being, since then one has the right to say that in the chemical laboratory the same happens what happens in nature. Jons Jacob Berzelius friendly with Friederich Wöhler says: the knowledge of nature is the basis of research. Those who do not keep to it expose themselves to delusive influence.—Wilhelm Preyer wrote about the phenomenon of death. He refused flatly that death cannot be understood as an end of the individuality incarnated in the body that the death of the human being cannot be understood in such a way even in the lower world. Preyer says that only the body dies, however, matter, energy, movement and life do not die.

These are sayings of real, basic naturalists, not of philosophical dilettantes who believe to be able to deny the soul phenomena on account of natural sciences—I do not want to say that—but to be allowed to explain them as nothing but functions of purely inorganic processes. If we see that just those who rendered outstanding services originally to the research of the physical development do not see any contradiction of this physical development to a soul development inside, then we must be in harmony with them. A saying of Hamerling applies to everybody who denies the internal soul development: somebody who searches for the soul appears to him like a dog which snaps at his own tail and cannot reach it.—This is a science of the soul in the spiritual-scientific sense, in the modern scientific sense, indeed, not applying the scientific method in a stereotyped way but spiritually. Then the law of destiny appears to us as a big law of development. As well as the genus is active in the animal development and appears like a wave, which is churned up by the passing development, the single human life appears like a wave in the churning sea and the subsequent lives appear like single waves of the human destiny.

In the next talk we consider the reasons of these waves understanding the nature of human destiny out of its eternal being. Today, I have shown that those who consider destiny as the great law of development, consider it as active, as churning up waves, and that every single wave is an image of the human being. Everybody who became engrossed in this matter considered the developing soul-life that way. Therefore, Goethe compares the single soul with a wave which is churned up again and again, and that the wind is the propelling destiny which churns up these waves from the water. That is why he compares the soul with the play of waves and the destiny with the wind, out of theosophical knowledge, because Goethe agreed in the deepest sense with this science of the soul. He compared wind and waves, soul and destiny using the nice words:

Wind is the wave’s
Charming lover;
Wind mixes from bottom
Seething waves.
Human soul,
You are just like the water!
Human destiny,
You are just like the wind!

Today I should like first of all to call your attention to and place before your mind's eye two pictures drawn from the evolution of man during the last few thousand years. I shall first direct your attention to something that occurred about the middle and toward the end of the fifth century B.C. It is well known to all of you, but, as I said, we shall look back at it with the eyes of our soul.

We see how the Buddha had gathered a number of disciples and pupils around him in the land of India, and how, from what took place then between the Buddha and his disciples and pupils, there arose the great and mighty movement that began and flowed on for centuries in the East, throwing up mighty waves and bringing to countless people inner salvation, inner freedom of soul, and an uplifting of human consciousness. If we wish to characterize what happened at that time we need only envisage the main content of Buddha's teachings and actions.

Life as it is lived by man in his earthly incarnations is suffering because through the sequence of his incarnations he is always subject to the urge for ever new incarnations. To free oneself from this yearning for reincarnation is a goal worth striving for. This goal is to blot out of the soul everything that can call forth the desire for physical incarnation, with the aim of at last ascending to an existence in which the soul no longer feels the desire to be connected with life through the physical senses and physical organs, but to ascend and take part in what is called Nirvana. This is the great teaching that flowed from the lips of the Buddha, that life means suffering and that man must find a means to free himself from suffering so as to be able to share in Nirvana. If we wish to picture to ourselves in precise but familiar concepts the impulse contained in the wonderful teaching of Buddha, we could perhaps say that the Buddha directed the minds of his pupils through the strength and power of his individuality to earth existence; while at the same time through the infinite fullness of his compassion he tried also to give them the means to raise their souls and all that was within them from the earthly to the heavenly, to raise human thinking and human philosophy from the human to the divine.

We might picture this as a formula if we wish to characterize clearly and correctly the impulse that went out from the great sermon of the Buddha at Benares. We see the Buddha gathering around him his faithful pupils. What do we perceive in the souls of these disciples? What will they eventually come to believe? That all the striving of the human soul must be directed toward becoming free from the yearning for rebirth, free from the inclination toward sense existence, free to seek the perfecting of the self by freeing it from everything that binds it to sense existence, and connecting it with all that links it to its divine spiritual origin. Such were the feelings that lived in the disciples of the Buddha. They sought to free themselves from all the temptations of life and let their only link with the world be the perception of the soul shining into the spiritual that is experienced in compassion; to become absorbed in striving for spiritual perfection, free from all earthly wants, with the aim of having as little as possible to do with what binds the external man to earthly existence. In this mood the pupils of the Buddha wandered through the world, and it was in this manner that they glimpsed the aims and objectives of Buddhist discipleship.

And if we follow up the centuries during which Buddhism was spreading and ask ourselves what lived in the hearts and souls of the Buddha's adherents and what it was that lived in the dissemination of Buddhism, we receive the answer that these men were devoted to lofty aims, but in the midst of all their thinking, feeling, and perception the great figure of the Buddha was living, together with everything that he had said in such thrilling, significant words about the deliverance from the sorrow of life. In the midst of all their thinking and perception, the comprehensive, all-encompassing, mighty authority of the Buddha lived in the hearts of his pupils and successors down the centuries. Everything the Buddha had said was looked upon by these pupils and successors as holy writ.

Why was it that the words of the Buddha sounded like a message from heaven to his pupils and successors? It was because these pupils and successors lived in the faith and belief that during the event of the Bodhi-tree the true knowledge of cosmic existence had flashed up in the soul of the Buddha, and the light and sun of the universe shone into it, with the consequence that everything that flowed from his lips had to be thought of as if it was the utterance of the spirits of the universe. It was this mood as it lived in the hearts of the pupils and successors of the Buddha, the holiness and uniqueness of this mood that was all-important. We wish to place all this before our spiritual eye so that we may learn to understand what happened there half a millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha.

Now we turn our gaze to another picture from world history. For in the long ages of human evolution what is separated by about a century may really be considered contemporary. In the thousands and thousands of years of human evolution a single century is of little importance. Therefore we can say that if the picture we wish to place before our souls is historically to be put a century later, as far as human evolution is concerned it was almost contemporary with the event of Buddha that we have just described.

In the fifth century B.C. we see another individuality gradually gathering pupils and adherents around himself in ancient Greece. Again this fact is well known. But if we are to come to an understanding of the last centuries it is a good thing to picture this individuality in our minds. We see Socrates in ancient Greece gathering pupils around himself, and indeed we need to mention Socrates in this connection even if we only consider the picture drawn of Socrates by the great philosopher Plato, a picture which in its essentials seems to be confirmed by the great philosopher Aristotle.¹ If we consider the striking picture of Socrates as presented by Plato, then we can also say that a movement began with Socrates that then spread into the West. Anyone who visualizes the whole character of Western cultural development is bound to conclude that the Socratic element was a determining factor for everything in the West. Although the Socratic element in the West spreads through the waves of world history more subtly than the Buddhistic element in the East, we are still entitled to draw a parallel between Socrates and the Buddha.² But we must certainly make a clear differentiation between the pupils and disciples of Socrates and the pupils and disciples of the Buddha. When we consider the fundamental difference between the Buddha and Socrates we may indeed say that we are confronted with everything that differentiates the East from the West.

Socrates gathers his pupils around himself, but how does he feel in relation to them? His manner of treating these pupils has been called the art of a spiritual midwife because he wished to draw out from the souls of his pupils what they themselves knew, and what they were to learn. He put his questions in such a manner that the fundamental inner mood of the souls of his pupils was stirred to movement. He transmitted nothing from himself to his pupils, but elicited everything from them. The somewhat dry and prosaic aspect of Socrates' view of the world and the way he presented it comes from the fact that Socrates actually appealed to the independence and to the innate reasoning power of every pupil. Though he wandered through the streets of Athens in a rather different way from the way the Buddha walked with his pupils, there is nevertheless a similarity. On the one hand the Buddha revealed to his pupils what he had received through his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, and by allowing what he had thus received from the spiritual world to stream down to his pupils he enabled what had lived in him to live on in his pupils and remain active for centuries. On the other hand, Socrates did not make the slightest claim to go on living as Socrates in the hearts of his pupils. When he was talking with his pupils Socrates did not wish to transmit anything at all of himself into their souls. He wished to leave it to them to draw out from themselves what they already possessed. Nothing of Socrates was to pass over into his pupils' souls, nothing at all.

We can think of no greater contrast than that between the Buddha and Socrates. The Buddha was to live on in the souls of his pupils, whereas in the souls of the pupils of Socrates nothing more was to live on than what the midwife has given to the child who comes into the world. Thus the spiritual element in the pupils of Socrates was to be drawn forth by the spiritual midwifery of Socrates when he left each person on his own, drawing forth from each one of them what was already there within him. That was the intention of Socrates. So we could characterize the difference between Socrates and the Buddha in the following way. If a voice from heaven had wished to state clearly what the disciples of Buddha were to receive through the Buddha, it might well have said, “Kindle within yourselves what lived in the Buddha, so that through him you can find the path to existence in the spirit.” If we wish to characterize in the same way what Socrates wanted we should have to say, “Become what you are!”

If we bring these two pictures before our souls, ought we not to say to ourselves that we are here confronted with two different streams of development in human evolution, and that they are polar opposites? They do meet again in a certain way, but only in the farthest distance. We should not mix these things together but rather characterize them in their differentiation, and only then indicate that there is at the same time a higher unity. If we think of the Buddha face to face with one of his pupils we could say that he is trying to kindle in the souls of his disciples what is necessary to lead them upward to the spiritual worlds through what he himself had experienced under the Bodhi tree. This may be recognized in the form of his discourses, with their sublime words and their endless repetitions, repetitions that should not be omitted in translation. The words are chosen in such a way that they sound like a heavenly proclamation from the heavenly world coming from beyond the earth, spoken through his lips out of the direct experience of what had happened during his enlightenment, words which he wished to pass on to his followers.

How then can we picture Socrates with his pupils? They confront each other in such a way that when Socrates is trying to make clear to his pupils the relation of man to the divine using the simplest rational considerations of everyday life, he shows them the logical connection between these considerations. The pupil is always directed to the most prosaic everyday matters, and his task is then to apply ordinary logic to what he has grasped as knowledge. Only once is Socrates shown as having risen to the height at which he could, as we might say, speak as Buddha spoke to his pupils. Only once does he appear like this, and that is at the moment when he was approaching death. When just before his death he spoke about the immortality of the soul he was surely speaking then like one of the highest of the enlightened ones. Yet at the same time what he said could only be understood if one takes into account his entire life experience. It is for this reason that what he said then touches our heart and soul when we listen to his Platonic discourse on immortality in which he speaks somewhat as follows, “Have I not striven all my life to attain through philosophy all that a man can in order to become free from the world of sense? Now when my soul is soon to be released from everything material, ought it not to penetrate joyfully into the world of spirit? Should I not be ready to penetrate with joy into that for which I have inwardly striven through philosophy?”

Anyone who can grasp the whole mood of this dialogue of Socrates in the Phaedo finds himself experiencing a feeling similar to that experienced by the pupils of the Buddha when they listened to his sublime teachings, so that it is possible to say that in spite of the difference, the polar difference between these two individualities, at a particular moment they are so sublime that even in this polar difference a certain unity appears. If we direct our vision to the Buddha we shall find that the discourses of Buddha as a whole are such that they arouse a feeling which one has with Socrates only in the case of the discourse on the immortality of the soul. I am referring to the soul-mood, the spiritual tension of this dialogue. But what is poured forth in the other discourses of Socrates which are always directed to a man's own reason is not often met with in the Buddha, although it is occasionally to be found. It sometimes sounds through. One can actually experience it as a kind of metamorphosed Socratic dialogue when on one occasion the Buddha wishes to make clear to his pupil Sona that it is not good to stay only in the realm of the material and enmeshed in sense-existence, nor yet to mortify the flesh and live like the old aescetics. It is good to pursue a middle path. Here the Buddha confronts his pupil Sona and speaks to him somewhat in the following manner, “See here, Sona, would you be able to play well on a lute whose strings are too loose?” “No,” Sona is forced to reply, “I shall not be able to play well on a lute whose strings are too loose.” “Well, then, will you be able to play well on a lute whose strings are too tight?” “No,” Sona must answer, “I shall not be able to play well on a lute whose strings are drawn too tight.” “When will you be able to play well on the lute?” Buddha then asks him. “When the strings are drawn neither too loosely nor too tightly.” “So it is also with man,” rejoined the Buddha. “If he is too much attached to the life of the senses he cannot wholly listen to the voice of reason. Nor will he truly listen to reason if he spends his life mortifying himself and withdrawing from earthly life. The middle path which must be taken also when stringing the lute must likewise be followed in relation to the mood of the human soul.”

This is just the way Socrates talks to his pupils, making an appeal to their reason, so that this dialogue of the Buddha with his pupil could equally well have been devised by Socrates. What I have given you is a “Socratic dialogue” carried on by the Buddha with his pupil Sona. But in just the same way that the discourse of Socrates to his pupils just before his death, a discourse that I have called Buddhistic, was unusual for Socrates, so is a dialogue of this kind rare in the case of the Buddha. We must never fail to emphasize the fact that we can reach the truth only by making characterizations of this kind. It would be easier to make a characterization if we were to say something along these lines, “It is through great leaders that humanity moves forward. What these leaders say is essentially the same thing though it takes different forms. All the individual leaders of mankind proclaim in their teachings different aspects of the same truth.” Such a statement is of course quite true, but it could scarcely be more trivial. What is important is that we should take the trouble to recognize things in such a way that we look for both the differentiations and the underlying unity; that we should characterize things according to their differences, and only afterward look for the higher unity to be perceived in these differences.

I felt that this remark about method was one that I had to make because in spiritual studies it usually is in accord with reality. It would be so easy to say that all religions contain the same thing and then concentrate on this one thing and then characterize it by saying, “All the various religious founders have presented only the same one thing in different forms.” But if we do make this characterization, it will remain infinitely trivial, however beautiful the words in which we express it. It would be just as unproductive as if we wished from the beginning to characterize two such figures as the Buddha and Socrates in the light of some abstract unity without seeking to perceive the polar difference between them. But if we trace them back to their forms of thought the matter will quickly be understood. Pepper and salt, sugar and paprika, are all put on the table to add to the food—they are all one, that is to say they are condiments. But because this can be said of them it does not mean that we must say all these condiments are the same and sugar our coffee by adding salt or pepper to it. What is unacceptable in life should not be accepted in spiritual matters. It would be unacceptable to say that Krishna and Zarathustra, Orpheus and Hermes are fundamentally only variations of the “one thing.” It is no more useful to make a characterization like this than it would be to say that pepper and salt, sugar and paprika are all different variations of one essence, since they are all equally condiments for food. It is important that we should grasp this point about method, and that we should not accept what is comfortable in preference to the truth.

If we visualize these two figures, the Buddha and Socrates, they will seem to us like two different, polar opposite configurations of the evolutionary streams of mankind. And when we now link these two within a higher unity as we have done, we may add to them a third in whom we also have to do with a great individuality around whom gather pupils and disciples—Christ Jesus. If among those pupils and disciples who gather around Him we fix our attention first on the Twelve, then we find that the Gospel of Mark in particular tells us with the utmost clarity something about the relation of the master to his pupils, in the same way as we characterized the relation with the greatest clarity we could between Buddha and Socrates in a different domain. And what was the clearest, the most striking and concise expression of this relationship? It is when the Christ—and this is indicated on several occasions—faced the crowd that wished to hear Him. He speaks to this crowd in parables and imagery. And the Gospel of Mark pictures this in a simple and grandiose manner when it describes how certain profound and significant facts about world events and human evolution are indicated to the crowd through parables and imagery. Then it is said that when He was alone with his disciples He interpreted this imagery to them. In the Gospel of Mark we are on one occasion given a specific example of how the Christ spoke to the crowd in imagery and then interpreted it to His pupils.

And He taught them many things in parables, and said to them in His teaching, “Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. And it happened as he sowed that one part fell by the path and the birds came and devoured it. And another part fell on stony ground, where there was not much soil, and it immediately shot up because it did not lie deep in the soil. And when the sun rose it was scorched and withered because it had no root.

“And another part fell in thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no fruit.

“And another part fell in the good ground and brought forth fruit, which sprang up and grew and yielded thirty-fold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.”

And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” And when he was alone, his company together with the Twelve asked him about the parables. (Mark 4:2-10.)

And to his more intimate pupils he spoke as follows, “The sower sows the word.

“But in the case of those who heard the word that was sown by the path, Satan comes immediately and takes away the word that had been sown among them.

“Those who hear the word that was sown on stony ground receive it immediately with joy. These have no root in themselves but are children of the moment. Then when they are afflicted or persecuted because of the word they immediately are confused and stumble.

“When by contrast it is sown among thorns some hear it, but then worldly cares, the temptation of riches, and other kinds of desires enter and choke the word, and it remains without fruit.

“Where it is sown on good ground there are people who hear and receive the word, and it yields fruit, thirty, sixty and a hundredfold.” (Mark 4:14-20.)

Here we have a perfect example of how Christ Jesus taught. We are told how Buddha taught, and how Socrates taught. Of the Buddha we can say in our Western language that he carried earthly experience up into the heavenly realm. It has often been said of Socrates that the tendency of his teaching can best be characterized by saying that he brought philosophy down from the heavens to earth in appealing directly to human earthly reason. In this way we can picture clearly the relation of these two individualities to their pupils.

Now how did Christ Jesus stand in relation to His pupils? His relationship to the crowd was different from that toward His own pupils. He taught the crowd in parable whereas for His intimate pupils He interpreted the parables, telling them what they were capable of understanding, of grasping clearly through human reason. So if we want to characterize the way Christ Jesus taught, we must speak of this in a more complex manner. One characteristic feature is common to all the Buddha's teaching; so the personal pupils of the Buddha are all of one kind. Similarly the entire world can become pupils of Socrates since Socrates wished only to elicit what lies hidden in the human soul. His disciples are therefore all of the same kind and Socrates has the same relationship to all. Christ Jesus, however, has two different kinds of relationships, one kind to His intimate pupils and another to the crowd. How may this be understood?

If we wish to understand the reason for this we must recognize clearly in our souls that the whole turning point of evolution had been reached at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. The end of the period during which clairvoyance was the common possession of humanity was approaching. The further we go back in human evolution the more was the ancient clairvoyance that enabled men to see into the spiritual worlds the common possession of all mankind. How did they see into these worlds? Their vision took the form of perceiving the secrets of the cosmos in pictures, which were either conscious or unconscious imaginations. It was a dreamlike clairvoyance in the form of dreamlike imaginations, not in the rational concepts that people today make use of in the pursuit of knowledge. Both science and popular thinking which today make use of prosaic reasoning power and judgment were absent in those ancient times. In confronting the external world men did indeed see it, but they did not analyze it conceptually. They possessed no logic, nor did they make deductions in their thinking. Actually it is difficult for a man of today to imagine this because today one thinks about everything. But ancient man did not think in this way. He passed by objects and formed mental images of them; and in the intermediate state between sleeping and waking when he looked into his dreamlike imaginative world and saw pictures he was able to understand his mental images.

Let us envisage the matter more concretely. Picture to yourselves how, many thousands of years ago, ancient man would have observed his environment. He would have been struck by the fact that a teacher was present who explained something to his pupils. A man of former times would have stood there and listened to the words the teacher was saying to his pupils. And if there had been several pupils present he would have heard how one receives the word with fervor, another takes it up but soon lets it fall, while a third is so absorbed in his own egoism that he does not listen. A man of former times would not have been able, for example, to have compared these three pupils in a rational manner. But when he was in the intermediate state between waking and sleeping, then the whole scene would have appeared again before his soul in the form of a picture. And he would have seen something, for example, like this: how a sower walks scattering seed; and this he would have really seen as a clairvoyant picture. He would have seen how one seed is thrown in good soil where it comes up well, a second seed he throws on poorer soil, and the third on stony soil. A smaller crop comes up from what was sown on the poor soil and nothing at all from the stony soil. Such a man of earlier times would not have said, as the man of today would, “One pupil takes up the words, another does not take them up at all,” and so on. But in the intermediate state between sleeping and waking he saw the imaginative picture, and with it the explanation. He would never have spoken of it in any other way. If he had been asked to explain the relation of the teacher to his pupils he would have told about his clairvoyant vision. For him that was the reality, and also the explanation. And that is the way he would have talked.

Now the crowd facing Christ Jesus possessed indeed only the last remnant of ancient clairvoyance. But their souls were still well versed at listening to what was told to them in the form of pictures about the coming into being and the evolution of mankind. When Christ Jesus spoke to the crowd He spoke as if He were speaking to people who still retained the last heritage of ancient clairvoyance and took it with them in their ordinary life of soul.

Who, then, were His intimate disciples? We have heard how the Twelve consisted of the seven sons of the Maccabean mother and the five sons of Mattathias. We have heard how throughout the whole history of the Hebrew people they had advanced to the point where they could vigorously assert their immortal ego. They were indeed the first whom Christ Jesus could choose Himself, appealing to that which lives in every human soul, living in it in such a way that it can become the new starting point for human development. To the crowd he spoke on the assumption that they would understand what they had preserved as a heritage from ancient clairvoyance. To His disciples He spoke on the assumption that they were the first who would be able to understand a little of what we today can say to human beings about higher worlds. It was thus a necessity for Christ Jesus during the whole of the turning point of time to speak in a different way when He was addressing the crowd from when He was speaking to His intimate pupils. The Twelve whom He drew to Himself He placed in the middle of the crowd. It was the task of Christ Jesus' closer circle of pupils to acquire that understanding, that rational understanding of things that belonged to the higher worlds and of the secrets of human evolution that in later times would become the common property of mankind. If we take what He said as a whole when He interpreted the parables for His pupils, we can say that He spoke also in a Socratic manner. For He drew forth what He said from the souls of each one of them, with the difference that Christ Jesus spoke of spiritual matters while Socrates spoke rather about the circumstances of earthly life and made use of ordinary logic. When Christ spoke to His intimate pupils about spiritual matters He did so in a Socratic manner. When the Buddha spoke to his disciples and expounded spiritual matters he showed how this was possible through illumination and through the sojourn of the human soul in the spiritual world. When Christ spoke to the crowd He spoke of the higher worlds in the way in which they formerly were experienced by ordinary human souls. He spoke to the crowd, as one might say, like a popular Buddha; to His intimate disciples He spoke like a higher Socrates, a spiritualized Socrates. Socrates drew forth from the souls of his pupils the individual earthly reason, whereas Christ drew forth heavenly reason from the souls of His disciples. The Buddha gave heavenly enlightenment to his pupils; Christ in His parables gave earthly enlightenment to the crowd.

