The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the last few reflections, I have tried to introduce you to the ideas and impulses that have been moving proletarian circles for a long time, that are alive in proletarian circles, and that will contribute the most essential thing to what will be world-shaking events from the present into the near future. Today, in order to bring these considerations to some kind of conclusion tomorrow, I would like to point out some of the forces that are available for the present from the past, so to speak, that can be perceived by the observer, especially the observer of spiritual science, as forces that have been preparing themselves in the past, are now are there, but which are actually not as obvious as most people today believe, but which must be taken into account by anyone who, at any point in world development, and at one point everyone is indeed, wants to participate in the shaping of events - one can already speak of such a shaping of events - that will form from the present into the future.

What happens always happens out of certain forces that have their center here or there and then radiate in different directions. We have seen how, in the last four and a half catastrophic years, long-standing forces have been unleashed in many different directions, taking on the most diverse forms, so that what has happened in the last four and a half years has taken place shows clearly distinguishable epochs, even if they are short in time, and one cannot get by with simply referring to these events of the last four and a half years as the “war” of the last years. The events came to a warlike ignition at a certain point, I would say. But then quite different forces were added to the things that first, I might say, shone more illusively into human consciousness and were also interpreted in the most illusory way by the broadest circles. In a relatively short time, people's decisions and impulses of will became quite different from what they had been before.

All this must be carefully considered. In the future, one will see that here and there these or those impulses of will will emerge. In one place, in one center, people will want one thing, in another center they will want another. These impulses of will, which will emanate from groups of people, will interpenetrate and mutually oppose each other in the most diverse ways. There is no possibility of thinking of a harmony of the effective forces, but the only thing to be considered at first is that the individual really acquires understanding for what occurs here or there. Today very few people are at all prepared to assess this or that in the right way, because people have become too accustomed to judging things according to preconceived opinions, according to catchwords. In the course of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, people have gradually been educated in such a way that they have diverted their attention from what really matters. As a result, it is hardly possible today to easily assess the weight of the volitional impulses emanating from this or that group of people in the right way. The course of recent events has provided sufficient evidence of this. This evidence will one day be recorded by history. Perhaps sooner than people think, they will be recorded by history. But for those who want to form an opinion on events in any way, it is necessary that they develop the will today to assess the free events, to assess the events.

I say: there is plenty of evidence for what I have just said. One only needs to provide a striking example, a proof whose validity unfortunately still extends far into the present, in that in this respect, in places where the judgments should not be clouded, these judgments are often clouded. In the course of the past few years we have had the distressing experience that precisely people who were in positions of responsibility here or there in the most diverse fields, that people who had to direct or manage this or that or even just had to judge this or that – because a great deal depends on judgment, on so-called true public opinion, which is sometimes actually is the unexpressed thought of men and which has nevertheless a certain deep meaning -, we have made the experience and it still works in the present, that people in decisive places or also in non-decisive places, which however are still taken into consideration, have formed illusion judgments about everything, about which they should have had a healthy judgment. I have already mentioned the fact that the German people in particular have been given a bad reputation by foreigners, which has had more influence than one might think in the course of recent events: that is the reputation of the German Kaiser. This judgment of the German Emperor is now being somewhat corrected by the very latest events, but it is only just beginning to be corrected. The worst thing about these judgments was that it had an almost devastating effect, considering this man to be an important man. If he had not been considered an important man, but a highly insignificant one, not at all relevant to the events, as he was throughout the years since he came to power, then the terrible judgment of the foreign countries would not have come about, which – as history will show – has caused greater devastation than one can even imagine today.

Not true, it will certainly help to correct the situation if we look at the terrible fear that a few people in Germany had when this man, still reluctant to resign, fled to headquarters in the last few days, in order to find some information at headquarters that might help him to hold on, to somehow hold on to the old conditions. If one could correctly assess the voices of those who always advised him to return to Berlin, where he belongs, then one must say that this shows the weight of necessary judgments. Things must not only be thought, they must be weighed, they must be weighed. It is highly reckless when, for example, an article appeared in a Basel newspaper yesterday, effectively apologizing for the German Kaiser and accusing the German people. This German people has truly suffered enough over decades from all that has been achieved through the insignificance and theatrical exaggeration of all circumstances, through the tiresome bullying. And when, as happened in yesterday's Basler Zeitung, the German people are now being accused in the most foolish way, by making the foolish claim that this man was merely an exponent of the German people – which he was absolutely not – then this is an act of profound recklessness that must be condemned unconditionally. It is important today that such reckless judgments do not gain a foothold, especially in neighboring countries. People must look at such judgments, which are likely to poison the whole atmosphere into which we must enter.

These things must really be looked at today with a more penetrating eye. One must not sleep in the face of these things, one must be awake. One must really be able to take these things in with a non-emotional, but with a truly intellectual temperament, and one must feel an indignation, feel it intellectually, when such follies are brought into the world today that are likely to completely distort a proper judgment. And an objective judgment is necessary today above all. Try to take things really as they are to be taken today, by taking them in their weight, by not spreading opinions about things that stir up sentiment, with an indifferent humor, which is no humor, and let everything slide, since it is nevertheless about events that, each in itself, can have an enormous, far-reaching, world-historical significance. These things must be observed today against a more urgent background. And I would very much like to see something enter the hearts of those who want to profess anthroposophy that I would call a world-historical sense of judgment. I would like something to enter into your hearts that constitutes the importance of the moment, that you really get beyond the mood that has never been there since I tried to bring an anthroposophically oriented worldview into the world , that the mood would change from one that takes what is presented in Anthroposophy only as a Sunday afternoon sermon, as something intended only to warm the heart and to soothe, to temper the soul. No, everything based on an anthroposophically oriented worldview was intended to guide hearts and souls into that world current that has been gathering since the end of the nineteenth century, that pointed more and more to the significant, great events that have come to shake humanity and will continue to come more and more. Everything was geared towards directing hearts to the forces at work, not just to please people's ears with something that tempers souls and warms hearts a little, so that when they have absorbed what an anthroposophically oriented worldview offers, they can sleep with a certain more peaceful soul than they would otherwise be able to sleep with. Today, the individual is no longer able to look only to themselves, to simply receive a new religion to soothe their own heart. What is demanded of humanity calls upon the individual to participate in what surges and billows through human sociality.

To do this, it is necessary to look at things in a larger context. I admit that it was necessary in the course of the last few years, under the impulses that the anthroposophically oriented worldview was to bring to people's hearts, to bring a lot in quick succession because time was pressing, to let ideas quickly replace each other. If the material that had to be presented during the course of a week had sometimes been available a month or even longer, it could have been offered in small portions, which, due to the urgency of the times, necessarily had to be brought to the hearts quickly, it might have been absorbed more deeply into the souls. But that was not possible. Time was pressing, and events have shown that time was pressing. I admit that the speed with which the teachings of the anthroposophically oriented worldview were presented to the members of the anthroposophical movement sometimes led to the fact that the later erased the earlier. But one cannot be in such a serious matter without changing one's whole mind. And in a certain sense, the word that had to be spoken again and again at the time of the founding of Christianity is being repeated in the present: Change your mind. It is not enough that we accept this or that teaching in terms of content; what matters is that we change our whole way of thinking, that we strip away everything that was decisive for the direction of our judgment from the nineteenth century, which can truly be called, as I said earlier in reference to a saying, the century of indecent psychology, of indecent soul direction, where, because of that lack of trust in the divine spiritual powers of the soul of which I spoke yesterday, one can see only arbitrariness or only powerlessness or only inaction within the human soul, where one has never grasped anything like Fichte's saying: “Man can what he should; and when he says, ‘I cannot,’ he means, ‘I will not’.” This nineteenth century was a century of great scientific achievements. But these achievements were such that they paralyzed the will of men and awakened the belief that everything that comes out of the human breast comes out of it only as something purely accidental. That the Divine Eternal radiates out of every human breast and that every human being is responsible for representing the Divine Eternal through himself, that is what the nineteenth century completely suppressed, that is what the Goethean Age into the age of philistinism; that is what makes today's intelligentsia so unprepared for all that I have indicated to you and what runs through millions and millions of proletarian souls as an impulse.

Understanding is the first thing that matters in the present. Doing will only come when people have really tried to understand. None of the things that the bourgeoisie, for example, believes today could be good in the future, none of them will somehow attack the impulses that I have given you these days as the impulses of the proletariat striving from bottom to top. Some of the quackery emanating today from those who should have learned from the events of the past decades would be tragicomic if it were not so tragic.

So today, in order to prepare for something that is of immediate relevance and that I still have to present, I would like to say that we are creating a larger basic tableau, creating a background, so to speak. You see, everything that has an effect on modern society, everything that acts as forces that will discharge in the most diverse ways towards the future, comes from certain basic forces that interact in the most diverse ways. Yesterday I pointed out in conclusion that the struggle, which is a purely material struggle, will be staged more and more from the West and will plunge humanity into materialistic struggles. From the East, the blood will counteract what comes from the West as an economic struggle. We must interpret this word in more detail, for it will be extraordinarily important in the future in social terms and is important for anyone who wants to form a clear judgment. Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to talk to a wide variety of people about the things that should be taken from the active forces in order to give the future this or that direction here or there. At every opportunity to discuss something effective, I was almost horrified, I would say, oppressed by the short-sightedness that has gradually taken over the judgment of modern humanity. Today, it is taken for granted that anyone who wants to have a say in what is developing should know the national conditions here or there. But people do not seek this knowledge in the ways in which it must necessarily be sought today, and that is why grotesque and grandiose errors arise. The one error I have mentioned is only a partial error. In order to visualize the full weight of what is involved, it must be pointed out that the time is now running out when whole masses were driven into the most nonsensical judgments.

Yesterday I showed you that the majority of people, because that is the proletariat, have a power of belief that extends only to purely material things. I had to tell you: if the power of belief, which, for example, has developed over decades in the proletariat through Marxist impulses, if this power of belief had existed to even the slightest degree in the bourgeoisie, things would be somewhat different than they unfortunately are today. But it would then have been necessary for precisely those people who, by virtue of their social position, would have had the opportunity to take advantage of this opportunity — since they did not do so, they must do so in the future — to enter the paths to judgment, on which alone real judgment can be gained; I do not mean judgment about this or that, but judgment in general. Just consider that not just one nation, but people over a wide area, were able for years to consider two generals to be important people, who were in fact highly insignificant people: Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Such a distortion of judgment for entire broad sections of the population is a characteristic of our time. This is mainly due to the fact that people do not feel the responsibility involved in forming a judgment. Of course I know that one could say: Yes, if someone had already formed a judgment, a correct judgment, for example, about Ludendorff, who must be seen as a pathological nature, who must be seen as a nature that, so to speak, since the beginning of the war can no longer be judged from any other than a psychiatric point of view. I know that one could say: What would such a judgment have helped at a time when a judgment was not allowed to be pronounced? Of course that is true, but that is not the point. The point is that people should at least form their own judgment in the first place. And now it must be said all the more, because the power of events has meant that individual judgments have to be corrected by the so-called central powers. This power of events has not yet arrived for the correction of the judgments of the Entente and the American powers. And that would bring a tremendous disaster upon humanity if the correction of the judgments were also to wait until the power of events speaks; if now, for example, there were an inclination to worship the rulers of the Entente; if the hearts did not mature the resolve to see clearly how things really are. If worship of success should arise now, if the destiny of judgments should be determined only by the outer course of events, then it would have tremendously devastating consequences for the development of humanity. That will not be a sign of how one or the other will be able to express themselves under the gagging of judgment, but at least in his or her own way, man should form an independent judgment about that which is. One forms this opinion when one feels within oneself that one is not a personality flung into the world by chance, who can think whatever he wants, but when one feels that one is a member of the divine world order and that the power which places a judgment in this heart, in this soul, is a power to which one is responsible even with one's most intimate thoughts. In the course of the events of the last four and a half years, many things have happened. This or that has happened here or there. It can be said that almost nothing has happened about which, for example, the German government or the German military leadership has formed a correct judgment in a responsible position. They have judged wrongly about everything and continued to act under false judgment. These are clear proofs of how little the present and the recent past have educated people to judge things.

I said that I have had occasion to talk to a wide variety of people. People do have the opinion, in abstract terms, that one should get to know what is going on in the various popular movements, for example. They are satisfied when one or another journalist is sent to this or that area and writes his newspaper article, and people do not know what to make of it when the same principle is applied to the field of spiritual life, as is necessary in mathematics, for example, where elementary basic maxims are taken as starting points and the furthest conclusions are reached. When bridges or railways have to be built, people admit that science is needed to build them, a science that starts from the simplest things in order to arrive at the most far-reaching conclusions. But people want to do history, to make history, without any principles, and they will not be able to do anything with it when you tell them: No one can judge European conditions without at least knowing the elementary fact that on the Italian peninsula the sentient soul is the soul of feeling, which is primarily effective in the folk, in France the soul of mind or feeling, in the British Empire the soul of consciousness, and so on, as we have come to know it. These things are the basis of what happens, just as the multiplication table is the basis of arithmetic. And unless you start from these things in relation to knowledge of the real conditions in the world, you are an incompetent person, no matter what your position in the structure of social or political life in today's world, just as you would be an incompetent person in bridge building if you did not know the simplest things in mathematics. People must come to realize this; they must learn to see through it. For the future of humanity depends on people being able to see through this. That is what matters.

Because only when you know these basic facts can you understand the various forces that radiate into what is happening. You cannot properly assess the path of a country peddler to the city if you are unable to place the peddler's journey from the countryside to the city within the fabric of social life. Humanity was allowed to live through social life in an atavistically drowsy state to a certain extent, and in the nineteenth century people preserved this state in order to sleep more deeply. In the future, humanity will not be allowed to continue living in this way. Rather, it will be obliged to think about what the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on think about the course of human evolution and what they radiate into what people do. The smallest must be linked to the greatest in everyday judgment. If today you see councils, workers' and soldiers' councils, emerging in this or that country, if you are in danger of seeing workers' and soldiers' councils emerging everywhere except in the Entente countries, then you must be able to appreciate the significance of such a fact in the right way. What is needed above all is to gain a judgment about these things. Do not ask first: What is to be done? What is to be done will come by itself, if only a real judgment is present, so that the smallest thing can be linked to the great lines of world events. The great world event, that is the peculiarity of our time, is becoming topical in these days; it will no longer be a mere theory, but will become topical.

For example, in the course of European events – American events are only a colonial appendix to European events – forces are at play that have been in preparation for a long, long time. The observer of European conditions – and we have been pointing this out from various points of view in recent days – should pay attention to the particular configuration of, say, the social conditions in the British Empire, and he should pay attention to the particular configuration of the social conditions in Eastern Europe, in Russia and in Central Europe, and he should pay attention to the forces that are at play there. For on the surface of events these events mask themselves in many ways, and he who observes only the surface of events will easily arrive at, as one says, catchwords, one can also say catch-ideas, catch-concepts, through which he wants to master events. In many cases, superficial stuff is going on in people's heads today. But in people's impulses, forces are at play that have been preparing themselves not just for centuries, but for millennia, and that are only now beginning to take on their very significant form.

You see, there is no possibility that that international entity, which I have characterized as the mood of the proletariat, which is mainly nourished by Marxist ideas, in the broadest sense, of course, Marxist ideas, really spreads across Europe. That is an illusion of the proletariat. And since the proletariat will one day wield a certain power, this is a very pernicious illusion of the proletariat. We must not overlook the fact that the worst would come to pass if this illusion of the proletariat were to gain world domination, for then one would be compelled to overcome this domination again. It would be better to see how things are preparing and how they can be counteracted. Even assuming that the impulses of the proletariat come to power in certain areas, what would happen as a result? Well, they would come to power externally; you can kill as many people here or there as Bolshevism killed in Russia. But all these ideas are only suitable for plundering, only suitable for consuming the old and not for establishing the new. When the ideas of the proletariat are realized socially, when they become established, then the existing values will be gradually consumed, consumed in rapid progression. Please take only such facts – I will show you a few, they could be greatly increased – take just one such fact: the treasury in Russia, for example, still had an income of 2,852 million rubles in the ill-fated year 1917. Bolshevism broke in. It practiced plundering. The state revenue of Russia in 1918: 539 million rubles! That is about one-fifth of the previous year's revenue. From such figures you can calculate for yourselves the progression that must occur when plundering is carried out. One must not look at these things from the point of view of the judgments that are formed from above, but one must look at them from the point of view of how the objective course of events in human history unfolds under the influence of this fact. If this social order were to spread, one would arrive at zero, at nothing. But before this nothing happens, the reactions from the subconscious of people emerge here and there, and into the spreading proletarianism, which is permeated by Marxism, everything that has been prepared over the centuries, sometimes over millennia, in the beliefs, impulses, illusions or even follies of human beings must again mix in the most diverse centers. It will not mix in the same form in which it was there, but it will mix in a transformed form. Therefore, one must know it and be able to assess it in the right way.

Now the powers that are now partly doomed but partly still rule the world have always made it their more or less conscious or unconscious task to deceive people. How much has not been deceived by means of so-called historical instruction! In all kinds of countries, history is nothing more than a legend; history is only there to train people's minds to take the direction that seems pleasant to those in power and seems like the right direction. But the time has come when people will have to form their own judgment. Over the years, much has been done in this regard, precisely in order to correct one judgment or another. But today something else must be asked. Today, among the—one does not know how many to say in terms of numbers—among the hundreds of questions that arise urgently, above all the question must be asked: How did the various power relations, the various social structures come about, for which people here or there are enthusiastic or have been enthusiastic or have quickly forgotten how to enthuse in recent weeks? For years, humanity has lived by catchwords, catchwords such as “Prussian militarism” or “German militarism,” “League of Nations,” “international law,” and so on, which were just catchwords. These have dominated and confused people's minds. As I said, a lot has been said here to correct these judgments. But the important thing is to realize that, of course, these things will not appear in the same form in the near future, but we must know them so that we will recognize them when they appear in a new form.

It is not to be assumed, for example, that the Hohenzollern dynasty will reappear as such. But the feelings of the people among whom the Hohenzollern dynasty was able to live will continue to live, masquerading in a different form. Or, it is not even very likely that, even with the will of the Entente, which to a certain extent certainly exists, the unfortunate Habsburg dynasty will somehow resurface. But that is not the point. The sentiments which were able to keep this Habsburg dynasty in the hearts of men will live on. They will not, of course, go so far as to restore the Habsburg dynasty, but they will contribute to that reaction against proletarianism of which I spoke; they will reappear in quite a different form. Therefore, it is necessary to see through what will arise from the most diverse centers with a truly healthy judgment. Then it is a matter of looking at the circumstances, but looking with a gaze that is directed by reality. The facts as such have no value. In my books—you can find this in the most diverse places—I have spoken of fact fanaticism, which has such a devastating effect. This fanaticism for facts is rooted in the belief that what is seen outside is already a fact. It becomes a fact only by being harnessed to right judgment. But right judgment must have behind it the impulse of the right directing power.

Take an example. You know that I have often said that in Central Europe all folk impulses are primarily conditioned by the fact that in this Central Europe the folk spirit works through the I, in contrast to the most diverse regions of Western Europe. But the I has the peculiarity, I might say, of circling up and down among the other regions, which are fixed. So let us assume: in the south and west, the sentient soul, mind or emotional soul, consciousness soul, but in the center the I (it is drawn). The I can be in the consciousness soul, in the mind soul, in the sentient soul. It oscillates up and down, so to speak, it finds its way into everything. Hence the peculiarity: If you look to the west of Europe, you have, I would say, sharply defined national contours. There is sharply defined nationality, nationality that you can really, I would say, define, that is within a good framework. Look to Central Europe, preferably to the German people, and you have a nature that is defined on all sides. And now follow history, judging these basic maxims in the right way. Look wherever you want, in the west as far as America, in the east as far as Russia, and see how German nationality has worked as a ferment everywhere. It penetrates into these foreign regions, is within them today, and will have an effect in the future, even if it has denationalized itself, as they say; it penetrates into these regions because the I soars and descends. It loses itself in it. You can find this out quite precisely from the fundamental nature of the people. Just look at how this whole Russian culture is permeated with the German character, how hundreds of thousands of Germans have immigrated there over a relatively short period of time, how they have given the national character its stamp to infinite depths. Look at the whole of the East and you will find this influence everywhere. Go back centuries and ask the question today. Take Hungary, for example, which is supposedly a Magyar culture. This Magyar culture is based in many ways on the fact that all kinds of Germanic elements have been introduced there as a ferment. The whole northern edge of Hungary is inhabited by the so-called Zipser Germans, who have naturally been majoritized, tyrannized, denationalized, who have suffered unspeakably, but who have provided a cultural ferment. If we go further east, to Transylvania, we find the Transylvanian Saxons, who once lived on the Rhine. If we go further to the so-called Banat, there you have the Swabians, who immigrated from Württemberg and who have left behind a cultural legacy. And if I were to show you a map of Hungary, you would see here the broad border of German people who have become Magyars, here the Zipser Germans, in the southeast the Transylvanian Saxons, here in Banat the Swabians, not counting those who have become individualized. And the peculiarity of this German nationality is that, precisely because its national spirit works through the ego, it perishes outwardly as a nation, so to speak, but forms a cultural ferment. That is what can contribute to the assessment of the effective forces. That is such an effective force.

Let Andrássy and Karolyi work away, let an old politician in the old feudal sense, as they say, work away; the only reason that what they are doing is not a slogan is that we must take into account what will be brought about in the future from the subconscious of the people through such historical events, as I have shown you one - and hundreds of others are involved -, in the future. And that radiates into the rest of what is happening in Europe, and basically one has to proceed quite thoroughly if one wants to get to know this complicated structure of Europe today. For example, one must not forget, when judging an important participant in the future shaping of Europe, namely the European East, that to a certain extent everyone who spoke the truth about Russia in a historical context was not only a heretic, but also in mortal danger. Russian history is, of course, not much more than the other histories, but it is also a historical legend. For example, those who learn Russian history in the usual sense are not even aware of what was developed here a few years ago: that at about the same time as the Normans were exerting their influence in western Europe, Norman-Germanic influence was also being exerted in the east. And today's Russian history has an interest in showing, going back further and further, how everything, absolutely everything, comes from Slavic people, from Slavic elements, and also an interest in denying that the decisive element, the one element from which what is in the East is still deeply influenced today, comes from impulses that are Norman-Germanic in origin. You don't get much further back in Russian history than telling people – well, that's the stereotypical sentence that is always said –: We have a great country, but we have no order, come and rule us. That is more or less how it begins, while in truth it should be pointed out that what had spread in Russia by the time of the Mongol invasion was of Germanic-Norman origin and had a Germanic-Norman social configuration. But that means that something spread in Russia at that time that was overgrown by later conditions, which, I might say, has been preserved and conserved in its purest form, for example, within the social fabric of the British Empire. There you have a straight line of development. If you take the social development of the British Empire, you have a current that naturally changes over the centuries, but which is the straight line continuation of the old Norman-Germanic social constitution. In the east, towards Russia, you have the same current spreading out, but under the Mongol yoke, under the Mongol influence, I would say, from a certain point onwards it breaks off. That is to say, if the same thing that was prepared under Norman-Germanic influence in the social structure of the British Empire at the time of William the Conqueror and developed until the nineteenth century to occupy its present position in the world had developed further in Russia, Russia would be similar to England.

Nowhere has anything that has worked more deeply in the hearts and souls of people than in Russia. Now, we must not forget: what is it that comes with the Norman-Germanic influence? This Norman-Germanic influence, in working itself out, has also had counter-effects in the West. I say: here it has developed in a straight line, it has developed in the straightest line, but it has also had counter-effects here. What it encountered here as a counter-effect, from which it emancipated itself to a certain extent and which modified its developmental current, is, on the one hand, the Western Roman Catholic Church and, on the other, Romanism in general, which contains an abstract legal element and an abstract political element. So that we see the national influence, from which all the stratifications of the estates, all the formation of classes and castes, as they are found within the British essence, originate, joined by what came from the church and what came from Romanism. All this is at work in it, but in such a way that, to a certain extent, the British character emancipated itself early on from the profound influence of the Church, which then continued to have an effect and flourish in Central Europe and still does so today; but that, comparatively speaking, this character emancipated itself less from the Romanesque-abstract element of legal-political thinking. The truth is that this Norman-Germanic element has also extended into the various Slavic areas, which have been present on the territory of present-day Russia since ancient times, as the dominant element, as the element that has shaped the social structure.

This Norman-Germanic nature is based on a certain view, which then finds expression in social facts. This Norman-Germanic nature is based on the view that what has blood relationship, closer blood relationship, should also have this blood relationship in an inherited or hereditary way in a social way, based on a certain social institution of the clan and the superclan, the nearest family clan and the clan standing above it, which then leads to the prince, who rules over the sub-clan, the clan that goes further. This is what a social constitution brings about according to a certain blood configuration.

This is in the sharpest possible contradiction to what, for example, the Romanesque-legal-political essence assumes. The Romanesque-legal-political essence brings abstract connections everywhere, sets up everything according to contracts and the like, not according to blood. This is something that brings the facts less to mind than to paper, something radical. Only one thing was thoroughly diverted by this Germanic-Norman nature. If it had worked alone – this is, of course, a hypothesis, it could not have worked alone – but if it had worked alone, there would never have been a monarchical state constitution in any European territory. For a monarchical state constitution does not lie in the development of those social impulses that emanate from the Norman-Germanic essence, but rather, this Norman-Germanic essence is based on the impulse of an organization according to clans, according to family configurations, which are relatively individual and independent of each other, and only from certain points of view do they unite under a prince, who then controls the overarching clan. And above all: apart from this, a monarch could never have taken hold of this Norman-Germanic essence, and pure monotheism could never have come from this essence, because it came from the south – I would actually say from the south-east – through the theocratic-Jewish element. If the Norman-Germanic element had remained purely isolated, it would be easier today to assert the rightful monotheism, which in turn does not accept the abstract single God, but rather the succession of hierarchies, angels, arch angeloi and so on, and not the nonsense that the one God, for example, protects two armies that are furiously facing each other, the Christian and the Turk at the same time, because he is the one God of the whole world. The nonsense that proliferates as abstract monotheism would never have been able to take hold, because within this element, abstract monotheism was not present. The people were pagans in the modern sense, that is, they recognized the most diverse spiritual beings that guide the forces of nature, and thus lived in a spiritual world, albeit in an atavistic way. What monotheism is, a nonsense, was only imposed from the southeast by the theocratic element. That is why it is so difficult today to get across what must necessarily be accepted: the diversity of spiritual beings that guide natural forces and natural events, the gods. But it was on Russian soil that the damping down of what came from the north took place to a certain extent. Some time ago I even talked about the name Russian here. You will remember that I pointed out that the name Russian indicated where these people came from in the north. They called themselves Vaeringjar.

But the actual idea of the state is a construct that should be carefully studied. This idea of the state comes, in a certain respect, from the same corner of the weather where many other significant things for Europe come from. Especially when discussing such things, one must remember that history can only be considered symptomatically. When we consider some phenomenon that is an external fact, we must recognize it as a symptom. In Russia, as long as this Norman-Germanic influence was present and shaping the social structure, there was no sign of any state idea. The Slavic areas were, so to speak, closed in on themselves, and what had spread was what I have called the clan idea. The clan idea has entwined this in a network-like way. The various closed Slavic areas had within them what modern man might call the democratic element, but at the same time linked to a certain longing for a lack of domination, with a certain insight that centralized ruling powers are not actually needed to bring order to the world, but only to create disorder. This lived in these closed Slavic areas. And in what extended from the Norman-Germanic element, the clan idea actually lived, the idea that was connected with blood.

Now came the Mongol invasion. These Mongols are indeed portrayed as being quite evil. But the worst thing they did was actually demanding high tributes and taxes, and they were more or less satisfied when people paid their taxes, of course in the form of natural produce. But what they brought – and please take this as symptomatic and don't think that I am saying that the idea of the state came from the Mongols – what they brought at that time, taken symptomatically, is the idea of the state. The monarchical idea of the state comes straight from this corner of the world from which the Mongols also came, only that it was brought to the further west of Europe earlier. It comes from that corner of the world that one finds when one follows the culture, or, for that matter, the barbarian wave that rolled over from Asia. What remained in Russia of the Mongols is essentially the idea that a single ruler with his paladins has to exercise a kind of state rule. This was essentially borne by the monarchical idea of the khans, and that was adopted there. In Western Europe it was only adopted earlier, but it came from the same weather angle. And essentially it was a Tartar-Mongolian idea that put together the so-called state structure in Russia. And so for a long time precisely that which characterized the culture of the West from many points of view proved to be without influence in Russia: feudalism, which was actually without influence in Russia because, by skipping monarchy spread, which was always disturbed in the West, initially by feudalism, by the feudal lords, who actually always fought the central monarchical power and who were an antithesis to the monarchical power.

The Roman Church is the second. This was ineffective in the East because the Eastern Church had already separated from the Western Church in the tenth century. The Greek-Roman, Roman-Greek education, as it has worked in the West and has contributed very much to the development of the modern bourgeoisie, has been ineffective in Russia. Therefore, the monarchical idea of the state, which has been brought in by the Mongolians, has taken its deepest roots there.

You see, you have a few of the impulses that one must know, because they will appear in the most diverse ways, masked, changed, in metamorphosis. Here or there you will see this or that flash up. You will only appreciate it correctly if you appreciate it from this point of view, which I have now stated. And above all, you will recognize the importance of the fact that within the establishment of world domination by the English-speaking population, which I have been talking about for many years now, the training of the consciousness soul is essentially effective, that this is precisely appropriate to our age, and that a healthy judgment should be applied in assessing the circumstances.

The social question will play a major role in the shaping of conditions in the future. The social thinking that already exists among the proletariat can only lead to overexploitation, to degradation, to destruction. It is a matter of really realizing that the shaping that the social question assumes, the shaping in particular that the proletarian movement will assume, makes it necessary that what today is furthest removed from spirituality as proletarian feeling must be brought closer to spirituality. What seems to be furthest apart on the outside is intimately related on the inside: proletarian will and spirituality. Of course, the proletarian today fights against spirituality with his hands and feet – one can say with his hands and feet, because he does not fight much with his head. But what he wants, without knowing it, cannot be achieved without spirituality. Spirituality must join forces with it. And it must join forces in all areas. And one must really acquire a feeling that one is at an important turning point in time. The mood that has prevailed in the most diverse areas in the nineteenth century must pass.

If you observe individual events and evaluate them correctly, you can already see, I might say, if I may express myself trivially, which way the wind is blowing. Through Mr. Englert's kindness I was recently given a letter written from Russia, which very vividly describes present-day Russian conditions. It also talks about art. The way in which people are introduced to art is very interesting; but what they paint, these people who are brought in directly from the factory, people who have lung diseases and can no longer work in the factory and are then placed in an artistic institution so that they learn to paint something there, so that they are driven from the proletariat into art, the painting – they don't paint quite like they do in our dome, but you can see it, they start painting in such a way that from this beginning, what is painted in our dome will ultimately result, even if it is still called Futurism today. That is on the march. Especially in those things where there is no programmatic approach, it becomes clear what impulses lie in the present. Those who look at programs – not to mention government programs – will always go astray. Those who look at the impulses that develop alongside and between the programs, namely from the unconscious, will see much that is radiating in the world today. You can be quite sure that the paths will be found, even if it is difficult. Once people begin to read something straight from the impulses that are emerging today in the proletariat in such a primitive, predatory way, I will not say the things themselves, which are imperfect and must be replaced by others, but things like my mysteries or the anthroposophical books, they will only be read with the right interest by the better elements that are streaming upwards from the proletariat, while what the bourgeoisie licked its fingers around in the nineteenth century: Gustav Freytag's 'Soll und Haben' or similar works, or Gottfried Keller, will interest no one. Today, for example, it is an insult to humanity to mention Gottfried Keller in the same breath as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. While Conrad Ferdinand Meyer represents an element of the future, an element that actually contains true spiritual life for the future, Gottfried Keller is the bourgeois poet of the sleeping humanity of Seldwyler Switzerland.