I would ask you to give thought to these three pictures: Over there in the land of the Ganges there is the Buddha with his pupils—the antithesis of Socrates; over there in Greece is Socrates with his pupils—the antithesis of the Buddha. And then four or five centuries later there is this remarkable synthesis, this remarkable combination. Here you have before your souls one of the greatest examples of the regular, lawful development of human evolution. Human evolution proceeds step by step. Many of the things taught in years past in the early stages of spiritual science may have been thought by some people to be a kind of theory, a mere doctrine as, for example, when it was explained that the human soul should be thought of as the combined action of the sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul. Some people certainly make their judgments too quickly, indeed, a good deal more quickly even than those who take something that is merely a first draft and regard it as the finished product, a draft that was still awaiting further development. Such different judgments which we have actually experienced are all right as long as it is drawn to the attention of anthroposophists how they ought not to think. Sometimes we are confronted with blatant examples of how not to think, although many people believe we should indeed think like that. For example, this morning someone gave me a fine example of an odd kind of thinking which I am quoting here only as an example, though it is one that we should very much take to heart for the reason that we as anthroposophists should not only take notice of the world's shortcomings but should actually do something towards the consistent perfecting of the soul. So if I take what was told me this morning as an example, I do this not for a personal but for a spiritual reason that has wide application.

I was told that in a certain area of Europe a gentleman is living who at one time a long time ago had printed some pointless statements about the teachings that appear in Steiner's Theosophy as well as about his general relationship to the spiritual movement. Now it happened today that an acquaintance of this gentleman was criticized because his acquaintance, that is this particular gentleman, had published something like this. To which the acquaintance replied, “Why, my friend has just begun to study the writings of Dr. Steiner in an intensive manner.” Yet this friend years before had passed judgment on these writings, and it is offered as an excuse that he is just beginning now to study them! This is a way of thinking that ought to be impossible within our movement. When some time in the future people write historically about our movement the question will certainly be asked, “Could it possibly be true that it occurred to someone to propose as an excuse that a man is only now beginning to acquaint himself with something on which he passed judgment years ago?” Such things are an integral part of anthroposophical education, and we shall make no progress unless it becomes generally accepted that such things must be unthinkable, absolutely unthinkable in our anthroposophical movement. For it is a necessary part of our inner honesty that we must be simply unable to think in this way. We can make no step forward in our search for truth if it is possible for us to pass such a judgment. And it is a duty for anthroposophists to take note of these things and not pass them by in an unloving manner while at the same time talking about the “universal love of mankind.” In a higher sense it is indeed unloving toward a man if we forgive him something of this kind because we thereby condemn him to karmic meaninglessness and lack of existence after death. By drawing his attention to the impossible nature of such judgments we make easier his existence after death. This is the deeper meaning of the matter.

So we should not take it lightly when the truth is put forward in the first place in a simple manner, namely, that the human soul is composed of three members, the sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul. Already in the course of the years it was emphasized how this fact has a much deeper significance than a mere dividing of the soul into three parts. It was pointed out how the various postAtlantean cultures gradually developed: the ancient Indian, the primeval Persian and the Egypto-Babylonian-Chaldean cultures, the Greco-Latin culture and then ours. And it was shown how the essential characteristic of the EgyptianBabylonian-Chaldean cultural epoch is the specific development of the true sentient soul of man. Similarly in the Greco-Latin era there was the specific culture of the intellectual soul, and in our era of the consciousness soul. So we are confronted with these three cultural epochs, which have their influence on the education and evolution of the human soul itself. These three soul members are not something that have been theoretically thought out, but are living realities developing progressively through successive epochs of time.

But everything must be linked. The earlier must always be carried over into the later, and in the same way the later must be foreshadowed in the earlier. In what cultural epoch do Socrates and the Buddha live? They live in the epoch of the intellectual soul; both have their task and their mission in that epoch.

The Buddha has the task of preserving the culture of the sentient soul from the previous, the third epoch, into the fourth. What the Buddha announces and his pupils take up into their hearts, is something destined to shine over from the third post-Atlantean period—the period of the sentient soul—into the era of the intellectual soul. In this way the era of the intellectual soul, the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, could be warmed through by the glow and the light of the teachings of Buddha, by what was brought forth by the sentient soul, permeated as it was by clairvoyance. The Buddha was the great preserver of the sentient soul culture, bringing it forward right into the culture of the intellectual soul. What then was the mission of Socrates, who appeared somewhat later in time?

Socrates in the same way stands in the midst of the era of the intellectual soul. His appeal is made to the single human individuality, to something that can truly emerge only in our fifth cultural age. It was his task to foreshadow, though in a still abstract form, the era of the consciousness soul in the era of the intellectual soul. The Buddha preserves what came from the past, so that his message appears like a warming, shining light. Socrates anticipates what in his own time lies in the future, the characteristics of the consciousness soul era. So in his age it seemed to be somewhat prosaic, merely rational, even arid. Thus the third, fourth and fifth cultural epochs are telescoped in the fourth. The third is preserved by the Buddha, the fifth is anticipated by Socrates. West and East have the task of pointing up these two different missions—the East preserving the greatness of the past, while the West in an earlier era is anticipating what is to appear in a later one.

From the very ancient times in human evolution when the Buddha appeared time and again as the Boddhisattva, there is a straight path until the time when the Bodhisattva ascended to Buddhahood. There is a great and continuous development that comes to an end with the Buddha, and this really is an end because the Buddha undergoes his last incarnation on earth and never again descends to it. It was a great age that came to an end then, since it brought over from very ancient epochs what constituted the culture of the sentient soul of the third post-Atlantean cultural era and let it shine out again. If you will read the discourses of the Buddha from this point of view you will gain the right mood of soul and as a result the era of the intellectual soul will be valued by you in a different way. You will then return to the discourses of Buddha and say, “Everything here is of such a nature that it speaks directly to the human mind, but in the background is something that escapes from this mind and belongs to a higher world.” This is the reason for that special rhythmic movement that ordinary rational men find objectionable which we find in the repetition of Buddha's discourses. This we can begin to understand only when we leave the physical for the etheric, entering in this way the first super-sensible element behind the material. Anyone here who understands how much is active in the etheric body which stands behind the physical will also understand why so much in Buddha's discourses is repeated again and again. The repetitions must not be deleted from the discourses since such deletion takes away that special mood of soul that lives in them. Abstract-minded persons have done this in the belief that it is doing something helpful if they eliminate the repetitions and stick to the content. But it is important that they should be left just as the Buddha gave them.

If now we consider Socrates as he was, without all the wealth of material provided by the discoveries of natural science and the humanities since his day, and observe how he approaches the things of everyday life, we shall see how a man of the present time, when fortified by all the material of natural science, will find everywhere the Socratic method active in it. We expect it and need it. So we have a clear line beginning with Socrates and continuing into our own era, and this will grow ever more perfect in the future.

Thus there is one stream of human development that goes as far as the Buddha and ends with him; and there is another stream that begins with Socrates and goes on into the distant future. Socrates and the Buddha stand next to one another like the nuclei of two comets, if I may be allowed such an image. In the case of the Buddha, the light-filled comet's tail encircles the nucleus and points far back into the indeterminate perspectives of the past; in the case of Socrates the comet's tail of light encircles the nucleus in the same way but points far, far into the indeterminate distances of the future. Two diverging comets going in succession in opposite directions whose nuclei shine at the same time, this is the image I should like to use to illustrate how Socrates and the Buddha stand side by side.

Half a millennium passes, and something like a uniting of these two streams comes into being through Christ Jesus. We have already characterized this by putting a number of facts before our souls. Tomorrow we shall continue with this characterization so that we can answer the question, “How can we best characterize the mission of Christ Jesus in relation to the human soul?”

• 1. Socrates, Athenian philosopher, 470–399 B.C. Our information about him comes mainly from the works of Plato and Xenophon, the more sympathetic and much better known picture being drawn from Plato. Socrates is not known ever to have written a word, his instruction having been all given orally, in the form of dialogues.
  
  Plato's picture of Socrates is contained mostly in his Protagoras, Meno, Symposium, Gorgias, and the three dialogues recounting the death of Socrates: The Apology, the Crito, and the Phaedo. Plato, 427–347 B.C.
  
  Aristotle, 384–322 B.C. A pupil of Plato, he never knew Socrates personally, but credits him with many philosophical innovations, especially the use of logic and dialectic.
• 2. Gautama Buddha, c. 563–483 B.C. His dialogue with his pupil Sona is recorded in Vinayapitaka I, page 182 in the edition of H. Oldenberg (in German).

Today I would like to return to much of that which I said in previous lectures and I would like to amplify, in the first place, certain ideas about the inner being of man, about the soul spiritual nature of man. You know that we speak in the first place of that particular member of the inner human being which we designate with an abstract expression as the ether body. Whereas the physical body of man is perceptible for the external senses to external science which is bound to the intellect and its observation, we know that the ether body is something of a super-sensible nature. Furthermore, we speak of the next member of human nature as the so-called astral body. We remember how often we have emphasized the fact that one cannot say that the inner being of man is completely unknown to us. Indeed, man perceives within his bodily existence in the physical world, he perceives his thinking, his feeling and his willing. He experiences it inwardly and he experiences this thinking, feeling and willing as being radiated through by his “I”. One can say that man inwardly perceives this thinking, feeling and willing. However one cannot say that you can actually perceive your astral body. Also one cannot say that you really perceive your “I”, because this “I”—and we have brought this to your attention in the course of these lectures—this “I” of which man speaks falls back into unconsciousness with every sleep and is actually only a reflection of the real “I”. Therefore, in a certain sense, it can he concluded also that this “I” with this thinking, feeling and willing, is in a similar way only an expression, a manifestation of the actual inner being of man, just as with the physical body what you have is a manifestation, an expression of the spiritual nature of that which we designate as the etheric body.

Now, man is obviously happy when, in reference to any given domain of knowledge, he has such a very tightly fit division which he can neatly preserve. Therefore people are so happy when they know that man consists of physical body, ether body, astral body and ego. However, in the man—and I want to emphasize this—all you have with these four expressions are just four words, nothing more than four expressions. And when you advance to real contemplation, then you must, in a certain sense, always pass beyond the borders which are so easily established by these expressions. you speak in a general way, to be sure you may say: Thinking, feeling and willing proceed in the astral body. However that is really only a one-sided abstract way in which the fact of thinking exhausts itself. Just as we as human beings stand in the first place within the physical world, so, to be sure, the impulse to the thinking which exist in the astral body is that impulse which proceeds from the “I”. However, the thinking develops itself as a thought only through the fact that we have the mobile ether body. Our whole thinking would remain unconscious to us as physical human beings if the astral body did not send its impulses into the ether body and the ether body in its mobility would be unable to take up the thought impulses of the astral body. And every thought again would simply just pass over in a transitory way without having the possibility of a memory if we did not have a physical body. You cannot say the physical body is the carrier of the memory. No. The carrier of the memory is the ether body. However, for us human beings, if our thinking were to merely flow along just as dreams flow along and if it were not possible to have it engraved in the physical materiality of the physical body, then our thoughts here in the physical body can assert themselves through the fact that we have this physical body. Thus you see how this thinking is actually a very complicated process. It has its impulses in the astral body, actually already in the “I”. These impulses continue themselves as forces in the ether body, call forth the thoughts, and the thoughts in their turn engrave their tracks into the physical body. And through the fact that they are imprinted, you can always fetch them out of the memory again during the physical life.

Now, just consider—and we have often spoken about this situation—what the memory actually represents for man here in the physical body. As you know, man has experiences. He works these experiences over; then he goes away from these experiences. There comes a time when such experiences relate themselves to the human being as if we knew nothing about them, as if we no longer stood in relationship to them. However, there again comes the time when we are able to fetch the thought experiences out of our inner being. That which we have already experienced is present for us again in in the form of memory. Now, in the first place, man must believe the following. This process of memory belongs to him; it belongs to his soul. When we as human beings walk through the streets and associate in society, someone outside of us with external physical sense organs cannot really know what is hidden within us as our memories, that is, he cannot know what sort of experiences we have had. We carry these in our soul. I might say the sheaths of the physical body are so arranged that they cover over our soul for us. It is as if true physical body is a mantle which hides our soul and in which we can preserve these memories. They belong to us and they work in us through our whole life. We make the outside world into our own inner world. Then we carry this external world in the form of memories with us through existence. We carry these memories as our own possession.

Now, it would be a great mistake if one were to believe that this carrying of the memories through life really comprises the whole process. This is not the case. Darwin, for example, had the correct idea when he investigated to see if rain worms had a special task, and he discovered that rain worms are not there just to merely enjoy their existence but have the very important task of making the soil fruitful as they crawl through it. These are things which natural science certainly admits and this is a ground upon which natural science believes itself secure. Now, natural science, in so far as it does that, should not be criticized because it is really good when they enter into certain single details. However, the problem is that one builds world views upon such details. Obviously you must consider the saying about a man who digs for treasure and is happy when he finds rain worms. However, from the spiritual point of view one can ask the following: Was this activity through which man forms thoughts during his whole life and preserves them in his memory, has that any significance for the whole cosmos? Is this process of memorization only a process which occurs in ourselves? Now, the materialist says that obviously that is a process which only occurs in us. With death we put our physical body in the grave and then that which we have preserved in us as memory is obviously something which is rarely an extinguished thing. We are not going to enter into such a materialistic reply. We want to ask the question: Is our thinking process and memory process something quite different from that which occurs in our memory?

So it is. While we think, while we form thoughts and out of our experiences preserve these memories, during this time we occupy ourselves not only with our thoughts, but the whole world of the Third Hierarchy occupies themselves with our thoughts, the Hierarchies of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. When we think, we think not only for ourselves, we think and we preserve our thoughts in our inner being in order that a field of activity should be created for Angels, Archangels and Archai. Whereas we believe that our thoughts live only in us, actually the three spiritual Hierarchies occupy themselves with our thoughts. The very smallest of that which we propose with our thoughts is something which concerns us. Even when we have forgotten the thoughts, they are in us and we again call these thoughts out of our memory. Just as we as human beings occupy ourselves on earth with our machines or with eating and drinking, so do the Angels, Archangels and Archai occupy themselves with a web which is formed from our thoughts; they work continuously on our thoughts. It is thus only the side of the activity of the thoughts which is turned toward us that we know about. There is in addition another side and this other side of our thoughts so appears for spiritual perception that we can say the following. While our thoughts which we have in our inner being occupy themselves from outside, the above mentioned spiritual beings weave these thoughts so that we, when we achieve this knowledge, can say the following of ourselves. Our thought process is acutely not something unnecessary for the world. Our thought process is something not only for ourselves, but it stands within the whole world development and contributes to it so that something new can continuously be woven into the world development. If we were not born as single individuals, if we had no thoughts, if we had not preserved memories in us, then at our death, that portion which would have been able to be woven out of our thoughts, that which we ourselves do not weave, that would be lost for world development. And when we pass through the portal of death—the elementary process I have often described—we put aside our physical body and this is given over to the elements of the earth in various ways. Our ether body remains with for a short time. It represents itself to our inner being as a great life tableau which is in front of us. Everything of that which we otherwise remember, that which has gone on in a time continuum becomes as a mighty panorama all at once, a mighty life tableau placed around us. Then, however, our etheric being is separated from us. It is, as it were, drawn out of us.

Now, who does that? Indeed, that is done by the beings of the three Hierarchies we mentioned and they weave it gradually into the cosmic ether so that after our death this web of the cosmic ether consists of that which we during our life between birth and death have added to it, also that which was worked over by the beings of these next three Hierarchies. The new webbing is taken away from us and is interwoven with the whole cosmic all. Every human being has a knowledge of this when he passes through the portal of death, since, for the human being after he has passed the portal of death, something enters which can be described in no other way than as follows. Now, you must see that the ether body is separated from him; his etheric web has been interwoven into the universal cosmic ether. That which he has carried in himself all through his life is now outside, it is external. And that is important. That person who knows these things indicates it with a short phrase which one should call forth before the soul in a meditative way. It can be described through a very essential process by saying the following. The inner being becomes the external, which means that which we always have felt as our thought life becomes external world. Just as here we are surrounded by rivers, mountains, trees, clouds, stones and stars, so after our death something occurs which one can characterize in following way. That which during our physical life has lived in in us now has become a portion of the external world so that it can now be perceived by us.

In addition to this ether body, we have the world of our astral body. This world of our astral body comes to our consciousness, in the first place, so that we feel it as thinking; we feel the world of the astral body as thinking. However, the thinking I have precisely characterized, indeed, sends its impulses down into the ether body so that the thinking itself cannot be conscious in the astral body. You can only become aware of feeling and willing in your astral body. You cannot be conscious of your thinking there, but you become aware of your thoughts in the ether body. It is very important that feeling and willing can become conscious for us, it has to go down into the ether body. Throughout our whole life we feel and we will, we foster feelings about certain experiences. These are processes in our astral body. That again is a very characteristic weaving, but now not just a web in thoughts as I have formerly described it but a web of perception, feeling and impulses toward willing. Higher beings also work in that which we have throughout our whole life as feeling and will impulses. Just as in our thinking beings of the Third Hierarchy work, so there work in our feeling and our will impulses the beings of the Second Hierarchy including the Thrones.

Just imagine how we stand in the world when we know these things how we feel ourselves inserted into the spiritual world. On the one side we say to ourselves: Man, you go through the world thinking, but your thinking in so far as it is turned to its inner side is only the one side of thinking. That which you think is substance for the work of the Angels, the Archangels, the Archai. In so far as we feel and will, we create substance for the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Thrones, or the Spirits of Will. Just as the human being cultivates the earth and works it over, he does not know that while he is working over the earth that it is only one side which is worked over, but on the other side actual processes are occurring which he does not know of with his normal consciousness. In a similar way, man believes that his feelings and his will impulses merely belong to him, but they are a field for the work of the indicated beings of the hierarchies.We are truly not merely physical body that only stands in connection with our environment, but we are also there as soul spiritual beings so this soul spiritual man can stand in connection with the environment. Normally one does not think about how our physical body belongs to our whole environment. But this is easy to work out.

In any given moment when you visualize yourself in a bodily way, you possess not only bones, blood, muscles and so on, but you also have a certain stream of air in yourself which you have breathed in and which you will soon breathe out. This belongs to you while you have breathed in; that was out of you in the previous moment, in the next moment it is again outside you. Just think of yourself without this stream of air. It is impossible to think in this way without realizing that you have this stream of air within you. It belongs to us, it is nonsense to think of the physical body as if it were only enclosed within the skin; whereas you are pointed to the fact that you live with the whole atmosphere environment. However, just as we through our physical body live with the atmosphere environment, with the warmth environment, so do we live with the environment of the Hierarchy of the Third Order through our thoughts and we live through our feelings and will impulses with the Beings of the Hierarchies of the Second Order and with the Spirits of Will. This is how we stand within the cosmic all.

Let us now turn our attention to passing through of the portal of death. We can then say the following. When man passes through the portal of death, we know that when his ether body is taken away from him, when the interweaving into the universal cosmic ether begins, then he has to live backwards three times as fast as he experienced during physical life between birth and death, in so far as during that period he perceives the effects of his experiences between birth and death. Thus, that which we have experienced in us during our physical life we do not perceive them just because we have perceived it here in physical life. We will perceive the feeling out of which we have executed an injury to someone else, not our feeling but that of the other person, that which we have lived through here in the physical life stands as a causative factor there and carries in itself the karma. We have not experienced the impression that our injury has made upon the other person's soul. We experience here, in the main, not that which our deeds, our actions, our thoughts have resulted in effects in the external world, we do not experience that here in the physical life, but we do experience that when we go through our backward vision in the time between death and a new birth. There we live through everything that is outside, not in the way it was experienced by us but in the way in which it was experienced by the external world with which we were in contact. Really everything which other human beings have perceived, have felt through our thoughts, through our words, we live through and because of this the external must become the inner in our new state of post mortem. Through this experience the effects of our thoughts, the effects of our deeds in life, the external effects now become inner which means something which we inwardly experience, something which is experienced by the spirit human being after death, because now he must live himself into that world in which he lived unconsciously during the time of his life.

In so far as he has an astral body, and the Spirits of the Second Hierarchy have worked upon his astral body, he must now live into that world in which his astral body gradually dissolves itself into the external, but now he experiences the external in an inward way, he really lives through it inwardly. He must learn between death and a new birth to work in that sphere in which the Spirits of the Second Hierarchy work, in which they prepare that which again can lead into a new incarnation. And, indeed, then we know that after the astral body has dissolved into the external world and man lives on further with his actual inner being in the time between death and a new birth.

When we want to understand something of this life between death and a new birth, we must make many points of view valid for ourselves. Our goal is not to be one-sided but to make various viewpoints valid so that gradually a comprehensive understanding of these processes can open themselves to us. Thus you must keep the following in view. Just as man through birth enters natural processes which around him in the mineral world, in the plant world, in the animal world, so he enters into a world where things are happening around him with the beings of the Hierarchies which we have mentioned. He is, as it were, enfolded into their activities and that which he has brought with him for them, they weave together so that it can become the foundation for his next incarnation.