This must be seen everywhere and in all areas. There will be no interest in the future for this when people put models in studios and imitate what nature can do much better and then delight in it, whether it looks really natural or whether it is really like the model. After that, one will demand that something is there in the world that is not made by nature itself. Understanding for this will have to be prepared. Therefore, the model as such had to be fought against here as well. You remember how I once spoke about art from this point of view years ago. An understanding must be created that one follows the impulses that are there. For example, the stupidity that people want to learn about how the people live, say, by reading Berthold Auerbach's “Village Stories” or similar stuff, where a person who knows the people, well, as one who goes out into the countryside on Sunday afternoons and looks at the people from the outside, describes how one has so beautifully described the people, must end. That is not what matters. What matters is not observing the temporary, but the eternal that lives in man must be observed more and more. That is what matters.

We will talk more about these things tomorrow.

Dear attendees, I must apologize again today for the cold that I brought with me yesterday and which has not yet been completely overcome, so I do not know how I will manage the lecture with my voice.

Now, dear listeners, when we listen to the most ancient voices that have emerged within the development of humanity with regard to the essence of man himself and the striving for knowledge of this human essence, it is without doubt one of the most significant sayings that we hear resounding from ancient Greece, for example: “Know Thyself”. When this injunction from the ancient seats of wisdom is addressed to man, it certainly does not mean that one should only bring one's bodily inner experiences to a kind of self-knowledge; rather, it means that man should strive to fathom his own being, that which constitutes his dignity as a human being, that which lies at the root of his destiny as a human being. And it can be said that ever since this word first resounded in human history, throughout ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, despite all its aberrations, right up to the present day, this word has become a guiding principle. And a large part of the scope of the human spirit's endeavors, a large part of what has been brought up from the deepest foundations of the soul's life, all of this has culminated in fathoming the human being itself in connection with the world being and with the development of the world.

And precisely in the heyday of natural science, in that period of the nineteenth century in which the greatest achievements of natural science were made, achievements that cannot be overestimated, in that period humanity, especially its most enlightened minds, increasingly came to despair of the possibility of such self-knowledge, such knowledge of the human being. People came to believe that human knowledge could only include that which could be expressed from material, sensual, visible experiences, insofar as one has to acknowledge that something lives and moves in the human being like a soul or spirit. because one thought one saw the limits of knowledge of nature in the right way – one said to oneself: one cannot approach this actual human being, this human consciousness, with real knowledge, which after all can only be knowledge of nature. And so doubt arose more and more about whether we could ever achieve what was set before humanity as the highest demand in the “know thyself!” of the ancient wisdom sites.

It can be said that if it were so, then man would have to renounce the fulfillment of that ancient demand; the possibility would be lost that man has firm ground for his soul life under his feet. It would be lost for man because the knowledge of his dignity and his essence, his destiny, would be lost; it would also be lost for man the possibility to develop a secure sense of purpose and a joyful, joyful, but also energetic desire to work in the world.

It was therefore no wonder that at a time when, on the one hand, science was increasingly drawing attention to the fact that it itself – and it believed that it was the only possible, scientific knowledge – could not arrive at a true knowledge of man , that because people actually cannot live without such self-knowledge in truth, they strove from the deep longing of their soul for such self-knowledge and for an understanding of the connection with the world by other means than the scientific ones.

And so, in modern times, the dissatisfaction with science itself led many people to feel an ever-increasing need to seek out mysticism. When science established its boundaries, the mystic believed that by immersing himself in the inner being of man, he could penetrate to the eternal core of this being, and thus to the point in the human being where man is connected to the divine-spiritual, where man is connected to the moral order of the world, and so on and so on.

It must be said that wonderful descriptions of inner experiences are often the result of this mystical contemplation. The mystics believe that in this way, and in many other ways, they are able to dispense with the clear scientific method of knowledge and to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the relationship between man and the world only by delving into the inner being of man himself.

Between the two cliffs – the natural science on the one hand, the mystical on the other – the research of the world is placed, of which I was allowed to explain the principles of its search and striving to you yesterday, my dear attendees.

This research into a worldview is neither pure natural science, although – as I emphasized yesterday – it certainly wants to learn its cognitive discipline, its scientific responsibility, from natural science in its most exact form. But this spiritual research is also not mysticism; because precisely when one advances on those paths, which I described yesterday, to a real human self-knowledge, then one simultaneously discovers that what today is almost exclusively called mysticism is basically only a further deepening of the ordinary human memory or ability to remember. Understandably, only the mystics do not see through this more precisely. Whether the mystic draws what is from within from his own inner being or whether it comes from the often very, very dubious channels of mediumistic predisposition through other people, it is nothing other than a raising of that which, at some time or other, even if in the most hidden way, even if it has remained so unconscious , through external observation in ordinary life, has entered the soul and developed in the soul, but then submerged into the physical-bodily organization; so that the mystic fathoms nothing else than how his own memory representations have been transformed by the organic powers of the physical-bodily-etheric human being. The one who honestly engages in true soul and spiritual research in the way described yesterday comes to this conclusion.

If the one described yesterday is pursued further, then on the one hand it comes to grief on the cliff of natural science, but on the other hand also on the cliff of mere mysticism. Natural science rightly tells us from its point of view: There are certain limits that cannot be transgressed by the scientific method, by the combining intellect, by measuring, counting, calculating, by research with the scales. When science asserts these limits from its point of view, one must give it full credit, but only if it sticks to its assertion: With everything that can be found in this way, which respects the usual limits of knowledge of nature, one does not come close to man.

This is the first experience, dear attendees. Natural science introduces us in a wonderful way to the realms of external nature, insofar as they carry the purely natural-law entities within them. Natural science also leads us up to that which man carries within him of external nature, of his organization, which he absorbs from this external nature. Only, this external natural science removes us from man. It does not allow us to approach the true essence of the human being.

My dear audience, only by looking at this matter can we understand why we actually have scientific limits to our knowledge. How is it that we come to certain points that we cannot get beyond with scientific knowledge?

Now, as I said yesterday, probably to give the pure scientists a slight shudder, I pointed out that a force of the human soul can become a power of knowledge if it is developed further and further in the sense that I characterized it yesterday: that is the power of human love. Love can be developed in such a way that it can be connected to scientific research. What is the aim of scientific research? It wants to examine things and processes objectively. It wants man to add nothing of his own imagination or prejudices to the entities of nature, to the processes of nature, but to be able to disregard himself completely and let the things and entities of nature speak for themselves. That is the ideal of natural science.

The next step can no longer be taken theoretically, no longer through observation; the next step can only be seen in an even greater self-denial. One already practices self-denial when one excludes all prejudices, all subjective desires, and everything subjective in general, when researching nature. If you go a step further, you arrive at love as a power of knowledge, where you completely give yourself up and identify with the things and processes you want to explore. Then, by making love the power of knowledge, you take nature research a significant step further into the spiritual.

But this, dear attendees, also leads to the realization that all talk of the boundary still stems from a last remnant of human egoism, perhaps even from a very hidden human egoism. Man does not want to go out of himself. He wants to assert himself. He wants to remain firmly rooted in his ego. Therefore, he sets limits to his knowledge, which he does not want to exceed. When he says, “He wants,” he must go out of himself, must enter into the world, must make love the power of knowledge.

All the talk of limits to knowledge in the course of the nineteenth century was nothing more than the unnoticed emphasis: we as human beings also want to remain cognitively selfish; we do not want to go out of ourselves, we want to set ourselves limits that delimit our [nature], that we do not want to cross, into the nature of things.

Now, my dear attendees, once this knowledge emerges in humanity with the right feeling, in deep feeling and with the necessary will impulses, Talking about the limits of knowledge is the last remnant of human egoism, but it is the assertion of a well-hidden egoism, then the great impulse will actually be there to no longer regard the limits of science as insurmountable in relation to the spiritual. For transcending these limits then means nothing more than throwing off the last unnoticed and thus all the more stubbornly championed human egoistic forces.

I would say that there is a scientific-ethical trend, which on the one hand stands as a shining ideal of spiritual research in the face of the one obstacle – natural science. And I would say that the other obstacle – the mystical one – is tempting and seductive, because it is connected with what man needs to stand in life as an individual.

During his life on earth, the human being needs his memory. This memory must submerge into the physical organism. The memory thoughts make use of the physical organism. There the human being feels himself in his own being. And when he, as a mystic, conjures up the transformed memory image or when he allows himself to be conjured up through a medium, then he associates such inner pleasure, such inner satisfaction with what has been transformed through his own being that he likes to dwell on it and likes to indulge in the illusion: That which satisfies him so voluptuously from the depths of his own being – I would almost say – must also be connected with the most valuable thing in the world, it must point to the place where man is connected to the eternal sources of existence.

You see, dear readers, these are the reasons why spiritual research, as it is meant here and as I have to represent it to you, can neither stop at mere natural science nor fall back on mysticism; but this spiritual research realizes that mere natural science never comes close to man. Mere research into nature investigates the outer, uninhabited, and uninhabited world, and only comes to recognize: in this world of animal, inorganic, plant, animal organization, man is the final point - not a separate being - the most highly developed animal, the final point of extra-human development.

Natural science cannot escape from the world, nor can it lead to man. And mysticism enters into man, but it does not come from man; it does not come from man to the world; just as natural science does not come from the world to man, mysticism does not come from man to the world!

Cultivating knowledge of the world and knowledge of man by wrestling with the limits of science on the one hand, with what one has acquired as soul culture and soul discipline and scientific responsibility, and then immerses, [on the other side] like the true mystic, but now not in a dreamy way into one's own memory, but immerses with clear concepts, to which one surrenders — as I described it yesterday — in a strengthened and activated thinking. In this way one first arrives at a realization of what I described yesterday, not at first at an external knowledge of the world, not at an inner exploration of one's own human nature – insofar as the physical body is involved, as it always is in mysticism – but one arrives at the tableau of one's life, where one, as in a single moment, one sees what has been working in one as one descended from the spiritual world and was clothed with a physical, earthly body; one sees what arises as human self-knowledge, that mighty tableau of life in which one sees how one has found one's way in the course of one's life on earth out of one's inner forces, out of the forces of sympathy and antipathy to this or that person, out of one's way to this or that other event in life. In this tableau of life one feels for the first time lifted out of one's physical body. You grasp the higher human being, not yet the highest, but the higher human being, and you forget the physical organization for the moments of this realization, to which you naturally have to come back again and again.

Now, dear attendees, I explained yesterday, but at the same time, that one is able to ascend to a higher level of knowledge, that one is able to erase this self-knowledge, this tableau of life.

But then one comes to the realization of that which arises from the deep silence of the human soul, where everything has been eradicated, including that which makes up the earthly course of life. But then, when one maintains an alert consciousness with the inner silence of the soul, after one has wiped out not only all remaining ideas, but one's own soul content — as I explained yesterday — then one attains the insight of one's still higher human being: the one one was before one descended from the spiritual-soul world into the physical earth world. One arrives at an understanding of what one was in a purely spiritual-soul world among spiritual-soul beings, among whom one lived before one entered earthly existence, and how one lives here in earthly existence among people and among the other beings of the natural kingdoms.

Now, my dear attendees, such knowledge not only fills the human powers of perception, it not only fills the human mind. Yesterday I indicated how it comes from the whole person. Therefore, it also penetrates to the whole person. It teaches us about the human being in his development; it gives us the basis for guiding the development of the human being in the right way in earthly life. For we look up to that in man which has been drawn into the child, that is, into that which appears to us first in its physical organization, and which has been drawn into this physical organization of the child as a soul-spiritual being that has received from the parents the earthly, physical, bodily garment.

We, as educators, then stand before the developing human being with the awareness that in this developing human being, this spiritual-soul element, which he was before his earthly existence, reveals itself more and more in the physical-sensual from day to day, from week to week, from year to year. In this way, we learn to stand before the developing human being in a new way.

It is truly a wonderful thing to see how the child's features gradually become more and more distinct, how the chaotic movements with which the child enters the world from its innermost being become more and more distinct. Observing the developing child is like confronting the greatest mystery in the world. And this mystery dawns, it gradually dawns when one sees how, in this childlike physical organization, that which has descended from the spiritual and soul worlds permeates more and more the physical, molds it, I would say, as it does with the moral and hygienic. One learns to look at human development in a new way.

What belongs to such a way of looking at human development – if I may express myself in this way, ladies and gentlemen – is above all that inner courage of the soul, which ordinary natural science and also ordinary mysticism do not give, but which one learns to develop when, on the one hand, one unfolds the activated thinking, as I described it yesterday, but on the other hand, one also develops the deep silence of the soul. And finally, love as a power of knowledge. Then one has the courage to judge a person as science judges external natural things. Only something completely different comes out of such a, I might say truly natural, because it goes beyond the limits of ordinary science - if I may use the paradox - scientific spiritual research.

We look at the child and see very clearly how certain life epochs unfold in the child. We see how the child develops up to the significant stage of changing teeth around the age of seven.

Dear attendees! Just think about what a very remarkable thing it is that happens after the first life epoch of the human being when the teeth change. Do not think that the change of teeth is something that concludes with the first phase of a person's life. When a person gets their second teeth, they sprout and release forces from within that come to a conclusion with their second teeth. This is because a person does not undergo another change of teeth. It is a final event of its kind. You just have to look at things in the right way.

On the other hand, we must be clear about one thing: the forces that push and sprout forth in the teeth are rooted in the human organism as a whole. These are forces and impulses that interweave and permeate the whole human being during the first seven years of life. The change of teeth is an external manifestation, a symptom. But the whole human organism, the whole human being, comes to a conclusion with this event of the change of teeth. What is concluded there? From such a knowledge of the world and the human being, as I have described it yesterday and today, one gets the courage to now investigate these things in the right way. One says to oneself the following: Yes, but with this change of teeth, something tremendous also changes in relation to the human soul.

Thus, more and more – this can be seen by anyone who has learned to observe – more and more, as the change of teeth occurs around the seventh year, what can truly be called memory or remembrance arises. Now someone who has become quite clever in modern psychology will immediately come along and say: Yes, but we know that children have memory and recall even before the seventh year, that it is precisely at this time that memory is particularly well developed. That seems to be correct at first. But the person who asserts this is only basing it on things that he does not really understand, because in truth, around the seventh year, something quite different emerges from what we already call memory earlier, and we should only call it memory after the seventh year of life.

For what is it in a child up to the age of seven? It is a habitual performance of the same mental processes that it has practised, that it practises by imitating its environment. The fact that a constant representation occurs again and again in a child has the same reason as that a certain practised hand movement is performed again and again out of habit.

Everything we address as memory up to the seventh year is not actually memory, but soul habits. With the seventh year, these habits, these soul habits, become more refined and what we actually call memory becomes an inner movement through life phenomena, based on ideas. The first thing, which was still completely bound to the organism, functions together with the organism as habits of the soul, detaches itself in the seventh year and becomes first spiritual-soul-like.

You see, my dear audience, this gives us the opportunity to say: Yes, what lived in the child during the first period of life until the change of teeth, when, for example, the child's brain develops most plastically up to the age of seven, — then it is actually already essentially formed according to its inner demands —, what lives down there in the body? That, ladies and gentlemen, lives down in the body, which later emancipates itself from the body and becomes an independent soul-imagination, memory.

In external natural science today, we have the courage to speak of the fact that during certain processes in the body, heat remains hidden – latent heat, we say – because through certain processes this heat is released. We can measure it with a thermometer. We speak of bound and free heat. We cannot measure bound heat with a thermometer; we can measure free heat with a thermometer. The physicist has this courage of exploration for external processes. The spiritual researcher must receive it and make it applicable to practical life.

What we see in the child from the age of seven, from the year we start school, becoming more and more soul-like, more and more independent, was not yet so independent in the first seven years of life. It lived as growth forces within the physical body. It lived as formative, plastic forces within the physical body and ceases to live as a whole in the physical body when the change of teeth occurs.

You see, dear audience, once you become aware of such an important transition, of such a significant metamorphosis in human experience, then you also continue. Then you look at how the child is up to this change of teeth. And then you discover something very strange in this child. You discover that up until this change of teeth, the child is completely given over to the sense organs. The child is completely absorbed in its surroundings!

And if we want to compare it to something that is present in this childlike organization of the first epoch of life, then we must point, for example, to the human eye or the human ear – in short, to a sense organ. The child is entirely eye, entirely ear, in a soul-spiritual way! Just as the eye simply takes in what is around it and imitates it inwardly, so the child takes in every gesture, every word, everything that those around him allow to happen, and takes it in like a whole sense organ, imitating it inwardly. Therefore, everything that lives in the child's environment becomes part of the child's entire physical organization during the first seven years. The child takes everything in spiritually and mentally, and it becomes part of the physical organization.

Let us imagine: a father with a violent temper lives next to the child. Those who can observe these things can see how this father with a violent temper, who lives next to the child, is not only perceived by the child in such a way that the child sees the gesture of violent temper, that it is somehow repulsed by everything that comes out of a fit of anger, but the child feels the moral quality of the anger, what the anger morally carries as a value within itself! The child senses the moral qualities of its environment, with gestures, with what it experiences inwardly and imitates.

This, however, makes us aware of how we have to look at how the child really experiences the moral and intellectual aspects of his environment. We should be clear about the imponderable forces that are unfolding, so that we should not even allow ourselves to have impure or immoral thoughts around the child. For the child perceives precisely that which has an effect, especially in the first seven years, through the subtlest gestures, the twinkle of an eye, the emphasis of a word, and countless details that we, with our coarse adult intellects, cannot even imagine. And it carries this down into its physical organization.

What grows out of the father's violent temper or the mother's negligence does not become just any mental quality in the child; it becomes the density of the vascular walls, the efficiency or inefficiency of the blood circulation, in breathing, in the finest ramifications, in the finest activities. What the child acquires through imitation from its environment in the first seven years of life goes straight into the physical organism, in which even memory is only a habit that is tied to the physical organism. The soul and spirit emancipate themselves with the change of teeth. And when we get the child into school, this whole life of the child, as I have described it, enters into a different metamorphosis.

In the first years of life, the child is entirely a sensory organ. It attentively absorbs what is happening in its environment, whether in gestures or in these or those actions. The child is devoted to the actions of its environment, not only sensually but also morally! But with the change of teeth, the child begins to be more and more devoted to that which is no longer just a gesture or an action, but which reveals itself in the gesture, in the action, in a way that is appropriate to speech.

Dear attendees! Let us not only understand language – although that is the most important language – in terms of what we express externally with words, through phonetics, but let us understand language as everything we do in life – in that what we do becomes an expression of our human character – we understand everything that a person reveals about their own nature, how they reveal it through language, we have to say that the child becomes receptive to this linguistic expression of the other person, especially the educating person, the teacher, from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. A child is an imitative being in the sense described until it has changed all its milk teeth; from then until sexual maturity, the child is a being who lives entirely under the self-evident authority of whoever in his environment expresses himself verbally to him.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen! You will not expect the man who wrote “The Philosophy of Freedom” thirty years ago and who is now speaking to you to develop any kind of unjustified reactionary-passive desire for you, or to speak of authority in an unjustified way. But precisely the person who wants to see freedom represented in human life as I have tried to present it in my “Philosophy of Freedom” already in the early nineties, knows that this right feeling of freedom, the right experience of freedom, can only come to people if the self-evident authority of teachers and educators is present in the child between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

Today we no longer appreciate in the right way what it means for our whole later life to have looked up with deep reverence to what was given to us in the person of an educator in the form of truth, beauty and goodness. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, a person is not organized in such a way that truth, beauty and goodness can appear to him. At this age, the human being is organized in such a way that the true, the beautiful and the good must appear to him through the adult human being!

Later in life, when one has faced an unquestionable authority at this age, one has said, as a matter of course: something is true because this authority recognizes it as true; something is good because this authority recognizes it as good and presents it as such; something is beautiful because this authority finds it beautiful! The world must approach the child through the medium of the human being.

Dear attendees! In this way, one gradually learns to look at the human being in earthly life when one becomes aware, through the research method that I described yesterday – and today could only hint at – of the fact that a spiritual being lived before becoming a human being on earth through conception. We were all spiritual-soul beings among other spiritual-soul entities before we descended into earthly life. If we look at the developing human being in the right way, at what was its prenatal, pre-earthly existence, we also stand, I would like to say, with the right piety, but also with the right reverence for what is revealed and developed and revealed so wonderfully and so mysteriously from day to day, from week to week in the developing human being, in the child.

But then one also looks at what then presents itself as a connection between the spiritual-supernatural life of the human being and the physical-sensory life. One sees the child, how it, devoted to its surroundings, imitates these surroundings. And now we remember that we can only achieve the highest form of spiritual existence, which man can achieve through loving devotion, through the development of love as the power of knowledge, because man, by is in a spiritual-soul world before his earthly existence and after his death, knows how selfish he is here on earth, so he must then be devoted to the other spiritual beings.

When you understand how man is given over to the spiritual and soul world in the supersensible existence, you realize how man brings himself with him into childish existence, before he changes this around at the change of teeth or at sexual maturity, when he becomes more and more selfish and selfish, as he physically relives what he was in his pre-earthly existence. And now we learn to look at the child in the right way: How does the child actually live in the world? Even if it sounds paradoxical, one may say: The child lives completely devoted to its surroundings! But that is the religious feeling. That is to say: the child lives, I would say bodily-religiously; through its nature, through the elementary of its organization, the child is bodily-religiously devoted to its surroundings. This is the case until the second change of teeth; at that point, the child is completely given over to a religious devotion in his physical organization, to a religious devotion to his surroundings. You see, this becomes spiritual-soul in the second age between the change of teeth and sexual maturity.

We must be clear about the fact that what was, I might say, taken for granted – if I may use the paradox – as physical-religious disorganization, we must now, as teachers and educators, bring into the spiritual-soul. We educate this when we ourselves stand as the self-evident authority for truth, beauty, goodness before the child. Then we gradually bring it about that what was first in the body down below in the child, until the teeth change, works its way up into the spiritual and soul life. Then, as the child reaches sexual maturity, it becomes entirely spirit. It comes to us as that which we call religion in social human life.

How do we best establish this religion in social life when we understand human education in this way? We establish it best when we let the child imitate the right thing in the right way from the first years of life until the change of teeth, when we do not want to give it commandments, but when we stand before it in such a way that it can imitate us until the change of teeth, and after the change of teeth until sexual maturity, it can look to us as the model for truth, beauty, and goodness. Then the child develops in full freedom into a religious human being, in that with puberty the spiritual awakens from the soul-like, just as the soul awakens from the physical with the change of teeth. In this way we gradually learn to see how the human being develops, and we also learn to use such human development as an educational principle.

Dear attendees! Spiritual research, as described here, is not a theory; it leaves that to mere natural science, to those who are opponents of spiritual science today for quite understandable reasons, who consider themselves practical people. Their reasons are well known. For the spiritual researcher first familiarizes himself with what the opponents have to say. Only when he has become sufficiently familiar with this does he feel fully responsible for representing what grows out of the soil of spiritual research itself.

Spiritual research aims to be thoroughly practical, to bring a full life into practice. But when it comes to a full life, people who think they are particularly clever in a materialistic sense are about as clueless as a farmer who finds a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron. Someone says to him: “Yes, look, that's a magnet, it attracts another iron, it can be used for all kinds of important things!” “Oh well,” says the farmer, “magnet? I don't see any magnet, I'll shoe my horse with it!” That's how the theoretical materialists seem, who don't want to know anything about spiritual research. They see everything as a horseshoe because they see nothing of the magnet! The supersensible is only hidden for those who only want to see the outwardly materialistic. If one really wants to be practical, if one wants to use the forces of the world in the right way in the progress of culture and civilization, then one must be able to really shine a light into the physical-material in the indicated way.

That is why spiritual research, I would say, did not get stuck in theory because of its destiny. Through the forces that have been developed out of social thinking by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, we were able to found the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, where it is really shown how an educational practice can be developed out of the consciousness of the full, spiritual, moral and religious human nature, which really takes into account the development of the human being as a whole.

This Waldorf school was founded a little over three years ago with about 150 children. Today, it has well over 700 children in six classes, and we have to run most classes in parallel classes. And the teachers, who now number many, are trying to educate the human being from out of the fullness of humanity so that the person can then grow into practical life out of this fullness of humanity.

For the spiritual science that is advocated here – I already spoke about it yesterday – grows out of the full nature of the human being, and therefore it does not want to stop at theoretical descriptions, but wants to flow directly into life, I would say.

Allow me to illustrate this with a particular example in a few concluding sentences. Spiritual science, as it is represented here, has been represented by me for more than two decades. I have been allowed to speak here in Kristiania for many years about the most diverse subjects of this spiritual science.

Now, after a decade of spiritual science, the idea arose in certain individuals who had devoted themselves entirely to the truth of this spiritual science with their common sense. These individuals were approached with the idea of building a structure for this spiritual science. In particular, my mysteries were to be used to express artistically what now flows not in some kind of straw symbolism or allegory, but from a truly artistic source, but from the same source as the idea of spiritual science — that is what I tried to present in my mysteries. At first they had to be performed in ordinary theaters. But this was to change through these personalities, who had devoted themselves to spiritual science in the way described and wanted to make their sacrifices in order to erect a building of their own for it. This building was to be erected for the cultivation of this spiritual science and especially for the performance of my mystery dramas. Destiny brought this building to Dornach near Basel in Switzerland, in the northwestern region of Switzerland: Dornach, near Basel.

Dearly beloved attendees! If any other spiritual movement had been in such a position that it wanted to build a house, a home, for the cultivation of that which it wants to cultivate in the world, it would have gone to some architect and had a building erected in an antique or Renaissance style or Rococo style - in any style, for that matter - and its world view would have been represented in it. This could never happen with anthroposophical spiritual science if one was true to it with one's whole being. Why not?

Well, spiritual science wants to be something that unfolds in ideas only in one direction; but it is not based in theories, it is not based in ideas, it is based in living spiritual life, in that living spiritual contemplation of the world and man, as I have described it yesterday and today.

So, my dear audience, three branches come out of the same source: there comes out the one branch – knowledge – which expresses itself in ideas. There comes out the second branch – art – which expresses itself in forms, in the form of sounds, of colors, of sculpture, in architectural forms. There comes forth the third branch – the religious-ethical, the moral branch.

Anthroposophy as a science does not want to found a sect or establish a religion. But it leads to the source from which religious life also flows, and the artistic flows from the same source. I have often used the following image:

Imagine, dear audience, a nut in a shell. You cannot imagine that the nut is surrounded by a shell that is built around it from the outside; rather, the shell must also be there, formed from the same forces and laws of form as the nut itself. You can see it in the nutshell: it is already formed according to the same laws of form as the nut itself.

This is life, where everything that arises arises from the same impulses, from the same laws of form.

Anthroposophical spiritual science is not abstraction, it is life that lives itself out, as I have described it, in education; that lives itself out in the social; that lives itself out in the religious. In the sense that a house is to be built for it, it is the nut, and the house must be built according to the same formal laws, must have its own style, which is not, for example, an artistically symbolic realization of an idea – that would be mere symbolist nonsense – but it must be a real, genuine artistic creation. The second branch can come from the same sources as anthroposophy comes from for its ideas.

And so, in connection with the fact that I myself gained the basis for my research from Goethe, the Goetheanum was built near Basel — a ten-year project — built in such a way that with every pillar, pillar, in every architrave piece, in every color scheme, in everything that could be seen, one could see the right artistic environment for what was being done from the podium in this building, which was designed for 900 people.

When one stood on the podium and spoke, one felt how the word one had to coin in order to bring spiritual vision before the listeners, one felt how this word is coined as an idea out of the idea, in exactly the same way as — and this may be said by the one who has worked out in wax every single detail in the model worked out in wax everything that has been built in Dornach may say —, how that which has stepped out to meet people outwardly visible in forms and colors; who heard the words from the podium in this Goetheanum itself, who saw the eurythmy artists unfold their art of movement, who heard reciting there, who saw anything else performed there, saw that what was happening and being spoken on stage and podium was just the other form of what the building forms, the architectural, the pictorial forms showed. And when the music sounded from the organ at the other end, the musical tones that filled the room were only a further expression of what was found in the column forms, in that which had found expression in the form and colors of the entire building. In short, this building for the anthroposophical worldview could not be built as an external Renaissance, Rococo, Gothic or classical shell. A new architectural style had to be created because anthroposophy is not a one-sided theory, but is that which can emerge on [the one hand] in all ideas of knowledge, which can emerge as art. And as art, as a performing art, it should now be expressed in one's own home.

It must be emphasized again and again: Anthroposophy does not want to found a new religion, does not want anything sectarian, wants to proceed in the same purely objective, purely legal way as any other scientific direction. But by penetrating with real scientific exactness, but with spiritual-scientific insight, it also penetrates to the source of religiosity.

This led to the desire to place a [nine and a half] meter high wooden group at one of the most prominent points in the Goetheanum, with Christ Jesus himself as the central figure. So now, my dear attendees, a worldview should be given through anthroposophy that recognizes as its ideal the embodiment of the human mystery of Golgotha at one of the most prominent points in its home, through anthroposophy. This is a form of knowledge that has a religious aspect in its objectives, although it does not want to establish itself as a sect or religion, but wants to remain on the ground of the artistic, on the ground of knowledge.

Dear attendees! When I was last able to speak here in Kristiania, I was able to think of the Home for the Spirit of Science in Dornach with different thoughts, because this home was destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922/1923, burnt down to the concrete foundations, and a is now standing on the spot where it once stood, the thing that, in its outer forms, has brought about a revelation for thousands upon thousands of visitors over the years, the thing that could be said from the bottom of one's heart about human eternity, human development on earth, about human being and world being and world knowledge.

It is self-evident that the small insurance sums that we may receive after the legal investigations into the Dornach fire have come to an end will not be sufficient to rebuild this building, the Goetheanum. And we live in different circumstances today than we did before the war, when numerous people who professed to be engaged in anthroposophical spiritual research were truly willing to make deep sacrifices to make it possible to rebuild the Goetheanum. And again and again, such friends have come forward to help. How the Goetheanum can be rebuilt will depend on whether, in the present difficult world situation, the same sacrifices will be possible as were possible before. It must be rebuilt in some form, because it was intended to visibly express what anthroposophical spiritual research wants to say about the deepest longings of contemporary man.

I said it yesterday as well: in the people of the present, in numerous people of the present — for it is a deepest longing, even if they do not know it, even if it only lives in subconscious feelings and sensations — there is the urge to rediscover the spiritual, to reconcile faith with knowledge again. This was to be expressed outwardly through the forms of the Goetheanum.