You must realize that in this it is, I might say, very difficult to give our present age the correct concepts and ideas for reasons which I have often presented. The present age works precisely with the most reversed concepts in this realm. When a human being enters through birth into physical existence, he enters with certain characteristics. The present time speaks purely of heredity, and means physical heredity, and one speaks of this physical heredity in the following way. A man shows this or that characteristic. Therefore to find out where those characteristics come from, you must look for its ancestors. For example, there is a very industriously worked over book about Goethe, in which Goethe's characteristics are so presented that it has looked for one thing in this ancestor, another in that, one characteristic from a great-great grandmother, another from a great-great grandfather, and so on, as if everything that Goethe had had came to him through heredity. I have often said the following: When you say that the child has the qualities of his parents, it is just as wise a saying as a human being is wet when he falls into water and is then drawn out of it. Naturally he is wet from the water when he is taken out. In the same way he has the properties of his ancestors in him, because they have been led through his soul. There is no greater wisdom there either. Therefore to go back to causes is, for the logical aspect ultimately the most logical, because one can say the following: One wants to prove that the soul-spiritual properties come through heredity in so far as one shows that a genius like Goethe has the same characteristics which his ancestors had, but as we have said, it is no cleverer than the assertion that the man is wet after he has fallen into water.

Now, if you really want to prove that the properties of genius are concerned with heredity, then you would have to show how the descendents of a genius show the properties of the genius. In other words, if you have to prove that genius can be transmitted by heredity, that would be a proof. Look at Goethe's son. See if he has Goethe's genius. Now, behind all this there is a much deeper process. Just imagine this hypothesis, for example, just imagine that there are beings who are not able to see human beings and just imagine that one of these beings who cannot see the activity of man goes to Berlin and sees how watches are being produced everywhere. This being obviously has to say to himself: These watches produce themselves. And that is no wiser than people who say that you do not need any additional explanations about how human beings come into the world; that that occurs quite of itself in the course of propagation in the generations. These ideas can only be held by people who cannot see human beings, who cannot see that that which occurs here in the physical world is only the external expression of an activity which continuously flows down out of the spiritual world just as the activity of the watchmakers flow into the watches. Therefore that which precisely occurs here upon the earth, of which human beings in their foolishness believe that they occur completely for themselves, that is only an external physical process which is directed just as the activity of making watches is a directing activity, so the moment which I have called the Midnight Hour of Existence in my mystery dramas, from that moment on which lies within the middle between death and a new birth, there already begins that activity of the spiritual world, as it were, of inclining itself into the physical in order after centuries to lead the human being into physical existence. When man goes through the portal of death, there is the activity of a working over of that which the human being experienced in his last life which is exercised in the spiritual world. All this occurs in the first half of the life between death and a new birth. However, in the second half of the life between death and a new birth,
the preparation for the next incarnation begins. And now the following can be said about the situation.

That person who is born has ancestors; ancestors again have ancestors; these ancestors have ancestors. Just see how far this goes when you go through 30 generations. However, if you go through 30 generations, you will find that in many people, as it were, there already is the tendency which ultimately leads to the fact that man A is brought together with woman B and then they bring another human being into existence. And if the whole thing did not so occur through 30 generations, if the people had not married, A not coming together with B, therefore that human being who descends into a physical incarnation would not have ultimately been produced. From the whole working together of many people which finally peaks into two, the single individuality of the human being has been a participation in the spiritual world. Thus when we see that the son has the characteristic of his father, of his mother and then again the father's and mother's characteristics are led back to grandfathers and grandmothers and great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers and so on, that is because there has previously been an influence exerted on these great-great-grandparents through 30 generations by that individuality who then later on after many centuries wants to be born and this has all been determined according to the plan to find himself as a human being through the generations. All that is a participating activity and the fact that you have similar inherited characteristics emanates from the fact that through the generations that power works down through the spiritual world which finally comes to appearance in a certain human being. This individuality already works in a father, a mother, a grandfather, a grandmother, a great-grandfather, a great-grandmother, and ultimately one gets the qualities which come to expression. It is not the physical stream which makes the inheritance, but the physical stream is inserted in this way through inheritance. Therefore, precisely the reverse of that which the so-called natural scientific view maintains, is true. In order that Goethe ultimately comes to appearance through Johann Casper Goethe and his Frau Eiya, Beings of the Second Hierarchy have worked through 30 generations in such a way that Goethe could ultimately be produced. Naturally this applies not only for genius but for eveiy single human being.

Now, you can say that this is difficult to imagine, and you could also ask yourself how is this compatable with human freedom when we have already been determined 30 generations before we descend. I know it is very complicated, but you must remember that this is complicated for the normal consciousness which has been apportioned to you during your earth existence. You will remember that what we are dealing with is not only the individual himself, but the individual in community with the Spirits of Form, with the Spirits of Motion, and so on, and so it is worked out in such a way that freedom is not influenced. Naturally this works in such a way that it corresponds to the working of these Higher Hierarchies. The situation is just like that.

There is worked together that which we are able to give over as thoughts to the cosmic ether with that which we express during our earth existence in our feeling life and in our will life. Therefore Spiritual Science is not supposed to be a totality of knowledge, but above all it should be capable of bringing forth a certain soul mood. I have attempted to indicate this soul mood in the first part of my second mystery play, in the meeting between Capaius and Benedictus, when the goal is that man as a complete human being lives here upon the earth. In order that that can happen, Gods and Gods, Spirits and Spirits work together so that the human being is a goal for Gods and Gods, Spirits and Spirits. This feeling, I might say, the thankfulness, the gratitude to the spiritual universe, this feeling to know ourselves in the spiritual universe must flow into our souls through spiritual science. This must become as natural for us as it is natural for us to know about the connections with the physical world.

Science today has advanced so far that everyone is aware of the fact that man cannot just live on his own resources but needs the atmosphere, that he is a menber of the whole environment. When he is hungry or thirsty, then he notices that the external world is necessary in a physical way for his existence, that he stands within the external world, within a universal process. However, man also stands in a universal process in the spiritual world. When he thinks he stands within Angels, Archangels, Archai, and in so far as he feels and he wills, he then stands in a spiritual connection with the next higher Hierarchy. Just as the air stretches itself into man's physical body in so far as his physical nature is concerned, so the spiritual aspect of the activity of the so-called Hierarchies works in his soul.

Quite often you get a materialist raising the objection: Indeed, it may be true that a spiritual world does exist, but it does not help us to know anything about this spiritual world even when you tell us that thinking, feeling and willing stand in connection with the Higher Hierarchies. It does not matter, because in order to think we do not need to know about these Higher Hierarchies. We already think in the world without knowing anything about them. Man believes, thank God. If he had to wait until he knew about the breathing process in a theoretical way before breathing, then he also would not be able to think unless he knew about the breathing process. You think without knowing anything about these Higher Hierarchies. However, let us present a counter question. Can you really think without one having that? At the present time you see that people work with the inheritance of the ancient times; they work with that which they have inherited and they are still inventing machines from that. All this is an inheritance of an earlier age. Much of what we accomplish today is a result of what we have inherited in the past.

Recently we were in Hamburg and saw a picture done in the 13th, 14th century by Master Bertram and I want to tell you something about this picture. Let us go back to the biblical story of the fall into sin which we in spiritual science call Luciferic temptation. When a painter in our modern age paints the fall into sin, so he would paint Adam and Eve on either side of the tree and then, naturally, a serpent on the tree. According to whether he is an Impressionist, Cubist, Expressionist or any other ‘ist’, he would more or less paint this; he would paint it beautifully. But he will paint a serpent looking like any serpent which crawls in the grass; that is realism. But is it realism? Is it actually not realism? I cannot imagine any simple woman being deceived by such a serpent. We know from spiritual science that Lucifer is a being who had remained behind at the Moon development. Lucifer, during the Moon evolution, could not be seen with physical eyes such as we have upon earth, so the serpent could not be something which could be seen with the physical eye, not the serpent referred to in the Garden of Eden. Lucifer had to be seen inwardly. When you study the human being more accurately, you can see in every skeleton that it consists of two portions. You have the skull and the spinal column attached to it with the brain inside the skull and the spinal fluid in the spinal column, and the rest of the human being is attached to it. You can consider the human being only as being attached to it. You have the head like a small cosmic sphere attached to the whole thing. You can also say: Thank God that man through his own wisdom cannot contribute to this head coming into existence through his birth. It would look very strange if the anatomists and physiologists could contribute anything to produce this wonderful structure of the human head. This human head comes into existence between death and a new birth as in a large sphere which we could compare with our blue heavenly sphere, that in which our karma is woven and is an organization which as it goes towards incarnation, becomes smaller and smaller and then unites itself with the mother. That which then becomes our head is woven through by countless beings of the Hierarchies out of the whole cosmic all. It is a wisdom of the most immense magnitude, a wisdom which has embodied in it all the experiences. Our head is an inheritance of the Saturn, Sun and Moon incarnations. The earth with all its forces could not have been able to produce this head. It is only possible to bring into existence that which is added to the head, not the head with all its forces. The other part of the human being, not the head with the spinal column, but that which is attached to it actually is earth man. Now, how would a person with inner vision try to represent Lucifer actually as a Moon being? One would represent a human head and would attach something like a boned up spinal column to it, something like a serpent; and that is how Master Bertram in the 13th, 14th century presents Lucifer there on the tree between Adam and Even. In the Hamburg Museum you can see the picture represented just like that. So you see that the painter who painted this picture has the living knowledge
of the configuration of Lucifer within him. You can also see that it was not so very long ago that we still had the ancient atavistic clairvoyance which has now been lost.

I would like to present the situation from another side in order that you will see the assertion of the materialist who says that you do not need to know anything that comes out of the spiritual world, that all you need to do is use your thinking and feeling just as we breathe in the atmosphere and take in food for our hunger and thirst. I have often talked about the very significant criminal anthropologist, Benedict. He was the first to investigate the brains of criminals, naturally, after their death. He analyzed these brains in order to see if he could find some connections between the structure of the brain and criminal qualities. Benedict found that they all have a common characteristic, namely, their rear head lobes were too short and did not completely cover up the small brain. Just imagine this: the common qulaities of the criminal brain is to have a too short rear head lobe just as the apes also have it, something which does not cover the small brain. Obviously this actually is a property of the physical body and so from that you can conclude that there are two types of people being born, those having a correct rear head lobe and those with too short lobes. Those who have a correct rear head lobe do not become criminals and those with too short rear head lobes must become criminals. From the standpoint of the materialistic world conception you cannot raise any objection against this knowledge, but then all talk about morality is nonsense. Can we really punish people when we have to say that they have to be criminals because they have too short rear head lobes. You can see how materialism and all that can come about from it can gradually degenerate. You must extinguish all sorts of spiritual aspects from the social, ethical and juristic life, otherwise we are living in a complete lie, because there can be no objection against the facts which have just been presented.

Now, let us see how we approach the situation. To be sure, there are those who have correct rear head lobes and those with too short rear head lobes. However, there is an ether body there which can be developed in a quite different way and is much more mobile than the physical body. Behind the rear head lobes of the physical body there are the rear head lobes of the ether body and the human beings of the future will have to learn to distinguish between children who have too short rear head lobes and those who have longer rear head lobes. The educators will have to know in what characteristics a short hind head lobe manifests itself in the earliest years of childhood. These children will have to be educated in such a way that the ether lobes can be correspondingly developed and so form a counter weight. Then through the fact that you have developed the ether lobes strongly, they will prevent the damage which the physical lobes can produce when they are too short. So we can see that if spiritual science does not enter into our civilization, then as a result of materialism, all morality, all ethics, all justice would be meaningless. The spiritual would be extinguished from mankind's experience.

Recently in my public lectues I spoke about a forgotten thinker, Karl Christian Plunk. I do not intend to defend everything which Karl Christian Plunk has written in a dogmatic way. However, I have showed you how he worked out of a very deep spiritual consciousness and that he had a certain spiritual world conception. He died in 1880. Very few people bothered about his books. In 1912 the book entitled A TESTAMENT OF A GERMAN by Karl Christian Plunk appeared,a wonderful book. Since he died in 1880, this book had to be written before that. In the first edition of my RIDDLES OF PHILOSOPHY which was entitled WORLD AND LIFE VIEW OF THE 19TH CENTURY, I had already pointed in the year 1900 to Karl Christian Plunk. Plunk actually was an Idealist; he really was a man who lived in the spiritual world and wanted to bring into existence that which inserts itself in the world from the spiritual. I could mention many other examples, however, I am just pointing to Karl Christian Plunk. (An extract from Plunk's book TESTAMENT OF A GERMAN written in 1880 is given in which he spoke of the present war ‘1914–1918’) In this book he refers to the fact that in the future war, Germany will have to defend herself in the West and the South; how on all sides the enemy has national jealousy against the Center. The people will be jealous of the success and growth of the culture of Germany. How many people who had a materialistic concept could have thought like that? Very few of them. Yet, these are the very people who call the people who have a spiritual feeling, idealists.

When a spiritual researcher says: Today people are alright, they can still continue to think, because they have an inheritance of the ancient type of thinking and are able to invent machines. However, human beings will come to a standstill before 50 years is over. They will not be able to discover anything more unless they decide to take spiritual influences up into their thinking. They will reach a dead end. They will have to go to the next stage which will be a development of a spiritual scientific point of view, then they will be able to have new discoveries. Today we have machines only because we have inherited the ancient thinking in our consciousness. We see that the time demands that we allow ourselves to become fructified from the spiritual world. And only this fructification will make it possible to be able to understand the spiritual facts as anthroposophical spiritual science gives us. And unless this happens, the great world tasks will not be solved. I have often mentioned the fact that we are living in a time when the second appearance of Christ will occur shortly, the Etheric Christ Being, that second appearance of Christ upon earth. However, it is necessary to have a preparation in order that this event does not go by unnoticed.

Just recently when I gave a lecture, two people came to me after the lecture and said that they are very surprised about what I was saying and they thought that they would not expect a Theosophist to speak the same way that I spoke. They thought Theosophists would speak differently, because they were pacifists. They forgot the fact that ever since pacifism arose, we have had the bloodiest wars. We talked about illnesses and I tried to explain that illness is the reaction of nature in order to make man healthy, that before the appearance of illness there are unnatural relationships and illness is an attempt to compensate for these unnatural relationships. The illness is necessary, because the unnatural relationships were there. You must see that in all circles of materialism, it leads to the unfruitfulness of thinking.

Spiritual scientific truths must work in our feeling, in our soul mood in a fructifying way and there must be a number of people in our age who can hold them true out of an inner conviction to that which is a necessity for world evolution, that which comes out of spiritual science. Then there will be what should be, then the Christ when He appears in His new form will find those people whom He needs; and that must be. When he appears in His etheric figure, and when someone says that he has experienced the Etheric Christ, then he must not be grasped as being an idiot. It is very necessary today to give mankind a strong push forward, a push which is able to overcome the materialism and its consequences, and this century needs it, needs it in order to take up a new form. And we have as the signs of fire for this goal of mankind today the significant bloody events all around us. We take up spiritual science so that the sacrifice of all those people who have died as a result of this will not have died in vain. If we take up spiritual science, then all that which has gone an around us as a sacrifice of these souls in this war, will be some sort of compensation for it and that will contribute towards the elevation of mankind. that must be, that is why we have to express this invocation again and again.

From the Courage of the fighters,
From the blood on fields of battle,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the people's sacrifice:
There will ripen fruit of Spirit,
If souls will turn in consciousness
Towards the realm of Spirit.

In the preceding lecture we studied the principles and powers in the being of man belonging specifically to Earth-existence. Certain forces operating in human nature are, in reality, “heritages” from the earlier embodiments of the Earth: from the Old Saturn period, the Old Sun period and the Old Moon period. These heritages from primeval epochs of evolution are contained in the physical body, the ether-body and the astral body of the earthly human being; but it is the Earth, the forces deriving actually from the Earth, that have made the physical body into the instrument of man's present form of consciousness. The ether-body has received, specifically from the Earth, the qualities whereby it becomes the bearer of the memory, the instrument of remembrance. The astral body itself developed during the Old Moon period of evolution—the planetary predecessor of the Earth—and the Earth adds the forces which provide for the operation of human karma. But something else exists as an activity, an expression of the human personality, something specifically connected with the “ I ” in man which has been acquired only during Earth-evolution. Waking consciousness, memory and remembrance, the operation of karma—these were the active principles added to the physical-, ether- and astral-bodies in that man was endowed with the “ I.” We said that the forces of the “ I ” are sent outwards, towards the outer spiritual world, and that these forces, unlike those inhering in karma, or in memory, do not remain inexorably bound up with the human being. A man's memories and remembrances remain part of him; his consciousness, obviously, has significance only for him, for other beings have quite different forms of consciousness; and karma is bound up with the human being in so far as it has to operate during the earthly incarnations to adjust and make compensation for his deeds. But “forms” or “forces” begotten of thoughts or feelings—these detach themselves from the real “ I ” of man, and in a certain respect acquire independent existence, independent reality. Unlike the other forces, they do not remain connected with him.

Now in respect of the forms or forces deriving from the “ I ” of man, a sharp distinction must be made. The human “ I ” or Ego can unfold either selfishness or selflessness in the inner life. According to whether selfishness, or selfless love and compassion are unfolded, these “forces” or “forms” operate quite differently. The forces of selfish thoughts become forces of disturbance, even of destruction; they pass into the spiritual world actually as destructive forces. On the other hand, all forces of selfless thoughts enter into the spiritual life of Earth-evolution, not as destructive but as upbuilding, constructive forces. In that these forces of selfless thought detach themselves as it were from the “ I ” of man, they leave behind certain traces in him. Especially is it true of forces begotten of selfless thoughts and feelings, that as they go forth from the “ I,” they leave traces behind in the human being—traces which are quite perceptible. The more the “ I ” sends out forces born of selfless thoughts and feelings, the more does a man develop individuality of form, of gesture, facial expression, and so on—in short, the power inherent in his own being. The forces of selfish, self-seeking thoughts and feelings, however, operate in him in such a way that he has little power to give expression to his own individuality. We must therefore ask: What is the principle underlying the distinction to be made among the individual forms of men in the course of the evolution of humanity?

Everything that is “form” on the Earth derives from the Spirits of Form. The name “Spirits of Form” is actually given to these Beings of the Higher Hierarchies because everything that has form, shape, life—everything that takes on shape inwardly and evolves an outer form, has received the essential impetus for this form from the “Spirits of Form.” Now all these Beings of the Higher Hierarchies are involved in a constant process of evolution. Not only man, but in a certain sense all the Beings of the different Hierarchies are involved in a constant process of evolution. In our present age, the Spirits of Form are moving to the higher rank of “Spirits of Movement”; the “Spirits of Personality” to that of “Spirits of Form; the “Archangeloi” to that of “Spirits of Personality” or “Archai.” As the Spirits of Form move upwards in rank they no longer function, in the primary sense, as “Spirits of Form,” but the succeeding Spirits of Personality do not, at once, assume the functions of Spirits of Form. This will help you to understand that something quite definite will come about during the second half of the period of Earth-evolution into which we have now passed. At the beginning of Earth-evolution, the Spirits of Form stamped the principle of form into man; this comes to expression in the different human forms. Just as the various races have developed their characteristic qualities, and individual human beings take on the traits of the several races, so have the various groups of humanity as a whole all over the Earth received their stamp from the Spirits of Form. What the Spirits of Form stamped into human beings has long since passed into the processes of heredity; it has long since become a heritage, handed down from generation to generation. In a sense, the Spirits of Form leave man greater freedom as they themselves move into a higher category and withdraw from the form-creating function devolving upon them at the beginning of Earth-evolution. So far as the Beings of the Hierarchies are concerned, man is drawing nearer and nearer to his “coming of age.” But of this we must be clear—The Spiritual Beings, moving up as they do to higher ranks, have themselves to evolve, and prepare for the next planetary condition of the Earth, in order that during the Jupiter-existence they may endow the beings who once belonged to the Earth with forms which will then be appropriate. Towards the end of a planetary age it is always the case that the being of central importance—and on the Earth this is man—is left free, so that the qualities with which he was originally endowed may pass more freely into his own hands. In the course of Earth-evolution in the future, therefore, the forces of form, the forms begotten by thoughts and feelings, will assume greater and greater importance. And in so far as they are selfless, in so far as they are the offspring of selfless wisdom, selfless love, these forces will work formatively upon man. For the design or pattern of the evolutionary process may be indicated in the following way. The further we go back into the past, the more do we find that the outer form of the child resembles that of its forefathers; but the further we go into the future, the more will the human being, in his outward appearance, become an expression of the individuality who passes on from one incarnation to another. This means that in one and the same family (even now it is very frequently the case and nobody with an eye for such things will deny it) there will be less and less likeness between the faces of the children and between the faces of the children and between the other parts of the human figure, for the reason that the forms will no longer be the expression of family or race, but more and more the expression of the individuality. Anyone with a knowledge of Spiritual Science, if he really observes human beings living all over the Earth, can perceive, even today, side by side with the inherited characteristics of race or family, more and more strongly individual lineaments of face, head, and other bodily forms; he can perceive the striking differences in form and figure among members of one and the same family. In this respect, of course, we are in a period of transition; but the Sixth Post-Atlantean epoch is in preparation, together with its paramount characteristic, namely, that unlike the conditions obtaining in earlier periods of culture, outer marks of race will be much less of a criterion. In the Sixth epoch the criterion all over the Earth will be the extent to which the individuality has impressed upon his countenance and upon the whole of his being, the forces left behind by the forms begotten of selfless thoughts and feelings—especially those deriving from wisdom.

It is contrary to every principle of true Spiritual Science to say that just as there was one leading race in each of the culture-epochs in the past, so in the future, too, there will be another such race, distinguished by physical attributes. The ancient Indian culture was borne and sustained by a leading race; so, too, was the culture of ancient Persia, of the Egypto-Chaldean and Graeco-Latin epochs. But already today it is apparent that culture, instead of being borne by one specific leading race, spreads over all races. And it is by Spiritual Science that culture—a spiritual culture—must be carried over the whole Earth, without distinction of race or blood. It is already apparent that our epoch will be succeeded by another of quite a different character, an epoch when, all over the Earth, the extent to which a man expresses his innermost being in his outer form, will be made manifest. It would be sheer contradiction of every principle of Spiritual Science to speak today of continental limits, or the limits of any particular territory, in connection with human beings belonging to the Sixth epoch of culture—for they, in the future, will be spread over the whole Earth. Only one whose vantage-point is not that of Spiritual Science, who has some queer bee in his bonnet that a kind of wheel revolving in spiritual evolution causes everything to repeat itself just as spring, summer, autumn and winter repeat themselves when a year has run its course—only such a one could make the statement that what was necessary for the creation of races in earlier times will simply be repeated for the Sixth epoch. Such a statement would be entirely at variance with true Spiritual Science, and would cut across all knowledge of the actual and real progress of humanity. The inner power of the soul becomes more and more manifest as evolution goes forward. The old is not repeated merely in slightly different form, but actual progress takes place in the evolution of humanity. If Theosophy is to keep faith with its good old principles—the first of which is to promote culture without distinction of race, colour, and so forth, it will not cherish groundless hopes of a future culture emanating from one particular race. The deeper connection of Theosophy with the actual course of evolution consists precisely in this:—that the processes operating in world-evolution are understood, that thinking and feeling are brought into harmony with theosophical knowledge, and the necessary impulses of will made effective in the world. In order to understand how the power of the soul will more and more be made manifest in humanity, it is only necessary to bring out one point clearly, and then we shall realise how the human being evolves as an individual. (The point that has been developed today has been dealt with repeatedly, for many years.¹).

At the beginning of Earth-evolution, the human being was part of a group-soul—as expressed in race, blood, family and so on—to a far greater extent than was the case later on. As evolution continues he becomes more and more of an individual, develops his individuality. We have heard what an important part certain forces play in the development of the individuality during Earth-evolution: consciousness that is dependent on the physical body; memory and remembrance which are dependent upon the ether-body; and karma, whereby a man can make real progress, in that his imperfections and faults do not remain but can be overcome by him as he passes through one incarnation after another. But the “forms” or “forces” created by thoughts and feelings, although they detach themselves from the human being and lead an independent existence, are nevertheless closely united with him, in that they leave vestiges behind; these vestiges, as they are sent out by the “ I ”, contribute to the definition of the individuality and man gradually divests himself of the qualities belonging to the group-soul. The trend which will become more and more general over the globe and will form the essential, fundamental character of the Sixth epoch of culture, is no kind of approach to a new group-soul, but far rather the laying aside of the attributes of the group-soul. Intimately connected with this is the fact that the spiritual guidance of human beings will become more and more a matter individual to each one; they will have greater inner freedom in this respect.

Anyone who has understood the trend of the little book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind will realise that a movement in this direction is in very truth taking place in the human race. It is a fact that in ancient times men lived under external leaders and teachers, but even in those days, leadership was gradually becoming an inner concern. Just as the outer form becomes an expression of the Individuality, so does the path to the spiritual worlds taken by human beings become more and more their individual concern. It is the duty of those who have insight into the signs of the times to insist that human beings have not remained stationary at an earlier stage of development, that the forces once employed, cannot be repeated in the same form, simply because men have gone forward in their evolution. In the age that is coming, the souls of men will become more and more mature, able to discern and perceive those things of which Spiritual Science teaches today.

The “Mystery of Golgotha,” as the essential Christ Event, was an outer happening, striking into the physical world; a future Christ Event will be an inner concern, inasmuch as the soul of man has been so quickened by the first Christ Event that in days to come, the way to Christ will be found in the Spirit, out of the life of soul.

Wherever you look in Spiritual Science as it is presented here, you will always find—even in the case of very specialised details—that it is consistent with your own powers of reason and free judgment, provided only that you make a real effort to apply this free power of judgment. In that the individual human being is all the time becoming more accessible to influences from the spiritual world, the authority of external leadership will gradually lose its weight. It is very important to realise that the ancient wisdom exists and must be understood, that understanding of it can constantly increase if men's souls are open to the spiritual worlds and if they strive to grasp this wisdom with their powers of reason. This is the very essence of progressive evolution. However specialised the subjects may be, appeal to individual reason and judgment must never be excluded. It is a very different thing to bring forward some young man and announce that he has this and that incarnation behind him! If I were to tell you such things I should beg you at the outset not to believe them simply on my word—but I should never dream of making such assertions authoritatively, for the simple reason that you could not possibly convince yourselves objectively of their truth. When, however, it is said that the same Individuality was present in Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis—all long since dead—you can yourselves discover by studying their lives, whether there are reasonable and sound grounds for such a statement. And no other kind of appeal must ever be made: the respect due to each individual soul demands that such a test should be within the realm of possibility. There are, of course, lazy-minded people who say: “We have to “believe” you when you speak of the same Individuality having lived in Elijah, John the Baptist, Raphael and Novalis.” ... No! they are not obliged to believe it ... but they can try, at least, to find evidence in the different lives of what, admittedly, can only be actually discovered by occult research. This evidence can be found, and it is pure laziness when people say that if someone speaks of the incarnations of human beings long since dead, this must be taken on authority just as is the case when the incarnations of some young person living today are announced. That is a very different matter! In this respect a deep appeal must be made to Theosophists to put everything to the test of reason and not to rest content with the cheap excuse that things cannot be proved. They can be proved, if there is willingness to do so. This must be constantly emphasised.

A kind of counterbalancing process operates in the world and while, on the one hand, the development of the individuality is progressing, on the other, something else will become more and more universal, namely, the objective knowledge which must be acquired by man. Objectivity of knowledge, uniformity of knowledge does not gainsay the principle of individuality. Mathematics in itself is an illustration of this fact. And so it is the task of occultism—if one may speak of occultism having such a task at the present time—to provide objective wisdom and knowledge of the universe. Even although, in the nature of things, the ideal is not immediately in sight because not every individual has sufficient time and opportunity to put specific details to the test, it is true, nevertheless, that although things can actually be discovered only through occult research, they can be examined and endorsed by every individual; it is not necessary to take them on faith. All that is required is to reflect about things, with reason and sound judgment. Let us take a definite case, remembering that what will be said about it is applicable everywhere.

Suppose someone says: “Mankind has evolved. Progress is a reality in evolution. This progress reveals itself in the fact that man is becoming more strongly individual in his nature and being. It follows that whereas in olden times, leadership was vested more in persons, in times to come this kind of leadership will be superseded by objective wisdom, objective knowledge; personal leadership will recede and become merely an instrument and means for bringing objective wisdom to the human being. The ideal vantage-point is that the occult teacher is no different from a teacher of mathematics, who quite obviously has his function. But mathematics are not accepted merely on the authority of the teacher of mathematics; every individual accepts mathematics because he gradually acquires knowledge and understanding of the fundamentals. Hence the element of wisdom and of knowledge will more and more supersede the element of personality” ... Suppose that such a statement were confronted by another, to the effect that “the world rolls onwards like a wheel; in olden days there were great Teachers of humanity, and new ones are about to come ...” When faced with a statement like that, it is not possible to adopt the easy-going principle that either the one or the other may be believed; it is a matter, then, for deciding: which of the two is acceptable to reason? There is the choice between deciding whether no progress is to be ascribed to humanity and everything thought of as eternal repetition, or whether humanity does really progress and that evolution has meaning and purpose. Those who refuse to recognise any meaning in evolution can speak, if they like, of the eternal repetition of epochs of time; but those who see meaning and purpose in Earth-existence as brought to light by occult research, will not speak of eternal repetition of the same things—which does not, in fact, take place.

It is all-important to realise that the faculties of man have developed and that in this development—to take one example—the following is involved. In the ancient Mysteries each human being was obliged to submit to certain enactments and procedures directed to his own person; thereby he became an “Initiate.” He passed through the “different grades of Initiation.” In and through the Mystery of Golgotha these grades of Initiation became a world-historical Event, made manifest for all humanity. What had in olden times been an affair of one or another particular centre of Initiation, became a world-historical event, passed into the common estate of humanity, and was thereafter accessible to every advancing individuality. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, therefore, the Mystery of Golgotha is described as the culmination and, in a sense, the close of the ancient Mysteries, because it brought all the ancient religions into one great unity. Occultism reveals still more clearly how the several streams of culture are gradually converging into one; but as they converge, they must be recognised and identified. The very operations of occult research reveal how the fruits of this research harmonise with what everyone can accept for himself, from his own observation of happenings on the physical plane.

Let us take a very far-reaching example, of which you may well say, to begin with: “There he is telling us something that really cannot be put to the test of reason, nor even approached by reason.” You may well say this, when it is first put before you.

My book An Outline of Occult Science describes how, at one time, Sun, Moon and Earth were united in a single planetary existence; the Sun then separated off and, at a later stage, Mercury and Venus; still later, Mars separated off from the Sun. The further we go back in time, the more does such a process become a spiritual process and the question it is essential to understand is really this:—Who were the Beings who thus separated? Of primary importance as regards the Earth, was the Christ Being, the great Sun Being Who through the Mystery of Golgotha subsequently united again with the Earth. Thereby all the antecedents of Christianity were brought to a kind of climax and culmination in Christianity itself. With the Mystery of Golgotha, a mighty Cosmic Power streamed into Earth-evolution. It might conceivably be argued that if the Christ came once and once only, this would imply injustice to the souls who lived before His coming. If a materialist were to bring forward such an argument, it might be understandable, but it would certainly not be understandable if it came from a Theosophist. For he knows that the souls living today also lived in earlier times, before the Mystery of Golgotha; the coming of Christ, therefore, is of equal significance for the souls of the pre-Christian ages, because they all incarnate again in the times following the Mystery of Golgotha. There is, however, this point to be made and it must be understood by Theosophists, namely, that in a certain sense the Buddha forms an exception. We must reach the vantage-point of the true Buddhist who says that the Individuality in the Buddha was that of a “Bodhisattva” who was born as the son of King Suddhodana, rose in his twenty-ninth year to the rank of Buddha, thereby attaining a height whence he need no longer return to a body of flesh. That, therefore, was the final incarnation of the Bodhisattva Individuality who does not reincarnate in the era following the founding of Christianity. The lectures in Christiania² drew attention to the fact that a very special mission in the universe devolves upon an Individuality as sublime as the Buddha. The Individuality who became the Buddha had been sent from the hosts of Christ on the Sun to the “Venus men” before they came to the Earth (see also the description in Occult Science); the Individuality of the Buddha, therefore, had been sent forth by Christ from the Sun to Venus, as His emissary. This Individuality came to the Earth with the “Venus men” and had thus reached such an advanced stage of development that through the Atlantean, on into the Post-Atlantean era, he was able to attain to the rank of Buddhahood before the coming of Christ. He was in very truth a “Christian” before the time of Christ. We know, too, that later on he revealed himself in the astral body of the Jesus-Child of St. Luke's Gospel—since he need no longer return in a body of flesh. United as he is with the Christ Stream, a different task devolves upon him for the times to come. (This task was described in greater detail in the Christiania lectures.) The Buddha need not incarnate again in a body of flesh. It fell to him to fulfil a certain Deed on Mars—a Deed not identical with the Mystery of Golgotha but to be thought of as a parallel—namely, the Redemption of the people of Mars. There is, of course, no question here of a Crucifixion as in the Mystery of Golgotha, for as may be read in Occult Science, the people of Mars are quite differently constituted from human beings on Earth. These things, of course, are the results of occult observation and can only be discovered through clairvoyant investigation.

Now let us think of this fact—that the Buddha was an emissary of the Christ and had lived on Venus. Then think of the uniqueness of the Buddha-life, of its fundamental character, and proceed as I did myself. First, there came to me the occult knowledge: Buddha goes from Venus to Mars in order there to accomplish a Deed of Redemption for the beings of Mars. And now take the life of Buddha, and observe how strikingly it differs from the lives of all the other founders of religion in that period. The teachings of all the others tend in the direction of concealing the doctrine of reincarnation; Buddha teaches reincarnation and founds a community based essentially upon piety, upon a kind of remoteness from the world. Ask yourselves whether there are beings for whom this quality would be of fundamental significance—beings whose redemption could be wrought by all that the Buddha had lived through and made his own? If it were possible, now, to say more about the constitution of the Mars beings, you would see that the Buddha-life was a kind of preparation for a higher mission; that it occurred in Earth-existence as a kind of culmination and can have no direct continuation. You may compare much in the Buddha-life with the indications given by occultism and then you will be able to form some real judgment of matters with such far-reaching cosmic connections. To discover them—that will still be beyond you; but you will be able to examine and study them with the help of all the material at your disposal, and you will find agreement and conformity among the indications given. That Buddha is connected with Venus was known, also, to H. P. Blavatsky. In her Secret Doctrine, she writes: “Buddha=Mercury”—“Mercury,” because in earlier times the names for Venus and Mercury were confused and reversed. “Buddha = Venus” would be the proper form. A knowledge possessed by occultists today is already hinted at in H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine—but it must be understood correctly.

These things are connected with the whole process of advancing evolution. The evolution of man must be studied in connection with the whole universe; man must be thought of as a microcosm within the macrocosm. The fact that Beings do actually mediate between the several planets is entirely in line with these concatenations of cosmic existence, so that a being like the Buddha can actually be regarded as a mediator between planets. A good principle on which judgment of all these things may be based, is recognition of human progress as a reality, recognition of “evolution,” not as a catchword, but as a truth.

How can we fail to realise that evolution is a reality? Goethe has shown with such beauty that in each plant, green leaf, petal, calyx, stamen and pistil are a unity and yet progress is clearly to be observed—from the green leaf to the petal and the fruit. Progress in the spiritual life is still more clearly perceptible. It would be pure abstraction to say that the path of the Mystic has everywhere been the same, among all peoples and in all ages. If one were content with cheap persuasion it would be quite easy to tell people that the mystical experience of a Yogi has never differed from that of a Christian Saint. But such a statement would not be based upon knowledge of the facts—not even of the external facts. The experiences of a Yogi and those of a Christian Mystic like St. Theresa, for example, differ fundamentally and essentially! Is it not casting all sense of truth to the winds to compare the experience of an Indian Yogi with experiences that are permeated through and through with the Christ Principle—or with the Jesus Principle in the case of St. Theresa? As true as there is a difference between the red petal of the rose and the green leaf on its stalk, so is it true that there is a difference between experiences arising in the practice of Yoga and those of a later age. There is a fundamental difference and a progression as well. Even if many lapses occur, it can be perceived, nevertheless, and the progress outruns and overcomes the lapses.

It is possible for everyone to put these principles to the test of reason—and that is essential. For Theosophy must be given under the assumption that it speaks to the innermost soul, the innermost heart, but is also grasped and assimilated. It would imply that human beings could never come of age, if in the future they were obliged to wait, in the same way as was necessary in olden times, for the coming of World-Teachers—and this quite apart from the fact that no true occultism will ever speak of such an abstract principle of repetition, because it is a direct contradiction of what actually happens. As world-evolution progresses, the factor of independent judgment and examination will assume greater and greater importance. That is one of the reasons why it is so difficult in the present age to speak truly of an Individuality who is so misunderstood, even among occultists—I mean the Individuality known as Christian Rosenkreutz. Those who have a real link with him will never disobey the principle here described. But recognition of the principle of evolution—which reveals itself most clearly in the intrinsic worth of a human being—is difficult and gradual. Christian Rosenkreutz whom we recognise as the one by whom the true occult movement will be led on into the future and who will assuredly never add weight to his authority by means of any outer cult, will be misunderstood—he more than all. Those who have any knowledge of this Individuality know, too, that Christian Rosenkreutz will be the greatest of martyrs among men—apart from the Christ Who suffered as a God. The martyrdom of Christian Rosenkreutz will be caused by the fact that so few make the resolve to look into their own souls, in order there to seek for the evolving individuality, or to submit to the uncomfortable fact that truth will not be presented ready-made but has to be acquired by intense struggle and effort; requirements of a different character will never be brought forward in the name of the Individuality known as Christian Rosenkreutz. These requirements are in line with the character of the present age and with what is felt by men of the present age, even if in many respects they misinterpret it. The present age feels quite distinctly that the principle of individuality will assume greater and greater prominence. Even if here and there this truth is expressed grotesquely and sometimes far too radically, the very fact that it is expressed is indication of a sound instinct in humanity. Many a time one is amazed that in spite of the materialism and the many absurdities current in modern civilisation, an absolutely true instinct, although it is often pushed to extremes and caricatured, prevails in regard to many things. An example occurs in a book recently published: Zur Kritik der Zeit, by Walter Rathenau. It contains a passage to the effect that the time for the founding of sects, for belief in authority, has gone forever as a possible ideal for mankind ... As, however it is a fact that every sound development in our time calls forth its opposite, belief in authority and mania for dogma are rampant in certain circles. And yet: anyone who knows the world today will realise that nothing can so deeply undermine peace and harmony among men as non-recognition of the principle here outlined. The ideal of man must be to fathom and recognise objective truth, to be led through objective truth itself into the spiritual worlds. Hindrances would be laid in his path by attempts to base some truth upon narrow, personal authority—a mode of procedure that is, furthermore, quite impermissible so far as the future is concerned. This must be clearly understood. Many years of work in the field of Spiritual Science have shown how very difficult things are. Not only here, but wherever theosophical work is possible, it is always difficult to make this principle of theosophical striving the root-nerve of theosophical activity. The reason of the difficulty is that there are always people who will not bestir themselves to grasp what must be the fundamental impulse of our age. Objections that may crop up here and there would die a natural death if people would only give a little thought to the fundamental requirements of the times and realise that humanity is ever and everywhere going forward. To lay hold of the whole essence and spirit of Theosophy—that is what matters! But it would run counter to the very essence of Theosophy if a certain teaching that is being broadcast today were to find any widespread acceptance, namely, that culture which should be the common property of all mankind without distinction of race and colour, is conditioned by some particular continental factor. Is it really possible to take back with one sentence what has been proclaimed in another? Is it difficult to see the contradiction when it is said on the one hand that universal wisdom must be spread as a possession of all men without distinction of race and other differences, while on the other it is said that the civilisation of the future rests with a race localised within geographical boundaries? It is high time to reflect on these things and get to the root of them. Is it possible to speak of the progress of humanity when it is constantly reiterated that the same need—in this case, the authority of a personal teacher—exists in the world as of yore? Is it possible to say that man's own spiritual forces must grow stronger, that he must by his own efforts find the way to the spiritual world, if this is made dependent upon the authority of a single individual on the physical Earth? It is extremely easy to say that all opinions have equal weight in the Theosophical Movement. This remains a catchword when it is not taken really in earnest. Above all it remains a catchword when the opinions of others are misrepresented. Once before I have been obliged to say that “equal right of opinion” is no more than a phrase if our work here—which has nothing whatever to do with any specific territory or race on the Earth—is presented by the other side as though it were suitable only for the German mind. It is an affair of humanity, like mathematics—not the affair of any particular nation. To speak of our work here as being an affair of one particular nation, of a strictly limited territory, is an untruth. To quote a catchword does not justify the spreading of untruths in the world. In such circumstances, moreover, the other side may well become the victim of injustice. A semblance of intolerance may easily be created, simply because a stand has to be taken for the truth. The hour shows signs of becoming very serious in this connection. What I am saying here will be understood only by those who take Theosophy in real earnest and will not countenance things that run counter to the fundamental principles of theosophical work. Suppose one were obliged to ward off certain untruths from those who cannot put everything to the test for themselves, can the other person say: “That is intolerance”? He can, of course, say so if, under the guise of truth, he is merely seeking domination and authority! In the future, spiritual truth will work by reason of its own inherent strength, its own power, independently of physical circumstances. And it will be a great and splendid achievement if Theosophy can promote unity of culture over the whole Earth. Not for personal reasons, not for national reasons, nor for any “human” reasons whatever, but for purely theosophical reasons it makes one's heart bleed that in England today the President of the Theosophical Society should be making speeches which really cannot be described as “theosophical” but are eminently political. Thinking of the good old traditions of Theosophy, the heart bleeds to hear it said in a theosophical address that the day will come for proclaiming: “England together with India, at the centre; America and Germany, right and left. One World Policy under the banner of Theosophy!” ... And then we are accused of “intolerance” when it is necessary to protest against the introduction of the personal element into the leadership—where it should never be. It makes an occultist's heart ache that the label “theosophical” should be tacked on to this kind of statement. Once again I repeat: the heartache is not caused by personal or human considerations but for purely theosophical and occult reasons. It is grievous that the root-principle of theosophical teaching should be tainted—either consciously or unconsciously—with national and imperialistic aspirations! It is grievous to me not because I have anything whatever against any country or any aspirations on the Earth, but because the placing of such aspirations in the foreground shows at the very outset that the most intensely personal element is insinuating itself into the true ideal of Theosophy.

Many times I have spoken earnest words of the tasks and aims of Theosophy. The occultist does not speak without reflection. He knows very well when he must use such words! What I have said to you is entirely remote from any emotion, any desire, any sympathy or antipathy; it is demanded by something you may perhaps yourselves realise, namely, the seriousness of the hour—I mean, for Theosophy, for Occultism. As I have so often said, Theosophy must draw from the well-springs of human wisdom the message that is needful for mankind in the present age. If Theosophy is to move towards this ideal, it must stand on its own feet, set up its own rules of conduct—not only for what it has to say, but for how it has to confront the world—in order that standards prevailing in the outside world shall not play into our theosophical Movement. For there they become an evil, a great evil. As often as certain usages current in the outside world are introduced into the theosophical Movement, just so often is the Movement handed over to the forces of destruction. To outside eyes, these usages, when introduced into Theosophy, sometimes assume so grotesque a form that the world will certainly take good care not to copy things that may grow from the rich and fertile soil of occultism. Every kind of league exists in the world today—for the promotion of Peace, Vegetarianism, Anti-Alcoholism and what not—all of which are perfectly justifiable goals. But when the basic principles of a society are stretched in order to include the foundation of Unions or even Orders connected with the coming of figure-heads, founders of religion, future World-Saviours³ ... then the outside world will certainly not follow suit! I cannot imagine that a Statesman would found a league to await the coming of a new Statesman, or a General to await the coming of a great General in the future!