Now, this is also expressed outwardly in the forms of the human being itself. But that which is physical and sensual - my dear audience - can be grasped by the material flames and thus perish like the Dornach Goetheanum. In the same way, the physical and sensual shells of the human being also perish. But spiritual science shows us how an eternal core of the human being descends from spiritual and soul worlds, only enveloping itself in the physical shell, and passes through the gate of death again in order to live on in the spirit.

What is said about the spiritual being human is expressed in the thoughts of anthroposophy, which also seeks to be spiritual. In the mortal building — whose passing is so painful to us, so melancholy, us who have grown so fond of this building, this structure — that had its mortal outer work, as man himself in relation to his true being in his earthly body has his mortal outer work.

Anthroposophy, however, seeks to speak of the eternal in man, but to speak in such a way that this very eternal can be fully realized in a truly practical way — as I have indicated today for a certain point — in the most diverse areas of life. To fully realize the eternal in the temporal, to be practical in all spirituality, that is what real anthroposophical spiritual knowledge strives for.

It will show that the deepest longings of the human soul can indeed be fulfilled more and more over time. And this spiritual knowledge can wait. It knows that the Copernican system was also first considered foolishness, but later became a matter of course. So Anthroposophy knows that it can well be considered foolishness by many people today. It will also wait and it can wait! It will also become a matter of course. For it speaks of what must be close to the human being when he, truly feeling, wants to turn again to the ancient, I would say sacred demand: “Know thyself!” If this great and mighty word of truth and warning is to be developed in any way in a modern form, then man must come to a knowledge of the world that shows through supersensible vision how the spiritual speaks from all realms of nature, from clouds and stars, from the movements of clouds and stars, how this world, which in truth can only be recognized when it is recognized in spirit, ultimately says: “I have achieved my goals in the human being.” Knowledge of the world is only complete in knowledge of man. And knowledge of man is not seen in mystical confusion and with mystical illusions, but as I have described it yesterday and today, in order to fathom man's being. Thus, by fathoming the human being, one comes to recognize the spiritual and soul nature of the human being, before and after death, when the human being is poured out into the world, despite having a higher self-awareness than here on earth; in true knowledge of the human being, one discovers world beings in the human being. Just as there is no true knowledge of the world without knowledge of man, because the world shows that its goal is man, so there is no true knowledge of man without seeing in man an image of the whole world, without penetrating through knowledge of man to knowledge of the world in the spirit.

This is what is already unconsciously seen today as a scientific, moral, and religious striving at the bottom of many human souls. This is what troubles many human souls today without them knowing it. This is what anthroposophical knowledge of the human being and the world wants to speak about, so that what the human being of the present, but especially the human being of the near future, will really need, will arise: truly genuine knowledge of the human being through true spiritual knowledge of the world, real, genuine knowledge of the world that is suitable for social work and religious feeling, through genuine, true knowledge of the human being that has been grasped in the spirit.

Dear attendees,

Anyone who speaks on a topic such as this evening's topic and the one I will be speaking on the 27th of this month must be aware, especially with regard to the spiritual life of the present day, that there are numerous souls today who long for a new impetus, for a renewal and metamorphosis of of important parts of our entire civilizational life, out of many things that today clearly bear the hallmark that, if continued, would lead humanity into the decline of civilization, out of many things that have been the civilizing current for a century or two or more. We find this especially in those souls who are trying to look most deeply into their own inner being in the present. We can say that whatever needs to be said about the supersensible worlds can be spoken to every human soul at any time. It can be spoken, one might say, to the hermit who has withdrawn completely from the world and is only interested in his immediate surroundings; it can also be spoken to personalities who are fully involved in life. For what is at issue here is, after all, a thoroughly human matter.

But it is not from these points of view alone, dear ladies and gentlemen, that I would like to speak to you today and on the 27th, but rather from the point of view that arises when one allows the most important civilizational issues of the present to take effect on one's soul. And there, especially leading souls find much that shakes them to the core, that drives them in their innermost being to long for a renewal of certain parts of spiritual life.

If we survey the situation in which we find ourselves in the spiritual life of the present, I would say we can trace it back to two main questions. One of these questions is illuminated by the scientific life, by the form of scientific life that has been observed within the civilized world for three to four centuries. The other of these questions is illuminated directly by practical life, but also by that practical life that has experienced the deepest influences from modern science.

Let us first look at what modern science has brought forth. I would like to say, precisely in order to avoid being misunderstood, that what I am representing here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should by no means be opposed to the spirit of modern science. The great triumphs and significant results of this modern scientific spirit are to be fully recognized by the spiritual science meant here. But precisely because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to penetrate with an unbiased soul into the spirit of this science, it must go beyond what has become the object of a general human education from this scientific spirit. In its specific disciplines, this science provides precise and conscientious information about many aspects of the human environment. But when the human soul asks about its highest concerns, about its deepest, its eternal destiny, it cannot receive any information within the spirit of science, especially not when it consults with itself quite honestly and quite impartially. And so today we find numerous souls who, out of more or less religious needs, long for a renewal of old worldviews.

What is external science, in particular anthropological science, is already drawing attention to the fact that our ancestors centuries ago did not know what is dividing and fragmenting human souls today: a certain disharmony between scientific knowledge and religious feeling, religious longing. If we look back to ancient times, it was the same human beings who cultivated a science that seems childlike to us today, but only seems childlike, and who, from this science, at the same time kindled the religious spirit in humanity. There was no discord between these two currents of thought.

Many souls today long for something like this. But one cannot say that a renewal of ancient Chaldean, ancient Egyptian, ancient Indian or other wisdom teachings would bring a special blessing to the present age. Those who believe this do not understand the true spirit of human development. Human development is such that each age has a special character, that in each age human souls want to be satisfied by something different. And what our souls need, simply by virtue of the fact that we live in the 20th century and have received our education from the 20th century, must be something different from what people of a distant past needed for their souls. Therefore, a renewal of old worldviews cannot serve the present. But one can orient oneself to what those old worldviews were. We will then see what actually gave rise to the satisfaction that human souls experienced within those old worldviews. We have to admit that the satisfaction for human souls in those days arose from the fact that they basically had a completely different relationship to scientific knowledge than we have today.

I would like to draw your attention to a phenomenon, my dear audience. If you point it out today, you are very easily accused of paradox or fantasy. But there is much that needs to be said that, just a few years ago, would have been considered highly dangerous for general education. After all, the last catastrophic years have at least brought about a change in the way we think and feel. And today, souls are better prepared than they were even ten years ago for the fact that the deepest truths may nevertheless initially appear paradoxical and fantastic to our habitual ways of thinking and feeling.

In ancient times, people spoke of something that, in view of scientific knowledge, is hardly questioned today, but which people will speak of again, probably also in the context of general education, in a relatively short time: of the Guardian of the Threshold, of the from the ordinary world in which we live in everyday life, in which we live with ordinary science, to that higher world in which man can recognize how he himself, with his supersensible, inner being, belongs to a supersensible world. Between these two worlds, the world that man perceives with his senses, the facts of which he can combine with his mind into natural laws, and the world to which man belongs with his actual being, one saw an abyss in those ancient times. One first had to cross this abyss. Within the old civilizations, only those who had been intensively prepared by the directors of the educational institutions of those days, which we now call 'mysteries', were allowed to cross this abyss. Today, we have different views on how to prepare for science and for a life of scientific research. In those ancient times, it was said that an unprepared person should not be allowed to receive higher knowledge about the nature of man at all. Why did they say this?

The reason for this can only be understood by someone who, going beyond ordinary historical knowledge, gains an insight into what the human soul has gone through in the course of human development. Today, we only have a knowledge of the externalities of human development. No attention is paid to the state of the soul. For example, no attention is paid to the state of the soul of people who have stood in the ancient oriental wisdom, of which only decadent forms still live in the Orient today. Basically, people have no idea how different the souls were in the world in those days. People in those days, just like us, saw the nature around them with their senses; they also combined in a certain way what they saw of nature with their minds. But they did not feel as separate from the nature around them as people today feel. They felt a spiritual soul within themselves. They felt that the human physical organization was filled with a spiritual soul. But they also felt a spiritual soul in lightning and thunder, in the passing clouds, in minerals, in plants, and in animals. They felt that which they suspected within themselves also outside in nature, in the whole universe. The whole universe was permeated by spiritual soul for them.

But they lacked something that we humans have today within our state of mind: they did not have such a pronounced, intense self-awareness as we do. Their self-awareness was duller, more dreamy than ours today. This was still the case even in Greek times. One can only understand later Greek culture if one imagines the souls of people in the Greek era as being in the same state as our souls. In earlier Greek culture, there can be no question of a state of soul such as ours. There was still a vague sense within nature. I would say: just as if my finger had a consciousness and then felt itself as one with my entire organism, as it could not conceive of itself as being separated from my organism, without which it would die, so man felt himself within the whole of nature, [unseparated] from it.

And those ancient sages who were the leaders of those schools of which I have spoken, they said to themselves: This is the moral in human self-awareness. But this self-awareness must not look at the world in such a way that it appears to be spiritless, soulless. If this state of mind were to face a world that is more spiritually empty – a world, I might add, that we perceive in our science, in our everyday life – then the souls of human beings would be overcome by a spiritual powerlessness.

This mental fainting was recognized by the ancient wisdom teachers in those people who were to arrive at such a world view as we have. Yes, can it be said at all that these ancient wisdom teachers said to themselves that souls should not arrive at such a world view as we say we have today? Yes, that can be said. And I would like to give you an example of this. Many examples could be cited, but I will highlight just one.

Dear participants, today we are justifiably satisfied that we no longer view the external and spatial structure of the world in a medieval way, based only on outward appearances. We stand on the standpoint of the Copernican world view, which is a heliocentric one. The medieval man believed that the Earth was at the center of the planetary system, and indeed of the entire star system, and that the sun and the other stars moved around the Earth. The heliocentric solar system brought about a complete reversal of all relationships, and today we hold fast to this reversal as something that we already absorb in our ordinary school education, in which we are immersed with all our education. We look back at the people of the Middle Ages, we look back at the people of ancient times, who in their Ptolemaic world system saw that which I have just characterized, the geocentric. But by no means did all people in those ancient times accept only the geocentric world system. We need only read Plutarch's account of the world system of an ancient Greek wise man of the pre-Christian era, Aristarchus of Samos. Aristarchus of Samos already places the sun at the center of our planetary system; he has the earth revolve around the sun. And if we take, not in the details, about which recent natural science has brought so much, but in the main features, the heliocentric system of Aristarchus of Samos, then it basically completely agrees with the one that is ours today.

What do we actually have here? Well, the world system that Aristarchus of Samos merely revealed was the one taught in the ancient schools of wisdom. Outwardly, people were left with the world system of appearances. Why was that so? Why were they allowed to keep this world picture of appearances? Well, it was said: Before a person can advance to this heliocentric world system, he must first cross the threshold to a different world than the one in which he lives. In his ordinary life, he is protected by the invisible Guardian of the Threshold, under whom these ancients imagined a very real, albeit supersensible being. He is protected from suddenly opening his eyes as if he were seeing the world, dead, de-spirited. For it is in a dead and spiritless way that we see the world today. We look at it and form our view of nature through the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and we see it as dead and spiritless. When we form ideas about the path and movements of the heavenly bodies at the observatory with the help of a telescope and calculations, we see the world as dead and spiritless. The ancient wisdom teachers of the mysteries knew that the world could also be seen in this way. They conveyed these insights after the preparation, after they had led their students past the Guardian of the Threshold, but they prepared the students through strict training of the will. How was this willpower given to the students? By leading the students through privations, but also by encouraging them for many years to strictly obey the pure morals prescribed to them by the wisdom teachers. The will had to be strictly disciplined, and this willpower was to strengthen self-awareness. And when the disciples had progressed from a dreamy, dull self-awareness to a more intense self-awareness, only then were they shown what lay beyond the threshold for them: the world that, in the heliocentric system, represents outer space. But they were also shown many other things that we now recognize as the content of our everyday worldview.

So it was that the pupils of those ancient times were first prepared, carefully prepared, before they were taught what, so to speak, every schoolboy and schoolgirl today absorbs. So times change, so do civilizations. One simply gets a false idea of the development of humanity if one only knows the outer history, not this history of the human soul.

What had the students of the old wisdom schools brought with them to the threshold of the supersensible world? They had brought with them an instinctive knowledge of the world, which arose, as it were, from the instincts, from the drives of their bodies. Through these, they saw — today we call this animism — everything outside as ensouled and spiritualized. They felt the kinship of man with the world. They felt their spirit within the spirit of the world. But to see the world here as we learn to see it today, already in elementary school, these ancients had to be prepared.

Dearly beloved attendees, in all the various types of literature that amateurishly tackle mysticism, even if they sometimes give the impression of being scholarly, there is a lot of talk about the Guardian of the Threshold, about the threshold into the spiritual world. And they are often believed all the more, the more nebulous mysticism one pours out about these things.

What I have presented to you now is what arises for the unbiased spiritual researcher precisely through what the ancients called the threshold into the spiritual world. Not those nebulous things, of which some orders and some sects and the like speak today, were sought beyond the threshold, but precisely that which is general education with us today. But at the same time we see from this that we face the world with a different self-awareness. The old wisdom teachers feared that their students, if they had not first strengthened their self-confidence through self-discipline, would have become mentally impotent if, for example, they had adopted the idea: The earth does not stand still, but circles around the sun at great speed; one circles around the sun with the earth. This loss of ground under their feet would have been unbearable for the ancients, it would have dampened their self-confidence to the point of unconsciousness. We learn to endure this from childhood on. We live, as it were, in the world as our world of education, into which the ancients had to penetrate only after careful preparation.

Nevertheless, we should not long for the conditions of ancient civilizations. They no longer fit with what nourishes our souls today. What I am presenting to you today as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is neither a renewal of old Gnostic teachings nor an ancient oriental wisdom, which could only be brought to human souls today as something decadent. It is something that can be found today through elementary creative power from this human soul, in the ways that I will explain in a moment. But first, I would like to point out that in a sense we can also speak of a threshold into the supersensible world, or in any case into a world other than that of ordinary life and ordinary science.

The ancients suspected a different world from the one presented to them in their everyday life beyond the threshold. But what do we hear from our conscientious natural scientists, from those who are most right in terms of their methods? We hear that natural science presents us with limits to knowledge. We hear about “ignorabimus” and the like, and, it must be emphasized, within natural science with full justification. If the ancients lacked the intense self-awareness that we have today, then we lack something else.

Where did we get this intense self-awareness in the first place? We got it from the fact that the way of thinking and the way of looking at things that began with Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Giordano Bruno and so on came into humanity. As a result, we have not only gained a sum of knowledge, but modern humanity has also undergone a certain education of its soul life. Everything that we have developed under the influence of the way of thinking of these minds in modern times tends to cultivate the intellect, the powers of reason. Of course, today we experiment in science, we observe carefully and conscientiously. We observe the phenomena around us with our instruments, with the telescope, the microscope, with X-rays, with the spectroscope, and we use our intellect, so to speak, only to extract the laws of nature from the phenomena. But despite all this, what are we doing when we observe, when we experiment? We are doing it in such a way that within this work of knowledge we only let the intellect speak in formulating the laws of nature. And it is also the case that, in the course of the last three, four, five hundred years, it is primarily the intellect that has been emphasized in human development. But the mind has the peculiarity of strengthening, hardening and intensifying human self-awareness.

Therefore, today we can endure what even the ancient Greeks could not have endured: the awareness that we move with the earth in the bottomless, as it were, around the sun. But on the other hand, precisely because of this strengthened self-awareness, which shows us the world as soulless and spiritless, we are led to lack a realization that souls must nevertheless long for: We see the world in its material phenomena, its material facts, as they have never been seen by ancient people without a preparation of the mysteries. But we do not see - and that is why conscientious naturalists speak of ignorabimus and of the limits of knowledge - we do not see the world of a spiritual around us.

We stand as human beings in this world. When we reflect on ourselves, we have to say to ourselves: it is the spirit that is active in us simply by thinking about things, by summarizing the experiments, by summarizing the observations. But is this spirit the same as the hermit who stands in a world of material appearances? Is this spirit only present in our body? Is the world spiritless and soulless, as we have to understand it from the point of view of the physical and biological sciences, and rightly so? Today we stand before our environment. We are standing on the threshold of a new era. This has certainly not yet dawned on the broadest sections of humanity. But what humanity does not fully realize is not completely extinguished in the soul. One does not think about things, but inwardly these things sit as feelings of the soul. We have an unconscious soul life. For most people it remains unconscious. But out of this unconsciousness arises the longing to cross a threshold again, to gain spiritual knowledge of the world through self-awareness.

Now, whatever else one may call these things, which one usually feels only unclearly, they are in truth, from one side, the deepest riddle of civilization; they are such that people feel that a spiritual world around them must be found again. The world of ordinary science, devoid of spirit and soul, cannot be the one with which the human soul also forms a unity in its deepest essence. This is the first great civilizational question of the present: How do we again find knowledge that at the same time deepens our religious feeling? How do we find knowledge that at the same time satisfies the deepest needs for a sense of the eternal in the human soul?

It can be said that this modern science has brought great and powerful things, but for the unbiased person it has not actually brought solutions, but rather, one might say, the opposite of solutions. And we should be satisfied and glad about that too. What can we do with modern science? Can we solve the questions of the soul? No, but we can ask them in greater depth! Through this modern science, we have before us the world of material facts in their purity, free from what the human being brings into the world of soulfulness and spirituality from his or her subjectivity. We see, so to speak, the pure phenomena of the external material world. Through this, we get to know the questions of the soul more intensely. This is precisely the achievement of the modern spirit of science: it has brought us new riddles, deeper riddles. This is the first great question of civilization in the present time: How do we face these deeper riddles? One cannot solve the great soul questions in the Haeckelian, Huxleyan, Spencerian spirit, but one can, in this spirit, feel the great riddle questions for the existence of humanity today more intensely than ever before.

This is where spiritual science comes in. Its aim is to guide humanity today, in accordance with its nature, over the renewed threshold into a spiritual world. And the way by which modern man can cross the threshold differently from the ancient man, it is to be described here today in outline. I can only do this in brief strokes. What I only want to explain in principle can be found in more detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” and in other writings.

I would first like to draw attention to the starting point that a person who wants to become a spiritual researcher must take today. He must start from a point that, due to the whole of our time, people today are least willing to accept. It is the point in the soul's makeup that I would like to call intellectual modesty. Although we have developed intellectually to a height never before seen in human development as humanity to a particular height in the last three to four centuries, as a spiritual researcher one must rise precisely to intellectual modesty.

I would like to illustrate what I mean by comparing it. Let us take a five-year-old child and give him a volume of Shakespeare. What would he do with it? He will play with it, leaf through it, tear it up; he will not do what is appropriate with it. But when the child has lived for another ten or fifteen years, he will relate to the volume of Shakespeare quite differently. What has happened? Well, abilities that were inherent in the child have been developed in the child through external intervention by people, through education and teaching. It has become a different being in the course of ten to fifteen years. Intellectual modesty allows the person to say, even when he is an adult, when he has absorbed the current education in science intellectually: you could face nature and the environment in such a way that your approach could be compared to that of a five-year-old child facing Shakespeare's works. There could still be potential in you that can be further developed, so that you become a different being in terms of soul and spirit.

People today are not very keen on adopting the point of view of such intellectual modesty. Our habits of thinking and feeling towards the life of education are different. Those who have received the usual education today are then accepted into our higher educational institutions. There, one no longer has to deal with the development of knowledge, willpower, and the abilities of the soul. Basically, one remains within the scientific research at the point of view that inheritance and ordinary education give. Certainly, observation was broadened in an incredible way through experiment and science, but the same powers of cognition were applied that one has once in so-called modern intellectual life. One did not aim at developing one's human being to bring these powers of cognition further. One did not say to oneself: the person who has these powers of knowledge of life or science could stand opposite nature as a five-year-old child stands opposite Shakespeare's works, and he could develop powers and abilities of knowledge within himself that would lead him to a completely different behavior towards nature. But this is said by someone who, in the sense of the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here, wants to become a researcher in the supersensible worlds. This is really about the development of human abilities that initially only exist in the Anlagen, albeit in every human being, but in order for them to be developed, a great deal has to be gone through.

I am not talking, dear listeners, about some kind of miraculous or even superstitious measures for the human soul, but rather about the development of abilities that every person is well acquainted with, that play a major role in everyday life and in ordinary science; they are just not developed to their full potential for the human being between birth and death.

There are many such abilities, but today I would like to characterize only two in their further development. You can find more details about this in the books mentioned. First of all, there is the ability to remember. This ability to remember is absolutely necessary for everyday life. We know, and those who are particularly interested in such things will know from the psycho-pathological literature, what it means for a healthy mental life that the memory is intact up to a point in childhood that lies quite early; that there is no period in life from which memory images do not emerge, bringing to mind the experiences we have gone through. If that which memory is extinguishes, then the human ego is destroyed; a severe mental illness has come over him. Now, what memory gives us is a re-emergence in pale or vivid images. It is precisely this ability, this power, that can be further developed. What is its peculiarity? Well, otherwise the experiences flit past us. The images we form of these experiences also flit past our soul. Memory retains them. I can only speak about this memory in sketchy terms; in my literature you will find a developed science precisely about this ability to remember.

What memory does with the otherwise fleeting images is that it gives them duration. This is what one first takes up and develops in the spiritual scientific method; one develops it through what I call meditation and concentration in the books mentioned. This consists of either seeking advice from someone who has experience in these matters or gleaning the advice oneself from the relevant literature, and of taking easily comprehensible complexes of images such as are geometric or mathematical figures, which one completely overlooks, knowing that these are not reminiscences from life emerging from the subconscious, but everything one has in consciousness is there through one's own arbitrariness in consciousness. One is not subject to auto-suggestion or reverie; one surveys that which one brings into the center of consciousness. Then one remains in consciousness for a long time with complete inner calm on this idea. Just as muscles develop when they perform a particular kind of work, so certain soul powers develop when the soul devotes itself to this unusual activity of remaining on such ideas. It looks easy, and not only do some believe that the spiritual scientist draws what he has to say from some kind of influence, but some also believe that what I am describing here as methods that take place in the inner, intimate life of the soul itself is easy. No, what I am telling you now also requires a long time; some people can do it more easily, others more difficultly. The depth of the performance is much more important than the length of time spent in such meditation.

But one must do such exercises for years. And what one has to accomplish within the soul is truly no easier than what one accomplishes in the laboratory, in the physics room, or at the observatory. Outward research is no more difficult to acquire than that which is carefully and conscientiously cultivated in the soul over many years. But then certain inner soul powers, which we otherwise only know as powers of remembrance, become stronger, and thus something arises in us as soul power that we have not known at all before. This enables us to clearly recognize what materialism says about the power of memory and remembrance. Materialism tells us that the human being's power of remembrance is bound to the material body; if something in the nervous system is not properly constituted, then the power of remembrance also declines, and it declines with age. In any case, mental powers depend on physical development. Spiritual science does not deny this for the life between birth and death. For someone who is developing his memory as I have just described it knows from direct experience how the ordinary memory, which conjures up images of our experiences before our soul, is dependent on the human body. But what he is now developing becomes completely independent of the human body. And the human being experiences how one can live in a soul realm, so that one has supersensible experiences in this soul realm, just as one has sensory experiences in the physical body. I would like to explain to you how these supersensible experiences are in the following way.

You know that human life alternates rhythmically between waking and sleeping. The moments of falling asleep and waking up and the intervening period of sleep occur in our waking life. What happens then? The following is present for the ordinary consciousness: when we fall asleep, our consciousness is dulled, and in most people it reaches absolute zero. Dreams sometimes bubble up out of this half-dulled consciousness. In this state, the person is indeed alive; otherwise he would have to pass away and be reborn, in a soul-spiritual sense, but his consciousness is paralyzed. This is because from falling asleep until waking up, the human being does not use his senses, does not use the impulses that represent his organic will impulses.

But the one who has developed the higher ability out of the ability to remember, which I have just mentioned, can switch off precisely the same. Such a spiritual researcher comes to the point where he no longer needs to see with his eyes, as one does not see with one's eyes when asleep; nor to hear with his ears, as one also does not hear with one's ears when asleep; nor to feel the warmth in the surroundings, nor to use the will impulses that work through the muscles, or through the human organization in general. He can shut out all physical things. And yet his consciousness is not dulled as it is when asleep, but he is able to devote himself to states in which otherwise a person is only in sleep, but unconscious; the spiritual researcher is fully conscious. Just as the sleeping person is surrounded by a dark world that contains nothing for him, so the spiritual researcher is surrounded by a world that has nothing to do with our sensual world, but which is just as full and intense as our sensual world. We face our sensory world through our senses; the spiritual researcher faces the supersensible world when he can consciously free himself from the body, when he is in a state that is otherwise experienced by a person between falling asleep and waking up; but he is fully aware in this state.

In this way, one learns to recognize that a supersensible world constantly surrounds us, just as a sensual world otherwise surrounds us. However, there is one significant difference: in the sensual world, we perceive facts through our senses, and within the facts, we also perceive entities. Facts predominate, and entities arise in the course of these facts. In the supersensible world that we open up for ourselves in this way, we first encounter entities. When we open our spiritual eyes to see the supersensible world, we are surrounded by real entities. And at first it is a world of very concrete, real, supersensible entities in which we are, not yet a world of facts; we still have to conquer that through something else.

So this is the achievement of modern anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: that the human being crosses a threshold again and learns to enter a different world from the one that otherwise surrounds him. And when a person learns to recognize how he is independent of the body, then he finally comes to say to himself: Not only when the soul falls asleep does it, as it were, separate itself from the body and then return to the body when it wakes up; through the desire for the body lying in bed, it returns. Through such supersensible knowledge one also comes to really get to know the essence of the soul, how it returns to the body through this desire when waking up. But if you acquire such real concepts of falling asleep and waking up, these concepts will eventually expand to include learning to recognize the human soul in its essence, as it was before it descended from the spiritual worlds through birth or conception into a physical body that is given to it through inheritance.

Once you have grasped and learned to follow the soul outside the body between falling asleep and waking up, just as you learn to recognize the lesser forces that draw the soul to the body in bed, you learn to recognize the soul as it lives when it is freed from the body after passing through the gate of death. In particular, the following ideas are recorded: One learns to recognize why the human soul has only a duller consciousness during sleep. It has this because the desire for the body lives in it. This desire for the body dulls consciousness between falling asleep and waking up to the point of unconsciousness. When a person passes through the gate of death, this desire no longer exists. And by getting to know the soul through the developed ability to remember, one gets to know it precisely in the state in which it develops after passing through the gateway of death; how it can then have consciousness because it is not bound to a physical body, because it no longer has any desire for one. This freedom from desire makes consciousness possible.

When a person passes through the gateway of death, he acquires a different consciousness from the one he had through the instrumentality of the body. In this way one also learns to recognize what forces were in the soul that attracted it to a physical body when it was in a spiritual world, but to a physical body that only generally shone before it as a physical body, which was not a specific one. One learns to recognize the soul as it absorbs the desire to come down again into physical life on earth. In other words, one first gets to know the eternal part of the human soul in its true meaning.

And that, dear listeners, is one thing that one gets to know in this way. But one also gets to know something else through it. By learning to recognize the eternal in the human soul that passes through births and deaths in images, I call them imaginations in my books, one learns to recognize that this human soul belongs to a supersensible world; that the soul belongs to a supersensible world just as the body belongs to the sensual world. And just as one can describe this sensual world through the body, so one can describe the supersensible world in its spirituality. One learns to recognize a supersensible world in addition to the sensual world.

However, one must be willing to develop a second soul quality, beyond that which is present in ordinary life. Today's scientist recoils at the mere mention of this quality as an intellectual capacity. One can fully appreciate the reasons why he does this; but nevertheless, what I have to tell you about the further development of this human soul ability is true.

The first power that had to be developed was the ability to remember, which becomes an independent force. The second power is the power of human love. In ordinary life between birth and death, love works through the physical organism; it is intimately connected with the instincts and drives of human nature. And only in the most sublime moments does some of this love detach itself from the physical. Then man has that uplifting moment when he becomes free from himself, which is the state of true freedom, where man does not give himself over to his instincts, but forgets himself, where he bases his actions on external facts, on the necessity of those facts. Because love is inwardly connected with freedom, I dared to say as early as 1893 in my Philosophy of Freedom, by which I wanted to found a philosophy of sociology for the present day, that true love does not make man blind, but rather seeing, that is, free. It leads him beyond that which otherwise blinds him when he is dependent on what is within him. Love allows us to be devoted to the outside world, and in so doing frees us from that which we must be freed from if we are to act freely.

But this love, which only shines into our ordinary life in truly free actions, must be cultivated by the modern spiritual researcher. Love must gradually spiritualize in the same way as the faculty of memory must spiritualize; it must become a power that is purely soul-life, and which makes him, as a soul-being, independent of the body, so that he can love without the body, through its blood, through its entire organization, providing the basis for this love. This is how immersion in the external world, in people, comes about; this is how you become one with the external world.

This developed power of love now brings us a second thing; it puts us into the spiritual world in a substantial way, which we enter through the developed ability to remember. And we now get to know spiritual facts and learn to describe the world in such a way that we do not merely say how our present planetary system once emerged from some old nebulous world, which will then in turn either disperse or fall into the sun. We do not look at such a world, which is alien to the spirit, and which is confronted by something else. And if a person is honest, they must feel that this world, as viewed scientifically, is confronted by the most valuable thing in the human being. In modern spiritual life, we have been able to get to know the besieged souls who tell us again and again: Science tells us about a world of pure natural necessity, that our world comes from worlds that were fog worlds, that clumped together into the four natural kingdoms, the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, up to man. But now, in the depths of his being, something arises in man to which he must attach the greatest value: his moral, his religious world. This stands before his soul, and it is what actually makes him human in the first place. But he must say to himself, if he is honest with regard to the purely scientific world view: This earth, on which you stand like a hermit of the universe with your moral ideals, will disintegrate, will fall back into the sun, will become a slag. There will be a large churchyard, the ideals will be buried.

This is where spiritual science comes in. It does not approach this situation from the standpoint of faith and hope, but from real knowledge, which is developed in the way I have indicated, and says: No, the mere scientific world view offers an abstraction of the world. This world is permeated with spirit, this world is permeated with supersensible entities. And if we look back to prehistoric times, what is material on earth has emerged from the spiritual; and what is material now will become spiritual in the future. Just as man discards his body and enters a spiritual world spiritually with consciousness, so that which is material on earth will fall away like a corpse, and that which is spiritual-soul on earth, that which is spiritual-soul in man, will arise in the future, even when the earth has perished. One could say that the Christian saying “Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” proves true here with a certain variation. Man can say: Everything my eyes see will perish, just as the human body perishes in the face of human individuality. But what lives in man as morality rises from what is perishing. Man senses a spiritual world around him; he lives into a spiritual world.

In this way, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science deepens our knowledge of the spiritual, and in doing so, it takes on a different form from that of external science in relation to the civilizational needs of the present. External science can in turn deepen knowledge and insight to religious fervor and higher consciousness. It gives the human being a spiritual self-awareness.

This is basically the first great civilizational question of the present day. If a person does not have the right inner support, if he feels like he is floating in the void as a mere material being, he cannot develop a strong inner being, nor can he appear as a strong being in social life. Man must create what external institutions are, man must create what external social conditions are. There is something significant about external institutions and external social conditions in terms of the great civilizational questions of the present and the future, and these civilizational questions lead us back to the search for the great, true consciousness of humanity. For only people who have such inner support, which can give them peace of mind, will be able to integrate themselves properly into social life. That is the first question: how can a person with inner support, with a secure hold on life, integrate themselves into our social conditions? The second is what we might call the encounter between people, human interaction. And here we enter a field where, no less than in the field of knowledge, modern civilization has brought man not new solutions but new riddles. Consider only the breadth of technology, of technical life, that the achievements of modern natural science have brought. Technical life, commercial life, life of intercourse, as they surround us from hour to hour today, they are the achievements of this magnificent, modern view of nature. But what we have not found within modern technology, what is posed as a new vital question, is: How should people live in this complicated technical, commercial and transport life?

This question is posed by modern civilization itself. That it has not yet been solved is shown by those terrible movements that present themselves all the worse the further east we go, into Asia, where human instincts are not used to create something upward, but, because the great civilizing questions have not been solved, are used to create something destructive. Undoubtedly, the whole of modern civilization would have to perish through what is emerging in the East. Much more terrible than people in the West imagine is what is lurking there to lead to the decline

of modern civilization. But it also testifies to how necessary it is to find something else to solve the civilizational issues of the present.

We must not only work in modern technology, which has emerged from the modern view of nature, but we must also gain another possibility: Man has become estranged from nature; he has been placed, practically speaking, with his actions and his whole occupation in a soulless, mechanistic way; he has been led from dealing with nature to dealing with the spiritless machine, with the spiritless mechanism of traffic; and we must find ways to give man something again that he can feel as something given by nature. It must be a world view that speaks to his soul with great power and tells him that man is something more than what he experiences here; that he belongs to a spiritual-soul, a supersensible world that surrounds him and can be explored in an exact science, just as the outer science is that leads to technology. But only such a science will also be able to establish the right relationship between people. Such a science will enable us to encounter a being in man that not only appears to us as it comes to us, as it appears between birth and death, but in such a way that we learn to respect the eternal, the immortal, the connection with a supersensible world forever. Through such a deepened knowledge, the feeling must change from person to person.

And a third thing is also important. It is important that the human being learns again that his life is not exhausted with the life between birth and death, as the modern proletarian believes from his ideology called ideology, but that what we do here in every moment has not only an earthly but also a cosmic significance. For indeed, when the earth has perished, what we bring out of our souls into our daily work, out of moral, spiritual and soul foundations, will arise in another world; it will take part in spiritualization in the metamorphosis.

Thus, spiritual science as anthroposophically oriented approaches the questions of the present in three ways. It brings people to a spiritual self-awareness. It brings people to see in their fellow human beings, in their neighbor, a spiritual being in turn. It brings people to give their work, their earthly activities, a cosmic, universal, spiritual meaning, however material they may be.

Spiritual science today not only has theoretical views about what can be worked out in this way, but has already begun to apply it in practice in life. In Stuttgart, we have the Waldorf School, which was founded by Emil Molt and which I am in charge of, and where a pedagogy, a didactics, is being developed through the knowledge of human nature that can be obtained through spiritual science, as it is meant here. Furthermore, in Dornach near Basel, we have the Goetheanum, a Free University for Spiritual Science, the construction of which I will show you in a few days with the help of slides. This Goetheanum in Dornach is not yet finished, but we were able to hold a large number of courses in the unfinished building last fall. I have also been able to speak here in Holland about spiritual science in the past. At that time I could only speak of spiritual science as a form of research, a research tendency, as something that lives in individual human beings.

Since then, this spiritual science has taken on a different form. It has begun to establish its own School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. Last spring I myself showed how what I have only outlined for you today in its beginning as spiritual scientific research can be applied to all fields of science in its execution. I showed physicians and medical students how what can be gained from this spiritual science in a strictly exact method can have an effect on medicine and therapy. Those questions in medicine that become borderline questions are juxtaposed with the health issues of humanity. Every conscientious doctor will perceive those practical questions of medicine as cultural issues. These questions are the ones that remain unanswered today because today's science does not want to rise from the sensory to the spiritual and supersensory.

How medicine can be fertilized, how all sciences can be fertilized by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, experts from all fields, from jurisprudence, mathematics, history, sociology, biology, physics, chemistry, pedagogy, tried to show it. Then there were also personalities who belong to the arts, to artistic creation, who showed how artistic creation can be fertilized by spiritual science. There were representatives of practical life, of commercial and industrial life, who showed how their lives, guided by spiritual science, are no longer merely caught up in the old routine that led us into the catastrophes, but how, through it, the human being is brought into life practice in a higher sense. This is precisely what these courses should show: how spiritual science does not want to cultivate some kind of dilettantism, some nebulous mysticism, but how it can fruitfully intervene in the individual sciences. But in doing so, it simultaneously elevates what is in these sciences to an overall spiritual and supersensible conception of the human being.

I will have more to say about the practical side here; then I will speak about teaching and educational issues and about the social question. Then you will see how the spiritual science meant here, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, does not seek some nebulous mysticism in a sphere that is alien to life, but how it wants to grasp the spirit for other reasons: firstly, because the human being must become aware of his connection with the true spiritual origin; secondly, however, because the spirit wants to intervene precisely in the material, in the practical life, as it makes a distinction between the spiritless practical life and a spirit conceived in terms of a lack of life, which certainly does not grasp the spirit of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, nor that which is most necessary for the present.

Dear attendees, we have found people who have an understanding of what is to be achieved in the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach for the development of humanity, and how necessary it is in the face of the great civilizational issues of the present day that this be achieved. The difficult circumstances have slowed down the construction very much. We are not yet finished, and completion will depend to a large extent on whether people who have a heart and mind for all the human progress that is needed today will continue to come to our aid. In its unfinished state, we gathered more than a thousand people at the opening of our courses. Those who come to this Dornach after this — as will also be shown in the next lecture — will see that at the same time this spiritual science wants to work out of the full humanity: that it does not just want to speak to the human head, that it not only wants to gain that which can be presented through experimentation and observation, but that at the same time it strives for truly artistic expression, without falling back on straw-like symbolism or abstract, pedantic allegories. Therefore, not just any architectural style could be applied in Dornach – as the slide lecture will show – but the architectural style had to be drawn from the same sources from which this spiritual science itself flows. It is not a one-sided science such as today's experimental and observational sciences, but seeks to draw from the full human being. It wants to speak to the full, whole human being, despite the fact that it is as exact as any science can be.

I will still have to talk about the practical implementation, but today I had to present the results of the spiritual research on these matters, in order to then show in the practical areas how necessary this is for our time, which is based on the observation of the history of this period by this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It aims to add to the conscientious and methodical study of the material world, which it recognizes more than any other spiritual direction, the science of the spirit, which in turn can lead to religious deepening and to artistic creativity, just as the old instinctive science, which we can no longer renew, led to art and religion in the mysteries.

That this spiritual science is not opposed to religion and Christianity, I will have to show in the further explanation of the practical side. It strives for that which every true, religious deepening has to strive for, it strives for the spirit. Hence we have hope: all those people who today still resist this spiritual science will come round to it in the end, because this spiritual science strives for something universally human: it strives for the spirit, and for humanity, it needs the spirit.

Roman Boos: Dear attendees, the question of how judgment is formed in the threefold social organism is to be addressed this evening. Dr. Steiner will give the introductory lecture. I would like to ask you now to take an active part in the discussion, and especially those of you who have something to say about the problems that will be presented today, to speak up then. I now ask Dr. Steiner to begin his lecture.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! I would like to introduce this evening's discussion with a few remarks about how a social judgment, on which a new social order must be built, can come about. I should say at the outset that it will not be easy to speak about this subject in a popular way. One should actually recognize the impossibility of speaking about this subject in a popular way from the facts that we now live in.

You see, our time is basically in many ways quite opposed to man forming a healthy social judgment. It is true that much is said today about man as a social being, about social conditions and social demands in general. But this talk about social demands is not really based on a deep understanding of what a social being actually is. We need not be surprised at this, because it is only in the present time that we are at the beginning of the time in which humanity is to mature to form a social judgment. In a sense, humanity has not needed to form a social judgment until now. Why? Of course, human beings have always lived in some kind of social circumstances, but basically they have not – not until now – organized these social circumstances out of their social consciousness, out of a real understanding. They have, if I may say so, received them in an ordered way through a kind of instinctive activity. Up to the present form of the state, which, in Europe, is basically no more than three or four hundred years old, people have formed connections more out of their instincts, and it has not actually come to grouping people out of judgment, consideration and understanding. Out of this understanding, out of a truly clear judgment, the threefold social organism wants to tackle the social question. In doing so, it is basically doing something that is still quite unfamiliar to people and that is highly uncomfortable for the vast majority of people today.

What has actually happened? The earlier social associations and the present state association have developed from human instincts, and people today simply accept this association, which is still combined with all sorts of national instincts. They grow into this association. Instinctively, they grow into this association and avoid thinking about it – or at least they avoid thinking about it to a certain extent. At most, one thinks about the extent to which one wants to have a say in the affairs of the state, but the framework of the state is accepted. They accept it, even the most radical wing of the socialists; Lenin and Trotsky also accept the state, the state that is put together out of all sorts of things, but instinctively, the state that was ultimately worked on by the old tsars. They accept it and at most wonder how they should shape what they want within this state. The question of whether the state should be left as it is or whether a different structure should be adopted that is based on understanding is not even raised. But you see, this question – how can the instinctive nature of the old social life be transformed into a social life that is born out of the human soul? – is the main question underlying the impulse for the threefold social organism. This question cannot be resolved in any other way than by the emergence of a more thorough knowledge of the human being, more thorough than the knowledge of the human being that has existed in recent centuries and that exists in the present.

One can say that the impulse for the threefold social order arose directly from the question: How should man come to a judgment about how he should live together with other people? It arose from a correct observation of what man must demand in the present. But most people do not seriously want to respond to the demands of the present. They would prefer to take the existing situation and make more or less radical improvements here and there. For example, it is probably easier to talk to an Englishman about anything but the threefold social order, since he usually takes it for granted that the unified state of England is an ideal that must not be challenged. Wherever you touch on the subject, you notice this prejudice. But this is nothing more than the persistence of the old human instincts in relation to social coexistence, and we must get beyond them. We must come to a conscious coexistence. This is highly inconvenient for people today, because they do not really want to come to a judgment out of an inner activity, out of an inner activity. They would basically like, as I said, to have a say in what is already there, but they do not really want to think thoroughly about how to deal with what is there and how to rectify what has been led into the absurd by the last catastrophes. This absolutely new aspect of threefolding is something that people basically do not want to see. They are not willing to make the effort of forming a social judgment.

You see, the question: how does a social judgment come about? - immediately breaks down into three separate questions when approached in the right spiritual-scientific way. And the sources from which the threefold social organism flows are actually based on this, that the question of how to form a social judgment is immediately divided into three separate questions. It is impossible to arrive at a judgment in the same way in the common spiritual life, in the social spiritual life, as in the legal or state life or in the economic life. Recently an essay appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt entitled 'Political Scholasticism'. In it, a very clever gentleman – journalists are usually clever – makes fun of the fact that in contemporary public life, people strive to separate the political from the economic. He would, of course, also make fun of it and call it a scholastic hair-splitting if one wanted to separate public life into the three parts, the spiritual part, the legal or state part and the economic part, because he has a very special reason, a reason that is so very easy for the man of the present time to understand. He says: Yes, in real life the economic, political and intellectual life is nowhere separated; they flow into each other everywhere, so it is scholastic to separate them. Now, my esteemed audience, I think one could also say that one should not perceive the head and the trunk and the limbs of a person separately, because in real life they belong together. Of course, the three limbs of the social organism also belong together, but one cannot get by if one confuses the one with the other – just as little as nature would get by if it grew a foot or a hand on the shoulders instead of a head, if it were to shape the head into a hand. It is a particular characteristic of these clever people of the present day that they have taken the greatest happiness with the most stupid of our time, because the most stupid today appears to be the most intellectually clever of the great multitude.

What matters is that at the moment when humanity is no longer to enter public life instinctively, but more consciously than before, the whole way in which man stands in the spiritual life of culture, how he stands in the life of law and the state, how he stands in the life of economics, is different. It is just as different as the blood circulation is different in the head, in the feet or in the legs, and different in the heart - and yet the three work together in just the right way when they are organized separately in the right way.

And we too, as human beings, have to form our social judgment in various ways in the field of intellectual life, in the field of legal or state life, and in the field of economic life. But we have to find ways to arrive at a truly sound judgment in the three fields. In general, this path - basically there are three paths - is really quite heavily obstructed by the prejudices of the time. Many obstacles must first be removed from the way.

In order to arrive at a sound social judgment in spiritual life, it must be clear that today's man is utterly incapable of even posing the question: What does social mean in spiritual life? What does human coexistence mean in spiritual terms? We still do not have a knowledge of man that, I would not even say, provides answers to such questions, but I would just say that it encourages such questions. This knowledge of man must first be created by spiritual science and made popular among mankind. One must raise the question properly and reasonably: What difference does it make whether I am facing a human being or whether I, as a lonely observer of nature, have only nature facing me, thus gaining knowledge of this nature by directly facing nature as an observer? I enter into a certain reciprocal relationship with nature; I allow nature to make impressions on me; I process these impressions, form inner images about these impressions by entering into a reciprocal relationship with nature; I take something in from outside, process it inwardly. That is basically the simple fact. It looks the same on the outside when I listen to a person, that is, enter into a spiritual relationship with him, find in his words the meaning that he puts into them. The words of the person make an impression on me; I process them inwardly into ideas. I enter into interaction with other people. One might think that whether I interact with nature or with other people is basically the same. But it is not. Anyone who claims that it is the same has not even looked at the matter in the right way. You have to pay attention to these things.

You see, I would now like to give a specific example. There is a fact in German intellectual life without which this German intellectual life is inconceivable. When one describes the intellectual life of a certain area, then one usually describes – depending on what one has reason to do – either the economic conditions of the time when this intellectual life developed, or one describes individual great personalities who, through their ingenious achievements, have fertilized this intellectual life. But now I want to mention a fact of a quite different nature, without which the special character of German intellectual life in the 19th century is inconceivable. I would like to speak of an archetypal phenomenon of social intellectual coexistence: the ten-year intimate relationship between Goethe and Schiller. One cannot say that Goethe gave Schiller something or that Schiller gave Goethe something and that they worked together. That does not capture the fact that I mean, but it is something else. Schiller became something through Goethe that he would never have become alone. Goethe became something through Schiller that he would never have become alone. And if you only have Goethe and only have Schiller and think about their effect on the German people, you do not get what actually happened. Because if you only have Goethe or only have Schiller and consider the effects that emanate from emanating from both, there is not yet what has become, but a third, quite invisible, but of tremendously strong effect, arises from the confluence of the two (It is drawn on the blackboard). You see, that is an archetypal phenomenon of social interaction in the spiritual realm.

What is the actual basis for this? Today's rough science does not study such things, because today's science does not penetrate to the human being at all. Spiritual science will study such things and only through this will it bring light into the social and spiritual life of people. Those of you who have heard something about spiritual science know what I am only briefly hinting at now. Spiritual science shows that the development of the human being is a real, actual fact. It shows that as a person develops, he becomes ever more mature and original, ever bringing forth different and different things from the depths of his being. And if social life suppresses this bringing forth, then that social life is wrong and must be brought into line.

Now, Goethe and Schiller were both individuals and personalities who were socially blessed in the highest sense. When did it happen that one can say that Schiller understood Goethe best, and that Goethe understood Schiller best? They were able to converse with each other best, to exchange their ideas best, and to achieve something together, this invisible something, which in turn had an effect and is one of the most significant facts in German intellectual life. I have tried very hard to determine the year of the most intimate period of their lives together, the time when the ideas of one, I would say, most thoroughly penetrated the ideas of the other. I think it was around 1795 or 1796 (written on the board). 1796, there is really something very special about this collaboration between Goethe and Schiller.

If one now investigates why Schiller of all people understood Goethe best in this year and why Goethe allowed himself to be understood best by Schiller in this year, one comes to this. Schiller was born in 1759; so he was thirty-seven years old in 1796. Goethe was ten years older; so he was forty-seven years old. Now spiritual science shows us that there are various life junctions in human life; they are not usually taken into account today: the change of teeth - the human being becomes something else by surviving the change of teeth, also in the spiritual-soul relationship -, sexual maturity, later transitions - these are less noticeable, but they are still there in the 28th year, again in the 35th and in the 42nd year. If one is really able to observe this inner human life, then one knows that the beginning of the 40s, I would say on average the 42nd year, when the human being develops inwardly, when he undergoes an inner spiritual life, this 42nd year is something very special. Between the 35th year and the 42nd year, what can be called the consciousness soul matures in the human being. And it has become fully mature, this judging consciousness soul, this conscious soul that enters into a relationship with the world entirely from the ego – this consciousness soul becomes mature at that point. Schiller at 37 was five years younger than 42, Goethe at 47 was five years older than 42. Goethe had passed the 42nd year just as much as Schiller was below it.

Schiller was at the same stage in the development of the consciousness soul, Goethe was beyond it; they were at the same distance from it. What does that mean? In relation to the soul, it means a similar contrast. I know that such comparisons are daring, but our language is also coarse, and therefore one can only use daring comparisons when one has important, fundamental facts to cite. For the soul-spiritual, it means a similar contrast as the male and female for the physical-sexual. In relation to physical development, the sexualities are unevenly developed. Out of courtesy to the ladies, and in order not to make the gentlemen arrogant, I will not say which sexuality is a later development and which sexuality is an earlier development, but they are of a different temporal development. It is not the whole human being, the head does not take part in it, so those whose sexuality must be thought of in an earlier stage of development need not feel offended. But it is not so in relation to the soul; there the earlier can come together with the later, then a very special fertilization arises. Then something arises that can only arise through this different kind of combination at different times. This is, of course, a special case; here, in social life, the interplay of soul to soul is formed in a special way. Whenever people influence each other, something arises that can never arise from the mere interaction of human beings and nature. You see, you get a certain idea of what it actually means to let something that comes not from nature but from another human being take effect on you.

This became a very particular problem for me when I immersed myself in Nietzsche, for example. Nietzsche had something that a whole range of people with a similar background to Nietzsche's now also have; it's just that he had it in a particularly radical sense. For example, he looked at philosophers, the ancient Greek philosophers, he looked at Schopenhauer, he looked at Eduard von Hartmann and so on. It can be said that Nietzsche was never really interested in the content of a philosophy. The content of the philosophy, the content of the world view, was actually of no great importance to him; but he was interested in the person. What Thales was thinking as the content of his world view is of no importance to him, but how this person Thales lives his way to his concepts is what interests him. This is what interests him about Heraclitus, not the content of Heraclitus' philosophy. It is precisely that which comes from a human being that has an effect on him, and in this way Nietzsche shows himself to be an especially modern character. But this will become the general constitution of the human soul life. Today people still argue about opinions in many ways. They will have to stop arguing about opinions for the simple reason that everyone must have their own opinion. Just as if you have a tree and photograph it from different sides, it is still the same tree, but the photographs look quite different; so everyone can have their own opinion, depending on - it just depends on the point of view they take. If he is reasonable in today's sense, he no longer argues about opinions, but at most finds some opinions healthy and some unhealthy. He no longer argues about opinions. It would be the same as if someone looked at different photographs and then said: Yes, they are quite different, these are right and those are wrong. At most, one can be interested in how someone arrives at their opinion: whether it is particularly clever or foolish, whether it is low and bears no fruit or whether it is high and beneficial for humanity.

Today it is a matter of really clarifying how people relate to each other in their spiritual and social coexistence, and how one person has something to give to another. This is particularly evident when we see what a growing child must receive from the other person who is his or her teacher. There are quite different forces at work than between Goethe and Schiller, even if they are not placed in such a lofty position, but there are more complicated forces at play. What I am developing here now provides a way to find the path to how one can rise to a truly social judgment in the realm of spiritual life.

You see, I said before that I cannot speak in a particularly popular way today, because if I want to discuss these questions from the point of view of an as yet unknown human science, at least in wider circles, I have to start from that point of view. In my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (The Riddle of the Soul) I have pointed out how the human being is a threefold being: he is a head human being or nervous-sensory human being, a rhythmic human being, and a metabolic human being. The nerve-sense human being encompasses everything that is the senses and what the organs of the head are. The rhythmic human being, the trunk human being, could also be said to encompass what is rhythmic in the human being, what is the movement of the heart, the movement of the lungs, and so on. The third, the metabolic human being, encompasses everything else.

These three aspects are found in human nature; in a sense they are fundamentally different from each other, but it is difficult to pinpoint their actual differences. In the case of the rhythmic person, the following can be emphasized. You will hear more about the rhythmic in the human being later on this evening when Dr. Boos speaks about the formation of social judgment in legal or state life, which will then make up the second part of the introduction. Dr. Boos will speak about what is particularly close to him, about the formation of social judgment in the second link of the social organism, in legal and state life. But now I would like to emphasize the following: the rhythmic activity in man is particularly evident when we consider how man breathes in the outer air, processes it within himself, how he breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbonic acid. Inhalation – exhalation, inhalation – exhalation: this is one of the rhythms that are active in man. It is a relatively easy process to understand: inhalation – exhalation = rhythmic activity.

The other two activities can perhaps only be understood by starting from this rhythmic activity. In a sense, the whole human being is actually predisposed to rhythmic activity. But with ordinary science, we do not recognize the nervous sensory activity, the actual main activity, at all. It cannot be compared with the activity of the lungs and the heart, with rhythmic activity. I can only mention something that may seem paradoxical to those who are less familiar with spiritual science, with anthroposophy, but which will be confirmed by a real science. In the future, what I am saying now will be known to the world as a completely exact scientific fact when the necessary conditions are understood. During inhalation and exhalation, there is a certain equilibrium. This equilibrium that exists could be depicted as a pendulum that goes back and forth. It goes up just as high on one side as on the other. It swings back and forth. There is also an equilibrium between inhalation and exhalation, inhalation and exhalation and so on.

If a person did not live together with other people in a spiritual and soulful way, if a person were lonely and could only observe nature, that is, could only enter into an interrelationship with nature, look at nature and inwardly process it into images, then something very special would happen to that person. As I said, today this seems highly paradoxical to people, but it is nevertheless the case: his head would become too light. By observing nature, we are, after all, engaged in an activity. We are not doing nothing by observing nature; everything in us is engaged in a certain activity. This activity is, so to speak, a sucking activity at the head of man – not at the whole organism, but at the head of man, a sucking activity. And this sucking activity must be balanced, otherwise our head would become too light; we would become unconscious. It is compensated for by the fact that the head, which has become too light, undergoes a metabolism, blood nourishment, and all that is deposited in the head. And so, by observing nature, we continually have a lightening of the head and a subsequent heaviness due to the digestive activity going up into the head.

This balancing must take place. It is a higher rhythmic activity. But this activity would become extremely one-sided if the human being were only in contact with nature. Man would indeed become too light in his head if he were only in contact with nature outside; he would not send enough balancing metabolic activity up into his head from within. He does this to a sufficient extent when he enters into a relationship with his fellow human beings.

That is why you feel a certain pleasure when you enter into a relationship with your fellow human beings, when you exchange thoughts or ideas with them, when they teach you or the like. It is one thing to walk through nature alone and quite another to stand face to face with a person who expresses his ideas to you. When you are confronted with a person who expresses his ideas to you – you should just consider this carefully in self-observation – then you have a certain feeling of well-being. And he who can analyze this feeling of well-being will find a similarity between it and the feeling he has when he digests. It is a great similarity, only one feeling goes to the stomach, the other goes up to the head. You see, that is precisely the peculiarity of materialism: these subtle material processes in the human body remain closed to materialism. The fact that a hidden digestive activity takes place in the head precisely because one is sitting opposite a person with whom one is talking, with whom one is exchanging ideas, is something that people do not notice through today's crude science. Therefore, they cannot answer social questions, questions about the human context, even if they are quite trivial.

For the spiritual scientist, the anthroposophist, it is quite clear why the coffee sisters are so keen to sit together. They don't just sit together because they like coffee, but because they then digest themselves. The digestion goes to the head, and they feel that as a sense of well-being. And when coffee sister sits next to coffee sister, or even, I can't say coffee brother, but skat brother sits next to skat brother at the twilight drink, and so on, the same thing naturally takes place among men. I don't want to offend anyone, but when people sit together like that, yes, they feel the digestive activity going on behind their heads, and that means a certain sense of well-being. What happens there is really necessary for human life. It is really necessary, but it can be used for higher activity than just for the evening drink and for being a coffee nurse. Just as the blood must not stand still in the human being, so must what happens in the head not stand still. A stunted rhythm would occur in the nervous system if we did not have the right kind of spiritual connection with people outside. Our right humanity, that we become right people, depends on our coming into a reasonable connection with other people.

And so one can only form a social judgment when one realizes what is necessary for the human being – just as necessary as being born. When one realizes that the human being must come into a spiritual and soul connection with other human beings, only then can one form a correct social judgment about the way in which the spiritual element of the social organism must be formed. For then one knows that this social life is based on the fact that man must come into a right individual relationship with man, that no abstract state life must intervene there, that nothing must be organized from above, but that everything depends on the fact that the original original in the human being can approach the original in the other human being, that there is real, genuine freedom, direct freedom from individual to individual, be it in the social coexistence of the teacher with his students, be it in social coexistence in general. People wither away when school regulations or regulations about intellectual social life make it impossible for what is in one person to have a fertilizing effect on what is in another. A truly social judgment in the realm of spiritual life can only develop when that which elevates one person above themselves, when that which is more in one person than in another, can have an effect on the other person and when, in turn, that which is more in the other person than in oneself can have an effect on oneself. One can only understand the necessity of freedom in spiritual life when one realizes that this human coexistence can only develop in a spiritual and psychological way if what comes into existence with us through birth and what develops through our abilities can freely influence other people. Therefore, the spiritual element of the social organism must also be administered only within itself. The person who is active in the spiritual life must at the same time be in charge of the administration of the spiritual life. So: self-administration within this spiritual realm. You see, that is what is very special about this spiritual life, which arises from a true understanding of the human being.

Dr. Boos will then describe the legal life in more detail from the same point of view. The legal life proceeds as follows: when humanity, through the demands of the present, is increasingly moving towards a democratic state, so that the mature human being is confronted by another mature human being, we are not yet dealing with what works across from one person to another in the way I have described for the spiritual life, where the digestive activity shoots up into the head. In the sphere of right living, where one fully developed human being is confronted with another, no such changes take place as in the spiritual life, but only interactions between human being and human being. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect I will now omit this middle aspect and move on to economic life, to the third link in the social organism. This economic life is not really understood today in such a way that a real social judgment can be formed from this understanding. What, in fact, can be called economic life? You see, you can clearly define economic life when you think of it in terms of the social organism. If we take any kind of animal, we cannot say that it lives in a social community in the human sense, because the animal finds what it desires in nature itself. It takes what it needs to live from the external nature; what is initially outside in nature passes into the animal, the animal processes it and releases it again – another kind of interaction. You see: here we have something that, I would say, is organized into nature. Such an animal species, so to speak, only continues the life of nature within itself. Nothing is changed in nature. The animal takes in what is in nature for its nourishment – just as it is in nature. We can find a complete opposite to this, and this contrast is present in zoo animals, which receive everything they eat through human intervention. Here, human reason supplies the animal with nourishment, and the human organization first assesses what the animals then receive. As a result, the animals are actually completely torn out of nature. Domestic animals are also completely torn out of nature; they are, so to speak, so changed that they not only absorb natural food substances into their inner being, but that food prepared by human reason is grafted into them. Domestic animals become a means of expression of that which, so to speak, has been processed spiritually, but they themselves do nothing to it. Animals are either such that they take in what is in nature unchanged in their own activity, or, when humans feed them something, they cannot contribute anything to it; they do not help to prepare what is fed to them.

In the middle, between these two extremes, is human economic activity, insofar as it lives in the social organism, at most not when man is at the lower level of a hunting people, when he still takes what is in nature unchanged, if he enjoys it raw, which he actually no longer does today. But the moment human culture begins in this respect, man takes something that he has already prepared himself, where he changes nature. The animal does not do that, and if it is a domestic animal, something foreign is supplied to it. That is actually economic activity: what man does in communion with nature by supplying himself with changed nature. We can say that all economic activity of man actually lies between these two extremes: between what the animal, which is not yet a social being, takes unchanged from nature, and what the domestic animal takes in, which is now fed entirely in the stable, only with what humans prepare for it. And when man works, he is involved with his economic activity between his inner being and nature. And this economic life that we know in the social organism is actually only a systematic summary of what individuals do in the direction that I have characterized.

Let us compare the economic life in a social context with the spiritual life that we have just characterized. The spiritual life is based on the fact that the individual human being, so to speak, has too much. What people possess spiritually, they usually give away very gladly; they are generous in this way and gladly hand it over to others. In contrast to material possessions, people are not as generous in the same sense; they prefer to keep material possessions for themselves. But what they possess spiritually, they are very happy to give away; they are generous in this way. But this is based on a good universal law. Man can indeed go beyond himself in a spiritual sense; and in the way I have just described it, it is beneficial for the other person when man gives him something, even if he in turn does not accept anything from the other. That is to say, when a person enters social life in a spiritual way, I would say that, in his inner being, he has too much judgment, too many ideas; he is compelled to give, he must communicate with others.

In economic life, it is exactly the opposite. But one can only come to this conclusion if one starts from experience, not from some kind of theoretical science. In economic life, one cannot arrive at a judgment in the same way as in the life of the spirit, that is, from person to person. Rather, in economic life one can only come to a judgment when one stands as an individual human being or as a human being placed in some association in relation to another association. Therefore, the impulse for the threefold social order demands the associative: people must associate according to their occupations or according to producers, consumers and so on. In the economic sphere, the association will be confronted with the association. Let us compare this to the individual human being, who, for my sake, has a lot of spirit in his head; he can share this spirit with many people. One person may absorb it better, another worse, but he can communicate this spirit that he has to many people. So there is the possibility that a person can give what he has of spirit to many people. In economic life, it is exactly the other way around.