These things are so simple that only a little reflection is necessary. For to found an Order to await the coming of a World-Saviour is just as grotesque as it would be to found a league to await the coming of a new Statesman or a great General. A certain person who is striving today to found a branch of such an Order, used the following argument to me: “Yes, but after all, in the year 1848 a league was founded for the purpose of uniting the German States—and then there was Bismarck too ... he certainly helped to bring the German Reich to birth.” I could only reply: “Really I am not aware that a league was ever founded to await the coming of a “Bismarck”!

Do you think I am saying this jokingly? I say it because occultism has also this side to it, that if it is not cultivated in the right way, it can actually undermine instead of developing the powers of judgment, and I say it because I am in deep earnest about these things. Many occult teachings have been gathered together here; in fifty years, possibly, one point or another may have been investigated still more closely, may have to be differently expressed.

But even if no fragment remains of the knowledge that has brought forward—I do desire that one thing shall have survived, namely, this: that here there was inaugurated and sustained a theosophical-occult movement taking its stand solely and entirely upon integrity and truth. Even if in fifty years it is already said; Everything must be corrected; but at least they were out to be true, to let nothing happen except what is true ... even then my ideal would have been attained. That integrity and truth can prevail in an occult movement, whatever storms may rise up against us in the world—I am not so arrogant as to say that this has been “achieved,” but rather that this is the goal towards which we have striven.

• 1. The reference here is to certain prejudiced and faulty views contained in the teachings emanating from the Theosophical Society.
• 2. Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy
• 3. For those who have only lately become acquainted with the Anthroposophical conception of the world, let it here be mentioned that these words were spoken at the time when Mrs. Besant had founded the “Order of the Star in the East,” with objects similar to those indicated here, and rejected by me. Mrs. Besant's subsequent malicious agitation against Germany is, moreover, a direct result of the errors into which she was falling at that time.

I remarked yesterday that what we have to say on the subject of anthroposophical moral principles and impulses will be based upon facts, and for this reason we brought forward a few facts in which moral impulses are pre-eminently exhibited.

It is, indeed, most striking and illuminating that in the case of a personality such as Francis of Assisi mighty moral impulses must have been active in order that he could perform his deeds. What sort of deeds were they? They were such that what they reveal is moral in the very highest sense of the word. Francis of Assisi was surrounded by people afflicted with very serious diseases for which the rest of the world at that time knew no cure. Moral impulses were so powerful in him that many lepers through him were given spiritual aid and great comfort. It is true that many could gain no more—but there were many others who by their faith and trust attained a stage when the moral impulses and forces which poured forth from Francis of Assisi had even a healing, health-giving effect.

In order to penetrate still more deeply into the question whence do moral impulses come, we must inquire in the case of such an exceptional personality as Francis of Assisi as to how he could, develop them; and what had really happened in his case. We shall have to look more deeply if we want to understand what was active in the soul of this outstanding human being.

Let us go back to the ancient civilisation of India. In that civilisation there were certain divisions of the people; they were divided into four castes, the highest of them being the Brahmins, who cultivated wisdom. The separation of the castes in ancient India was so strict that, for example, the sacred books might only be read by the Brahmins and not by members of the other castes. The members of the second caste, the Warrior caste, were only allowed to hear the teachings contained in the Vedas or in the epitome of the Vedas—the Vedanta. The Brahmins alone were allowed to explain any passage from the Vedas or have an opinion as to their meaning and it was strictly forbidden for all other people to have any opinion on the treasure of wisdom which was contained in the sacred books. The second caste consisted of those who had to cultivate the profession of war and the administration of the country. Then there was a third caste which had to foster trades, and a fourth, a labouring caste. And last of all, an utterly despised part of the population, the Pariahs, who were looked down upon so much that a Brahmin felt he was contaminated if he so much as stepped upon the shadow thrown by such a one. He even had to perform certain rites of purification if he had touched the shadow of such an outcast as a Pariah was considered to be. Thus we see how the whole nation was divided into four recognised castes and one that was absolutely unrecognised. Though these regulations may now be considered severe they were most strictly observed in ancient India. Even at the time of the Graeco-Latin civilisation in Europe, no one belonging to the Warrior caste in India would have ventured to have his own independent opinion about what was in the sacred books, the Vedas. Now, how could such divisions as these have arisen amongst mankind? It is certainly remarkable that we should find these castes exactly in the most outstanding people of human antiquity and in the very people who had wandered over to Asia from Atlantis at a comparatively early date and also precisely those amongst whom were preserved the greatest wisdom and treasures of knowledge from the old Atlantean epoch. This seems very remarkable, and how can we understand it? It almost seems as if it contradicted all the wisdom and goodness in the order of the universe, in the guidance of the world, that one caste, one group of people should be separated off, who alone were to preserve what was looked upon as the highest possessions and that the others should be destined from the very beginning, by the mere fact of their birth, to occupy subordinate positions.

This can only be understood by an examination into the secrets of existence. Development is only possible through differentiation, through organisation; and if all men had wished to arrive at the degree of wisdom reached in the Brahmin caste not a single one would have been able to achieve it. If all human beings do not attain to the highest wisdom, one may not say that it is a contradiction of the Divine regulation of the world, for this would have no more sense than if someone were to demand of the infinitely wise and infinitely mighty Deity that He should make a triangle with four angles. No god could make a triangle other than with three angles. That which is ordered and determined inwardly in spirit must also be observed by the divine regulation of the world, and just as the laws concerning the limits of space are strict, for example, that a triangle can only have three angles, so also if is a strict law that development must come about through differentiation, that certain groups of people must be separated in order that a particular quality of human nature can be developed. To this end the others must be excluded for a time. This is not only a law for development of mankind, it is a law for the whole of evolution.

Consider the human form. You will at once admit that the most valuable parts in the human form are the bones of the head. But by what means could these particular bones become bones of the head and envelop the higher organ, the brain? As far as the rudiments are concerned, each bone that man possesses could become a skull-bone, but in order that a few of the bones of the whole skeleton could reach this height of development and become bones of the forehead or of the back part of the head, the hip bones or the joints had to stop at a lower stage of development—for the hip bones or the joints have within them the possibility of becoming skull bones, just as much as those which actually have done so. It is the same everywhere throughout the world. Progress is only possible in evolution through one remaining behind and another pushing forward, even beyond a certain point of deve1opment. In India the Brahmins passed beyond a certain average of development, but on the other hand the lower castes remained behind it.

When the Atlantean catastrophe took place, great bodies of people gradually wandered from Atlantis, that ancient continent which lay where the Atlantic Ocean is to-day, towards the East, and peopled the continents now known as Europe, Asia and Africa. We shall not at present consider the few who went westward, whose descendants were found in America by its discoverers. When the Atlantean catastrophe took place, the body of people which then migrated towards the East did not consist merely of the four castes which settled down in India and there gradually differentiated themselves, but there were seven castes, and the four which appeared in India were the four higher castes. Besides the fifth, which was completely despised and which in India formed, as it were, an intermediate body of the population, besides these Pariahs there were other castes which did not accompany them as far as India, but remained behind in various parts of Europe, Asia Minor and especially Africa. Only the more highly developed castes reached India, and those who remained in Europe had entirely different qualities.

Indeed, one can only understand what took place later in Europe when one knows that the more advanced sections of humanity in those days reached Asia, and that in Europe, forming the main body of the population left behind, were those who furnished the possibility for very special incarnations. If we wish to understand the special incarnations of souls in the most ancient European times in the general mass of the population we must take into account a remarkable event which took place in the Atlantean epoch. At a certain stage in Atlantean development great secrets of existence were betrayed; these were great truths, concerning life, which are of infinitely greater importance than all those to, which post-Atlantean humanity has since attained. It was essential that this knowledge should have been limited to small circles, but owing to the violation of the mysteries, great bodies of the Atlantean population became possessed of occult knowledge for which they were not yet ripe. In consequence of this, their souls were at that time driven, as one might say, into a condition which was a moral descent, so that there remained on the path of goodness and virtue only those who later went over to Asia.

You must not, however, imagine that the whole population of Europe consisted
only of people in whose souls, were individuals who through being misled in the Atlantean epoch had suffered a moral downfall. Here and there in this European population were others who during the great emigration to Asia had remained behind to act as leaders. Thus, all over Europe, Asia Minor and Africa there were people who simply belonged to castes or races providing the requisite conditions for misguided souls to live in their bodies and there were also other better and more highly developed souls who remained behind to
guide those who did not go on to Asia.

The best places for these souls who had to assume the leadership at that time—in the age in which the Indian and Persian civilisations developed—were the more northerly parts of Europe, the regions where the oldest mysteries of Europe have flourished. Now they had a kind of protective arrangement as regards what had previously taken place in old Atlantis. In Atlantis temptation came to the souls described, through wisdom, mysteries and occult truths being given them for which they were not ready. Therefore in the European Mysteries the treasures of wisdom had to be guarded and protected all the more. For this reason the true leaders in Europe in post-Atlantean times withdrew themselves entirely and they preserved what they had received as a strict secret.

We may say that in Europe also there were persons who might be compared with the Brahmins of Asia, but these European Brahmins were not outwardly known as such by anyone. In the strictest sense of the word they kept the sacred secrets absolutely secluded in the Mysteries, that there might be no repetition of what had once taken place in the Atlantean epoch among the souls whom they were now leading onwards. Only through Wisdom being protected and most carefully guarded did it come about that these souls were able to uplift themselves; for differentiation does not take place in such a way that a certain portion of humanity is destined from the beginning to take a lower rank than another, but that which is made lower at a certain time is to develop higher again at another period. But the conditions must be formed for this end to be attainable. Hence it came about that in Europe there were souls who had fallen into temptation and had become immoral, but they were now guided according to wisdom which proceeded from deeply hidden sources.

Now, the other castes who had gone to India had also left members behind in Europe. The members of the second Indian caste—the Warrior caste—were those who then chiefly attained to power in Europe. Where the wise teachers—that is, those who corresponded to the Indian Brahmins—entirely withdrew, and gave their counsels from hidden sanctuaries, the Warriors came out among the people, in order to improve and uplift them according to the counsels of those ancient European priests. It was this second caste that wielded the greatest power in Europe in primeval times, but in their way of life they were guided by the wise teachers who remained hidden. Thus it came about that the leading personalities in Europe were those who shone by virtue of the qualities of which we spoke yesterday—valour and bravery. Whereas in India, wisdom was held in the highest esteem and the Brahmins were revered because they explained the sacred writing; in Europe bravery and valour were the most valued and the people only knew of the divine mysteries through those who were filled with valour and bravery. The civilisation of Europe continued under these influences for thousands of years and gradually souls were improved and uplifted. In Europe, where souls existed who were the successors of the people who had undergone temptation, no real appreciation of the caste system of India could develop. The souls were mingled and interwoven. A division, a differentiation into castes such as existed in India did not arise. The division was rather between those who guided in an upper class, who acted as leaders in various directions, and the class that was led. The latter consisted principally of souls who had to struggle upward.

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When we look for the souls which gradually struggled upwards out of this lower class, and which from being tempted developed higher, we find them chiefly in a part of the European population of which modern history tells but little. Century after century this people developed in order to rise to a higher stage, to recover again, as it were, from the heavy set-back the souls had received in the Atlantean epoch. In Asia there was a continuation in the progress of civilisation; in Europe, on the other hand, there was a change from the former moral collapse into a gradual moral improvement.

The people in Europe remained in this condition for a long time, and improvement only came about through the existence of a strong impulse in these souls to imitate that which they saw before them. Those who lived and worked among the people as the braver among them were looked up to as ideals and patterns, as leaders or chiefs, they were those who were called Fürsten (princes) and were imitated by the people at large. Thus the morality of the whole of Europe was raised through those souls mingling as leaders amongst the people.

Thereby something else became necessary in European development. If we wish to understand this, we must distinguish between the development of a single soul and that of a whole race. The two must not be confused. A human soul can develop in such a way that in one incarnation it embodies itself in a particular race. If in this race it gains certain qualities, it may re-embody itself in a later incarnation in an entirely different one; so that we may find incarnated in Europe at the present day souls which in a previous incarnation were embodied in India, Japan or China. The souls do not by any means remain in the same race, for soul development is quite different from race development, which goes its peaceful way forward.

In ancient times, souls who were unable to go over into the Asiatic races, were transposed into European ones, and were obliged to incarnate again and again in them. But as they became better and better, this led to their gradually passing on into the higher races; and souls which were previously embodied in quite subordinate races developed to a higher stage, and were able later to reincarnate in the bodily successors of the leading population of Europe. These bodily successors of the leading population multiplied, and as these souls increased in number in this direction, they became more numerous than they originally were. After having progressed and improved, they incarnated in the leading population of Europe, and the development then took place in such a way that, on the whole, as a physical race, the bodily forms in which the most ancient European population had originally incarnated died out; the souls forsook the bodies which were formed in a certain way, and which then died out. The offspring of the lower races decreased in number while the higher increased until gradually the lowest classes of the European population completely die out. This is a definite process, which we must grasp. The souls develop further, the bodies die out. For this reason we must be careful to distinguish between soul development and race development. The souls reappear in the bodies belonging to higher races. the lower race bodies die out. A process such as this does not take place without effect. When over large areas something disappears as it were, it does not disappear into nothing, but it dissolves and then exists in a different form. When in ancient times the worst part of the population of which I have just now spoken, died out, the whole region became gradually inhabited by demons, representing the products of dissolution, the products of the putrefaction of that which had died out.

Thus the whole of Europe and Asia Minor were filled with the spiritualised products of putrefaction from the worst part of the population which had died out. These demons of putrefaction endured for a long time, and later they acted upon mankind. It came about that these demons of putrefaction which were incorporated in the spiritual atmosphere, as it were, gained influence upon human beings and affected them in such a way that their feelings were permeated by them. The effect may be seen from the following example:—When at a later date, at the time of the Migration of the Peoples, great bodies of people came over from Asia to Europe, amongst them came Attila with his hordes. His invasion was the cause of great terror to many of those who lived in Europe and through this state of terror people laid themselves open to the demoniacal influences still persisting. Gradually through these demoniacal beings there developed—as a consequence of the terror produced by the hordes coming over from Asia—that which appeared as leprosy, the epidemic disease of the Middle Ages. This disease was nothing else than the consequence of the state of terror and fear experienced by the people at that time. But the terror and fear could only lead to this result in the souls which had been exposed to the demoniacal forces of former times.

I have now described to you why it was possible for people to be laid hold of by a disease—which was later practically exterminated in Europe—and why it was so widespread at the time we mentioned in our last lecture. In Europe the peoples which had to die out because they had not developed upwards became extinct, but the after-effect was seen in the form of diseases which attacked mankind. The disease we have mentioned, leprosy, is thus seen to be the result of spiritual and psychic causes.

This whole condition was/had now to be counteracted. Further development could only come about if that which has just been described was entirely removed from Europe. An example of how it was taken away was described in the last lecture, where we showed that while, on the one hand, the after-effects of what was unmoral existed as demons of disease, on the other hand, strong moral impulses appeared as in Francis of Assisi. Through his possession of strong moral impulses he gathered others around him who acted also in the same way as he, although in a lesser degree. Really there were very many who at that time worked as he did, but this activity did not last very long.

Now how had such a soul-power come into Francis of Assisi? As we are not gathered together to study external science, but to understand human morality from its spiritual and occult foundations, we must examine a few occult or spiritual truths. Let us inquire: Whence really came such a soul as that of Francis of Assisi? We can only understand such a soul as this if we investigate it a little; if we take the trouble to find what was hidden in its depths.

I must remind you that the old division into castes in India really received its first blow, its first shock, through Buddhism, for among many other things which Buddhism introduced into Asiatic life was the idea that it did not recognise the division into castes as something justifiable; that as far as it was possible in Asia it recognised the power of each human being to attain to the highest possible to man. We know too that this was only possible through the pre-eminent1y great and mighty individuality of Buddha. We also know that Buddha became a Buddha in the incarnation of which we are usually told and that in the earlier part of his life he was a Bodhisattva, which represents the stage next below Buddhahood. Through the fact that this son of King Suddodana, in the twenty-ninth year of his life, experienced and felt deeply in himself the great truth of life and sorrow, he had attained the greatness to announce in Asia the teaching known as Buddhism.

Connected with this development of the Bodhisattva up to Buddha, there was something else of which we must not lose sight, namely, the fact that the individuality which had passed through many incarnations as Bodhisattva and then risen to the rank of Buddha, when it became Buddha had to dwell for the last time in a physical body on earth. Thus he who is raised from Bodhisattva to Buddha enters into an incarnation which for him is the last. From this time onwards, such an individuality only works down from spiritual heights, he still works, but only spiritually. Thus we now have the fact that the individuality of Buddha has only worked down from spiritual heights since the fifth century before Christ.

But, Buddhism continued. It was able to influence in a certain way not only Asiatic life, but the spiritual life of the whole of the then known world. You know how Buddhism spread in Asia. You know how great is the number of its followers there. But in a more hidden and veiled form it also spread into the mental life of Europe; and we have particularly to point out that the portion of the great teaching of Buddha relating to the equality of man was especially acceptable to the population of Europe, because this population was not arranged on the plan of caste divisions, but rather upon the idea of the equality of all human beings. On the shores of the Black Sea there existed an occult school which lasted far into the Christian era. This school was guided by certain human beings who set themselves as their highest ideal that part of the teaching of Buddha which we have just described, and through their having taken into themselves the Christian impulse along with it, were able in the early centuries of Christianity to throw new light upon what Buddha had given to humanity. If I were to describe to you this occult school on the Black Seas as the occultist or spiritual investigator sees it—and you will understand me best if I do this—I must do it in the following manner:—

People, who to begin with had external teachers in the physical world, came together there. They were instructed in the doctrines and principles which had proceeded from Buddhism, but these were permeated by the impulses which came into the world through Christianity. Then, after the pupils had been sufficiently prepared, they were brought to where the deeper forces lying within them, the deeper forces of wisdom could be brought forth, so that they were led to clairvoyant vision of the spiritual world and were able to see into the spiritual worlds. The first thing attained by the pupils of this occult school, was, for example, the recognition of those who no longer descended to the physical plane. But this they could only do after they had been accustomed to it by the teachers incarnated in the physical body. In this way they came to know Buddha. Thus, these occult pupils learned to know Buddha face to face, if one may so speak of his spiritual being. In this way he continued to work spiritually in the occult pupils and thus his power worked down to the physical plane, although he himself no longer descended to physical embodiment in the physical world.

Now the pupils in this occult school were grouped according to their maturity into
two unequal divisions, and only the more advanced were chosen for the smaller division. Most of these pupils were able to become so clairvoyant that they came in touch with a being who strove with all his might to bring his impulses through to the physical world, and although he himself did not descend into this world they learned all the secrets of Buddha and all that he wished to have accomplished. Most of these pupils remained as such, clairvoyants, but there were some who, in addition to the qualities of knowledge and of psychic clairvoyance, had developed the spiritual element to a remarkable degree, which cannot be separated from a certain humility, a certain highly evolved capacity for devotion. These, then, attained to where they could receive the Christ-impulse in an advanced degree precisely in this occult school. They could also become clairvoyant in such a way that they became the specially chosen followers of Saint Paul and received the Christ-impulse directly in life.

Thus from this school proceeded two groups, as it were, one group which possessed the impulse to carry the teaching of Buddha everywhere, although his name was not mentioned in connection with it, and a second group which, in addition, received the Christ-impulse. Now the difference between these two kinds did not appear very strongly in that particular incarnation, it only appeared in the next. The pupils who had not received the Christ-impulse but who had only gained the Buddha-impulse, became the teachers of the equality and brotherhood of man; on the other hand the pupils who had also received the Christ-impulse, in the next incarnation were such that this Christ-impulse worked up further so that not only could they teach (and they did not consider this their chief task) but they worked more especially through their moral power

One such pupil of the occult school on the Black Sea, was born in his next incarnation as Francis of Assisi. No wonder, then, that in him there was the wisdom which he had received, the knowledge of the brotherhood of mankind, of the equality of all men, of the necessity to love all men equally, no wonder that this teaching pulsated through his soul and also that his soul was permeated and strengthened by the Christ-impulse.

Now how did this Christ-impulse work further in his next incarnation? It acted in such a way that, when in his next incarnation Francis of Assisi was transposed into a community in which the old demons of diseases were especially active—this Christ-impulse approached the evil substance of the disease-demons through him, and absorbed it into itself, thus removing it from mankind. Before this, however, the Christ-impulse incorporated itself in this substance in such a way that it first became visible to Francis of Assisi in the vision in which he saw the palace when he was called upon to take upon himself the burden of poverty. The Christ-impulse had here revived in him and streamed forth from him, and laid hold of these disease-demons. His moral forces thereby became so strong that they could take away the harmful spiritual substances which had produced the disease. It was through this alone that the power was produced to bring to a higher development what I have described to you as the after-effect of the old Atlantean element, to purify Europe from these substances and sweep them away from the earth.

Consider the life of Francis of Assisi; notice what a remarkable course it took. He was born in the year 1182. We know that the first years of the life of a human being are devoted principally to the development of the physical body. In the physical body is developed chiefly that which comes to light through external heredity. Hence there appeared in him first of all that which originated through external heredity from the European population. These qualities gradually came out, as his etheric body developed from the seventh to the fourteenth year, like any other human being. In this etheric body appeared primarily that quality which as the Christ-impulse had worked directly in him in the mysteries on the Black Sea. From his fourteenth year, at the dawn of his astral life the Christ power became particularly active within him, in such a way that there entered into his astral body that which had been in connection with the atmosphere of the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha. For Francis of Assisi was a personality who was permeated by the external power of Christ, owing to his having sought for the Christ power, in his previous incarnation, in that particular place of initiation on the shores of the Black Sea.