At first we have no idea about economic life at all. What I said to some of you yesterday is absolutely true: if you want to judge what is right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy in economic life, and you just want to deduce it from the inner being, then you you are just like that character in a Jean Paul novel who wakes up in the middle of the night in a dark room and thinks about what time it is, who wants to find out what time it is in the dark room where he can't see or hear anything. You can't work out what time it is by thinking about it. You can't come to an economic judgment through thinking or through inner development. You can't even come to an economic judgment when you are negotiating with another person. Goethe and Schiller were good at exchanging spiritual and psychological ideas. Two people together cannot come to an economic judgment. One can only come to an economic judgment when one is faced with a group of people who have had experiences, each in his own field, and when one then takes in as judgment what they, as an association, as a group, have worked out. Just as you have to look at your watch if you want to know what time it is, in order to arrive at an economic judgment, you have to take on board the experiences of an association. And one can hear very beautiful things about the duty of one person towards another, about the rights of one person towards another when they are face to face; but one cannot come to an economic judgment when only one person is confronted with another, but one can only come to an economic judgment if one understands what is laid down in associations, in groups of people, in mutual economic intercourse as economic experience. There, the exact opposite of how one lives together socially, spiritually and soulfully must be present. In the spiritual and soul realm, the individual human being must give to others what he develops within himself. In the economic sphere, the individual must absorb the experiences gained by the association. If I want to form an economic judgment, I can only do so if I have asked associations what experiences they have had with this or that article in production, in mutual dealings, and so on. And this is what it comes down to when forming a social judgment in the economic sphere: that such associations make up the economic body of the threefold social organism and that each individual belongs to such associations. In order to arrive at an economic judgment, from which one can in turn act, the economic experiences of the associations must be available. What we are meant to learn scientifically, cognitively, we must acquire in the free spiritual life through individual experiences. What is to inspire us in our economic will must be experienced by the individual through the experiences handed down to him by associations. Only by uniting with people who are economically active can we ourselves arrive at an economic will.

The formation of judgment in the spiritual-mental and economic spheres is radically different. And an economic life cannot flourish alongside a spiritual life if the two spheres receive orders from one and the same place, but only if the spiritual life is such that the individual can freely hand over to another what he has within it. And economic life can flourish only when the associations are such that the economic branches related to one another by production or consumption are united associatively, and thus the economic judgment, which again underlies the economic will, arises. Otherwise, it becomes a muddle, and we end up with the reactionary, liberal or social ideas of modern times, where we never realize how radically different human activities are in the spiritual, economic and, in the middle, legal or state spheres.

Basically, it is so difficult for people today to arrive at a sound judgment in this area because they have been led astray by the traditional creeds from seeing the real structure of the human being in body, soul and spirit. Man is said to be only a duality, only body and soul. As a result, everything is mixed up. Only when we divide the human being into spirit, soul and body, only when we know how the spirit is that which we bring into existence through birth, how the spirit is that which brings forth the potential for development within us, which we must bring into the social sphere, only then will we get an idea of how this spiritual part of the social organism must have a separate existence. When we know how everything that springs from the soul, which is intimately connected with our rhythmic life, is the product of human beings living together in circles of duty, work and love, then we can see what must be present in the democratic state as the legal organization of the threefold organism. And when we realize that we cannot arrive at an economic judgment and therefore cannot engage in economic activity without being integrated into a fabric of associations in the threefold social organism, then we come to see how only that which is a special kind of judgment in the economic field can lead to help in the future.

It is the task of the present to achieve a true understanding of the human being and, on the basis of this true understanding of the human being, to then arrive at an understanding of what today is striving for a true understanding. Man judges quite differently in the social life in the spiritual realm than in the legal realm, and it is quite different again than in the economic realm. Therefore, if these three very differently structured social contexts are to develop in a healthy way in the future, they must also be administered separately and then work together. Just as in the individual organism it is not possible to form anything other than the shape of a head where the head is to be, nor a hand or foot or heart or liver, so the spiritual organism must not be systematized in the same way as the economic organism or the legal organism. But precisely when they are properly organized in the right place, they work together to form a whole, just as the hand and foot and trunk and head of the human being work together to form a whole. The right unity arises precisely from the fact that each is properly organized in its own way.

As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, the idea presented to humanity in the form of the threefold social organism is truly not a frivolous one, but one that has been extracted from a real science. This science must, of course, first be fought for against all the scientific chaos that prevails today. But it is, I might say, not only a wall, it is a thick barrier of prejudices through which one must first fight, first fight with what must underlie the science of man, and then with what emerges from this true science of man as an impulse for a real social reconstruction. One can say: It makes one's heart bleed when one looks today into this chaos of social misconceptions that reigns everywhere, and at the social drowsiness. And one must say: It is indeed not possible for everyone to make a social new order out of what has been taken up by this European humanity as a prejudice from a mistaken science for three to four centuries. It is a terrible thing when people talk about a social order based on a science that can never justify a social judgment because it does not know man. That science, ladies and gentlemen, does not regard man as man, but only as the highest link in the animal series. It does not ask: What is man? - but: What are the animals? It only says: When the animals develop to the highest level, that is precisely the human being. One does not ask what the human being is, but the animals are there, and in the series of animals, the human being is added as the last one, without saying anything different about the human being than what is said about the animal being. Such a science will never create a social reconstruction.

What is so distressing is not that people today are not radical enough to say to themselves: We must first demand real knowledge, real science – but that they are more faithful today to external scientific authority than Catholics ever were in the past to papal authority. At that time, at least some still rebelled against this papal authority. Today, however, everything is subjugated to scientific authority, even radical socialists like Lunacharsky; when it comes to defending the old science against a renewal of science, he crawls under scientific authority because he cannot imagine that science itself needs to be transformed if we want to make progress. These things must be taken very seriously and they must be said. And no matter how many social clubs, liberal communities, development communities, women's mobs or women's clubs people join, nothing will come of it if the matter is not approached radically, if one does not start from the point where one can arrive at a real social judgment: And this is only a social human knowledge that can give what today's science cannot give. And only a real spiritual science can give a renewal of science.

That is what I wanted to say in introduction to this evening. I now ask Dr. Boos to speak about the second part of the social organism, about the life of rights.

Roman Boos speaks about “The formation of judgment in the legal aspect of the social organism.” After that, a discussion will take place.

Roman Boos: Perhaps someone still has a question to ask, or perhaps someone would like to add something? - That does not seem to be the case. I do not know if Dr. Steiner could be asked for a final word. It is very late and I do not know if there are any other questions that Dr. Steiner would like to address.

Rudolf Steiner: Taking into account the lateness of the hour, I would just like to add a few words, because a closing word is customary at a discussion. This evening's two topics, the demand for a social reorganization on the one hand and on the other hand the necessity to penetrate to the sources of spiritual science, because only there can the forces be found to do justice to the demands of the day, these two things must always be emphasized again in all seriousness from this point of view. This has often been said, but it cannot be said too often.

I began by saying today that people have grown instinctively into the present social orders, and in fact the materialists would also instinctively like to remain in them. They do not want to take into account that today is the time to move on to the activity of judgment, that is, to consciousness, and to create a new social world out of consciousness. But we must penetrate to this consciousness if we do not simply want to continue the disastrous policies of recent years, which have taken hold in such a terrible way and are now being continued within European civilizational life and its appendages. I have already pointed out here how a mind like Oswald Spengler's, which is, after all, ingenious on the one hand but sick on the other, can seriously attempt to prove scientifically that the Occident must have arrived at barbarism, at complete and utter decline, at the beginning of the third millennium. One gets the same pain that I spoke of at the end of my introductory words today when one sees how extraordinarily difficult it is to instill in the minds of the present the sense of the seriousness of the times, and how much more difficult it is to instill the sense of the necessity to carry out a real transformation with the knowledge of the present.

My dear audience, do not say that this knowledge of the present is only found in a few scholars or in some contemporary views of people. No, this knowledge is everywhere, only people do not admit it to themselves. What matters is not whether one holds this or that hypothesis, this or that scientific theory, but whether one's whole life of ideas and feelings is moving in a certain direction, which ultimately amounts to this scientific life of the present, which impoverishes and empties the human being. Of course, some people may not be concerned that it is the consequence of contemporary science that the earth originated from a nebula and will end up in some final state of heat in which all life will be destroyed. Perhaps there are even some who say: That may be, but I don't care. — But, my dear audience, that is not the point. Open any chemistry, any physiology, any zoology or any anthropology today, read five lines in it and take these five lines – it says something along those lines. Regardless of whether you open this or that and take this or that, you are in the direction that leads to these views. Of course, today it is convenient when you want to know something about this or that to resort to the usual things and not to think that even something like this needs a thorough transformation. Today it is convenient if you want to learn something about malachite, to go to the encyclopedia, take out the volume with “M”, open “Malachit” and read what is in there. If you accept it uncritically, regardless of what you otherwise think, and if you are not aware that you are living in a serious time of transformation, then you are asleep, then you are not prepared for what is necessary in today's world. Today it is a matter of not just becoming aware of the seriousness at some times when reflecting on the ultimate problems of world view, but today it is a matter of being aware every minute of the day that it is our duty to work on the transformation, because we live in a thoroughly serious time. And just in these days we are again experiencing the tragedy that the most important problems are unfolding, perhaps even more important than during the external years of war, and that people are trying to sleep as much as possible, not even participating with their consciousness in what is actually taking place.

To accept anthroposophy as a confession does not mean merely to advocate this or that in theory, to speak of etheric body and astral body, of reincarnation and karma. To accept anthroposophy means to be connected in one's feelings, with one's whole being, to that which is now taking place in the day and now in the great epoch as the impulse of a significant transformation. And when you look into the sleeping people today, your heart bleeds. Because today it depends on waking up. And again and again I would like to say, and I would like to conclude every discussion with it: try to get to the sources of spiritual knowledge, because with the water that comes from these sources, you splash yourself from a real source of consciousness. This knowledge touches one's own personality in such a way that one, I would say, takes it up from the deepest depths of one's earthly nature and into one's human inner being: wake up and fulfill your tasks in the face of the great demands of the time.

Roman Boos: It will be announced what will be discussed here a week from today. This concludes today's event.

When people see the present distress and misery, they ask what has caused it, and usually they look for the causes in external circumstances. They will first look back at the painful years that have passed, four to five years. Perhaps he will also gradually become aware that what has been so painfully experienced in the last four to five years has been preparing itself over a long period of time, through decades, indeed through centuries of recent human development, just as a thunderstorm prepares itself through the sultriness of the whole day, without its formation being noticed, and then discharges itself. But even those people who look further back in this way to the causes and reasons for our present plight and our misery in this age, they will look more or less at external circumstances. They will also think of appearances when it comes to getting out of the confusion and chaos of this age, of external measures and institutions.

To a great extent, this view is correct. I myself have tried to express the extent to which this is the case, in accordance with my own convictions, in the lecture I was allowed to give here in Ulm a few weeks ago on social issues. But there is another side to this way of looking at things. We need only be attentive to what is a significant contemporary phenomenon in our present time with regard to the inner human life, the human soul life. In line with what I just mentioned, we are rightly striving for a more social organization of the external conditions of life than has been granted to humanity in the last three to four centuries. But is it not noticeable that we are striving towards this social organization from a very strange human state of mind? Do we not notice that basically human souls in the present are permeated with antisocial drives, with antisocial instincts, with little possibility of mutual understanding? And it is out of these antisocial states of mind, and all the more so because they are present, that we must strive for a more social organization of external life than that which the antisocial instincts of our present human life had developed during the last three to four centuries. If we consider the question from this point of view, we find that these antisocial tendencies of the present time are actually connected with the fact that we have lost the way to the innermost core of man's being, the way to that innermost core of being that every human being actually senses within himself, even if more or less brightly or only instinctively and obscurely: the supersensible human being. However strange it may sound, people today do not know exactly what their deeper, darker soul craves. It longs for a realization of the supersensible essence of the human being. And in the difficulties that our age in particular is experiencing in advancing to a satisfactory realization of this innermost human nature - in these difficulties lies much of what then expresses itself externally in confusion and chaos, as little as people want to admit this even today. Many people, however, think that the question I am talking about should be answered in a completely different way from the one I will give you tonight.

Since I have to discuss this question from the point of view of anthroposophical spiritual science, I will not be able to answer it in the convenient way that is sought by many people today, and which is popular in the broadest circles of humanity. When people today are told about the Mountains of the Moon and how one informs oneself about them through physical instruments and physical measures, they believe that acquiring knowledge about the Mountains of the Moon is a complicated matter. The human being overcomes himself and admits that one cannot penetrate to knowledge of, say, the Moon Mountains or the moons of Jupiter or the like in a completely comfortable way. But when it comes to the supersensible world, when it comes to the spiritual existence of the human being himself, the broadest circles today still behave quite differently. They find it too difficult to speak in the way I will have to speak to you today. Even today the widest circles say: Better than this apparent science is childlike confession or childlike belief in the Bible to enter the supersensible worlds. They insist on that which they find comfortable, on the childlike simplicity of the belief in confession or in the Bible, when it is a matter of the highest thing to which man can aspire on the path of the soul, and they reject that which does not lead man along this path in such a comfortable way. But even today people do not see certain inner connections that exist between this striving for comfortable spiritual paths and between our anti-social instincts and the difficulties of getting out of these anti-social instincts. If people realized the connection between what they have been told and believed from certain quarters: that you can seek the paths to the supersensible through childlike, simple creeds, and if they realized the connection between this assertion and this belief and between what is expressed today in terms of anti-social impulses, then one would certainly learn to think differently about what the widest circles today find to be a 'convenient way into the supersensible worlds'. 'But it is not out of some kind of intellectual quirk that spiritual science shows modern man other ways today, but it shows these ways because it feels it has an obligation to do so in view of the needs and tasks of present-day humanity. If present-day humanity were to recognize itself in its very depths, it would say to itself: With regard to supersensible striving, we can no longer be satisfied with the old ways. This lives today as a longing in many souls, and anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to meet this longing.

As already mentioned, people today do ask more or less clearly or more or less unconsciously about the relationship between soul and body; if they have not already come so far as to deny everything of a soul nature, because doubt has always arisen in response to this question, doubt that has wearied them. But what does the modern person fundamentally know about soul and body? He observes the body in such a way that he applies his senses, his external physical mind, or, for that which he cannot directly learn through the senses and the mind, he resorts to natural science, which, through its investigations, is supposed to tell him what the laws are, what the inner nature of this human physical body is. On the other hand, man inwardly perceives that which he calls thinking, feeling and willing. This becomes an inner experience for him. To this thinking, feeling and willing he also attaches certain inner longings, desires and hopes, he attaches the belief that this inner life, living in thinking, feeling and willing, has not only the temporary significance for the world that the life of the physical body has. But then the question arises for the human being that gives rise to the great doubts: What is the relationship between what I perceive inwardly as soul in me, as thinking, feeling and willing, and what I see outwardly in myself and in others as the outer physical body, the laws and essence of which science seeks to explain to me? And if the human being cannot explain this relationship between the soul and the body to himself, then he may well turn to those who, based on certain scientific foundations, have the opportunity to investigate this relationship more deeply. And lo and behold, today's man, who is so eager to have everything explained to him by scientific authority, must then realize that in this question he can be helped little by the scientists he so seeks. If he takes anything at hand in which the researchers in this field have expressed themselves, he will usually find that they say about this question just as uncertainly as he carries within himself. All kinds of hypotheses and conjectures can be found. But something that seizes the human being in such a way that, if only they can truly take a position on it without prejudice, they might get a sense of the truth, is rarely found today. The task of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is to find this.

But we cannot advance along the same paths by which we arrive at external science to that which I must now speak of as a spiritual science, as a real spiritual science. Imagine someone telling you about the paths of research they have taken in the chemical or physical laboratory, in the clinic, to research external nature. You would usually hear from such a researcher, who can justifiably believe that he has become an expert in his field, that he has gone his research ways with a certain calm, with a certain inner equanimous soul mood. There is not much excitement to be found on today's research paths.

But anyone who wants to tell you about the path he took to his insights into the supersensible human being cannot speak of such calmness, of such an inner, equanimous mood of the soul. If he is to tell you about what he went through to arrive at these insights, he will have to speak of inner struggles, of inner soul-searching, of difficult efforts, of repeatedly standing at the precipice of doubt. He will have to tell you about what he had to overcome in abundance, what he had to go through to arrive at what provides information about the actual supersensible human core of being. For one only really enters upon the path to knowledge of the supersensible human being when one has familiarized oneself with everything I have already indicated: when doubts arise when considering the question of the relationship between body and soul, so that one that can only arise from a certain intellectual modesty – while most people today, in such matters, have not at all intellectual modesty, but on the contrary, terrible intellectual arrogance.

But if one really makes an effort with ordinary thinking, with all the ordinary powers of the soul that one otherwise has in life, to approach these questions about the nature of soul and body, then one gradually realizes that one must be modest, that one cannot approach these questions with ordinary human thinking. And gradually, through inner experience, through inner discovery, one comes to realize that with this ordinary human thinking and feeling, one's approach to the supersensible is comparable to the abilities of a five-year-old child when, for example, it is presented with a volume of lyric poetry. This child cannot do anything with the volume of poetry that corresponds to the essence of this volume of poetry. We must first develop his abilities further, then he can do something with the volume of poetry that corresponds to the essence of this volume of poetry. So we must say to ourselves with regard to the thinking abilities that we have for our ordinary lives, with regard to the powers of knowledge that we have for our ordinary lives: you cannot use them to recognize the actual essence of the world and your own existence; you are initially confronted with this essence of the world and this essence of your own existence in such a way that you can do with it as little as a five-year-old child can with a book of poetry.

Only when one has developed this mood in one's soul, when one has conquered intellectual modesty so that one says to oneself: You must not remain with the way you can think now, feel and will now - only then does one stand at the starting point of the path into the supersensible worlds. For anyone who has something to say about the supersensible worlds must not only speak about something different from the ordinary external sense world, but must speak in a different way. This means, however, that one can only become a spiritual researcher if one first takes into one's own hands the faculties of thinking and cognition that one has for ordinary, everyday life and for ordinary science. Just as a child is educated by others, and its abilities developed by others, so must one take one's own inner soul abilities, first of all one's thinking ability, into one's own hands and develop them further, from the point of view at which thinking comes naturally in life.

In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have described in detail the systematic structure of the thinking process by which man can take his thinking ability into his own hands and develop it further than it has been developed by ordinary life and ordinary science.

This evening, due to the limited time, I will only be able to present the fundamentals of the matter. I will only be able to show you how to further develop this thinking, how to take it into your own hands and how to advance it further and further. The following is a prerequisite for this: If you want to educate yourself about the external physical being of a person, as I said earlier, you should turn to natural science. Now, this natural science is not to be disparaged. The spiritual researcher fully recognizes the great triumphs of natural science in modern times, just as the natural scientist can only recognize them himself. He recognizes this natural science as justified; he is all the better a spiritual researcher the better he is able to appreciate the value and significance of natural science. But precisely for this reason the other side must also be stated: if one asks this natural science, it initially presents one with the limits of knowledge. You are all well aware that it is precisely the level-headed natural scientists who speak of such limits of knowledge. Certain concepts, certain ideas are presented to the person who asks about the nature of things, about power, matter, etc. These concepts change from time to time, but certain limits always remain, beyond which the natural scientist says: You cannot go. The natural scientist is right in his field if he stops at these limits. The spiritual researcher cannot do this. But he must not want to go beyond these limits through mere speculation or mere fantasy.

When the spiritual researcher approaches that which science cannot recognize and where it has driven the boundary posts for knowledge, there the great inner soul struggles begin for him, for the spiritual researcher. The spiritual researcher must fight inwardly with what the natural scientist presents as fixed boundary concepts. And here this struggle becomes a first great experience. He overcomes these limitations in his inner experience by struggling, and by overcoming them, a realization dawns on him with the experiences, which is important, fundamentally important for everything that is to lead to the knowledge of supersensible human nature. By devoting himself to this struggle with the limitations of natural knowledge, he realizes how peculiarly the human being is adapted to life. For the spiritual researcher must ask himself, from his experience, what prevents him from looking into the inner nature of things in a purely scientific way? There he discovers something most remarkable, I might say, something most distressing. If nature were transparent, if it did not set limits for us, then we human beings would not possess a quality in our life between birth and death that we absolutely need for our social existence in this life. If man could see into the inner nature of nature, he would have to do without the soul power of love! Everything we call love from person to person, what we call love and brotherly feelings from person to person, what glows in the soul when we approach another person socially, we could not have if nature did not set limits for our knowledge of nature.

This is a truth that cannot be proven logically. Just as little as one can logically prove that there is a whale or that there is no whale – one can only be convinced by seeing it with one's own eyes – so one cannot prove that one would have to do without love if knowledge of nature had no limits. But as an experience it presents itself to him who really struggles into spiritual knowledge. There you see what secrets our human existence holds. It is such a secret that man must pay for limited knowledge of nature by developing love. And vice versa: he must pay for his ability to love by initially having no unlimited knowledge of nature.

But this also shows us what the one who really wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, to which man himself with his innermost core of being belongs, has to overcome. One of the basic principles for the paths up to the supersensible human being and to the supersensible world in general is that one's ability to love, one's devotion to all beings in the world, must be greater than it is in ordinary life between birth and death, so that one does not lose love when one now tries to shape one's thinking more and more so that it becomes different from the way one thinks in ordinary life. It must be a preparation for the spiritual path of knowledge, to make oneself much, much more capable of love than one has to be for the ordinary social life. One gradually realizes that one actually only gets to know the world in one's full human nature as long as one is in the physical body, through love, through no other method of research.

But if you want to penetrate into the spiritual world, you must at the same time develop your thinking higher than it develops naturally in human nature. This is achieved by systematically applying certain inner soul activities, which in life are otherwise only applied incidentally, by forcing yourself to do so. Today I can only give you a small excerpt of what you will find described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” But I can at least hint at what this higher development of human thinking is based on.

You know that when something from outside stimulates us in some way, we become aware of it. We hear a sound and we are interested in what is happening in the direction of that sound. So being interested in something and turning our attention to it are inner soul activities that are usually stimulated in people from the outside world. What is important when entering the spiritual path of knowledge is that we apply such forces as the forces that lead to attention and interest in us, for example, by meditating on an idea for a very, very long time, as they say, by putting our soul completely into this idea. In the ordinary, natural course of life, attention and interest in this idea are lost. But if you deliberately immerse yourself in such an idea with all your soul, and remain in it, so that you maintain from within the attention that is in danger of fading, that you maintain from within the interest when it is in danger of fading, through the length with which you devote yourself to the idea - and if you keep doing this, then you invigorate your thinking; your thinking becomes something quite different from what it used to be. Then one comes indeed to a thinking that is full of inner activity, but in which one must also exert oneself, as one must exert oneself in an external manual labor. One comes to a thinking that relates to ordinary thinking as ordinary thinking relates to the thinking of a five-year-old child, for example, in relation to lyrical poems. But one comes to a kind of thinking of which one says to oneself: if one has achieved it, then one had to exert an inner strength in order to achieve it, which really took the physical, which also cooperates, so that one feels it like a fatigue from hard external work, to which one has devoted oneself for years. If one learns to recognize that one can work at something in one's soul that costs as much effort as chopping wood costs for me, then one comes to grasp the living thinking in one's soul, while ordinary thinking only accompanies external phenomena, external experiences. Think about how you actually think in ordinary life: you do your work in ordinary life, and your thinking runs along dreamily alongside this outer life. Try to make this thinking more strenuous by reading a difficult book, and you will notice that just when thinking wants to be inwardly active, it must tire, like any other activity. But what is developed from within through this activity must be pushed further and further with the thinking. When it is pushed further and further, one notices that a great change is taking place in thinking. Then one learns to recognize something of which one had no idea before: one learns to recognize that one lives in a thinking of which ordinary thinking is only a reflection, an image: one learns to know a thinking that lives inwardly, a thinking that is completely independent of the tool of the brain, of the tool of the body. However grotesque, however paradoxical, however insane it may appear to present-day humanity, in this way, which you will find described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, the human being can come to know very precisely: by thinking, by developing the soul activity of thinking, you live outside the body with your thinking, while ordinary thinking is tied to the instrument of the body, to the nervous system. But one also learns to recognize exactly how little the inner soul being, which one grasps in one's thinking, is bound to the instrument of the brain. For one does not develop this inner soul being in the first place, but one only gets to know it. I am not talking to you about something that is being developed anew today, but about the knowledge of the supersensible human being. One learns to recognize the great error to which ordinary natural science and external popular opinion about thinking succumb, especially in our materialistic age.

Natural scientific thinking says: the brain is the instrument of thinking. But that is an error, just as it would be an error if you were to see wagon tracks or the marks of human footsteps in a muddy country lane and then to reflect – let us assume for the moment – on the forces at work from below, from the earth, that have produced the wagon tracks or the marks of human footsteps. That would, of course, be foolish. You cannot see from the structure of the earth itself how the furrows were formed. You have to realize that a cart has driven there, that people have walked over it with their feet, that this has left an impression. In this way you come to see the error of science with regard to the human soul life when you really get to know thinking that is independent of the body. There you learn that what is in the brain as nerve furrows does not have the forces in the brain itself that produce the soul; rather, you learn that all these furrows are driven in — like furrows in soft earth driven in by carts and footsteps — that these furrows are dug in by soul activity independent of the body. And now you also understand the error that can arise in science. Such traces arise in the brain for everything that is engraved there; you can follow them all; but this did not arise from the body, it is engraved into the body.

But it is not always easy to grasp this active being. In order to get even a brief glimpse into this human thinking, which is independent of the body, one needs what could be called presence of mind, because it does not last long, such a glimpse of the spiritual into our ordinary perception. One can prepare oneself well – you will also find something about this in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' – by developing in everyday life what can be called presence of mind, rapid orientation in situations and the ability to act quickly in a situation. If we develop this quality more and more, we prepare ourselves to see what can appear out of the spiritual, the supersensible world, and what we otherwise do not see because we do not have time to muster the necessary presence of mind while it occurs; because we do not have time to look at it before it is over. But if you really learn to look into the spiritual world in this way, if you learn to recognize what lives in the human being and can be grasped in this way through developed thinking, then you see not only into the ordinary human life of everyday life, but then a completely different perspective arises.

There is one thing that this spiritual knowledge does not have: it is not memorable in the ordinary sense. The one who wants to tell you something from the spiritual world must always create the conditions to see it. He cannot just develop a memory for his earlier spiritual vision. But even if that spiritual insight, I would like to say, passes quickly like a fleeting dream that is soon forgotten, it contains within itself a meaningful memory. And at this point something must be said that will naturally strike the people of the present time as highly peculiar. But it certainly did strike people as peculiar when they were told that there are not just glowing points up there, but countless worlds spread throughout space! Just as men centuries ago were slow to believe it, but became so accustomed to it that today it is a matter of course for them, so what the spiritual researcher presents as his experience through his developed thinking will still seem unusual today, but it will have to be a matter of course for the coming centuries. And one of the tasks of our time will be to develop people's understanding for such an expansion of human knowledge and human perception. In the moment when man has an inwardly living thinking and knows that with this thinking he is independent of the body, he looks back - while he cannot have the ordinary memory in this moment - to the spiritual-soul that he has gone through in a purely spiritual world before he united with the physical human body through birth or conception and thereby descended from a spiritual world into the sensual world. The view expands beyond the life one has been living since birth; life expands into the contemplation of the spiritual world from which we have descended to our physical existence.

This also gives a new meaning to our entire social life. In our social life, we relate to this or that person. We quickly develop an affinity for one person, while with another we do not find ourselves so quickly united in sympathy. The most diverse relationships arise with other people here in this life between birth and death. If, as a spiritual researcher, you learn to recognize life as I have just indicated, then you will find that what attracts you to one person and what more or less alienates you to another person – in short, what arises in your relationships with others – is the result of what we have lived through with other souls in another world before we descended to this physical existence. Everything we experience in the physical world is a reflection of experiences in the spiritual world. In this way, human spiritual endeavor in our time will be able to give rise to insight into the spiritual world from this physical world.

There may still be many people today who cannot relate to such a view. But one can still think about such people. When the first railroad was built in Germany, a council of physicians and other scholars were called together to decide whether or not to build railroads. These learned gentlemen delivered the verdict that railways should not be built because traveling would be harmful to health and only fools would want to travel in them. In any case, a high board wall would have to be erected so that those along whom the railroad passes would not get concussions. Today there are people who, figuratively speaking, believe that one gets a concussion when the spiritual researcher speaks of the insights of the supersensible world. But the development of time will overcome these prejudices as it has overcome other prejudices.

What I have described to you is one way of crossing over from the physical world into the superphysical world. One must struggle with the limitations of knowledge of nature. But one must also come to terms with another limitation if one is to enter the spiritual world and gain insights into the supersensible nature of the human being. Just as one must come to terms with the limitations of knowledge of external nature, one must also come to terms with the limitations of knowledge of one's own being.

A great many people despair of finding satisfaction for their inner soul life in their old religious traditions and turn to so-called mysticism, believing that if they delve deeper and deeper into their souls, their inner soul life, their human nature, will become clear to them. Many people believe that what they truly are as human beings can arise mystically. The spiritual researcher must also learn this limit. He must be able to be a mystic, just as he must develop knowledge of nature. But he must not stop with mysticism, just as he must not stop with knowledge of nature. He must learn that mere mysticism leads to nothing but illusions about the supersensible human being, but not to a real knowledge of this supersensible human being. A true spiritual researcher is truly not an illusionist. He does not succumb to any illusions about what he has to recognize as reality. Therefore, unlike the ordinary mystic, he does not set out to conjure up all kinds of fantasies from within himself. No, there he knows one thing again: by struggling with his own inner being, by going through his own personal struggle, he knows that what mystics find is basically nothing other than what has made an impression on their souls since birth. They may have only grasped it dimly, it may not have come to their perception quite clearly, but it has remained in their memory.

Scientific research has already made some very interesting observations in this regard. I will briefly share one with you that is recorded in scientific literature, but which could be multiplied a hundredfold, a thousandfold. A natural scientist passes a bookstore window. His eye falls on a book. And as he looks at the title of the book, he has to laugh. Just imagine, a naturalist has to laugh when he sees a serious book title! He cannot explain to himself why he has to laugh. Now he closes his eyes because he thinks he will be able to figure it out more quickly if he is not distracted by the external impression. By closing his eyes, he hears in the distance what he had not heard before, as long as he was distracted: a barrel organ. And by continuing his investigation, he realizes that the organ is playing a melody to which he once danced. At the time, it made no strong impression on him; he was more interested in the dancer, or even in the dance steps. The impression of the melody itself was weak at the time, but still strong enough to resurface in later life when the researcher hears the same melody from the organ!

The spiritual researcher is very familiar with such things and their essence, for he has no illusions. He knows that when some mystic speaks of experiencing the divine human within himself, of experiencing something that brings him together with his eternal self, then it is the 'sounds of the barrel organ': he has once taken something in, that has transformed itself – for such things transform themselves – that rises as reminiscence. In the path of ordinary mysticism you find nothing but what you have once absorbed, and you can give yourself up to the most terrible illusions by wanting to be a mere mystic.

It is precisely this limitation that the spiritual researcher must overcome. Through experience one comes to know that what cannot be proved “logically” can be attained by the spiritual researcher through direct experience: one learns to recognize that one may not learn to know oneself by looking inwardly. For if one could see through oneself inwardly, one would in turn lack a human soul power that one must have for ordinary life if one could see through oneself inwardly. If one could see through oneself inwardly, one would not have the power of memory in ordinary life. And that this power of memory, the power of memory, is healthy, depends on whether we are healthy at all in our soul life. If our memory, our recollection, is disturbed, the ego is disturbed, a terrible mental illness occurs. So that we have to say: just as man, in order to have love, must have limits in his knowledge of nature, so too, in order to have memory, he must be placed in the impossibility of coming to the higher human being through mere inner contemplation.

But one can also ensure that this ability to remember is more firmly rooted in human nature than in ordinary life, which can also be done through exercises such as those I have described in the book mentioned.

In the same way that you can move towards consciously elevating your thinking, as I have described, you can also move towards conscious self-discipline by always noticing: You are doing this or that badly, you have to learn from life. In this way, you can take your will development into your own hands, just as you took your thought development into your own hands. When you take your will development into your own hands, something develops that, so to speak, illuminates the otherwise dark will in which you find yourself in ordinary life: you feel everything that you feel as will, interspersed with thoughts. In a sense, you are the spectator of your own will and action. When one comes to be the observer of one's own will and actions in such a tangible, spiritual and soul-like way, then what one receives as a higher willpower coincides with what developed earlier as thought activity. And now another faculty comes into play: one now beholds in one's own human nature something that appears so independent of all physical activity that one knows: What you carry within you, you carry out through death into the spiritual world. Through the culture of the will, one comes to know the spiritual life that a person lives after death, just as one comes to know, through the culture of thought, the spiritual life that a person has experienced before birth or conception. As you can see, spiritual research cannot speak in the usual way about the supersensible human being, but must relate how one experiences being able to look at the life of a person before and after death.

By penetrating into the world of one's own human existence in this way, one encounters social life in a new form. One observes how one experiences this or that together with other people, how one enters into relationships with other people, how one becomes friends with other people or is connected or disconnected again through other circumstances in the world. One learns to recognize that everything that takes place in the physical-sensual world is only the beginning of something that develops further as we pass through the gate of death. The relationships of the soul that are formed here between human and human find their continuation when the human being passes through the gate of death. The life that joins death becomes a very concrete reality in that we know that we are connected to those people here through our relationships in the sensual life, even beyond death.

These are things that still seem strange to people today, but they must be mastered by the tasks of our time. If they are, then something quite different will come to the fore. Then man will recognize in a completely different light what he today calls his own human development, what he today calls history. If one develops abilities such as those of which I have spoken, then one also looks differently into the historical of humanity than the fable convenue indicates, which is called history today and which must become something completely different in the future. I will give you an example at the end of my discussion to show you how the human being of the future must penetrate into the historical development of humanity itself.

We do not usually notice it, but at a certain historical point in recent times, a major turning point occurred in the development of humanity. That was in the middle of the 15th century. We usually say that nature does not make any leaps. It is a saying that is generally believed, although it is false. Nature is constantly making leaps. Consider the development of a plant, how a flower with stamens and pistils develops from a leaf, and finally the fruit! In the same way, historical life also makes leaps. And such a leap occurred in the middle of the 15th century, which we only fail to recognize because we look at history so superficially. The expanded human gaze, which overcomes, as it overcomes the experiences between birth and death, also that which is only presented in external history, in external facts, and it looks into the spirit of historical activity. And so this view shows that we have been living since the middle of the 15th century in the age that will last for a long time, which replaced another age that began in the 8th century BC and lasted until the middle of the 15th century. century. This era, from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD, encompasses everything that was the magnificent Greek culture, what was Roman culture, and the after-effects of Greek and Roman civilization. And since the middle of the 15th century, we have, as I will characterize it in a moment, our modern culture with modern humanity.

How do these two cultures differ? They differ in something that people in the present time do not yet want to see and acknowledge. Before the 15th century, going back to the 8th century BC, man was capable of development in a completely different way than today. I can make this clear to you in the following way. Think about what the human being is like in the years before he changes his teeth around the seventh year, and how that marks a turning point in his life! You can read more about this in the small booklet on 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. You will see what it actually means for the more precise observer of human nature, what the child goes through with the change of teeth. There is a parallelism between the outer development of the body and the inner development of the soul. Then, in turn, there is a next point of development at the time of sexual maturity, in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then the parallelism between body and soul becomes less clear, but for present humanity it continues until about the twenty-seventh year. In the twenty-seventh year, one ceases to feel this connection between spiritual-soul development and bodily development strongly. This remarkable fact that the human being completes his physical development at the age of twenty-seven has only emerged since the middle of the 15th century. It was different in the previous period. What can be recognized here through spiritual research is an infinitely significant human developmental truth. In Greek and Roman times, human beings were at such a stage of development that until the age of thirty-three or thirty-five, there was a parallelism between their physical and spiritual-soul development. The Greeks developed qualities such as these, although not to the same extent, until well into their thirties, as evidenced by the change of teeth and sexual maturity. This is what constituted the remarkable harmony of soul and body in the Greeks. The progression that human history shows is that we have less and less of the years of youth, less and less of what emancipated us from the physical and bodily in our earlier years. But this also requires a completely different position of the soul-spiritual to the world being in the human being. In the long period from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD, human beings developed more of an instinctive mind and an instinctive emotional life. Everything that lives in this period is permeated by this instinctive life of mind and soul. But since the middle of the 15th century, man has developed a more conscious mental and emotional life and with it the demand to place himself on the level of the free personality. This demand of human nature to place itself on the level of the free personality is only developing in history since the middle of the 15th century.

This also explains how the great events in human development fall differently depending on whether they occur in one or the other epoch. In the epoch that preceded our own, in which man remained capable of physical development well into his thirties, the greatest event in the development of the earth occurred in the first third of this epoch: the event that actually gives the development of the earth its true meaning, the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, the founding of Christianity. In the first third of the Greco-Latin era, what is like the central event of the whole human development on earth took place. The way it took place in the human race at that time, it could only be grasped naively by humanity in the age in which instinctive powers of mind and instinctive powers of the soul were present. It was only through these instinctive powers that people were able to relate to the great event in the right way during that period, because they did not yet behave consciously, but naively. They said to themselves: This is not just something that is done by human beings, something superhuman has broken into earthly development. The Christ, the superhuman being, has united with the body of Jesus of Nazareth. What happened at Golgotha is, in its physical facts, only the outer expression of something supersensible that has taken place in the development of the earth.

In those days, therefore, it could be grasped instinctively. This has changed since the middle of the 15th century. Since the middle of the 15th century, the instinctive mind, the instinctive power of mind, has been transformed into conscious mind, into conscious powers of mind. This made it possible to develop natural science to the high level it has reached, but also to develop industry, and to develop the materialism of the age, which had to be there as an adjunct to place the free personality at the top. But this materialism must be transcended by seeking the path to the spiritual world in a new way, as I have described it today. The age became materialistic in the epoch in which the consciousness soul of man developed from the earlier instinctive soul. Then, in addition to external materialism, the materialism of theology also emerged. Consider how, in wide circles, even theology, the religious view, has been grasped by materialism; how man of the age of consciousness became incapable of recognizing the supersensible in the event of Golgotha, how he came more and more to drag it down into the sensual; how he finally became proud of it, how even numerous theologians became proud of no longer seeing in the Christ the supersensible entity that descended to earth in the body of a human being, but only seeing the “simple man from Nazareth,” who is indeed somewhat greater than other people, but is nevertheless merely a human being. That in the Mystery of Golgotha, in the death and resurrection of Christ, the greatest fact in the evolution of the world and of humanity is presented to us, has not yet dawned upon the materialistic age. Religion itself has become materialized. Simple religious belief will not be able to stop this materialization of religion. It can only be stopped by the conscious knowledge of the spirit, of which I have spoken today. It will in turn arise from the realization that in Jesus of Nazareth there lived a supermundane, a supersensible being, which since that time has united itself with the evolution of mankind. The Mystery of Golgotha will be placed in the sphere of human contemplation through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science; but now it will be placed in such a way that it will be freed from the narrow-mindedness of the individual denominations.

What will develop as the spiritual outlook of the supersensible human being, as I have described it today, will make it possible for it to live in every human being across the whole earth, without distinction of race or nationality. From there, however, the path to the mystery of Golgotha will also be found, and all people across the whole earth will understand this Christ event, learn to comprehend it. In our time people enthuse about the so-called League of Nations; one enthuses about this League of Nations in the utopian way in which it originated in the abstract thinking of Woodrow Wilson. It will not be able to arise in this way. It needs a foundation of reality, and this must proceed from the innermost part of the human soul. That is the task of the present time. Only in this ability of the soul, which leads to the path of knowledge of the supersensible human being and unites people of the whole earth, only through such knowledge, which can look at the Christ event as a supersensible event, only in such an impulse, which works across nations, which works across all borders through nations, lies the real power for a future true League of Nations across the earth. In this way, Christianity must strike its new roots into human culture.

This shows you the other side to what I was allowed to say here in the previous lecture. This shows you the side that corresponds to the human inner soul life, which in turn will ignite social instincts in the human being when it fills him. To receive this spiritual science, one does not need to believe in authority as one does to receive the other scientific knowledge that is conveyed, say, from the observatory about astronomy, from medicine about the nature of the physical human being. That must be accepted on authority if one does not want to become an astronomer or a physiologist and so on oneself. But you do not have to believe what the spiritual researcher tells you on authority. You do not have to be a spiritual researcher yourself, just as you do not have to be a painter to find the beauty in a picture. You can absorb spiritual science through your common sense without being a spiritual researcher yourself, if you just sweep away the prejudices that have developed from today's materialism. Because everything in spiritual science is stored in the depths of the human soul, it can be understood without belief in authority. And this understanding, this trust in the revelations of spiritual science, is something that must be lived into the tasks of our age. Then this age will experience a renewal. Then this age will be given the ferment for what, as an external institution of a new structure, will have to play a corresponding role.

For what do we see when we really try to understand the nature of the present time? I would say: We see two paths, one on the left and one on the right. One of these offers us the possibility of stopping at the views that mere natural science has brought, and from this view, which natural science has brought, to now also proceed to social views; thus to start from the belief that one can understand social life with the same faculty of thought with which one understands nature. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did that, and so do Lenin and Trotsky. That is why they arrive at their conclusions. People today do not yet realize that natural science stands on one side, and that its ultimate consequences find expression in social chaos and social decline. The terrible faith that now seeks to destroy all truly human culture in Eastern Europe, this terrible faith of Lenin and Trotsky, arises from the other faith, that the paths of scientific knowledge must also be followed in social life. What has happened under the influence of this newer materialistic-scientific faith? Our entire spiritual life has been mechanized. But because our spiritual life no longer rises to thoughts about the supersensible human being, because it mechanizes itself on the external mechanistic view of nature, at the same time the souls are vegetarianized, made plant-like, sleepy. Thus we see that in addition to the mechanized mind, we have a vegetarianized soul in modern cultural life. But if the soul is not warmed through by the spirit, if the spirit is not suffused with supersensible knowledge, then animal qualities develop in the body. Today these animal qualities live in anti-social instincts and want to become the executioners of culture in Eastern Europe. Then, under the guise of wanting to socialize, the most anti-social thing develops; then the bodily life becomes animalized alongside the mechanized spirit and the vegetated soul. The wildest instincts and drives arise as historical demands. That is the path that leads left.

The other way, the right way, is to enter into the view of the supersensible human being, the supersensible world, as presented in today's message. This view also sees the development of the human being in the supersensible light, and penetrates to the truly free spirit.

In my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”, I wanted to describe freedom as the basis for human progress, and to show how man can experience his true inner freedom by grasping the spiritual life. Only the spirit that permeates man can truly become free. The spirit that only permeates nature and seeks to shape all social life according to the pattern of modern natural science becomes mechanistically unfree. And the soul, permeated only by this spirit, sleeps like the plant. The soul that is warmed through by the true, pulsating will of spiritual knowledge of supersensible human nature steps forward in social life. It learns to recognize the supersensible human being in the other person. It learns to see the divine in the archetype in every person. It learns social feeling towards every person. It learns how, with regard to this innermost soul, all people here on earth are equal. And in this soul, warmed by the spirit, equality can develop in the other way on the right. And when the bodies are imbued and spiritualized by the supersensible consciousness, when they are warmed through, when they are ennobled by what the soul absorbs, by being awakened by the spirit, not remaining vegetated, then the bodies will not become animalized either; then the bodies become such that they develop what, in the broadest sense, can be called genuine love. Then, then the human being knows that he enters into his earthly body as a supersensible being, that he enters into this body to develop love in this body, to develop love towards the spirit. Then he knows that there must be brotherhood in the earthly body, otherwise the individual cannot be a whole, a full human being in unbrotherly humanity.

Thus the continuation of the old way leads us to the mechanization of the spirit, to the vegetarianization of the soul, to the animalization of the body. The path that is to be shown by spiritual science leads us to the true social virtues, but to the social virtues that are permeated by the spirit and warmed by the soul; that are carried out by the ennobled human body.

Thus spiritual knowledge of the supersensible human being leads us to found the future on a beautiful new building on earth: freedom in spiritual life. The spiritualized human being will be a free human being. Equality in the soul life warmed by the spirit: the soul that takes in the spirit will perceive and treat the other soul that it encounters in social life as truly equal, as if in a great secret. And the ennobled body, the body ennobled by spirit and soul, will become the vehicle of truest, most genuine human love, of true brotherhood. Thus the social order of man in freedom, equality and brotherhood will be able to take place through the correct understanding of body, soul and spirit.

Today and tomorrow, I will attempt to say something about certain relationships between human beings and the spiritual worlds, proceeding from the Faust poem. It may be assumed by anyone who really delves into the Faust poem with the tools of spiritual science that Goethe actually wanted to say something of the deepest that he had gained through his long life on earth as his world view in these last scenes in particular. In this case, world view is also meant to imply that Goethe, as if instinctively, as if as a matter of course, wrote these scenes in such a way that one can really feel his position in them, also in relation to the development of humanity, to the impulses of the development of humanity, as far as they were accessible to his knowledge. When spiritual scientific ideas are applied to the figures that Goethe created in his Faust poem, then this must naturally be understood in a very definite way. It would be quite wrong to think that Goethe first took these ideas as a basis and then, as one hangs up clothes on a coat rack, hung up the speeches of the characters and their characteristics. That is not the case. When we speak as we now wish to speak about these figures from Goethe's Faust, we must bear in mind that Goethe knew these figures face to face, so to speak, and characterized them as he was able to, but that spiritual science can justifiably go into the matter in even greater depth. If you meet a person whom you are seeing for the first time, you will not immediately be able to discern everything that is in his soul. Nevertheless, this is in his soul. If you now describe the person after the first encounter with this person, it may be that you only describe a few sides of the person, perhaps something that is purely external. But it is still this person whom perhaps you yourself, if you have seen him often, or someone else who is able to see deeper into the soul, would then have to characterize with much deeper ideas. If I therefore begin by posing the question: What is this Mephistopheles in Goethe? — so that I may be able to express what is significant in connection with the Faust legend today and tomorrow, this is not to be imagined as if Goethe had had in his consciousness the ideas that I must develop for you when I speak of Mephistopheles. Goethe simply characterized the Mephistopheles as he knew him, but that is why the Mephistopheles remains as he really is, a definite figure, who can also be characterized by spiritual-scientific ideas; and it is precisely the significant thing that one can look deeper into the individuality of Mephistopheles or other figures in the Faustian legend through these spiritual-scientific characteristics.

In the sense of spiritual science, one must in any case imagine such a figure as Mephistopheles as, in a sense, having remained on the old moon development. That is the prerequisite, so to speak, the spiritual-scientific prerequisite, that Mephistopheles is a being that has not undergone the corresponding form of development, which it could have undergone from the moon, or perhaps from the sun to the earth, or through the moon to the earth. But even if he confronts us – admittedly in a spiritual and visionary way – even if he confronts us, this Mephistopheles, in the earthly form of a human being, we would still be mistaken if we were to interpret him as saying, for example, that he is more developed than human beings on the moon. He stands quite decidedly higher on earth, Mephistopheles, than man stands on earth, with regard, of course, to his development, not with regard to the talent for evil. You can, if you want, call it lower that Mephistopheles has this genius for evil. But he is a being, so to speak, of a higher hierarchical order than man is, that is, after all, self-evident. If we were to go back to the old moon development, we would find that man, in his moon development, is clearly below the development of Mephistopheles, the being from which Mephistopheles on earth has become. Thus we must seek a higher being in Mephistopheles, a being that has simply been left behind with higher abilities on the lunar evolution than man has ever had. How could we, I would like to say, still make it clear through an analogy how such a being is actually constituted?

Let us assume that we look at our present development on earth. We also find during our present development on earth that some people are further along in their development than others. There are people who are decidedly further along in their development than others. Indeed, during earthly development we speak of certain people who have undergone initiation, who, while this is not yet the case for the general public in the present earthly cycle, already look into the world that lies beyond the threshold. Of course, there is also a corresponding progressive development for such advanced people. But even these people can, in a sense, lag behind on the stages of their earthly development and live their lives in such a way that, when the Jupiter development becomes acute, they say: “If everything followed the path of regular world development, we would now be going through this or that on Jupiter, but we don't want that, we remain at the point we reached during our earthly development.” The point of view is perhaps a higher one than could have been attained by people during the development of the earth; the point of view is such that the Jupiter development is perhaps already anticipated during the development of the earth. But these beings – in this case they are human beings – still lag behind in terms of the stage they had reached on Earth, and so they enter the Jupiter evolution with a Jupiter evolution that they had already undergone during their time on Earth. Thus they are behind in relation to their own measurements, but not behind in relation to the general evolution. They just do not go through the evolution as people on Jupiter will go through it; they remain earthly beings, earthly people, but they already carry the Jupiter evolution within them from the Earth.

You must be quite clear about the fact that the various evolutionary processes are really quite complicated, and that such evolutionary processes as I have just characterized actually exist. And if you now transfer what I have said from Jupiter-Earth to Earth-Moon, you will get a rough idea of what Mephistopheles, who appears in Goethe's “Faust,” is like. He can be counted among the Ahrimanic hierarchies because he had already anticipated human evolution on earth during the old lunar period, but now he adjusts himself to the earth in such a way that he does not bring earthly reason, earthly understanding, earthly individuality into the earthly evolution as they are given by the earth, but as he had anticipated them on the old moon and accepted them. This is why he feels so extraordinarily superior to the man Faust in 'Prologue in Heaven'. He is superior to the man Faust, because in Goethe's sense, the man Faust is supposed to be a real earthly human being who is not only retarded in the region of the dull-witted, but who relies entirely on earthly forces, on earthly impulses, for what he has to develop in his soul. Faust is an earthly human being, an earthly fighter. Mephistopheles appears to him as a lunar man, who naturally feels vastly superior to him because he has already adopted reason and science in the spiritual regions of the moon, which otherwise only people on earth have. Therefore, of course, Mephistopheles can only be a spiritual being. If he were to take on human form like any other human being, then he would also have to adapt to the evolution of the earth. But he does not. Thus we see in Mephistopheles a being who can feel himself to be extraordinarily superior to man on earth. But since the possibility of having moral impulses only arises during earthly development - remember the lectures we have just given in these weeks -; since human-moral impulses only arise during the earthly period, namely everything that arises from the impulse of love, Mephistopheles, who has retained his lunar development, does not have these impulses of love without further ado. He simply does not have them. He is therefore a spiritual being that belongs to a hierarchy, which, because it has held back and also rose very high in earlier developmental epochs, has a certain height out of its entire being.

Let us contrast this Mephistopheles with the higher angels. Let us assume that a present-day angel were to stand beside Mephistopheles, that is to say, a being that is now an angel. What kind of being is this, that is now an angel? It is a being that has to descend during the Jupiter evolution in order to perform services for Jupiter humanity during the Jupiter evolution, which other beings - let us say, for example, archangelic beings - perform for present-day earthly humanity. So this is a being, such an angelic being, which, by its very nature, because it is spiritual, is, when it simply stands next to Mephistopheles, less advanced in evolution than Mephistopheles himself, or rather the hierarchy to which he belongs. In terms of intellectuality, the angelic beings will only be able to achieve during the Jupiter development what Mephistopheles has already achieved through his hierarchy – albeit not through himself, if we regard him as a moon man, as a moon initiate – on the moon. One could say that Mephistopheles' immediate superior is even an extraordinarily high-ranking being, albeit one that is lagging behind in evolution. This being is so highly developed that a being of the rank of, say, the archangel Michael feels himself to be beneath the immediate superior of Mephistopheles. These evolutionary processes complicate the ranking of spiritual beings. A being like Mephistopheles has developed very far during the lunar evolution. This puts it ahead of the usual angelic evolution, the normal angelic evolution. But a being like Mephistopheles has remained a spirit. Because it is a spirit, it has something in common with the usual angelic evolution. After all, angels are spirits too. So we can say: From the Mephistophelian point of view, Mephistopheles is quite right when he speaks of the angels as “immature people”. They really are immature in relation to him, a people who, in the development he values most highly, have not progressed as far as he has.

Now, of course, there are also all possible stages of evolution in the hierarchy of the angeloi. Here, too, we can assume a normal stage of evolution for the development of the angels. But we must assume - this is a fact - that certain angels have also remained behind, that they have, if I may use the expression, lost themselves in Lucifer. Certain angels fall behind in their normal development and become Luciferized. These are the ones that do not go along, but remain at earlier stages. The angels that became Luciferized in this way, or had already become Luciferized before the Lemurian Earth period, now occupy a very special position. After all, how did they achieve this, that they were able to become Luciferized back then? It was about to happen – if I am to express myself popularly, even if only approximately, because it cannot be otherwise – that the group of beings that was human was about to undergo its moon development. Now what is called the Luciferic seduction occurred through spiritual entities that had become Luciferized. This Luciferization led certain beings during the Lemurian evolution to bring about that which you know from Occult Science. Then again, the Ahrimanic evolution during the Atlantean time led to that which you also know from Occult Science and from lectures that have been given recently. So we have to say: During the ancient Lemurian period, a certain impulse emanated from the Luciferic side, in which all beings that had previously Luciferized were involved for humanity. This impulse consists in the fact that man descended further into the material during the development of the earth than he should have done in the progressive development, that his desires, instincts and passions became, one might say, entangled in the material development. A counterweight had to be provided. And this counterweight was provided by the Ahrimanic development, so that man hovers in balance between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic development. But all this, that man thus hovers in balance between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic development, is in a certain higher style, in a certain higher sense again the plan of progressive evolution, lies in the plan of progressive evolution.

Having recapitulated this for you, you can say to yourself: Faust, the right man for the earth, will face Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. And the Ahrimanic forces that confront him are shown to you by Goethe particularly in the Mephistopheles whom he places at Faust's side as the representative of the Ahrimanic force. We have already discussed why Goethe refrained from clearly emphasizing how the Luciferic impulses approach Faust. But everywhere – as I have indicated – it shines through that Goethe actually placed Faust in the middle between the Mephistophelian and the Luciferic forces. I have repeatedly emphasized that Goethe, in his time, could not yet be completely clear about the relationship of the human Faust to Ahriman-Mephistopheles and to Lucifer, because spiritual science did not yet exist as it does today. But he had a certain instinctive recognition that Faust is confronted with these two types of impulse.

Now we ask ourselves: What is it that Mephistopheles himself or his relatives wanted with people? What Mephistopheles wanted with people is really nothing more than something that would have made people on earth impossible, really impossible. For what has only occurred on earth is reproduction through the sexes of man, through the male-female. Mephistopheles, as a true initiate of the moon, who is only retarded, cannot stand this at all, and that is what he actually regards as his task: to eliminate the possibility of having humanity on earth through sexual reproduction. It should not exist on earth. So let us summarize this precisely: the normal development of man on earth consists in the human race reproducing itself on earth through the sexes. But Mephistopheles wanted to remain on the lunar development. He therefore did not want love to lead to the love of the sexes on earth. Mephistopheles is the enemy of the love of the sexes on earth. He is the most determined enemy. He therefore feels – and Goethe characterizes this quite correctly – extraordinarily called upon to reduce to absurdity everything that somehow leads to sexual love. What he wants to bring about in the relationship between Faust and Gretchen — just read the Gretchen scenes carefully and you will see that he wants to prevent all sorts of things that are the duty of Ahriman-Mepbistopheles. But he does not want the love between Faust and Gretchen, the real human love on earth, to arise; he does not really want to tolerate it in either Faust or Gretchen. On the other hand, he is really present in the play when the homunculus is created in the laboratory. And you know from earlier presentations that I have given from 'Faust' that the homunculus is created in order to become a creator of a human being — Helen — out of nature, without sexual love. Mephistopheles sets himself the task, not of creating a humanity in the sense of progressive development, which on earth comes about through sexual love, but of creating a different kind of being through the powers assigned to Ahriman, a being that is not in the sense of the human race destined for the earth. Because if you think of anything other than this homunculus, think of Euphorion, think of the whole way that Helen comes up again, Mephistopheles is at play everywhere. But nowhere should anything of regular sex love come into consideration. So the role that Mephistopheles is assigned is already very well done and can be fully justified from the point of view of spiritual science. There is tremendous depth in it.

And now take the strange word that immediately follows the heavenly host:

I hear discordant notes, nasty strumming,
From above it comes with unwelcome day;
It is the mischievous, girlish bumbling,
As sanctimonious taste may love it.
You know how we, in deeply wicked hours,
Conspired to destroy the human race:

He accuses the angels of knowing that they were watching when Mephistopheles and his companions plotted the destruction of the human race. Now he says something else, adopting the language of earthly man, as it were:

The most shameful thing we have invented,

— the most shameful thing is precisely this destruction of the human race. It is called the most shameful.

In order to make progress with our understanding – it is of course extremely difficult to approach these things, because Goethe wanted to express his deepest human, spiritual feeling and perception in them – in order to make progress, we need to consider the following. You are aware, are you not, that there is — for us at least — a spiritual science, even if it is only at the beginning of its development today. You also know that there has always been something like this, even if in earlier times it was attained in a different way, as true knowledge of the world that goes beyond appearances and penetrates to reality. Now you also know that in a certain way, especially in older times, the spiritual knowledge that was preserved in the mysteries was carefully guarded and that it was based on real knowledge of the world. This spiritual knowledge was only imparted to those who showed their maturity for it. If we now ask ourselves what kind of special kind of knowledge this actually was, this special kind of spiritual knowledge that was imparted in the mysteries, it is best to compare our fifth post-Atlantic period with previous periods, the Greco-Latin, Egyptian-Chaldean and so on. And if, on the basis of this comparison, we ask ourselves how the whole conception of the world has changed through man from earlier epochs, from earlier cultural epochs into our cultural epoch, It is truly the case that something important and significant has taken place in the evolution of humanity, that it is a fable convenante if one believes that one only needs to know about the development of humanity what the trivial story, what is today called history, tells. The earlier cultural ages were quite different from how they were imagined according to ordinary history, which is a fable convenante. Just consider the depth of such a saying as I have quoted:

Oh Sun, a king of this world,
Luna receives your gender;
Mercury copulates you quickly.
Without Venus' favor, you achieve nothing,

Whatever Martian is chosen as a husband.
Jovis G'nad is not lost on you;
So that Saturnus, old and decrepit,
Proves to be many-colored.

There is an enormous depth of malapropism in such a saying, but this depth was once there. People once saw into these realities, even if only through the results of atavistic clairvoyance, which were also pointed to in such sayings, for example. The fifth post-Atlantic period emerged from this knowledge of the basis of existence. It has strayed in two directions. I have characterized one of these, so to speak, through the initiation of the fifth post-Atlantic period, which I have described through Baco von Verulam, through Lord Bacon. There we have the longing to treat everything that goes beyond the perceptible as mere idols. You know, Bacon assumed four types of idols. We have listed them: Idola tribus, Idola specus, Idola fori, Idola theatri, four types. This tendency, to base everything on knowledge gained through sensual observation and through concepts that in turn arise from sensual observation, is expressed through Bacon's spirit at the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period. Everything that goes beyond sensory perception is an idol, the content of which is actually exhausted in words. And we have already characterized that, so to speak, that is one current.

Now take, schematically expressed, the current that expresses itself through something like: “O Sun, a king of this world,” which still goes into the deep foundations of existence. If it only wanted to develop from the fourth into the fifth post-Atlantic period, we can say that it would go like this (see drawing). The development that leads to the idols goes down below this evolution (blue line); it does not recognize that in reality one finds a spiritual immediately, just as one finds a sensual; it excludes the spiritual and regards it only as contained in the word idols. This development is inaugurated with Bacon.

What would be the counter-image to this? The counter-image would be an evolution that would only recognize the existence of the spiritual, of the soul-spiritual, which the physical-material does not recognize. That would be the counter-image to this. We could therefore ask: Does this development also exist? Is it also the case, as Bacon says, that only sensual reality is reality, and that everything else is mere word-idols, an expression for the fact that there is only a spiritual reality and no material-physical reality that enters into the senses? This too actually exists. George Berkeley lived a little later than Bacon, and he represents this line of development (red line). Let us take a few moments to clarify the essence of Berkeley's world view.

Berkeley's view, which essentially resulted from his theological world view – he was a bishop at the end – is that everything outside of man that is perceived by the senses is only there as long as it is perceived by the senses. So Berkeley's view is this – isn't it, perhaps the contrast is the best way to characterize it – you assume, now from a, I would say, view that is naive towards Berkeleyanism, you assume the following: When you enter, you see, let us say, Mr. Brown sitting here, but you assume that he was already sitting here before, and you see him afterwards. — As I said, there is not the slightest proof that what you see sitting in this chair was also there before you saw it. And when you go out again, you believe that the Lord remains seated here and sits there while you turn your back on him and go out. Berkeley is of the opinion that there is no proof that, let us say, what you have seen here is still sitting there. It sits there as long as you look, because that is alive, the forming in the eye, and how should the forming in the eye be there if you do not look? One can prove Bacon's view of the world to be logically complete. One can also prove Berkeley's view of the world to be logically complete, because there is no contradiction in Berkeleyanism that could arise logically. It is perfectly possible to prove it logically, even if it does not correspond to naive consciousness. Berkeley does not believe that when you go in you create the farmer and when you go out you magically make him disappear again, he certainly does not believe that, but that what you see comes only with your looking and goes away again with your looking. Esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived. And there is no being other than being perceived in the surrounding world. Therefore, as you can imagine, for Berkeley everything that is the sensory world is only in the process of becoming. You look, there it is; you look away, there it is gone, no longer there. So all this is only there in your perceptions. As I said: esse est percipi, there is nothing but perception, except the process of perception. But behind this process of perception, which is nothing but the process of perception, there is the divine spiritual being. Apart from your perception, Mr. Bauer also has to do with the God who sets him up as he wants him. And this God, when you enter, creates the image of Mr. Bauer in you from what is only in you. Then, when you leave, he lets it disappear again. So this world of the senses does not exist, only the spiritual and soul-like. All of you, as you stand here before me, are only the creature of my eyes. Besides what is the creature of my eyes, there is also the divine-spiritual, soul-spiritual world, but it receives and sustains you quite differently than you exist as the creature of my eyes.

I have only characterized this view. It is really strictly provable philosophically. But it is the one that gives, one might say, the other half of the world to Baconism. And all world views of the fifth post-Atlantic period oscillate between these two directions, between the red and the blue. Either this world view becomes entangled in the mere recognition of the sensual-real and thereby declares itself powerless to see a real spiritual in the sensual-real, or it exhausts itself in the mere recognition of the spiritual-soul, seeing only God and divine thoughts everywhere and declaring itself powerless to descend from the life in God and divine thoughts to the sensual reality. These two aberrations are very much present in the fifth post-Atlantean period. And anyone who observes spiritual life as it develops outside of esotericism will constantly find it either on one or the other, on the red or the blue line. The outer esotericism does not lie on what I have drawn here as the white line.