Thus we see how differentiations act in humanity, for differentiation must come about. For that which by earlier events has been thrust down to a lower condition is raised up once more through special events in the course of human development. On another occasion a particularly important uplifting took place in the evolution of humanity, one which exoterically will always be incomprehensible; for this reason people have really ceased to reflect upon, it, but esoterically it can be fully explained. There were some who had developed very quickly from the strata of the Western population, who had gradually wrestled their way up from the lowest rungs of the ladder, but who had not risen very high in intellectual development, but had remained comparatively humble and simple men, chosen ones as it were, who could only be uplifted at a certain time by a mighty impulse which reflected itself in them; these were those who are described as the twelve Apostles of Jesus. They were the cast-off extract of the lower castes which did not reach India. From them had to be taken the substance for the disciples of Christ Jesus. [We are not here referring to previous or succeeding incarnations of the individualities of the Apostles, but solely to the physical ancestry of the bodies in which the personalities of the Apostles were incarnated. The succession of incarnations and the physical line of heredity must always be distinguished.]

Thus we have discovered the source of the moral power in that chosen personality, Francis of Assisi. Do not say that taking ordinary human rules into consideration, it would be too much to expect a person to realise the ideals manifested in Francis of Assisi. Certainly what I have said was not with the intention of recommending anyone to become a Francis of Assisi. One only wished to point out by means of a striking example, how moral power enters man, whence it can spring and how it must be understood as something quite special, something that was originally present in man. But from the whole spirit of what I have said up to now you may gather one thing with regard to other forces in human evolution, namely, that humanity has first gone through a descent and has now undertaken an ascent again.

If we go back in human evolution we pass through the post-Atlantean epoch to the Atlantean catastrophe, then into the Atlantean epoch and then further back to the Lemurian epoch. When we then arrive at the starting-point of earthly humanity we come to a time when man, not only as regards his spiritual qualities, was much closer to the Deity, when he first developed not only out of the spiritual life, but also out of morality. So that at the beginning of earthly evolution we do not find immorality but morality. Morality is a divine gift which was given to man in the beginning, it was part of the original content in human nature, just as spiritual power was in human nature before man's deepest descent. Fundamentally, a great part of what is unmoral came into humanity in the manner we have described, namely, by the betrayal of the higher Mysteries in the ancient Atlantean epoch.

Thus morality is something about which we cannot say that it has only developed gradually in humanity, it is something which lies at the bottom of the human soul, something which has only been submerged by the later civilisations. When we look at the matter in the right light we cannot even say that immorality came into the world through folly; it came into the world through the secrets of wisdom being disclosed to persons who were not sufficiently mature to receive them. It was through this that people were tempted, they succumbed and then degenerated. Therefore in order that they might rise it was above all necessary that something should occur which would sweep away from the human soul all that is contrary to moral impulses. Let us put this in a somewhat different form.

Let us suppose we have before us a criminal, a man whom we call especially immoral; on no account must we think that this immoral man is devoid of moral impulses. They are in him and we shall find them if we delve down to the bottom of his soul. There is no human soul—with the exception of black magicians, with whom we are not now concerned—in which there is not the foundation of what is morally good. If a person is wicked, it is because that which has originated in the course of time as spiritual error overlies moral goodness. Human nature is not bad; originally it was really good. The concrete observation of human nature shows us that in its deepest being it is good and that it was through spiritual errors that man deviated from the moral path. Therefore moral errors must in course of time once more be made good in man. Not only must the mistakes be made good but their results as well, for where evil has such mighty after-effects that demons of disease have been produced, super-moral forces such as were in Francis of Assisi must be also active.

The foundation for the improvement of a human being always consists in taking away his spiritual error. And what is necessary to this end? Gather together what I have told you into a fundamental feeling; let the facts speak to you, let them speak to your feelings and perceptions, and try to gather them together into one fundamental feeling, and then you will say: What is the attitude which a man needs to hold regarding his fellow-man? It is that he needs the belief in the original goodness of humanity as a whole, and of each single human being in particular. That is the first thing we must say if we wish to speak at all in words concerning morality; that something immeasurably good lies at the bottom of human nature. That is what Francis of Assisi realised; and when he was approached by some of those stricken with the horrible disease we have described, as a good Christian of that day, he said somewhat as follows:-- “A disease such as this is in a certain way the consequence of sin; but as sin is in the first instance spiritual error and disease the result it must therefore be removed by a mighty opposing power.” Hence Francis of Assisi saw by the sinner how, in a certain way, the punishment of sin manifests itself externally; but he also saw the good in human nature, he saw what lies at the bottom of each human being as divine spiritual forces. That which distinguished Francis of Assisi most was his sublime faith in the goodness lying in each human being, even in one who was being punished.

This made it possible for the contrary power to appear in his soul, and this is the power of love which gives and helps morally, and indeed even heals. And no one, if he really develops the belief in the original goodness of human nature into an active impulse can arrive at anything else than to love human nature as such.

It is primarily these two fundamental impulses which are able to found a truly moral life. First, the belief in the divine at the bottom of every human soul, and secondly, the boundless love of man which springs from this belief. For if was only this measureless love which could bring Francis of Assisi to the sick, the crippled and those stricken with leprosy. A third thing which may be added and is necessarily built upon these two foundations, is that a person who has a firm belief in the goodness of the human soul, and who loves human nature, cannot do otherwise than admit that what we see proceeding from the co-operation of the originally good foundation of the human soul with practical love, justifies a perspective for the future which may be expressed in the fact that every single soul, even though it may have descended far from the height of spiritual life, can be led back again to this spiritual life. This third impulse implies the hope for each human soul that it can find the way back again to the Divine-Spiritual.

We may say that Francis of Assisi heard these three things expressed very very often; they were continually in his mind during his initiation in the Mysteries of Colchis, on the Black Sea. And we may also say, that in the life he had to lead as Francis of Assisi, he preached very little about faith or love, but was himself their embodiment. Faith did not work, hope did not work; one must indeed have them, but only love is effective. It stands in the centre, and it is that which, in that single incarnation of Francis of Assisi, really carried the actual development of humanity forward in the moral sense towards the divine.

How did this love—which we know was the result of his initiation in the Colchis Mysteries—develop in St. Francis? We have seen that in him appeared the knightly virtues of the ancient European spirit. He was a valiant boy. Valour, bravery, was transformed in his individuality, which was permeated by the Christ-impulse, into active practical love. We see the old valour, the old bravery resurrected once more in the love manifested in Francis of Assisi. The ancient valour transposed into the spiritual; bravery transposed into the spiritual is love.

It is interesting to see how very much of what has just been said corresponds also to the external historical course of human evolution. Let us go back a few centuries into the pre-Christian era. Among the people who have given the principal name to the fourth post-Atlantean age, the Greeks, we find the philosopher Plato. Amongst other things, Plato wrote about morals, about the virtues of man. By the way in which he wrote, we can recognise that he was reticent concerning the highest things, the actual secrets, but what he felt able to say he put into the mouth of Socrates. Now, in a period of European culture in which the Christ-impulse had not yet worked, Plato described the highest virtues he recognised, namely, the virtues which the Greeks looked upon as those which a moral man ought to have above all things. He described first of all three virtues, and a fourth with which we shall later become acquainted. The first was “Wisdom.” Wisdom as such, Plato looked upon as virtue. This is justified, for in the most varied directions we have found that wisdom lies at the foundation of moral life. In India the wisdom of the Brahmins lay at the foundation of human life. In Europe this was indeed withdrawn into the background, but it existed in the Norse Mysteries where the European Brahmins had to make good again that which had been spoiled through the betrayal in the old Atlantean epoch. Wisdom stands behind all morality, as we shall see in our next lecture. Plato also, described, in the manner corresponding to the Mysteries, as the second virtue—“Valour”—that which we meet with in the population of Europe. As the third virtue he described Temperance or “Moderation” that is, the opposite of the passionate cultivation of the lower human impulses. These are the three chief Platonic virtues: Wisdom, Valour or Bravery; and Moderation or Temperance, the curbing of the sensual impulses active in man. Finally, the harmonious balancing of these three virtues Plato describes as a fourth virtue, which he calls “Justice.”

Here is described, by one of the most eminent European minds of pre-Christian times, what were looked upon at that time as the most important qualities in human nature. Valour, bravery, is in the European population permeated by the Christ-impulse and by what we call

“ I ” or the Ego. Bravery, which in Plato appears as virtue, is here spiritualised and thereby becomes “ love.” The most important thing is that we should see how, moral impulses come into the human race, how that which formerly existed in the form we have described becomes something entirely different. Now without disparagement to Christian morality we cannot describe as the only virtues, wisdom, temperance, valour and justice, for we might receive the reply: “ If you had all these and yet you had not love you would never enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Let us bear in mind the time when, as we have seen, there was poured out into humanity an impulse, a current of such a nature that wisdom and bravery were spiritualised and re-appeared as love. But we shall go still further into the question as to how wisdom, moderation or temperance and justice, have been developed, and thereby will appear what is the particular moral mission of the Anthroposophica1 Movement in the present day.

I remarked yesterday that what we have to say on the subject of anthroposophical moral principles and impulses will be based upon facts, and for this reason we brought forward a few facts in which moral impulses are pre-eminently exhibited.

It is, indeed, most striking and illuminating that in the case of a personality such as Francis of Assisi mighty moral impulses must have been active in order that he could perform his deeds. What sort of deeds were they? They were such that what they reveal is moral in the very highest sense of the word. Francis of Assisi was surrounded by people afflicted with very serious diseases for which the rest of the world at that time knew no cure. Moral impulses were so powerful in him that many lepers through him were given spiritual aid and great comfort. It is true that many could gain no more—but there were many others who by their faith and trust attained a stage when the moral impulses and forces which poured forth from Francis of Assisi had even a healing, health-giving effect.

In order to penetrate still more deeply into the question whence do moral impulses come, we must inquire in the case of such an exceptional personality as Francis of Assisi as to how he could, develop them; and what had really happened in his case. We shall have to look more deeply if we want to understand what was active in the soul of this outstanding human being.

Let us go back to the ancient civilisation of India. In that civilisation there were certain divisions of the people; they were divided into four castes, the highest of them being the Brahmins, who cultivated wisdom. The separation of the castes in ancient India was so strict that, for example, the sacred books might only be read by the Brahmins and not by members of the other castes. The members of the second caste, the Warrior caste, were only allowed to hear the teachings contained in the Vedas or in the epitome of the Vedas—the Vedanta. The Brahmins alone were allowed to explain any passage from the Vedas or have an opinion as to their meaning and it was strictly forbidden for all other people to have any opinion on the treasure of wisdom which was contained in the sacred books. The second caste consisted of those who had to cultivate the profession of war and the administration of the country. Then there was a third caste which had to foster trades, and a fourth, a labouring caste. And last of all, an utterly despised part of the population, the Pariahs, who were looked down upon so much that a Brahmin felt he was contaminated if he so much as stepped upon the shadow thrown by such a one. He even had to perform certain rites of purification if he had touched the shadow of such an outcast as a Pariah was considered to be. Thus we see how the whole nation was divided into four recognised castes and one that was absolutely unrecognised. Though these regulations may now be considered severe they were most strictly observed in ancient India. Even at the time of the Graeco-Latin civilisation in Europe, no one belonging to the Warrior caste in India would have ventured to have his own independent opinion about what was in the sacred books, the Vedas. Now, how could such divisions as these have arisen amongst mankind? It is certainly remarkable that we should find these castes exactly in the most outstanding people of human antiquity and in the very people who had wandered over to Asia from Atlantis at a comparatively early date and also precisely those amongst whom were preserved the greatest wisdom and treasures of knowledge from the old Atlantean epoch. This seems very remarkable, and how can we understand it? It almost seems as if it contradicted all the wisdom and goodness in the order of the universe, in the guidance of the world, that one caste, one group of people should be separated off, who alone were to preserve what was looked upon as the highest possessions and that the others should be destined from the very beginning, by the mere fact of their birth, to occupy subordinate positions.

This can only be understood by an examination into the secrets of existence. Development is only possible through differentiation, through organisation; and if all men had wished to arrive at the degree of wisdom reached in the Brahmin caste not a single one would have been able to achieve it. If all human beings do not attain to the highest wisdom, one may not say that it is a contradiction of the Divine regulation of the world, for this would have no more sense than if someone were to demand of the infinitely wise and infinitely mighty Deity that He should make a triangle with four angles. No god could make a triangle other than with three angles. That which is ordered and determined inwardly in spirit must also be observed by the divine regulation of the world, and just as the laws concerning the limits of space are strict, for example, that a triangle can only have three angles, so also if is a strict law that development must come about through differentiation, that certain groups of people must be separated in order that a particular quality of human nature can be developed. To this end the others must be excluded for a time. This is not only a law for development of mankind, it is a law for the whole of evolution.

Consider the human form. You will at once admit that the most valuable parts in the human form are the bones of the head. But by what means could these particular bones become bones of the head and envelop the higher organ, the brain? As far as the rudiments are concerned, each bone that man possesses could become skull-bone, but in order that a few of the bones of the whole skeleton could reach this height of development and become bones of the forehead or of the back part of the head, the hip bones or the joints had to stop at a lower stage of development—for the hip bones or the joints have within them the possibility of becoming skull bones, just as much as those which actually have done so. It is the same everywhere throughout the world. Progress is only possible in evolution through one remaining behind and another pushing forward, even beyond a certain point of development. In India the Brahmins passed beyond a certain average of development, but on the other hand the lower castes remained behind it.

When the Atlantean catastrophe took place, great bodies of people gradually wandered from Atlantis, that ancient continent which lay where the Atlantic Ocean is to-day, towards the East, and peopled the continents now known as Europe, Asia and Africa. We shall not at present consider the few who went westward, whose descendants were found in America by its discoverers. When the Atlantean catastrophe took place, the body of people which then migrated towards the East did not consist merely of the four castes which settled down in India and there gradually differentiated themselves, but there were seven castes, and the four which appeared in India were the four higher castes. Besides the fifth, which was completely despised and which in India formed, as it were, an intermediate body of the population, besides these Pariahs there were other castes which did not accompany them as far as India, but remained behind in various parts of Europe, Asia Minor and especially Africa. Only the more highly developed castes reached India, and those who remained in Europe had entirely different qualities.

Indeed, one can only understand what took place later in Europe when one knows that the more advanced sections of humanity in those days reached Asia, and that in Europe, forming the main body of the population left behind, were those who furnished the possibility for very special incarnations. If we wish to understand the special incarnations of souls in the most ancient European times in the general mass of the population we must take into account a remarkable event which took place in the Atlantean epoch. At a certain stage in Atlantean development great secrets of existence were betrayed; these were great truths, concerning life, which are of infinitely greater importance than all those to, which post-Atlantean humanity has since attained. It was essential that this knowledge should have been limited to small circles, but owing to the violation of the mysteries, great bodies of the Atlantean population became possessed of occult knowledge for which they were not yet ripe. In consequence of this, their souls were at that time driven, as one might say, into a condition which was a moral descent, so that there remained on the path of goodness and virtue only those who later went over to Asia.

You must not, however, imagine that the whole population of Europe consisted only of people in whose souls, were individuals who through being misled in the Atlantean epoch had suffered a moral downfall. Here and there in this European population were others who during the great emigration to Asia had remained behind to act as leaders. Thus, all over Europe, Asia Minor and Africa there were people who simply belonged to castes or races providing the requisite conditions for misguided souls to live in their bodies and there were also other better and more highly developed souls who remained behind to guide those who did not go on to Asia.

The best places for these souls who had to assume the leadership at that time—in the age in which they Indian and Persian civilisations developed—were the more northerly parts of Europe, the regions where the oldest mysteries of Europe have flourished. Now they had a kind of protective arrangement as regards what had previously taken place in old Atlantis. In Atlantis temptation came to the souls described, through wisdom, mysteries and occult truths being given them for which they were not ready. Therefore in the European Mysteries the treasures of wisdom had to be guarded and protected all the more. For this reason the true leaders in Europe in post-Atlantean times withdrew themselves entirely and they preserved what they had received as a strict secret.

We may say that in Europe also there were persons who might be compared with the Brahmins of Asia, but these European Brahmins were not outwardly known as such by anyone. In the strictest sense of the word they kept the sacred secrets absolutely secluded in the Mysteries, that there might be no repetition of what had once taken place in the Atlantean epoch among the souls whom they were now leading onwards. Only through Wisdom being protected and most carefully guarded did it come about that these souls were able to uplift themselves; for differentiation does not take place in such a way that a certain portion of humanity is destined from the beginning to take a lower rank than another, but that which is made lower at a certain time is to develop higher again at another period. But the conditions must be formed for this end to be attainable. Hence it came about that in Europe there were souls who had fallen into temptation and had become immoral, but they were now guided according to wisdom which proceeded from deeply hidden sources.

Now, the other castes who had gone to India had also left members behind in Europe. The members of the second Indian caste—the Warrior caste—were those who then chiefly attained to power in Europe. Where the wise teachers—that is, those who corresponded to the Indian Brahmins—entirely withdrew, and gave their counsels from hidden sanctuaries, the Warriors came out among the people, in order to improve and uplift them according to the counsels of those ancient European priests. It was this second caste that wielded the greatest power in Europe in primeval times, but in their way of life they were guided by the wise teachers who remained hidden. Thus it came about that the leading personalities in Europe were those who shone by virtue of the qualities of which we spoke yesterday—valour and bravery. Whereas in India, wisdom was held in the highest esteem and the Brahmins were revered because they explained the sacred writing; in Europe bravery and valour were the most valued and the people only knew of the divine mysteries through those who were filled with valour and bravery. The civilisation of Europe continued under these influences for thousands of years and gradually souls were improved and uplifted. In Europe, where souls existed who were the successors of the people who had undergone temptation, no real appreciation of the caste system of India could develop. The souls were mingled and interwoven. A division, a differentiation into castes such as existed in India did not arise. The division was rather between those who guided in an upper class, who acted as leaders in various directions, and the class that was led. The latter consisted principally of souls who had to struggle upward.

When we look for the souls which gradually struggled upwards out of this lower class, and which from being tempted developed higher, we find them chiefly in a part of the European population of which modern history tells but little. Century after century this people developed in order to rise to a higher stage, to recover again, as it were, from the heavy set-back the souls had received in the Atlantean epoch. In Asia there was a continuation in the progress of civilisation; in Europe, on the other hand, there was a change from the former moral collapse into a gradual moral improvement.

The people in Europe remained in this condition for a long time, and improvement only came about through the existence of a strong impulse in these souls to imitate that which they saw before them. Those who lived and worked among the people as the braver among them were looked up to as ideals and patterns, as leaders or chiefs, they were those who were called Fürsten (princes) and were imitated by the people at large. Thus the morality of the whole of Europe was raised through those souls mingling as leaders amongst the people.

Thereby something else became necessary in European development. If we wish to understand this, we must distinguish between the development of a single soul and that of a whole race. The two must not be confused. A human soul can develop in such a way that in one incarnation it embodies itself in a particular race. If in this race it gains certain qualities, it may re-embody itself in a later incarnation in an entirely different one; so that we may find incarnated in Europe at the present day souls which in a previous incarnation were embodied in India, Japan or China. The souls do not by any means remain in the same race, for soul development is quite different from race development, which goes its peaceful way forward.

In ancient times, souls who were unable to go over into the Asiatic races, were transposed into European ones, and were obliged to incarnate again and again in them. But as they became better and better, this led to their gradually passing on into the higher races; and souls which were previously embodied in quite subordinate races developed to a higher stage, and were able later to reincarnate in the bodily successors of the leading population of Europe. These bodily successors of the leading population multiplied, and as these souls increased in number in this direction, they became more numerous than they originally were. After having progressed and improved, they incarnated in the leading population of Europe, and the development then took place in such a way that, on the whole, as a physical race, the bodily forms in which the most ancient European population had originally incarnated died out; the souls forsook the bodies which were formed in a certain way, and which then died out. The offspring of the lower races decreased in number while the higher increased until gradually the lowest classes of the European population completely die out. This is a definite process, which we must grasp. The souls develop further, the bodies die out. For this reason we must be careful to distinguish between soul development and race development. The souls reappear in the bodies belonging to higher races. the lower race bodies die out. A process such as this does not take place without effect. When over large areas something disappears as it were, it does not disappear into nothing, but it dissolves and then exists in a different form. When in ancient times the worst part of the population of which I have just now spoken, died out, the whole region became gradually inhabited by demons, representing the products of dissolution, the products of the putrefaction of that which had died out.

Thus the whole of Europe and Asia Minor were filled with the spiritualised products of putrefaction from the worst part of the population which had died out. These demons of putrefaction endured for a long time, and later they acted upon mankind. It came about that these demons of putrefaction which were incorporated in the spiritual atmosphere, as it were, gained influence upon human beings and affected them in such a way that their feelings were permeated by them. The effect may be seen from the following example:—When at a later date, at the time of the Migration of the Peoples, great bodies of people came over from Asia to Europe, amongst them came Attila with his hordes. His invasion was the cause of great terror to many of those who lived in Europe and through this state of terror people laid themselves open to the demoniacal influences still persisting. Gradually through these demoniacal beings there developed—as a consequence of the terror produced by the hordes coming over from Asia—that which appeared as leprosy, the epidemic disease of the Middle Ages. This disease was nothing else than the consequence of the state of terror and fear experienced by the people at that time. But the terror and fear could only lead to this result in the souls which had been exposed to the demoniacal forces of former times.

I have now described to you why it was possible for people to be laid hold of by a disease—which was later practically exterminated in Europe—and why it was so widespread at the time we mentioned in our last lecture. In Europe the peoples which had to die out because they had not developed upwards became extinct, but the after-effect was seen in the form of diseases which attacked mankind. The disease we have mentioned, leprosy, is thus seen to be the result of spiritual and psychic causes.

This whole condition was now to be counteracted. Further development could only come about if that which has just been described was entirely removed from Europe. An example of how it was taken away was described in the last lecture, where we showed that while, on the one hand, the after-effects of what was unmoral existed as demons of disease, on the other hand, strong moral impulses appeared as in Francis of Assisi. Through his possession of strong moral impulses he gathered others around him who acted also in the same way as he, although in a lesser degree. Really there were very many who at that time worked as he did, but this activity did not last very long.