It can be said that in the fifth post-Atlantean period, man enters into a certain tension between these two views of the world. And Goethe felt this tension intensely. I have presented here, I would say, the theoretical, the more philosophical impulses, but it did not stay that way. All life also errs between the merely spiritual-soul and the merely sensual-material. Goethe felt this tension in the most eminent way. That he felt everything that lives in the outer world, I would like to say under the influence of the current of the blue line, you will not find wonderful, because that is how our essential development goes in the fifth post-Atlantic period, as far as possible towards the material and towards the mere recognition of the material.

But Goethe also felt the other line. He felt it deeply, only in Goethe's time it really was not yet so, I would say, precarious, to call materialism materialistic as it is today. At that time it was not as precarious to point out the aberrations of the blue line as it is today. Today spiritual science must point out the aberrations of the blue line, and it will therefore have to endure all the terrible impacts that must come, because one always only opposes with prejudice, yes, with hatred, what wants to go out into the world as knowledge. And more and more, materialism will be canonized, albeit in a worldly way. But one can still say that materialism will be canonized. How close is materialistic medicine today to declaring itself sacrosanct, how many other endeavors today are declaring themselves sacrosanct in the sense of materialism, in the sense of the aberration indicated by the blue line, the deviation from the spiritual and soul, which at the same time, however, contains as its manifestation the sensual and material, which then belongs to it, which is one with it, and which must be asserted by that which we call spiritual science. Those persecutions, which one might call inquisitorial persecutions, which have already occurred in other fields, will only come in the field of materialism, are actually only just beginning, are now beginning, are only just beginning to assert themselves, even if the forms will be different. The rebellion against the materialistic coloring of knowledge will no less fall prey to the inquisition, the inquisition of the future, which will appear in somewhat different forms than the inquisition of the past, when earlier endeavors fell prey to the corresponding inquisitions. One should not believe that everything that strays according to the blue line will not become just as intolerant as endeavors in other fields became intolerant.

The red line was not so clearly visible in the past. It only separated itself in the fifth post-Atlantic period, and even somewhat later than the blue line, but it was already included in earlier endeavors. It only really emerged in a particular form and has its most important, its greatest philosophical representative in Berkeley. But it has enough other representatives. It emerged in the fifth post-Atlantic period, but certain things remained out of the forms it already had, and that is why it was that in Goethe's time it was already difficult to talk properly about the red line, while Goethe could still talk about the blue line without difficulty. It was difficult to talk about the red line. For what is it that actually strives on the path of this red line? All those world-views strive towards it that avoid extending their view over the whole breadth of the world, and that would revel in a general spiritual-soul life, in a spiritual-soul life that wants to be powerless in the face of the manifestation of the senses. It is a world-view that wants to speak about the supersensible, but that really does not want to recognize anything. Here we have a broad field to which almost all religious denominations and all sects have gradually turned, for it is characteristic of these world views that they actually refrain from trying to understand the world and just talk about something supersensory in general and want to indulge in words. They do not want to acquire the positive, concrete power of knowledge, to really delve into the world of reality with what they attain, with what they talk about.

You will perhaps understand me better if I try to express myself in the following way. Think about how life can unfold for an average person today. He works, let us say, six days a week in a factory or in an office or wherever. He is part of a purely material mechanism that is absorbed in mere sensory observation; today, nothing spiritual is mixed into it, and less and less spiritual is mixed into it. On the contrary, anyone who wants to mix something spiritual into it is considered a real character. But in this sphere all the forces which present-day science seeks to recognize are at work. All the human interconnections which knowledge seeks to fathom are at work here. In short, all the thoughts and concepts which express themselves through the reality unfolding before our eyes are developed here. And then we assume, for his own good, that this person, who has spent the week in the office or in the factory dealing with the purely material or teaching the purely material - after all, nothing but the material is taught in ordinary schools - materially cognizable. Let us assume, out of a sense of honesty, that the person goes to church on Sunday for his own good. There he hears talk about the things that are talked about in church today, based on the evolution that has taken place over the centuries. Try, if you can, I mean, if you have been to church often enough and listened to sermons with an open mind, if you have seen with open eyes what is going on, ask yourself whether there is something in what is being said that is suitable for educating the world that is spreading around us. It is admitted that the God of whom they speak is the author of the world's ruin, but there is no mention, not a single one, of the way in which He intervenes in the world through His forces, through His impulses. There is a special Weltanschhauung for weekdays: blue line; a special Weltanschhauung for Sundays: red line. Nowhere, absolutely nowhere do we see a connection between the two, if we really look at things with insight. Just ask yourself: what does what is taught from the pulpit have to do with chemistry, physics, biology? No relationship is sought, it is even condemned.

Take, on the other hand, the humanities, and you will immediately see what is important. The humanities do not speak of the sensual-material world in the same way as ordinary physics or ordinary chemistry, but they speak of the physical-sensual world in such a way that what they say about the physical-sensual world can flow into every detail of what they say about the spiritual world. It does not have a weekday view and a Sunday view, but a view that extends over the spiritual world and flows down into the details of the physical-sensual world. It does not declare itself powerless, like Berkeleyan idealism, to grasp the world of the senses from the spiritual; it does not declare itself powerless, like Baconian materialism, to find the spirit in the world of the senses, but only to find idols. Where does that come from? Well, we have already grasped that. It is natural to the fifth post-Atlantic period that evolution, schematized by the blue line, came into being. We could, so to speak, call Bacon the inaugurator. Man had to submerge into matter at some point. I have often discussed and discussed the fact that spiritual science is by no means opposed to materialism, but understands why material development is recognized in the fifth post-Atlantic period. But it cannot be recognized without allowing oneself to be inspired by a spirit like Ahriman. And however long this materialism of the fifth post-Atlantic period continues to develop in its Ahrimanic sense, it will have to believe in turn – you can be assured of this, and you will not be because I am telling you, but because you will understand it from the whole spirit of spiritual science, he will have to hold on to this materialistic Ahrimanic sense, to which Ahriman-Mephistopheles, in his deepest hours of wickedness, had resolved to have nothing to do with the regular progress of the human race on earth. Therefore, this science, which has grown out of this materialism, will never come to a thorough understanding of the mystery of the human becoming, of the riddle of embryology and so on - never! It would be able to come to an understanding of the origin of such entities that can form on the way of the homunculus. But this science will never come to that. Now this is only one current of evolution. But much, much depends on this Ahrimanism. Knowledge is only one part of it. But this Ahrimanism runs through the whole of culture.

Goethe also felt the other current, schematized by the red line, deeply, but it was not possible for him, I would say, to present the figures for this red line as clearly, as distinctly as he presented them for the blue line. For the blue line, he created Mephistopheles and his stout and lanky demons and the lemurs. There they stand before us. He dared to do that. For those who speak of the lemurs and the stout and lanky demons will only be slandered from the present age onwards, and will be slandered more and more if they speak in the sense of spiritual science. In Goethe's time, this was still less worrying to some extent. But what was worrying was the other thing, which Goethe also saw through and saw through quite well. It was that he knew that when this red line enters our present time, when there really is a view that declares itself powerless and will declare itself more and more powerless, to come from the recognition of the spiritual and soul to the penetration of the real world, it is due to the fact that certain Luciferic spirits prevent currents that were justified in the past from progressing. Luciferic nature hinders certain trends, religious and sectarian trends, from progressing. And so they cannot penetrate the world, remain stuck in mere recognition of the spiritual-mental. Berkeleyism is just a particular expression of this. This is based on a Luciferic restraint. How does it express itself for Goethe, for example? Mephistopheles remembers himself and his brothers and sisters, those who once, in the depths of their depravity — which means something different in the language of Mephistopheles — swore destruction to the human race, that is, not wanting to know about the way humanity populates the earth. Mephistopheles remembers that it was actually part of his essence that, in the Ahrimanic period, figuratively speaking, he was in the momentous meeting of his spirits, who then decided that no human being should ever be born naturally on earth, but that the powers that exist on earth as sexual beings should be used for something completely different. These Ahrimanic entities decided in ancient times not to allow the love of the sexes to arise. But now Goethe says, not identifying himself, of course, but thinking as Mephistopheles: There are others who are not inspired by Mephistopheles, but are also inspired, well, they don't say anything about the human race on earth not reproducing in the usual human way, but they begin to pray, and find that those who do nothing in the sense of the ordinary reproduction of the human race, who refrain from it, who want nothing to do with it, those are the ascetics, the saints, who make the familiar long faces at the love of the sexes, of which we have spoken several times before. — Mephistopheles sees, looks, beholds such on the other side in the host of angels. There he sees the inspirers of these others, who, in essence, worship what Mephistopheles and his brothers and sisters have decided:

... how, in our most wicked hours,
we devised destruction for the human race.
The most shameful thing we have invented
is just right for their devotion.

That is what devotion is focused on. The Luciferian inspirers of the backward church communities, monastic communities, and sectarian movements are standing among the other crowds inside it. It is not for nothing that Mephistopheles says to the one tall fellow whom he particularly likes:

The priestly mien does not suit you at all.

Goethe has here intuitively grasped much of what he had on his mind regarding the world view that goes hand in hand with the priestly mien, regarding the Sunday world view, which he conceived as Luciferic as opposed to the Ahrimanic. Mephistopheles feels a kinship with those who have taken up into their devotions what Mephistopheles has taken up into his science and into his will.

We can talk about how we think about all these things in purely spiritual terms. But now we want to talk about these things in the Goethean sense. And what I have just said is already, if I may say so, a primeval Goethean intuition. Thus, the Ahrimanic world of lemures, dickteufel and dürrteufel is juxtaposed with something that is initially touched by Lucifer. Goethe expresses this very clearly. The Luciferic is contrasted with the Mephistophelian, as I said, in as veiled a way as possible for a personality to express it, well, a personality to whom many things are allowed: the devil. He is allowed to speak of the 'cleric's expression', of the 'dearest' boys and so on. So in the facts, these two stand in contrast to each other. On the one hand, Mephistopheles, who has, as it were, pledged Faust's soul. How is it pledged? By having driven Faust through everything earthly that goes down below the sphere that has entered into earthly becoming, and goes down below the sphere of human becoming through sexual love. He has a claim on Faust's soul because he has introduced him to everything Ahrimanic. Mephistopheles is truly not to blame for what has entered Gretchen's love through Faust, and he has sufficiently transformed it into its opposite. And afterwards things go quite Ahrimanically. Only Ahrimanic arts are used to evoke certain external phenomena of the Greek world. What can be achieved by Ahrimanic arts is first achieved in the context of the state – let us say it very softly. Then it is sought in the development of the human being, in the context of evolution, but in the context of subhuman and subanimal evolution, in the context of the mechanized homunculus, historically mechanized homunculus. Helen is brought up in a way that is not in the earthly existence of humanity. Then some earthly actions are produced, well, after all, these are not earthly figures either, who help as elves and goblins. All this is already very much mortgaged under the influence of Ahrimanic arts, and mortgaged through the only thing he can have of man's actual earthly blessing. Thus, by leading him through the shallow insignificance - for earthly existence it is only shallow insignificance, but it is therefore not something to which immense reason and science do not belong, even if it is shallow insignificance - the soul is pledged to him. Then pledged by the other, that he has of the actual earthly blessing - well, what then? Man has received his ego on earth, so first his blood. Bones, tendons, ligaments, what the patched half-nature does, Mephistopheles can have, but the actual earthly blessing, the blood, the representative, the physical-material representative of the earthly man, he would like to have that, but he cannot have that, he is left standing on the moon. From him he can only obtain the title written in blood, only that which can be brought into the abstract contract, so to speak, that which is not connected with the impulses that are in reality, but which remains in the abstract, in conformity with the contract. He can only extract that from the blood, not the impulse itself, only that can Mephistopheles extract.

The soul is pledged to him. Now, in his language, it looks as if the other host has simply smuggled it away, cunningly taken it away. But it's not that easy. Up to the point of the death we described yesterday, Mephisto still has Faust pretty much in his claws. But if you recognize death as we showed it yesterday, not just when Faust falls down, but as death gradually sets in, then what Faust experiences, and in particular experiences as the blissful feeling that I described at the end yesterday, after the soul has detached itself from the body, is something that has already been experienced in the spiritual world. There Faust's soul, or, as Goethe first wrote, Faust's entelechy (we will speak of this entelechy tomorrow), glides over into the luciferic sphere and would dissolve in the luciferic sphere. Faust would have just as little benefit from this as if he were to fall prey to Mephistopheles. Just think of what is threatening him there!

Turn to me, loving flames!
The truth will heal
those who condemn themselves;
so that they may joyfully release themselves
from evil
to be blissfully united with the All.

But this beatitude would lead to dissolution in the All, to transition into the eighth sphere! This is precisely what Faust would have: dissolution into the All, which would be identical with annihilation. And now turn to the last scene, of which I have said that it is necessarily connected with the preceding scene, that it belongs to it, that it must be there. There we see the action continuing in a completely different area. There the angels come again and bring Faust's entelechy, Faust's immortality. But in bringing this entelechy, this immortality, they say how they can bring this entelechy here. The younger angels, so it says in the last scene:

Those roses, from the hands
of loving, holy penitents,
helped us to win the victory
and to complete the great work,
capturing this treasure of the soul.

Thus the angels do not raise the entelechy, the soul of Faust, through their own nature, but by receiving the roses from the loving and holy penitents, they raise it out of the human sphere, or rather out of the sphere of people who have gone through human life on earth, who have truly developed out of earthly life. Goethe derives the whole evolution from Mephisto, from the angels, to the human evolution, in that the angels do not only save the entelechy through their own power, but they save it by having received the roses from the hands of loving, holy penitent women. That is the infinitely profound thought. Goethe brings into it his conviction of the significance of continuous human development, of the significance of earthly evolution. And so he must find something in the human being that overcomes the mere Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian. Mephistopheles stands there, commanding the lemurs, half-natures patched together out of bones, tendons and ligaments, commanding the devilish thicks and scrawnies. I have come to terms with what this means: the subhuman nature that could never produce the human being lies in all this only, nature in a basis from which man cannot grow out of, lies in there. Everything lies in there that the world view can grasp, which runs on the blue line, but what surrounds us must not be grasped in this way. From his time on the moon, Mephistopheles has only the powers at his disposal that command lemurs, thick and scrawny devils, but what they draw from nature, from the earth, is only the Mephistophelean, and something else can be drawn from it that Mephistopheles cannot know because he has not gone through the evolution of the earth in his own way. This is drawn out by seeking out the relationship with earthly powers and elements from the now real sanctification of physical nature, the ennoblement of physical nature.

Eternal bliss,
glowing bond of love,
boiling pain of the chest,
foaming divine joy.
Arrows, pierce me,
Lances, conquer me,
Maces, crush me,
Lightning, batter me;

- and so on. There you have the effervescence of nature, which belongs to the human being, which is also connected with the Luciferic, with the devilish, but goes higher. There you have this nature. And the angels have the task on earth or for the earth to take with them the care of the human race. The angels who do not stay behind, but progress to the point of caring for the human race as it should be on earth, Goethe regards as the true redeemers. Do you remember what commission the Lord gives to the actual angels:

But you, the true sons of the gods,
Rejoice in the living, rich beauty!
That which is becoming, that which is eternally working and living,
Embrace you with the sweet barriers of love.

- there they are to provide help, there they are to intervene, and they do so. Those angels truly advance in the angelic host who occupy themselves with the loving-holy penitents and take the roses from them. Just as man absorbs what is allotted to him in earthly evolution, so these angels, who do not remain on the level of lunar evolution but go along with earthly evolution, receive the forces that come from natures such as those portrayed in the last act in the loving, holy penitent women. That is what will help them to progress. Goethe is convinced that the angels develop beyond the Luciferic. As I said, I wanted to hint at Goethe's thought, at how Goethe was connected with all the great evolutionary thoughts of his kind.

We will continue our discussion tomorrow. I hope that from what we have discussed today you have seen how Goethe delves into the depths of becoming and the secrets of the world in order to create his “Faust” and how he wanted to give his verdict on the evolving currents of world view. Truly, there is much in this “Faust”, very, very much in this Faust! And it must be said: humanity could gain infinitely if it tried to find its way through all that is contained in Goethe's “Faust”, to use Goethe's own expression. But we will talk more about all this tomorrow, and about some of the connections between these Faust ideas and the ideas of spiritual science.

Above all, I thank Dr. Zeylmans and all of you for giving me the opportunity to express some thoughts here about the – if I may say so – medical consequences of the anthroposophical method of research. Of course, it will only be possible to give a few brief hints in the two short hours, and given the deviation of the point of view that I will have to choose from the one in use today, it will also be particularly difficult in the two short hours to get beyond the fact that much of what needs to be said, from today's point of view – from the point of view that one is used to – may seem quite paradoxical, perhaps more than paradoxical. But those present will know how, in the course of the historical development of mankind, we have learned to rethink many things; and so, at least to begin with, there will also be a certain tolerance for the fact that a point of view that arises out of genuine, conscientious research must appear paradoxical.

But the first thing I would like to say in the way of an introduction is that the medical consequences of the anthroposophical research method are not about opposing anything that would have to be absolutely “new” to what today's conscientious medicine, built on the natural science that has become customary for centuries, has to say. The research method I am talking about does not want to overthrow, but rather the opposite: by looking at the various things that have emerged from natural science for medicine in recent times from conscientious sensory-empirical methods, it has to take on board the fact that modern medicine points everywhere to an area that is still difficult for it to enter, for the reason that, yes, because the research methods are basically so conscientious has arisen, that modern medicine refers everywhere to an area that is still difficult for it to enter, for the reason that, yes, because the research methods are basically so conscientious, so exact, so exact in relation to the sensory-empirical methods that we are all familiar with. But precisely because of what natural science has become great, because of what has enabled it to provide such a meaningful basis for medicine, precisely because of this, certain paths to knowledge of the human being and thus to healing have been made impossible. And so allow me to start today by mentioning some principles and then to go into the peculiarity of some of our remedies, which are typical, which are characteristic, tomorrow.

We did not choose this path from the outset, saying to ourselves: Anthroposophy must know everything, so it must also have something to say about medicine. That is the agitator's method. But we, on truly anthroposophical ground, want to take the standpoint of genuine scientific knowledge, at least in our fundamentals. And so it has come about that this medical movement has arisen within the overall anthroposophical movement, because doctors, especially doctors in Germany, but basically doctors in all countries, have found that current science and medicine raise questions that cannot be answered with the methods in use today, at least not from diagnosis, from pathology, to rational therapy. Then these doctors came and asked whether anthroposophy, with its special kind of knowledge of the human being, might have something to say about medicine, about a knowledge of the human being that can go somewhat deeper into the human being than one is able to do with the methods currently in use. And so, I would say, the challenge, especially from those medical doctors who were dissatisfied or who had fallen into a certain skepticism as a result of their studies and practice, led to the development of what I will be talking to you about today and tomorrow. From the outset, we did not take the view that we could now introduce all kinds of amateurish ideas into a conscientiously conducted field of research that had been put into practice. And when the founding of Kommender Tag in Stuttgart and Futurum in Switzerland suggested that the field of medicine should now also be cultivated, it came about that I said: Certainly, what Anthroposophy has to give can throw light on the preparation of remedies, but one should not simply start from preparing remedies, but everything that is done in this direction should be in the strictest connection with medicine, with real practice. And so our institutes came into being, which are indeed institutes for preparing remedies using the methods I will talk about; but these institutes are connected to clinical institutions, and in the course of time I will often refer to that clinical institute which has now become exemplary in the first place: that of Dr. Wegman in Arlesheim, which is directly connected with the Goetheanum, our anthroposophical university in Switzerland. There it is indeed possible, through constant contact with the sick, to enter into a living connection with regard to therapy, which, through the anthroposophical method of research, is to be cultivated as the great question of our time.

But we have not yet been satisfied with that either. We have affiliated actual research institutes to these institutes. And we have affiliated a biological institute and physical institutes, but I will not speak of them for the time being, as they are still in the early stages of their work. At the Biological Research Institute – which I want to mention so that you can see that we want to work with the same exactitude that is otherwise required – we have already recorded two findings. Please don't take it as silly vanity of mine when I express my conviction – oh no, it's important to honestly express what one can be convinced of based on the available results – when I say: Despite some individual methodological objections that one could still make, these two results are such that they can point the way to how we can strive for the same exactitude that is otherwise striven for today in the scientific basis of medicine.

The first work to come out of our research institute is a work on the function of the spleen, and since I can only give you two lectures, only suggestions, you will forgive me if I can only point out some of them. In the course of anthroposophical research work, the function of the spleen has become particularly interesting to me, and I will have to speak about what can be called the spiritual scientific method. Through these methods, it has become clear to me how special the spleen function is in the human organism as a whole, which, as you know, is a kind of crux for anthropology. The human being - I can only hint at this now - carries within him the most diverse processes, including those that require rhythm. These processes include not only breathing and blood circulation, but also rhythms of a larger scale, for example, the rhythm of digestion. Now, the rhythm of digestion is something that is demanded by human nature itself, but which, in the way it is demanded by it, can never be maintained. According to the demands of his organism, man should actually eat and drink with an enormous rhythmic regularity. He cannot do this, because even if he organized the times for his meals with great pedantry, this would not yet result in the rhythmicity demanded by the organism actually being able to be maintained. For one day one eats this, the next day something else, and one would have to proceed with an almost immeasurable knowledge of the details if one were to do all this. Breathing and blood circulation have it easier, but the rhythm of digestion is, because we are dependent on our contact with the outside world, something that cannot really be met. Now the functions of the spleen are designed to compensate for and correct those irregularities that necessarily occur in the digestive rhythm, by combining these spleen functions with the entire digestive function in the broadest sense. That is what I realized at the time. Now, at our Biological Research Institute, through methods that are as exact as the clinical methods of today, even if some objections can be raised with regard to the details, this has been fully empirically confirmed by the work on spleen function. It is a work that one would like to believe, if it had been done in an ordinary clinic, would have made a great impression in the field of medical thinking. That this has not happened – and this is not a case of silly vanity, I assure you – and that this work, carried out with such enormous dedication by Dr. Kolisko, is still relatively unknown today, is solely due to the fact that it was created on anthroposophical ground.

The second work is such that a scientific-medical “belief” has been made to the extent that it can become an exact science.

It is historically understandable that, given the tremendous successes that have emerged in the last few centuries, at least in the natural sciences, in the 19th century, humanity was, so to speak, hypnotized by what sensual-physical observation and exact experimentation could yield. But as far as knowledge of the human being is concerned, and even in terms of ordinary physical knowledge of the human being, it is not possible to go so far with these research methods that an inner understanding of the nature of the human organization emerges. And this is simply because, on the one hand, great and tremendous progress is being made in our knowledge of the human physical organization, but, on the other hand, precisely because of the exact and fruitful nature of these research methods, a whole part of the human being, which is just as real as the physical human being, is simply being excluded. The greatness of scientific research can also be seen from the fact that it has thrown out of our knowledge of man with tremendous energy that which is the spiritual-soul man, who - as we shall see - must be understood in the medical sense no less as a reality in practice than the physical man. To do this, it is necessary for me to first tell you a few basic principles about the anthroposophical research method in general, especially insofar as it leads to knowledge of the human being.

The fact is that today, in all our research, we simply stop at how we have become in our soul constitution, which also includes our cognitive ability, through what culture has already brought up as our school education, as education within the conventional sciences. That is where we stop. We do not say to ourselves: as a two- or three-year-old child, we still look quite unlike our soul mood and constitution in later life. We develop; we become quite different in the course of, say, fifteen years of our human youth. In our eighteenth or nineteenth year, we have abilities that we do not have as a two- or three-year-old child, let alone earlier; these develop from within us. Why should it not be possible to raise the question: Is it not possible for an adult to remain relatively capable of development? Is it possible to arbitrarily, so to speak, complete this development of the soul life? Of course, at first it is a question of inner trial. But anyone who tries, who really tries to go beyond what is today considered the norm of human soul development, to attain other soul abilities, can do it, will succeed! More details about this can be found in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science: An Outline” and others. In principle, I will only hint at this, that we are able to develop further what we otherwise have as thinking, what we know from its application not only in ordinary life but also in current science when we experiment and interpret observations. When this is said, people usually start saying: Yes, now he is coming up with a “mystical development.” But if you want to contemptuously point to the mystical development — if you want to use the word — that I am talking about here, then you should also contemptuously point to mathematics and geometry. The essence of mathematics and geometry is this: that one moves in full deliberation from one position to another, that there is absolutely nothing of the subconscious, in which suggestive can play a role. This deliberation, this full awareness, must follow us everywhere in the object, in mathematics and geometry. The same thing that we do inwardly with the object, when we proceed exactly, can be applied to the development of our own soul. Not in that mystical conspiracy, with which one often speaks about mysticism, but in full clarity, the soul can be further developed in relation to its ability to think, but not by brooding within itself, but by proceeding from quite definite, clearly comprehended ideas and from there — just as it happens in mathematics for the object — now taking in nothing but that by which one can pass with full composure from one content of consciousness to another. If this is applied as a truly inwardly exact method of developing the soul for a sufficiently long time — it takes longer for some, shorter for others — then one does indeed gradually come to grasp thinking, not as it is otherwise passive, but in its activity; so that one, while otherwise passively following with one's thoughts what one can observe, comes to experience an inner activity.

This inner activity of thinking gives the first real insight into what is supersensible in man, the first stage. I would like to say: if one approaches man from the outside – and one can chart the whole blood dynamics – then in the blood dynamics one has, so to speak, a picture of man, of a part of man, seen from the outside. But by proceeding as I have indicated with regard to thinking, one comes to experience oneself inwardly filled with a second human being, with the human being who is independent of the physical organism.

Anyone who thinks that something suggestive is occurring is ignoring the fact that the methods I am referring to here are absolutely exact methods, in which everything is experienced in full composure; so that one can arrive at precisely what might be even the slightest suggestion in the depths of the soul and reject it. The path one follows with this method is exactly the opposite of that which can introduce anything suggestive or autosuggestive into consciousness. But one comes to the following:

If one observes the gradual development of the child with the precise observation that one acquires through such a development of thought, then a significant difference arises between the whole constitution of the child up to about the change of teeth, up to the seventh or eighth year, and after that. The difference that exists between the earlier and later stages is such that one must first acquire the ability to pay attention to it. Otherwise one overlooks it, does not pay attention to it, but one must start precisely there, I would say, with the courage to approach the human being and such observations really as precisely as one has otherwise become accustomed to in physics in the course of more recent research. In physics we speak of latent warmth and of warmth that actually occurs. We speak of the fact that through some process a state of warmth that would otherwise remain latent in some substance, that is, within the substance, can come out. Whatever external physical science has arrived at, we must also arrive at. We must be able to have the courage to do this, the courage with regard to the development of the human soul, for example. And if one has this courage to do research, the following emerges: one sees — one only has to understand how to focus one's attention on it — how, in the case of a child who has changed teeth, inner soul forces arise that were not there before. Not even education has progressed so far as to be able to say anything about this, because it is not observed precisely, because the curves do not rise steeply and fall deeply, but because it is a matter of subtleties and these subtleties must be observed with a different, spiritual eye; that is why little attention is paid to them today. But for those who acquire the ability to conduct spiritual research, it turns out that everything we call the ability to remember, for example, is radically changed when the teeth change. The ability to remember is one that, with a certain elementary power, still allows the organism to shoot out what the child presents in their memory. That special kind of memory experience, where one goes back and has the feeling that one is going back to the experience, that only occurs with the change of teeth.

So countless things in the mental experience only occur with the change of teeth. They are then there; they did not reveal themselves before in the child's nature. Where were they? They were in the child's nature, just as latent warmth is in a substance; and those organic processes that have only their external symptom in the change of teeth have brought out what was previously in the organism and working on it, just as some physical process brings out the latent warmth from a substance. Today, psychology speaks of psychophysical parallelism and the like; it cannot come to the conclusion that there may be a connection between what we have in psychology today: the soul, thought of in a completely abstract way, and what comes to light anatomically and physiologically, because the two things are such that, if you look at them in such an abstract way, you cannot find a bridge from one to the other.

But the human being is, after all, a developing being. If we look at what is present in the soul after the change of teeth, what has emerged in the soul, we can say: the same forces that now confront us as the metamorphosed thinking in the soul were previously organic forces, acting as forces for the growth of organs in the child; so that here we have an empirical relationship between the life of soul and the life of body, which one must seek only at the right time in human development.

If we now carry out the mental exercises I have mentioned, we come once more to something similar in this thinking, something that is as strong and active as the thinking still in the organism. That is the second person that one discovers in oneself: it is on a higher level than the ordinary, merely passive thinking, but what we have as a second, etheric body - I ask you not to be offended by the term - thoroughly organized. So it is not a matter of the anthroposophical research method that one now speaks of an imagined etheric body, but that one can in fact - I can only give hints here - empirically show how what one finds through the special methods of knowledge is really active in human nature; because when we look at a child, what we later find in thought is at work. If I want to understand the forces of growth in the child, if I want to know how there is something particularly vitalizing in it, then I have to do it in what I call imaginative knowledge, because that makes it an inner content of consciousness. If, for example, the forces that are growth forces in the child later pass over into the life of the soul, but then work passively, and if there are healing powers in these growth forces, then I can only explore these healing powers if I now, in turn, come to look at and inwardly experience what the vitalizing forces are, using the actual spiritual scientific method. This makes it possible to see in these things not mere fantasy but something that is active in the human organism, and thus to make outer anthropology a real anthroposophy through inner empiricism.

And just as one finds this second human being through a special training of thinking, so, if one goes further, within these two humans, the physical and the etheric, a third can still be found. But do not be put off – because terminology is needed everywhere – if I call it the astral human being, anthroposophy already indicates the reasons for this. I will only hint at the constitution of man himself.

When one has come so far as to really experience this second, etheric man inwardly independent of the physical man, then one has a content of consciousness. With reference to this, I can say: One feels almost as secure in it as one feels in one's physical body in normal waking consciousness. One already feels this second man. Therefore, the next step, which must follow, is much more difficult inner work: to find out what I have described as the etheric human being. Because you only get the rest by gaining the strength to sucker out this etheric human being. This must now be done very consciously, so that you, as it were, drive out again after driving in. Generally speaking, the preliminary exercise for this is not easy. Ideas that have stuck with you for a long time, that were so present that they occupied your entire consciousness – but again in full consciousness, so that there is nothing suggestive about them – are difficult to switch off, because they work in consciousness with much stronger force than ideas that are fleetingly established in everyday life and from ordinary observation. But once one has practiced freeing one's consciousness in general, in a more conscious way, from whatever may be present in it, then one can also learn to use suggestion to make this figment of one's own imagination disappear and to create an empty consciousness. This consciousness is then exactly in the state in which man would be if, after entering the ordinary dreamless sleep, he were suddenly to perceive around him a different world, if he were to wake up not in the body but outside the body, and also not in the physical world but in a spiritual world.

This awakening can be brought about by doing what I have just described: after first energizing the consciousness in the strongest possible way, so that it acquires an etheric content, one then empties it again, has the empty consciousness, the mere awakening, without any of the content one otherwise has in life or in science. To produce empty consciousness – you know how difficult that is in ordinary life, because when you let the sensations of the senses disappear in ordinary life, the person simply falls asleep. But in this way, as I have described it, you come to the empty consciousness that merely watches, but it does not remain so for long. Then the spiritual world enters, above all a third human being, a person who is actually now only an inner function, only inner mobility and activity. The second, etheric human being, is the vitalizing one, the third, astral human being, is mobility, activity.