Now how had such a soul-power come into Francis of Assisi? As we are not gathered together to study external science, but to understand human morality from its spiritual and occult foundations, we must examine a few occult or spiritual truths. Let us inquire: Whence really came such a soul as that of Francis of Assisi? We can only understand such a soul as this if we investigate it a little; if we take the trouble to find what was hidden in its depths.

I must remind you that the old division into castes in India really received its first blow, its first shock, through Buddhism, for among many other things which Buddhism introduced into Asiatic life was the idea that it did not recognise the division into castes as something justifiable; that as far as it was possible in Asia it recognised the power of each human being to attain to the highest possible to man. We know too that this was only possible through the pre-eminently great and mighty individuality of Buddha. We also know that Buddha became a Buddha in the incarnation of which we are usually told and that in the earlier part of his life he was a Bodhisattva, which represents the stage next below Buddhahood. Through the fact that this son of King Suddodana, in the twenty-ninth year of his life, experienced and felt deeply in himself the great truth of life and sorrow, he had attained the greatness to announce in Asia the teaching known as Buddhism.

Connected with this development of the Bodhisattva up to Buddha, there was something else of which we must not lose sight, namely, the fact that the individuality which had passed through many incarnations as Bodhisattva and then risen to the rank of Buddha, when it became Buddha had to dwell for the last time in a physical body on earth. Thus he who is raised from Bodhisattva to Buddha enters into an incarnation which for him is the last. From this time onwards, such an individuality only works down from spiritual heights, he still works, but only spiritually. Thus we now have the fact that the individuality of Buddha has only worked down from spiritual heights since the fifth century before Christ.

But, Buddhism continued. It was able to influence in a certain way not only Asiatic life, but the spiritual life of the whole of the then known world. You know how Buddhism spread in Asia. You know how great is the number of its followers there. But in a more hidden and veiled form it also spread into the mental life of Europe; and we have particularly to point out that the portion of the great teaching of Buddha relating to the equality of man was especially acceptable to the population of Europe, because this population was not arranged on the plan of caste divisions, but rather upon the idea of the equality of all human beings. On the shores of the Black Sea there existed an occult school which lasted far into the Christian era. This school was guided by certain human beings who set themselves as their highest ideal that part of the teaching of Buddha which we have just described, and through their having taken into themselves the Christian impulse along with it, were able in the early centuries of Christianity to throw new light upon what Buddha had given to humanity. If I were to describe to you this occult school on the Black Seas as the occultist or spiritual investigator sees it—and you will understand me best if I do this—I must do it in the following manner:—

People, who to begin with had external teachers in the physical world, came together there. They were instructed in the doctrines and principles which had proceeded from Buddhism, but these were permeated by the impulses which came into the world through Christianity. Then, after the pupils had been sufficiently prepared, they were brought to where the deeper forces lying within them, the deeper forces of wisdom could be brought forth, so that they were led to clairvoyant vision of the spiritual world and were able to see into the spiritual worlds. The first thing attained by the pupils of this occult school, was, for example, the recognition of those who no longer descended to the physical plane. But this they could only do after they had been accustomed to it by the teachers incarnated in the physical body. In this way they came to know Buddha. Thus, these occult pupils learned to know Buddha face to face, if one may so speak of his spiritual being. In this way he continued to work spiritually in the occult pupils and thus his power worked down to the physical plane, although he himself no longer descended to physical embodiment in the physical world.

Now the pupils in this occult school were grouped according to their maturity into two unequal divisions, and only the more advanced were chosen for the smaller division. Most of these pupils were able to become so clairvoyant that they came in touch with a being who strove with all his might to bring his impulses through to the physical world, and although he himself did not descend into this world they learned all the secrets of Buddha and all that he wished to have accomplished. Most of these pupils remained as such, clairvoyants, but there were some who, in addition to the qualities of knowledge and of psychic clairvoyance, had developed the spiritual element to a remarkable degree, which cannot be separated from a certain humility, a certain highly evolved capacity for devotion. These, then, attained to where they could receive the Christ-impulse in an advanced degree precisely in this occult school. They could also become clairvoyant in such a way that they became the specially chosen followers of Saint Paul and received the Christ-impulse directly in life.

Thus from this school proceeded two groups, as it were, one group which possessed the impulse to carry the teaching of Buddha everywhere, although his name was not mentioned in connection with it, and a second group which, in addition, received the Christ-impulse. Now the difference between these two kinds did not appear very strongly in that particular incarnation, it only appeared in the next. The pupils who had not received the Christ-impulse but who had only gained the Buddha-impulse, became the teachers of the equality and brotherhood of man; on the other hand the pupils who had also received the Christ-impulse, in the next incarnation were such that this Christ-impulse worked up further so that not only could they teach (and they did not consider this their chief task) but they worked more especially through their moral power.

One such pupil of the occult school on the Black Sea, was born in his next incarnation as Francis of Assisi. No wonder, then, that in him there was the wisdom which he had received, the knowledge of the brotherhood of mankind, of the equality of all men, of the necessity to love all men equally, no wonder that this teaching pulsated through his soul and also that his soul was permeated and strengthened by the Christ-impulse.

Now how did this Christ-impulse work further in his next incarnation? It acted in such a way that, when in his next incarnation Francis of Assisi was transposed into a community in which the old demons of diseases were especially active—this Christ-impulse approached the evil substance of the disease-demons through him, and absorbed it into itself, thus removing it from mankind. Before this, however, the Christ-impulse incorporated itself in this substance in such a way that it first became visible to Francis of Assisi in the vision in which he saw the palace when he was called upon to take upon himself the burden of poverty. The Christ-impulse had here revived in him and streamed forth from him, and laid hold of these disease-demons. His moral forces thereby became so strong that they could take away the harmful spiritual substances which had produced the disease. It was through this alone that the power was produced to bring to a higher development what I have described to you as the after-effect of the old Atlantean element, to purify Europe from these substances and sweep them away from the earth.

Consider the life of Francis of Assisi; notice what a remarkable course it took. He was born in the year 1182. We know that the first years of the life of a human being are devoted principally to the development of the physical body. In the physical body is developed chiefly that which comes to light through external heredity. Hence there appeared in him first of all that which originated through external heredity from the European population. These qualities gradually came out, as his etheric body developed from the seventh to the fourteenth year, like any other human being. In this etheric body appeared primarily that quality which as the Christ-impulse had worked directly in him in the mysteries on the Black Sea. From his fourteenth year, at the dawn of his astral life the Christ power became particularly active within him, in such a way that there entered into his astral body that which had been in connection with the atmosphere of the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha. For Francis of Assisi was a personality who was permeated by the external power of Christ, owing to his having sought for the Christ power, in his previous incarnation, in that particular place of initiation where it was to be found.

Thus we see how differentiations act inhumanity, for differentiation must come about. For that which by earlier events has been thrust down to a lower condition is raised up once more through special events in the course of human development. On another occasion a particularly important uplifting took place in the evolution of humanity, one which exoterically will always be incomprehensible; for this reason people have really ceased to reflect upon, it, but esoterically it can be fully explained. There were some who had developed very quickly from the strata of the Western population, who had gradually wrestled their way up from the lowest rungs of the ladder, but who had not risen very high in intellectual development, but had remained comparatively humble and simple men, chosen ones as it were, who could only be uplifted at a certain time by a mighty impulse which reflected itself in them; these were those who are described as the twelve Apostles of Jesus. They were the cast-off extract of the lower castes which did not reach India. From them had to be taken the substance for the disciples of Christ Jesus.¹

Thus we have discovered the source of the moral power in that chosen personality, Francis of Assisi. Do not say that taking ordinary human rules into consideration, it would be too-much to expect a person to realise the ideals manifested in Francis of Assisi. Certainly what I have said was not with the intention of recommending anyone to become a Francis of Assisi. One only wished to point out by means of a striking example, how moral power enters man, whence it can spring and how it must be understood as something quite special, something that was originally present in man. But from the whole spirit of what I have said up to now you may gather one thing with regard to other forces in human evolution, namely, that humanity has first gone through a descent and has now undertaken an ascent again.

If we go back in human evolution we pass through the post-Atlantean epoch to the Atlantean catastrophe, then into the Atlantean epoch and then further back to the Lemurian epoch. When we then arrive at the starting-point of earthly humanity we come to a time when man, not only as regards his spiritual qualities, was much closer to the Deity, when he first developed not only out of the spiritual life, but also out of morality. So that at the beginning of earthly evolution we do not find unmorality but morality. Morality is a divine gift which was given to man in the beginning, it was part of the original content in human nature, just as spiritual power was in human nature before man's deepest descent. Fundamentally, a great part of what is unmoral came into humanity in the manner we have described, namely, by the betrayal of the higher Mysteries in the ancient Atlantean epoch.

Thus morality is something about which we cannot say that it has only developed gradually in humanity, it is something which lies at the bottom of the human soul, something which has only been submerged by the later civilisations. When we look at the matter in the right light we cannot even say that unmorality came into the world through folly; it came into the world through the secrets of wisdom being disclosed to persons who were not sufficiently mature to receive them. It was through this that people were tempted, they succumbed and then degenerated. Therefore in order that they might rise it was above all necessary that something should occur which would sweep away from the human soul all that is contrary to moral impulses. Let us put this in a somewhat different form.

Let us suppose we have before us a criminal, a man whom we call especially unmoral; on no account must we think that this unmoral man is devoid of moral impulses. They are in him and we shall find them if we delve down to the bottom of his soul. There is no human soul—with the exception of black magicians, with whom we are not now concerned—in which there is not the foundation of what is morally good. If a person is wicked, it is because that which has originated in the course of time as spiritual error overlies moral goodness. Human nature is not bad; originally it was really good. The concrete observation of human nature shows us that in its deepest being it is good and that it was through spiritual errors that man deviated from the moral path. Therefore moral errors must in course of time once more be made good in man. Not only must the mistakes be made good but their results as well, for where evil has such mighty after-effects that demons of disease have been produced, super-moral forces such as were in Francis of Assisi must be also active.

The foundation for the improvement of a human being always consists in taking away his spiritual error. And what is necessary to this end? Gather together what I have told you into a fundamental feeling; let the facts speak to you, let them speak to your feelings and perceptions, and try to gather them together into one fundamental feeling, and then you will say: What is the attitude which a man needs to hold regarding his fellow-man? It is that he needs the belief in the original goodness of humanity as a whole, and of each single human being in particular. That is the first thing we must say if we wish to speak at all in words concerning morality; that something immeasurably good lies at the bottom of human nature. That is what Francis of Assisi realised; and when he was approached by some of those stricken with the horrible disease we have described, as a good Christian of that day, he said somewhat as follows:-- “A disease such as this is in a certain way the consequence of sin; but as sin is in the first instance spiritual error and disease the result it must therefore be removed by a mighty opposing power.” Hence Francis of Assisi saw by the sinner how, in a certain way, the punishment of sin manifests itself externally; but he also saw the good in human nature, he saw what lies at the bottom of each human being as divine spiritual forces. That which distinguished Francis of Assisi most was his sublime faith in the goodness lying in each human being, even in one who was being punished.

This made it possible for the contrary power to appear in his soul, and this is the power of love which gives and helps morally, and indeed even heals. And no one, if he really develops the belief in the original goodness of human nature into an active impulse can arrive at anything else than to love human nature as such.

It is primarily these two fundamental impulses which are able to found a truly moral life. First, the belief in the divine at the bottom of every human soul, and secondly, the boundless love of man which springs from this belief. For if was only this measureless love which could bring Francis of Assisi to the sick, the crippled and those stricken with leprosy. A third thing which may be added and is necessarily built upon these two foundations, is that a person who has a firm belief in the goodness of the human soul, and who loves human nature, cannot do otherwise than admit that what we see proceeding from the co-operation of the originally good foundation of the human soul with practical love, justifies a perspective for the future which may be expressed in the fact that every single soul, even though it may have descended far from the height of spiritual life, can be led back again to this spiritual life. This third impulse implies the hope for each human soul that it can find the way back again to the Divine-Spiritual.

We may say that Francis of Assisi heard these three things expressed very very often; they were continually in his mind during his initiation in the Mysteries of Colchis, on the Black Sea. And we may also say, that in the life he had to lead as Francis of Assisi, he preached very little about faith or love, but was himself their embodiment. Faith did not work, hope did not work; one must indeed have them, but only love is effective. It stands in the centre, and it is that which, in that single incarnation of Francis of Assisi, really carried the actual development of humanity forward in the moral sense towards the divine.

How did this love—which we know was the result of his initiation in the Colchis Mysteries—develop in St. Francis? We have seen that in him appeared the knightly virtues of the ancient European spirit. He was a valiant boy. Valour, bravery, was transformed in his individuality, which was permeated by the Christ-impulse, into active practical love. We see the old valour, the old bravery resurrected once more in the love manifested in Francis of Assisi. The ancient valour transposed into the spiritual; bravery transposed into the spiritual is love.

It is interesting to see how very much of what has just been said corresponds also to the external historical course of human evolution. Let us go back a few centuries into the pre-Christian era. Among the people who have given the principal name to the fourth post-Atlantean age, the Greeks, we find the philosopher Plato. Amongst other things, Plato wrote about morals, about the virtues of man. By the way in which he wrote, we can recognise that he was reticent concerning the highest things, the actual secrets, but what he felt able to say he put into the mouth of Socrates. Now, in a period of European culture in which the Christ-impulse had not yet worked, Plato described the highest virtues he recognised, namely, the virtues which the Greeks looked upon as those which a moral man ought to have above all things. He described first of all three virtues, and a fourth with which we shall later become acquainted. The first was “Wisdom.” Wisdom as such, Plato looked upon as virtue. This is justified, for in the most varied directions we have found that wisdom lies at the foundation of moral life. In India the wisdom of the Brahmins lay at the foundation of human life. In Europe this was indeed withdrawn into the background, but it existed in the Norse Mysteries where the European Brahmins had to make good again that which had been spoiled through the betrayal in the old Atlantean epoch. Wisdom stands behind all morality, as we shall see in our next lecture. Plato also, described, in the manner corresponding to the Mysteries, as the second virtue—“Valour”—that which we meet with in the population of Europe. As the third virtue he described Temperance or “Moderation” that is, the opposite of the passionate cultivation of the lower human impulses. These are the three chief Platonic virtues: Wisdom, Valour or Bravery; and Moderation or Temperance, the curbing of the sensual impulses active in man. Finally, the harmonious balancing of these three virtues Plato describes as a fourth virtue, which he calls “Justice.”

Here is described, by one of the most eminent European minds of pre-Christian times, what were looked upon at that time as the most important qualities in human nature. Valour, bravery, is in the European population permeated by the Christ-impulse and by what we call “ I ” or the Ego. Bravery, which in Plato appears as virtue, is here spiritualised and thereby becomes “love.” The most important thing is that we should see how, moral impulses come into the human race, how that which formerly existed in the form we have described becomes something entirely different. Now without disparagement to Christian morality we cannot describe as the only virtues, wisdom, temperance, valour and justice, for we might receive the reply: “If you had all these and yet you had not love you would never enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Let us bear in mind the time when, as we have seen, there was poured out into humanity an impulse, a current of such a nature that wisdom and bravery were spiritualised and re-appeared as love. But we shall go still further into the question as to how wisdom, moderation or temperance and justice, have been developed, and thereby will appear what is the particular moral mission of the Anthroposophical Movement in the present day.

• 1. We are not here referring to previous or succeeding incarnations of the individualities of the Apostles, but solely to the physical ancestry of the bodies in which the personalities of the Apostles were incarnated. The succession of incarnations and the physical line of heredity must always be distinguished.

Today, before going into any further explanations concerning questions of method, I should like to add something more to what I said yesterday about the teachers' conferences. We attach the greatest importance to our relationship with the parents of our Waldorf School children and in order to ensure complete harmony and agreement we arrange Parents' Evenings fairly frequently, which are attended by parents of children living in the neighbourhood. At these meetings the intentions, methods and the various arrangements of the school are discussed—naturally in a more or less general way—and, in so far as this is possible in such gatherings, the parents have the opportunity of expressing their wishes and these are given a sympathetic hearing. In this way the opportunity is provided actually to work out what we should seek to achieve in our education and moreover to do this in the whole social milieu out of which such aims have in truth their origin. The teachers hear the ideas of the parents in regard to the education of their children; and the parents hear—it is our practice always to speak with the utmost sincerity and candour—about what is taking place in the school, what our thoughts are about the education and future of the children and why it is that we think it necessary to have schools which further a free approach to education. In short, by this means the mutual understanding between teachers and parents is not only of an abstract and intellectual nature, but a continuous human contact is brought about. We feel this contact to be very important, for we have nothing else to depend upon. In a state school, everything is strictly defined. There one knows with absolute certainty the aims which the teacher must bear in mind; he knows for instance, that at 9 years of age a child must have reached a certain standard, and so on. Everything is planned with exactitude.

With us everything depends on the free individuality of each single teacher. In so far as I may be considered the director of the school, nothing is given in the way of rules and regulations. Actually there is no school director in the usual sense, but each teacher reigns supreme. Instead of a school director or headmaster we have the teachers' conferences, in which there is a common study and a common striving towards further progress. There is therefore a spirit, a concrete spirit living among the college of teachers which works freely, which is not tyrannical, which does not issue statements, rules or programmes, but has the will continually to progress, continually to make better and better arrangements, in meeting the teaching requirements. Today our teachers cannot know at all what will be good in the Waldorf School in 5 years time for in these 5 years they will have learned a great deal and out of the knowledge they will have to judge anew what is good and what is not good. This is also the reason why what associations for educational reform decide to be valuable is a matter of complete indifference in the Waldorf School. Educational matters cannot be thought out intellectually, they can only arise out of teaching experience. And it is this working out of experience which is the concern of the college of teachers. But just because we are in this situation, just because we live in a state of flux in regard to what we ourselves actually want, we need a different kind of support than is given to an ordinary school by the educational authorities, who ordain what should be done. We need the support of that social element in which the children are growing up. We need the inner support of the parents in connection with all the questions which continually crop up when the child comes to school; for he comes to school from his parents' home.

Now if the aim is to achieve an individual and harmonious relationship, the teacher is concerned with the welfare of the child possibly even more than the parents themselves to whom he looks for support. If he does not merely let the parents come and then proceed to give them information which they can make nothing much of, but if, after a parents' evening, he shows a further interest by visiting the parents in their home, then in receiving a child of school age, about 7 years old, into his class, he has taken on very much more than he thinks. He has the father, the mother and other people from the child's environment; they are standing shadowlike in the background. He has almost as much to do with them as with the child himself, especially where physiological-pathological matters are concerned. The teacher must take all this into account and work it out for himself; he must look at the situation as a whole in order really to understand the child, and above all to become clear in his own mind what he should do in regard to the child's environment. By building this bridge between himself and the parents, as he sees them in their home, a kind of support will be brought about, a support which is social in its nature and is at the same time both free and living.

To visit the parents in their home is necessary in order to foster in the parents a concern that nothing should occur which might damage the natural feeling a child must have for the authority of the teacher. A lot of work must be done between the college of teachers and the parent-body by means of an understanding imbued with feeling, with qualities of soul. Moreover the parent too, by getting to know the teachers, getting to know them pretty thoroughly, must break themselves of the tendency to be jealous of them, for indeed most parents are jealous of their children's teachers. They feel as if the teachers want to take the child away from them; but as soon as this feeling is present there is an end to what can be achieved educationally with the child. Such things, can, however, be put right if the teacher understands how to win the true support of the parents. This is what I wished to add to my previous remarks on the purpose of the teachers' conferences.

Now there is something else to be considered. We must learn to understand those moments in a child's life which are significant moments of transition. I have already referred to one such moment when the teaching, which up to this time has been imaginative and pictorial must pass over, for instance, into teaching the child about the nature of the plants. This point of time lies between the 9th and 10th year. It shows itself in the child as an inner restlessness; he asks all kinds of questions. What he asks has usually no great importance in so far as the content is concerned; but the fact that the questions are asked, that the child feels impelled to ask questions, this is undoubtedly of great significance.

The kind of relationship we establish with the child just at this time has great importance for the whole of his life. For what is it that indwells the soul of the child? It is something that can be observed in every child who is not pathological. Up to this age a child who has not been ruined by external influences accepts the authority of the teacher quite naturally; a healthy child who has not been ruined by being talked into all kinds of nonsensical ideas also has a healthy respect for every grown-up person. He looks up to such a person, taking him as an authority quite simply and as a matter of course. Just think back to your own childhood; realise what it means, particularly for the quite young child, to be able to say to himself; You may do what he does or what she does for they are good and worthy people. The child really requires nothing else than to place himself under an authority

In a certain sense this feeling is somewhat shaken between the 9th and 10th year; it is shaken simply in the course of the development of human nature itself. It is important to be able to perceive this clearly. At this time human nature experiences something quite special, which does not however rise up into the child's consciousness, but lives in indefinite sensations and feelings. The child is unable to give it expression, but it is there. What does the child now say to himself unconsciously? Earlier he said out of his instinctive feelings: If my teacher says something is good, then it is good; if he says something is bad, it is bad; if he says something is right, it is right; if he says it is wrong, it is wrong. If something gives my teacher pleasure and he says it pleases him, then it is beautiful; if he says something is ugly and it does not please him, then it is ugly. It is quite a matter of course for the young child to look upon his teacher as his model. But now, between the 9th and 10th year this inner certainty is somewhat shaken. The child begins to ask himself in his life of feeling: Where does he or she get it all from? Who is the teacher's authority? Where is this authority? At this moment the child begins to feel an inner urge to break through the visible human being, who until now has been for him a god, to that which stands behind him as super-sensible or invisible God, or Divine Being. Now the teacher, facing the child, must contrive in some simple way to confirm this feeling in him. He must approach the child in such a way that he feels: Behind my teacher there is something super-sensible which gives him support. He does not speak in an arbitrary way; he is a messenger from the Divine.

One must make the child aware of this. But how? Least of all by preaching. One can only give a hint in words, one will achieve nothing whatever by a pedantic approach. But if one comes up to the child and perhaps says something to him which as far as content goes has no special importance, if one says a few words which perhaps are quite unimportant but which are spoken in such a tone of voice that he sees: He or she has a heart, this heart itself believes in what is standing behind,—then something can be achieved. We must make the child aware of this standing within the universe, but we must make him aware of it in the right way. Even if he cannot yet take in abstract, rationalistic ideas, he already has enough understanding to come and ask a question: Oh, I would so much like to know .... Children of this age often come with such questions. If we now say to him: Just think, what I am able to give you I receive from the sun; if the sun were not there I should not be able to give you anything at all in life; if the divine power of the moon were not there to preserve for us while we sleep what we receive from the sun I should not be able to give you anything either. In so far as its content is concerned we have not said anything of particular importance. If however we say it with such warmth that the child perceives that we love the sun and the moon, then we can lead him beyond the stage at which he asks these questions and in the majority of cases this holds good for the whole of life. One must know that these critical moments occur in the child's life. Then quite of itself the feeling will arise: Up to this time when telling stories about the fir tree and the oak, about the buttercup and dandelion, or about the sunflower and the violet, I have spoken in fairytale fashion about Nature and in this way I have led the child into a spiritual world; but now the time has come when I can begin to tell stories taken from the Gospels. If we begin to do this earlier, or try to teach him anything in the nature of a catechism we destroy something in the child, but if we begin now, when he is trying to break through towards the spiritual world, we do something which the child demands with his whole being.

Now where is that book to be found in which the teacher can read what teaching is? The children themselves are this book. We should not learn to teach out of any other book than the one lying open before us and consisting of the children themselves; but in order to read in this book we need the widest possible interest in each individual child and nothing must divert us from this. Here the teacher may well experience difficulties and these must be consciously overcome.

Let us assume that the teacher has children of his own. In this case he is faced with a more direct and more difficult task than if he had no children. He must therefore be all the more conscious just in this respect and above all he must not hold the opinion that all children should be like his own. He must not think this even subconsciously. He must ask himself whether it is not the case that people who have children are subconsciously of the opinion that all children should be like theirs.

We see therefore that what the teacher has perforce to admit touches on the most intimate threads of the life of soul. And unless he penetrates to these intimate subconscious threads he will not find complete access to the children, while at the same time winning their full confidence. Children suffer great, nay untold damage if they come to believe that other children are the teacher's favourites. This must be avoided at all costs. It is, not so easily avoided as people usually think, but it can be avoided if the teacher is imbued with all those principles which can result from an anthroposophical knowledge of man. Then such a matter finds its own solution.

There is something which calls for special attention in connection with the theme I have chosen for this course of lectures, something which is connected with the significance of education for the whole world and for humanity. It lies in the very nature of human existence that the teacher, who has so much to do with children and who as a rule has so little opportunity of living outside his sphere of activity, needs some support from the outer world, needs necessarily to look out into this world. Why is it that teachers so easily become dried up? It happens because they have continually to stoop to the level of the child. We certainly have no reason to make fun of the teacher if, limited to the usual conceptual approach to teaching, he becomes dried up. We should nevertheless perceive where the danger lies, and the anthroposophical teacher is in a position to be specially aware of this. For if the average teacher's comprehension of history gradually becomes that of a school textbook—and this may well happen in the course of a few years' teaching—where should he look for another kind of comprehension, for ideas in keeping with what is truly human? How can the situation be amended? The time remaining to the teacher after his school week is usually spent trying to recover from fatigue, and often only parish pump politics plays a part in forming his attitude towards questions of world importance. Thus the soul life of such a teacher does not turn outwards and enter into the kind of understanding which is necessary for a human being between say, the ages of 30 and 40. Furthermore he does not keep fit and well if he thinks that the best way to recuperate in leisure hours is to play cards or do something else which is in no way connected with the life of the spirit.

The situation of a teacher who is an anthroposophist, whose life is permeated with anthroposophy, is very different. His perspective of the world is continually widening; his sphere of vision extends ever further and further. It is very easy to show how these things affect each other—It is indicated by the fact that the most enthusiastic anthroposophist, if, for instance, he becomes a teacher of history, immediately tends to carry anthroposophy into his conception of history and so falls into the error of wanting to teach not history, but anthroposophy. This is also something one must try to avoid. It will be completely avoided if such a teacher, having on the one hand his children and on the other hand anthroposophy, feels the need of building a bridge between the school and the homes of the parents. Even though anthroposophy is knowledge as applied to man, understanding as applied to man, there are nevertheless necessities in life which must be observed. How do people often think today, influenced as they are by current ideas in regard to educational reform or even by revolutionary ideas in this field? I will not at this moment enter into what is said in socialist circles, but will confine myself to what is thought by those belonging to the prosperous middle classes. There the view is held that people should get out of the town and settle in the country in order that many children may be educated right away from the town. Only so, it is felt, can they develop naturally. And so on, and so on. But how does such a thought fit into a more comprehensive conception of the world? It really amounts to an admission of one's own helplessness. For the point is not to think out some way in which a number of children may be educated quite apart from the world, according to one's own intellectual, abstract ideas, but rather to discover how children may be helped to grow into true human beings within the social milieu which is their environment. One must muster one's strength and not take children away from the social milieu in which they are living. It is essential to have this courage. It is something which is connected with the world significance of education.

But then there must be a deep conviction that the world must find its way into the school. The world must continue to exist within the school, albeit in a childlike way. If therefore we would stand on the ground of a healthy education we should not think out all kinds of occupational activity intended only for children. For instance all kinds of things are devised for children to do. They must learn to plait; they must carry out all kinds of rather meaningless activities which have absolutely nothing to do with life, merely to keep them busy. Such methods can never serve any good purpose in the child's development. On the contrary, all play activity at school must be a direct imitation of life. Everything must proceed out of life, nothing should be thought out. Hence, in spite of the good intentions lying behind them, those things which have been introduced into the education of little children by Froebel or others are not directly related to the real development of the children. They are thought out, they belong to our rationalistic age. Nothing that is merely thought out should form part of a school's activity.

Above all there must be a secret feeling that life must hold sway everywhere in education. In this connection one can have quite remarkable experiences. I have told you already that the child who has reached the stage of changing his teeth should have the path of learning made smooth for him by means of painting or drawing. Writing—a form of drawing which has become abstract—should be developed out of a kind of painting-drawing or drawing-painting. But in doing this it should be borne in mind that the child is very sensitive to aesthetic impressions. A little artist is hidden somewhere inside him, and it is just here that quite interesting discoveries can be made. A really good teacher may be put in charge of a class, someone who is ready to carry out the things I have been explaining, someone who is full of enthusiasm and who says: One must simply do away with all the earlier methods of education and begin to educate in this new way! So now he starts off with this business of painting-drawing or drawing-painting. The pots of paint and the paint brushes are ready and the children take up their brushes. At this point one can have the following experience. The teacher simply has no idea of the difference between a colour that shines and one that does not shine. He has already become too old. In this respect one can have the strangest experiences. I once had the opportunity of telling an excellent chemist about our efforts to produce radiant, shining colours for the paintings in the Goetheanum and how we were experimenting with colours made out of plants. Thereupon he said: But today we are already able to do much better—today we actually have the means whereby we can produce colours which are iridescent and begin to shimmer when it is dark. This chemist understood not a word of what I had been saying; he immediately thought in terms of chemistry. Grown-up people often have no sense for a shining colour. Children still have this sense. Everything goes wonderfully with very few words if one is able to read out of the nature of childhood what the child still possesses. The teacher's guidance must however be understanding and artistic in its approach, then the child will find his way easily into everything his teacher wishes to bring to him.

All this can however only be brought about if we feel deeply that school is a place for young life; but at the same time we must realise what is suitable for adult life. Here we must cultivate a sensitivity as to what can and what cannot be done. Please let no one take offence at what I am about to say. Last year in the framework of a conference on anthroposophical education the following took place. There was the wish to show to a public audience what has such an important part to play in our education: Eurythmy. This was done, but it was done in the following manner. In this particular place children gave a demonstration of what they had learned at school in their eurythmy lessons and a performance showing eurythmy as an art was only given later. Things were not arranged so that first people were given the opportunity of gaining some understanding of eurythmy, so that they might perhaps say: Ah, so that is eurythmy, that is what has been introduced into the school. It was done the other way round; the children's eurythmy demonstration was given first place, with the result that the audience was quite unconvinced and had no idea what it was all about. Just imagine that up till now there had been no art of painting: then all of a sudden an exhibition was held showing how children begin to daub with colours! Just as little was it possible for those who were outside the anthroposophical movement to see in this children's demonstration what is really intended and what actually underlies anthroposophy and eurythmy. Such a demonstration only has meaning if eurythmy is first introduced as an art; for then people can see what part it has to play in life and its significance in the world of art. Then the importance of eurythmy in education will also be recognised. Otherwise people may well say: Today all kinds of whimsical ideas are rife in the world—and eurythmy will be looked upon as just such another whimsical idea.

These are things which must lead us, not only to prepare ourselves for our work in education in the old, narrow sense, but to work with a somewhat wider outlook so that the school is not sundered from life but is an inseparable part of it. This is just as important as to think out some extremely clever method in education. Again and again I have had to lay stress on the fact that it is the attitude of mind which counts, the attitude of mind and the gift of insight. It is obvious that not everything can be equally perfect; this goes without saying. I do beg you not to take amiss what I have just said; this applies also to anthroposophists. I appreciate everything that is done, as it is here, with such willing sacrifice. But if I were not to speak in this way the following might well happen. Because wherever there is light there are also strong shadows, so wherever efforts are made to do things in a more spiritual way, there too the darkest shadows arise. Here the danger is actually not less than in the usual conventional circles, but greater. And it is particularly necessary for us, if we are to be equal to the tasks with which we shall be faced in a life which is becoming more and more complicated, to be fully awake and aware of what life is demanding of human beings. Today we no longer have those sharply defined traditions which guided an earlier humanity. We can no longer content ourselves with what our forefathers deemed right; we must bring up our children so that they may be able to form their own judgments. It is therefore imperative to break through the narrow confines of our preconceived ideas and take our stand within the all-comprehensive life and work of the world. We must no longer, as in earlier times, continue to find simple concepts by means of which we would seek to explain far-reaching questions of life. For the most part, even if there is no desire to be pedantic, the attempt is made to characterise most things with superficial definitions, much in the same way as was done in a certain Greek school of philosophy. When the question was put: what is a man?—the explanation given was as follows: A man is a living being who stands on two legs and has no feathers.—Many definitions which are given today are based on the same pattern,—But the next day, after someone had done some hard thinking as to what might lie behind these portentous words, he brought with him a plucked goose, for this was a being able to stand on two legs and having no feathers and he now asserted that this was a man. This is only an extreme case of what you find for instance in Goethe's play, “Goetz von Berlechingen,” where the little boy begins to relate what he knows about geography. When he comes to his own district he describes it according to his lesson book and then goes on to describe a man whose development has taken place in this same neighbourhood. He has however not the faintest idea that the latter is his father. Out of sheer “erudition,” based on what he has learned out of the book, he does not know his own father. Nevertheless these things do not go so far as the experience I once had in Weimar, where there are, of course, newspapers. These are produced in the way that usually happens in small places. Bits and pieces of news regarded as suitable are cut out of newspapers belonging to larger towns and inserted into the paper in question. So on one occasion, on 22nd January, we in Weimar read the following item of news: Yesterday a violent thunderstorm broke over our town. This piece of news had, however, been taken out of the Leipziger Nachrichten.

Similar things happen in life and we are continually caught in the web of their confusion. People theorise in abstract concepts. They study the theory of relativity and in so doing get the notion that it is all the same whether someone travels by car to Oosterbeek or whether Oosterbeek comes to him. If however anyone should wish to draw a conclusion based on reality he would have to say: If the car is not used it does not suffer wear and tear and the chauffeur does not get tired. Should the opposite be the case the resulting effect will likewise be opposite. If one thinks in this way then, without drawing a comparison between every line and movement, he will know out of an inner commonsense that his own being is changed when from a state of rest it is brought into movement. Bearing in mind the kind of thinking prevalent today, it is no wonder that a theory of relativity develops out of it when attention is turned to things in isolation. If however one goes back to reality it will become apparent that there is no accord between reality and what is thought out on the basis of mere relationship. Today, whether or not we are learned or clever we live perpetually outside reality; we live in a world of ideas in much the same way as the little boy in Goetz von Berlechingen, who did not know his father, in spite of having read a description of him in his geography book. We do not live in such a way as to have direct contact with reality.

But this is what we must bring into the school; we must face this direct impact of reality. We are able to do so if above all we learn to understand the true nature of man and what is intimately connected with him. It is for this reason that again and again I have to point out how easy it is for people today to assert that the child should be taught pictorially, by means of object lessons, and that nothing should be brought to him that is beyond his immediate power of comprehension. But in so doing we are drawn into really frightful trivialities. I have already mentioned the calculating machine. Now just consider the following: At the age of 8 I take something in but I do not really understand it. All I know is that it is my teacher who says it. Now I love my teacher. He is quite naturally my authority. Because he has said it I accept it with my whole heart. At the age of 15 I still do not understand it. But when I am 35 I meet with an experience in life which calls up, as though from wonderful spiritual depths, what I did not understand when I was 8 years old, but which I accepted solely on the authority of the teacher whom I loved. Because he was my authority I felt sure it must be true. Now life brings me another experience and suddenly, in a flash, I understand the earlier one. All this time it had remained hidden within me, and now life grants me the possibility of understanding it. Such an experience gives rise to a tremendous sense of obligation. And one cannot do otherwise than say: Sad indeed it is for anyone who experiences no moments in life when out of his own inner being something rises up into consciousness which he accepted long ago on the basis of authority and which he is only now able to understand. No one should be deprived of such an experience, for in later years it is the source of enthusiastic and purposeful activity in life. [Walter de la Mare has described this experience and the joy of saying: “Ah, so that was the meaning of that.”]

But let us add something else. I said that between the change of teeth and puberty children should not be given moral precepts, but in the place of these care should be taken to ensure that what is good pleases them because it pleases their teacher, and what is bad displeases them because it displeases their teacher. During the second period of life everything should be built up on sympathy with the good, antipathy for the bad. Then moral feelings are implanted deeply in the soul and there is established a sense of moral well-being in experiencing what is good and a sense of moral discomfort in experiencing what is bad. Now comes the time of puberty. Just as walking is fully developed during the first 7 years, speech during the second 7 years, so during the third 7 years of life thinking comes fully into its own. It becomes independent. This only takes place with the oncoming of puberty; only then are we really capable of forming a judgment. If at this time, when we begin to form thoughts out of an inner urge, feelings have already been implanted in us in the way I have indicated, then a good foundation has been laid and we are able to form judgments. For instance: this pleases me and I am in duty bound to act in accordance with it; that displeases me and it is my duty to leave it alone. The significance of this is that duty itself grows out of pleasure and displeasure; it is not instilled into me, but grows out of pleasure and displeasure. This is the awakening of true freedom in the human soul. We experience freedom through the fact that the sense for what is moral is the deepest individual impulse of the individual human soul. If a child has been led to a sense of the moral by an authority which is self-understood, so that the moral lives for him in the world of feeling, then after puberty the conception of duty works out of his individual inner human being. This is a healthy procedure. In this way we lead the children rightly to the point at which they are able to experience what individual freedom is. Why do people not have this experience today? They do not have it because they cannot have it, because before puberty a knowledge of good and bad was instilled into them; what they should and should not do was inculcated. But moral instruction which pays no heed to a right approach by gradual stages dries up the human being, makes out of him, as it were, a skeleton of moral precepts on which the conduct of life is hung like clothes on a coat-hanger.

If everything in life is to form a harmonious whole, education must follow a quite different course from the one usually pursued. It must be understood that the child goes through one stage between birth and the change of teeth, another between the change of teeth and puberty and yet another between puberty and the age of 21. Why does the child do this or that in the years before he is 7? Because he wants to imitate. He wants to do what he sees being done in his immediate surroundings. But what he does must be connected with life, it must be led over into living activity. We can do very much to help bring this about if we accustom the child to feel gratitude for what he receives from his environment. Gratitude is the basic virtue in the child between birth and the change of teeth. If he sees that everyone who stands in some kind of relationship to him in the outer world shows gratitude for what he receives from this world; if, in confronting the outer world and wanting to imitate it, the child sees the kind of gestures that express gratitude, then a great deal is done towards establishing in him the right moral human attitude. Gratitude is what belongs to the first 7 years of life.

If gratitude has been developed in the child during this first period it will now be easy between the 7th and 14th years to develop what must be the activating impulse in everything he does. This is love. Love is the virtue belonging to the second period of life. And only after puberty does there develop out of what has been experienced with love between the change of teeth and puberty that most inward of human impulses, the impulse of duty. Then what Goethe once expressed so beautifully becomes the guiding line for life. Goethe asks: “What is duty? It is when one loves what one commands oneself.” This is the goal to which we must attain. We shall however only reach it when we are led to it by stages: Gratitude—Love—Duty.

A few days ago we saw how things arising out of an earlier epoch of life are carried over into later ones. I spoke about this in answer to a question. Now I must point out that this has its good side also; it is something that must be. Of course I do not mean that gratitude should cease with the 7th year or love with the 14th year. But here we have the very secret of life: what is developed in one epoch can be carried over into later epochs, but there will be metamorphosis, intensification, change. We should not be able to carry over the good belonging to one epoch were there not also the possibility of carrying over the bad. Education however must concern itself with this and see to it that the force inherent in the human being, enabling him to carry over something out of an earlier into a later epoch, is used to further what is good. In order to achieve this however we must make use of what I said yesterday. Let us take the case of a child in whom, owing to certain underlying pathological tendencies, there is the possibility of moral weakness in later life. We perceive that what is good does not really please him, neither does what is bad awaken his displeasure. In this respect he makes no progress. Then, because love is not able to develop in the right way between the 7th and the 14th year, we try to make use of what is inherent in human nature itself, we try to develop in the child a real sense of gratitude, to educate him so that he turns with real gratitude to the self-understood authority of the teacher. If we do this, things will improve in respect of love also. A knowledge of human nature will prevent us from setting about things in such a way that we say: This child is lacking in love for the good and antipathy for the bad; I must instil this into him! It cannot be done. But things will go of themselves if we foster gratitude in the child. It is therefore essential to know the part gratitude plays in relation to love in the course of moral development in life; we must know that gratitude is a natural development in human nature during the first years of life and that love is active in the whole human organisation as a quality of soul before it comes to physical expression at puberty. For what then makes itself felt outwardly is active between the years of 7 and 14 as the deepest principle of life and growth in man; it weaves and lives in his inmost being. Here, where it is possible to discuss these things on a fundamental basis, I may be allowed to say what is undoubtedly a fact. When a teacher has once understood the nature of an education that takes its stand on a real knowledge of man, when on the one side he is engaged on the actual practice of such an education, and when on the other side he is actively concerned in the study of the anthroposophical conception of the world, then each works reciprocally on the other. For the teacher must work in the school in such a way that he takes as a foregone conclusion the fact that love is inwardly active in the child and then comes to outer expression in sexuality.

The anthroposophical teacher also attends meetings where the world conception of anthroposophy is studied. There he hears from those who have already acquired the necessary knowledge derived from Initiation Wisdom about such things as the following: The human being consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. Between the 7th and 14th years the etheric body works mainly on the physical body; the astral body descends into the physical and etheric bodies at the time of puberty. But anyone able to penetrate deeply into these matters, anyone able to perceive more than just physical processes, whose perceptions always include spiritual processes and, when the two are separated, can perceive each separately, such a man or woman can discern how in an 11 or 12 year old boy the astral body is already sounding, chiming, as it were, with the deeper tone which will first make itself heard outwardly at puberty. And a similar process takes place in the astral body of an 11 or 12 year old girl.

These things are actual, and if they are regarded as realities they will throw light on life's problems. It is just concerning these very things that one can have quite remarkable experiences. I will not withhold such experiences. In the year 1906 I gave a number of lectures in Paris before a relatively small circle of people. I had prepared my lectures bearing these people specially in mind, taking account of the fact that in this circle there were men of letters, writers, artists and others who at this particular epoch were concerned with quite specific questions. Since then things have changed, but at that time a certain something lay behind the questions in which these people were interested. They were of the type which gets up in the morning filled with the notion: I belong to a Society which is interested in the history of literature, the history of the arts; when one belongs to such a Society one wears this sort of tie, and since the year so-and-so one no longer goes to parties in tails or dinner jacket. One is aware of this when invited to dine where these and similar topics are discussed. Then in the evening one goes to the theatre and sees plays which deal with current problems! The so-called poets then write such plays themselves. At first there is a man of deep and inward sensibility, out of whose heart these great problems arise in an upright and honourable way. First there is a Strindberg. Later on follow those who popularise Strindberg for a wider public. And so, at the time I held these Paris lectures, that particular problem was much discussed which shortly before had driven the tragic Weininger to suicide. The problem which Weininger portrays in so childlike yet noble a fashion in Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) was the problem of the day. After I had dealt with those things which were essential to an understanding of the subject I proceeded to explain that every human being has one sex in the external physical body, but bears the other sex in the etheric body. So that the woman is man in etheric body, and the man is woman. Every human being in his totality is bi-sexual; he bears the other sex within him. I can actually observe when something of this kind is said, how people begin to look out of their astral bodies, how they suddenly feel that a problem is solved for them over which they have chewed for a long time, and how a certain restlessness, but a pleasant kind of restlessness is perceptible among the audience. Where there are big problems, not merely insignificant sensations in life, but where there is real enthusiasm, even if it is sometimes close to small talk, then again one becomes aware of how a sense of relief, of being freed from a burden, emanates from those present.

So the anthroposophical teacher always looks on big problems as being something which can work on him in such a way that he remains human at every age of life; so that he does not become dried up, but remains fresh and alert and able to bring this freshness with him into the school. It is a completely different thing whether a teacher only looks into text books and imparts their content to the children, or whether he steps out of all this and, as human being pure and simple, confronts the great perspectives of the world. In this case he carries what he himself has absorbed into the atmosphere of the classroom when he enters it and gives his lesson.