Then there is a fourth human being that makes it possible for us to be human in the fullest sense of the word. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to elaborate on this in the course of the lectures; for now I will only hint that this is the actual I-human being, because what I have described so far is also possessed by the animal: physical body, etheric body and astral body. But the human being also has the possibility of experiencing this combination of his limbs within himself, not in the abstract but in the concrete. If the human being not only produces empty consciousness, thereby grasping the spiritual world, but if he now goes further and energizes the experience of the spiritual world even more, then he comes up to the full conception of the I.

In this way, one can form a picture of what gradually becomes the content of the human being through anthroposophically exact methods. This content of the human being is now truly there. Just as warmth, which was first latent and then brought up and became real warmth, manifests itself in its physical effects, so that which is etheric body, astral body and I definitely manifests itself in the human being. And we only understand the human being if we can truly consider this interaction of the four members of his being.

Let us look at a single aspect. Let us look at a single aspect so that we can form an idea of how these things can interact, for example the kidneys and kidney function in humans. In every single aspect of the human being, the four aspects of human nature interact to a greater or lesser extent. When we study kidney function, what we can observe in the corpse or otherwise is only the sum of physical effects. However, this sum of physical effects is energized by what I initially called the etheric body, that is, by that part of the etheric body that contains the vital functions for the kidney in particular. But this is again permeated by the astral body, and it is only in the interaction of these members of human nature that we can inwardly comprehend the human being, whether in the case of a single organ or a system of organs. Now let us take the case of detecting some kind of irregularity in kidney function. I need only refer to this in general terms, since you are a professional in this field. And anyone who sees through the whole thing as I have indicated will see that in some way the physical kidney function and the etheric kidney function oppose the astral kidney function. So that is a typical case. One can come to the conclusion that the physical and etheric kidney organization offer resistance to the astral kidney function — which one only gets a view of when one has established empty consciousness. But now it is like this: when a living organ, the kidney, offers resistance through its physical and etheric organization to the astral, then, because otherwise the organ would atrophy, the astral organization must intervene more thoroughly more energetically; and therefore, in special cases, of course (I always relate to specific cases), we have a particular concentration of the part of the astral organization that corresponds to the kidney on the kidney activity. In other words, the astral kidney function becomes much stronger in itself than it is allowed to be called upon to be according to the whole constitution of the human being; so that the one who sees through the kidney function in this way has the picture: Here the astral body is performing work in the kidneys that it withdraws from the totality of the human being in which it must be active; it develops a process in the kidneys that should not actually be there. Due to the particular abnormal developmental aspects in the physical and etheric kidneys, the astral kidneys are overburdened.

Now it is a matter of pushing the diagnosis to this point. It is known that the astral part of the kidney now has something to do that it does not actually have to do in the normal functioning of the organism; it performs something that it should not actually perform, but which the kidney, as it is in its diseased, pathological state, or as the etheric kidney, now demands of this astral part. This leads to the first part, to the very first link in a view of the nature of the patient. The disease processes should actually be the greatest mystery for the thinking person, because they are, after all, natural processes. But the normal processes are also natural processes. How do these abnormal processes, these disease processes, come to be in the midst of the normal processes? As long as one regards the human being only as an equally valuable tissue of physical substances and functions, one does not actually arrive at a possible distinction between what is physiological and what is pathological; but one does arrive at it when one knows that the kidney can undergo a metamorphosis in which it develops physical processes that the normal kidney does not develop because in the normal kidney there is a right harmony between the physical, etheric and astral kidneys. This is what one first sees.

The question now is: how can this disease process, which must simply be explained in terms of an excessive demand on precisely a supersensible part of human nature, possibly be eliminated? How can we get the astral person to function normally again?

In these discussions, I always want to look at something very specific and individual. I do not want to talk about a severe kidney disease, because the principle of the matter can also become clear to us in the case of a mild kidney disease. But just so that I can indicate how to deal with such a kidney, I would like to start from a very specific example.

What we know is, first of all, that we must now free the astral body from its work on the kidney, which is deformed in the broadest sense. There is a process going on there that the human astral body should not be doing; we have to get it out of the abnormally running process of the kidney.

If we now gain the kind of knowledge that first looks at the human being and then at the world, the following emerges with the method I have described. We turn our gaze from the human being to the outer nature. We come to study the special nature of Equisetum arvense. If we study this horsetail, not so much emphasizing the individual substances it consists of, but rather looking at the process that lives in it, then we come to the following: Today it is common, because materialistic thinking has taken hold of everything, that we state for everything organic: it consists of so much protein, fat and carbohydrates and so on. We look everywhere for what the external chemistry can indicate as the individual components of a substance, and in this way we arrive at the elements, as they were called; but that is not what is of primary importance in what I have in mind here. What interests us most about equisetum is that when we analyze it, that is, when we break down its functions, we find that silicic acid is the main constituent among the substances that remain. It must therefore be present in such a strong way that it predominates, still exerting its silicic acid function in equisetum. In analyzing, we do not recognize the substance as such, but we do recognize what significance the substance has. And that must also be recognized.

Equisetum is a plant; in it we do not find an astral body, but we do find a physical body and an etheric body. We study Equisetum arvense and find that silicic acid plays a particularly important role. Of course, there are other plants that contain silicic acid. We also find that certain sulphuric acid salts play a role and finally we find that the most important constituents that still assert their nature, their essence, in Equisetum, are silicic acid — but not the “material”, but the silicic acid function — and the sulphur function. And now we find something very remarkable. If we are able to see through the special kind of connection with the spiritually developed powers, what is around the sulfuric acid salts in connection with the silicic acid, SiO2, we find that there is there is a process, a functional connection that we can now transpose into the human organism, either orally or – in the case of other processes we do not have to choose the oral route – through a bath or by injection. The significance of these individual methods will be discussed later. But if we introduce the equisetum into the human organism in a certain way – but it is better not to use equisetum as such now, and that is the basis of the essential way we prepare our remedies, because although the effects are there, visually, they are not as permanent – if we now study the functional relationship between silica and sulfur and then try to imitate it in the preparation, we have the opportunity, by implementing what can be studied in the case of Equisetum in the more or less inorganic preparation, to develop stronger effects on the human organism than those achieved by using the mere plant as a tea or the like. This is particularly important for the production of our remedies.

If I now introduce into the human organism the functional relationship between sulphur and silicic acid in the right way, then simply through the special quality of this functional relationship the following happens: the process that the human astral body has to carry out while the disease is present is now taken from the kidney. If I introduce into the kidney the functioning of sulphur and silicic acid in Equisetum arvense, I relieve the human astral body of what would otherwise have to be done by the deformed kidney (deformed in the widest sense); I let the disease process, so to speak, be done by something that I have introduced into the body.

This is the beginning of every healing process. You have to know the disease process. You first have to have a rational pathology, you have to know the disease process and you have to research where in nature something can be found that can exactly reproduce this disease process. For one must not believe that one can always fight the disease process everywhere in a disease, but one must actually catch it. What the disease process is, must be caught by something that is known in its dynamics, as here with Equisetum sulfur and silicic acid. Then one gets out that which, as in this case of kidney disease, used to function as the astral body. And by getting this out, one must also ensure that the person is strengthened internally through diet and so on, so that they can apply all their inner strength more energetically than usual. That is, one must devote some energy to the entire astral body. Then one gets the astral body, which has now been released in its entirety in this way and in the corresponding case, to extinguish the disease by means of the healthy part of the astral body, if one first has the excessive activity of the astral body take over from an external function.

This is how one arrives at a rational concept of healing. As a rule, this healing always consists in intercepting the disease process by means of an inserted process from outside and then, by energizing, inducing what is already in the person to overcome the disease process, while one cannot do this as long as — as in this case — the astral body has to turn its activity one-sidedly towards the kidney, which is different from how it should be. What I have just described is the case, or can be the case, with all those disease processes that are based on organ irregularities that - as I would like to call it - have a centrifugal effect, an inward centrifugal effect. The kidney is a secretory organ that first secretes inwards, even if the excretion goes outwards, it secretes inwards. And if you take my point of view, pathological processes must be understood in such a way that the cure consists in inducing a centrifugal process in the kidneys by introducing Equisetum arvense, a process that radiates out from the kidneys.

There are other processes that show us the polar opposite of what I have just mentioned. And here I do not wish to mention a serious illness, but rather, to discuss the principle, something that, although it only attracts more or less distant attention compared to the actual deeper illnesses of the human being, is, above all, extremely unpleasant for the patient: that is hay fever, hay fever catarrh. If we want to combat this, we must bear in mind that we are dealing with a very serious constitutional disorder. Ultimately, however, it can be traced back to a weakening of the astral body with its powers, this third, internally mobile human being, which occurs peripherally in the human being. We can trace hay fever back to early childhood, where we have general illnesses that we usually do not pay much attention to, which then specialize into what occurs later in life as hay fever. And if we know that this hay fever is based on the astral body weakening in relation to certain functions, not reaching the physical body and etheric body, then it must be our primary concern to energize this astral body inwardly, to lead it back to its proper functions, so that when we have to deal with more outward-directed centrifugal effects in the pathological, we now counteract them with something else. In the example of kidney disease, we have, as it were, intercepted the disease; we have considered the astral body in such a way that, when it is freed from its abnormal work, we only need to energize it, to strengthen it; then, when we relieve it of what it had to do with the diseased kidney, it will already be working in the direction of health. This is not the case with processes such as hay fever. In such cases we must not try to stop the disease process; instead, we must set in motion a process that is the exact opposite of the disease process. It has been found that we can stimulate the astral body to perform a function that it can no longer perform because it no longer has access to the physical and etheric bodies. This can be done by using certain fruit juices that which have skins, and which actually show centripetal effects within the fruit, and when we prepare the corresponding preparation from these fruit juices, as an ointment for milder cases and as an injection for more severe cases. We drive it back to the physical body and ether body, and in this respect, we can indeed show some very nice successes. Dr. Wegman has injected numerous patients with our hay fever remedy and has had the most wonderful successes in this area. It is entirely possible, from this way of thinking, to bring about a meeting between the astral body, which has become sluggish, and to energize it, so that one can see in this process, which one causes with the injection – these processes then have a certain affinity to particular organs; so if we use a particular fruit juice, it has a particular affinity to particular organs; one then one has to find out the particular points and know the currents in which the affinities express themselves – one can see how those physical functions that occur through that which has become sluggish and inert in the astral body, which would not occur if they were held by the astral body, how these functions really cease to occur when we now intercept the astral body itself. Before, we intercepted the disease process; now we intercept the process in the particular area on which we want to act. Thus, with regard to the preparations we use, we have to distinguish between processes that work more centrifugally, as I described in the case of the kidney process, and healing processes that work more centripetally, as for example in the case of the hay fever remedy.

When you consider these things, you might think at first that they are imaginary. Most people in the present day also believe that they are imagined. That is why I attach great importance to the fact that we not only produce such remedies, but that our institutes work in line with this medical way of thinking. Now, when examining these remedies, one is in a different situation than when trying out remedies in a purely empirical way. In the latter case, one is mainly dependent on statistics, which tell us: if the number of cases in which a remedy has helped is very large in relation to those in which it has not helped, then statistics will help us. But if we start from a method such as I have described, we see to a certain extent from our understanding of the disease process what must occur in a particular healing process. Pathology and therapy become one! Because the thing is this: if I recognize through diagnosis what is going on in the diseased kidney, then it is the same process, only on a different level, that I have to apply in therapy: I have to intercept the process; I have to introduce something into the human organism through the combination of sulfur and silicic acid so that I myself produce what presents itself to me as a pathological process. I heal by developing a therapy that is an imitation of the disease process at a different level, and that must be carried out by the astral body. For example, if I introduce the function of equisetum into the human organism, I leave it in the etheric body, and I relieve the astral body of its work on the diseased kidney.

In this way what is otherwise juxtaposed and can only be found together by pure empiricism – pathology and therapy, is transformed into an absolute unity. If we recognize the nature of the disease process in this way, we must find in the outer nature how, for example, a particular kidney process is imitated in Equisetum arvense; or if we recognize that the bile secretion process in the liver is really its inner nature in certain forms of the disease, we find this form of disease of the gall secretion process, for example, in Cichorium intybus, then we are able, through the way in which the function proceeds in Cichorium intybus, to relieve the astral body of the liver in the gall secretion process of what it would otherwise have to do. We thus advance in healing in such a way that pathology itself is actually nothing other than therapy. This is how therapy becomes a truly rational science. — If, for example, we are familiar with the wonderful connection that exists between iron and certain mucilaginous plant components and salts of Anisum vulgare, we can see how there is something functional in this aniseed, particularly in the seeds of Anisum [Pimpinella anisum], which is one with certain hyperinflammatory blood disease processes. We can relieve the blood of these disease processes by using a preparation that is modeled on the connection between certain plant mucilages and the iron in aniseed. In this way, we not only free the astral body, but, when it comes to blood diseases, the ego organization is also involved.

In this way, we come to turn our gaze to the whole of nature. What is beautiful nature outside is actually nothing but an imitation of disease processes. In the human being, these are disease processes on the inside, while outside it is the wonderfully beautiful nature. But one must understand the connection and know how to bring disease functions into the human being from the wide field of natural processes and thereby relieve the supersensible members of human nature of disease processes. Now one no longer has to rely on statistics! For if one recognizes such a connection by inner insight, and observes how the effects must occur, then it is the same as in a physical experiment carried out correctly in an exact scientific way. There one does not proceed according to statistics either, but one knows, for example from Mariotte-Gay-Lussac's law, that this is an exactly executed experiment which, if it is carried out exactly, is also conclusive. With human beings it is not as simple as with a physical experiment, but it is actually the same if one can see through the process of the illness and say: this or that must work, and then see step by step how it works. What is necessary – and this is precisely what is available to such a high degree in the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute of Dr. Wegman in Arlesheim – is that one really banishes all medical skepticism; because that is actually what continually puts the strongest obstacles in one's way. What Dr. Wegman has is the courage to heal. The courage to heal is part of everything! Then you also come to see the disease process and start to counter it, so to speak, intercepting it. But then it becomes particularly important to see how it all actually happens, if you don't want to be sloppy; but to follow the healing process step by step. And then you also know where something is not in order; then you have to go back and investigate where you have overlooked something. But if you then have the courage to heal in every single case and actually do not presuppose anything else, do not want anything other than healing, than courageously healing the disease processes, then you have that, from which you can feel most strongest stimulus, as a scientific basis for medicine that does not merely want to work out rational therapy from an exact pathology as a consequence, but which already has the healing process in the diagnosis. Then one cannot speak about the disease process other than that one already has the therapy at the same time as the diagnosis. One then describes the kidney disease in such a way that the description is very similar to what happens in Equisetum arvense: one transfers what one sees in the kidney to an external natural process; so that one describes in such a way in the diagnosis that the diagnosis contains the healing process.

When the words “health issues” are spoken, many of our contemporaries may reflect on how our views, our opinions of everyday life, of life in general, of all its blessings and woe; when the words “health issues” are spoken, however, it is particularly a feeling that may be evoked here that slumbers more or less consciously or unconsciously in every human soul: that man rightly regards health as a precious possession in this physical life.

Not only those who are completely absorbed in this physical life, with all their thoughts and interests, regard health as a precious thing, but also those who focus their minds on the highest ideals of humanity, who focus their minds on the spiritual, must also recognize what a precious thing health is, and even if he says to himself: Above all, this health is valuable to me because it enables me to fulfill my tasks in the world when I have it, because it prevents me from fulfilling these duties, these tasks in life when it is in any way damaged.

What the word “health” encompasses is directly or indirectly related to our highest destiny, to our human goals. Therefore, it may well depress some who reflect on how health and illness are always viewed differently in a certain way, depending on how human views and opinions change; and those who are attentive observers of life in its depths may well have seen many changes in this regard, especially in recent decades.

But what underlies all striving in relation to health and illness, in relation to the healing of the human being, is in turn only that which we must call the science of life, the knowledge of life. What transformations have taken place in relation to the knowledge of life in these last decades, much greater ones than one would usually assume! It could tell the observer of life a great deal if he observed the way in which currents arise from the scientific foundation, from the scientific knowledge of the world, and lead to this or that view health, if he compares these currents and this foundation [with that] of 20, 30, 40 years ago, how it was then and how it presents itself to us today.

What has often been emphasized here in relation to many other areas, namely that our age has taken a significant step towards materialism, can be observed particularly in the area to which our present consideration is devoted.

Those who are able to look back on the scientific knowledge that underlies today's discussion, as it was formed 20, 30, 40 years ago, may come across a venerable personality when they happen to encounter this phenomenon. I myself once encountered this honorable personality, and I may well refer to the character of this personality because it seems symptomatic to me of what has changed over the past few decades.

Those who were lucky enough to study in Vienna quite a long time ago were able to get to know the scientific basis of our current field of study at the medical faculty in Vienna. They got to know the then famous and widely significant anatomist Hyrtl, the man who provided the basis for hundreds and hundreds of young doctors at the time, the basis that every doctor needs, the anatomical foundations... When he stood before his audience and built up the human being from the components of the human organism, which seemingly can only be expressed in the driest of terms for scientific observation, when he built the human being out of anatomical parts, then, listening to him, you had the feeling that behind this description, this explanation of the structure of the human organism, something else was still alive, something lived from a deep understanding of the spiritual, which builds the wonderful structure of the human organism... there was just something... something... there was something in Hyrtl's presentation that can only be expressed as follows: just as the creative power of nature itself, as the spirit of nature, allows the individual structures to sprout and grow into the entire structure of the human organism, so this human organism was anatomically built up before the audience.

Those of you who have often attended these lectures here know that spiritual science tells us that what we call the outer physical body, what the eyes see, what the hands touch and what the ears and the lower senses of the human being can perceive, that this is only part of the human being, only the outer sensual part, that everything that external science can only deal with this outer limb. They also know that the first higher limb in human nature, which truly and really lives for those who can observe human beings with higher abilities, is what we call the etheric or life body in spiritual science: the mysterious master builder who is there and builds up this human organism.

This etheric or life body is something that cannot be seen by the physical eye, but what the open “spiritual eye” of the seer can see as a fact just as much as the external sensual facts can be seen by the physical eye.

One would like to say: Hyrtl stood there as a chaste scientist, as a chaste physician; he said nothing about this etheric or life body, but how he spoke of it,

how the one developed from the other, it was as if that principle of the life body lived in his words; and that was enough, it had an enormous stimulating effect, he influenced his listeners so that something of the mysterious depths of the whole of human nature was awakened in them, that something of that striving was kindled in them, which wants to take hold of man ever more deeply and which does not remain on the surface...

Soon afterwards, one could see that these times were passing, in which this scientific foundation was considered in this way...

Let me make this clear from the outset: it was not just because Hyrtl was a particularly great genius, but because he had grown out of a time that, if not precisely cognizant of the spiritual world, at least had a feeling for it. Anyone who observes life knows that today everything is pieced together, that such a representation no longer exists in broad circles of science... therefore, we must emphasize all the more that it is precisely spiritual science that goes back to the whole, to the spiritual-living behind the sensual, that it has the task of fertilizing and illuminating that which can be offered in the external, sensory realm for the horizons that interest us today, for it is in the external, sensory realm that our admirable science has achieved the most extraordinary things... for there is no lack of individual research, no lack of methods by which one can gain insight into the individual external facts of natural existence and its interrelationships...

But what spiritual science will have to bring to this individual research... that is the overarching spirit of the matter...

Now, the very same Hyrtl made a remarkable statement, a statement that may be our guiding principle today and from which we can start today. It may sound strange to many today, and yet it was made by a brilliant anatomist and physician:

Only a physician can recognize illnesses, but anyone who knows what help is can heal them.

A seemingly rather strange saying; now, let us see how spiritual science can relate to this...

Above all, we must be clear about one thing, because of the brevity that must characterize today's lecture – its subject could take up 20 to 40 lectures without exhausting everything – with this brevity, it is necessary that what is said is understood in such a way that one recognizes the attitude from which it is said. This attitude is basically the same as that on which all spiritual science is based; it can be briefly characterized by saying that spiritual science does not have the vocation of proving one or the other party line right, it has to stand on a higher vantage point and, precisely because it looks into the depths of existence, of life, has to gain a point of view that can have a unifying effect... Those who look around at life know that the shades of opinion that fight each other on the... are not usually so that one can say that one is absolutely right and the other wrong...

As a rule, one must say: Those who fight with slogans, who carry a flag, have gained their views and opinions in very specific areas of life; these areas of life have, so to speak, had a suggestive effect on them, and they actually only say what can be naturally gained as a one-sided view of life from their area of life...

But theosophy is not supposed to agitate for this or that direction, not even in the area that interests us today, in the area of illness and health and healing... Perhaps the humanities scholar in particular might feel tempted to advocate for one or the other... because in how many party divisions do we see today the very area in which the human heart would perhaps most like to sense unity.

Theosophy has the task of saying what is, how things are in life... and then the theosophist has the confidence that man, when he knows through his knowledge what is, will then come to realize through himself what he should. The point of view has not yet become theosophical, which appears and says: I also want to persuade that this or that should be done, and not...

Theosophy or spiritual science should never have anything to do with “should” or demands. It should objectively tell what is and have confidence in the human being that if he knows what is, he will find the guiding principle for his “should” in his own soul...

Now, who could deny that the most diverse, the most varied, the seemingly most opposing party lines confront us precisely in the area of health issues... and with what conviction and sharpness is fought for one's own conviction and with what bitterness is the other conviction fought against! And it should also be mentioned at the outset that Theosophy in particular never wants to do anything against the sciences, against the true scientific work. To put it bluntly: spiritual science or Theosophy must not go along with dilettantism in this field; it would prefer to work in harmony with those who at least have the opportunity to be experts in this field...

Of course, it is impossible to list all the shades of parties in this field here, but even if that is not possible, at least some of them should be roughly characterized. First of all, there is the allopathic healing method, the one that is so heavily opposed by so-called natural healing and what is called homeopathy... Much more could be said, but we have to draw in broad strokes... Not so much should be said for the time being about what the concepts of spiritual science could achieve, but rather what is said, so to speak, in a popular or scientific way as a characteristic of the individual shades of the parties. There we hear that the medical healing method is based on the fact that there are illnesses, damage to health, and that there are specific remedies from certain realms of nature that counteract certain damage that we call illnesses in a certain way . For each disease, this or that remedy is indicated, and science works in a careful and conscientious manner to find the specific remedies for this or that form of disease through experience in the sensory realm...

Naturally, we cannot go into detail here; as I said, we should only point out the characteristic features. But now we hear from many others, who take the same so-called natural healing approach, that everything the so-called allopathic healing approach says is fundamentally based on error... Because it takes too little account of the deeper causes of the disease; it looks at the way the disease manifests itself, but one must go deeper, assume that the causes lie deeper, that where a form of disease occurs, there are deeper disturbances in the organism that can only be remedied by intervening in this organism in the way that nature itself would intervene if it were to direct and guide the organism in a completely normal way.

We hear that, above all, it is not so much a matter of combating the individual diseases, but of investigating those activities in the organism, those functions that have been undermined and as a result of which the disease occurs, and which in turn are to be put back on the right track through appropriate measures, and now various healing methods are indicated, various physical and other remedies...

Above all, the specific remedy is opposed here, which, as experience has shown, is there to combat this or that disease. With bitterness, one side fights against the other.

Now, regardless of how one or the other or I myself think about it, let us briefly characterize how, for example, the homeopathic healing method thinks in turn in its main features; it says: In what we initially encounter in the disease, we do not have what appears to be the primary damage, what appears to be the primary unhealthiness, but we have before us in the phenomena that present themselves to us a kind of force that is called upon in the organism to fight the actual damage that lies deeper. Thus, in what presents itself to us as the symptom of the disease, we have something that the organism brings into the field in order to bring out the actual, deeper damage. We must therefore pay attention to what causes the very symptoms that appear in the disease. We must investigate which remedy we can find in the natural kingdom that causes exactly the same symptoms in a healthy person as we see in the sick person. We then support what nature has initiated...

What appears to us as illness has been initiated by nature, and we should help it by applying the means that cause the same symptoms in a healthy person, in order to support the fight against the actual damage.

One would like to say that with all these party shades, as far as the theories are concerned, on what is given as a logical basis, one would like to say that one can go along a long, long way everywhere and one soon recognizes , after a little insight into the matter, how little the objections of the respective opponents actually apply. And we can actually say that in all these fields, the supporters put forward weighty arguments in favor of their convictions. Or is it not true when today scientific medicine points out, by means of easily compiled statistics, the great successes, especially in external health care, and the improvement in the health situation in cities under the influence of precisely this medical healing method... and how then it is pointed out how much good has been done in this very respect by the research of many a specific remedy in recent decades... Great successes can be pointed out; those who would compare the health conditions in cities about a century ago with today's would be unjust if they did not recognize what medical science has achieved here. On the other hand, however, we hear, and we certainly have to admit it, that even if these conditions have improved, on the other hand it cannot be denied that certain types of disease, heart disease, nervous disorders and the like are increasing at an alarming rate... and that must also be admitted...

And should not the layman sometimes use this or that word, saying that, even if it is correct in a certain respect, that many conditions have improved, many worrying social consequences are emerging...

One need only think, for example, of the fact that in the case of a disease that was only discovered in the last few decades, namely tetanus, attention is drawn to a germ that is rightly said to be carried by people who remain healthy and others then become ill from it...

... Where would it end...

It is, for example, quite possible and a fact that entire schools have been infected with this or that communicable disease and it has been found that teachers who remained healthy were the carriers of the germs; they themselves were not infected by it. What tyranny would result if one were to build dogmatic legislation on such cases?

... How does that grow, what one could call the fear of illness, the fear of the mysterious sources of illness, through a way of thinking that can be very easily based on such attempts that cannot be doubted at all...

You really have to be a party man if you want to fight this or that with certain buzzwords...

Some of the watchwords of natural healing, for example, are as if all specific remedies had to be eradicated, as if one could only go back to the basics of the disease through physical or other methods, and support the functions... one hears the same watchword over and over again: poison; all specific remedies are poisons, but a poison could never be anything useful under any circumstances. And you can see how the word “poison” can have an enormous suggestive effect on entire gatherings. You only have to let these suggestions work and thereby create convictions that are extraordinarily effective. But anyone who knows what poison really is knows that those who use such buzzwords are the ones who are least accountable for what poison is. What is poison? The phenomena, the facts of nature, especially those in human life, are so tremendously complicated that answering this question is not so easy. What is poison in nature?

Belladonna, for example, is a poison for humans; the rabbit can eat it quite well.

Hemlock... Socrates had to drink from the hemlock cup to carry out his death sentence, but for the goat, hemlock is not a poison at all.

Hydrogen sulfide is certainly very toxic to the organism in certain respects; but there are small organisms, so-called sulfur bacteria, a type of split algae, that live almost exclusively on this substance: they build their organism in a very strange way from the sulfur... and if you deprive them of the hydrogen sulfide, they die. This fact provides an example of how the material can be incorporated into the phenomena of life...

So the keyword “poison” should not be the only one that tells us what we are actually fighting...

We will only make progress if we try to approach the whole consideration more and more from the perspective of spiritual science...

What is the actual difference between medical healing methods and naturopathy... in principle? We see a big difference that the spiritual scientist can characterize quite accurately from his point of view without taking sides for one or the other direction...

For those who know the facts, it is simply nonsense to say that there are no specific remedies for this or that disease. But what is healing with such remedies based on?

The fact that there is damage in the disease and the remedy combats this damage, that this can happen, is not disputed. To dispute the positive, that which is gained from experience, is narrow-minded and would not be spiritual science. But what are we dealing with in the human being when we heal by combating some kind of health disorder with external means? We are dealing with the physical human body, the external aspect of human nature. Since the human being has this physical human body, there is no doubt that it can also be treated with such an external remedy.

Natural healing has a certain idea that there is something mysterious and supernatural behind the physical human body, that what makes up the physical body is governed by the etheric or life body... The doctor does not need to believe it, but he does take the view that there is something that lives and moves behind the physical apparatus. The naturopath has an inkling of this etheric or life body and tries, so to speak, not to give so much to what can only be externally determined by physical means, but goes back to what lies behind the physical, what can be determined. This is very important, but the pressure of the materialistic way of thinking is far too strong for him to be able to move towards real spiritual knowledge of human nature. It would be horrifying if anyone who claimed to be a scientist were to speak of the visible having its basis in the invisible, the sensual in the supersensible.

Therefore, one can at most suspect that there is such a thing, but one cannot speak of it as a reality. If one speaks of it and has gained conviction from spiritual science, if one has recognized the inner reasons that lead to this supersensible link of human nature, then one cannot stop there, then one also proceeds to other links of human nature... then one enters with purest spiritual science into the secrets of the invisible, but which is nevertheless very real and real for that reason.

Then you go further and learn that in this physical human body there is not only an ether or life body that distinguishes humans from everything that surrounds us as seemingly inanimate... This ether or life body is a constant fighter against the physical body following its physical substances and chemical forces during life. Because when this life body withdraws from the physical body, then the physical body of the person follows the physical substances and forces, but then it is a corpse. During life, however, the etheric or life body is a constant fighter against the decay of the physical body...

Thus, in the etheric body, we have the creator, the builder of the physical body of man or any living being, who stands behind this physical body.

Then we proceed to what we call the astral body. This is the carrier of lust and suffering, joy and pain, of all the surging feelings and ideas, of everything that is instinct, desire and passion, that is, the instincts. But beyond that, we then also come to a fourth link, the carrier of the actual self-awareness, the carrier of the ego.

These four members make up the whole human being, and if we want to consider the whole human being, we must consider that the higher, the supersensible members are the actual creators of the lower, the more sensual members. Everything that happens in the lower members arises from what happens in the upper members...

Therefore, one should not only proceed to the idea of an etheric or life body, but one must consider that deeper causes, much deeper causes must lie precisely in the astral body and in the soul-spiritual of the human being, if one wants to come to an understanding of illness and health. Here the causes of the illnesses are not so easy to find. This vehicle of pleasure and suffering, instinct, desire and passions, expresses that which is within it in the etheric body and in the physical body. If something unhealthy lives in the astral body, consisting of wrong passions, drives and instincts, then this must have an effect on the etheric body and the physical body:

But, someone might say, let us look at a person; what contradictions can prevail between their healthy perceptions and healthy urges and the illnesses they nevertheless have! In this case, we must fully embrace spiritual science and be clear that what we call the innermost essence of man, the actual individuality of man, is something that is only just enveloped by the physical shell, and that it takes completely different paths in its development than this physical shell. When we look at the core of a person, we say: this person consists of two currents...

The person who comes to us in life, let us look at him. He is first a result of heredity, a result of what comes from father, mother and the ancestors before them...

But in all that continues through the generations, in all that lives something completely different, something that now has to do with the astral body and I. And when we meet a person, we see not only what we have inherited from previous generations, but also what has descended from the spiritual world as the spiritual core of our being. We look at what is called re-embodiment or reincarnation, at the innermost core of our being, which carries over from life to life. This unites with what lies in the line of inheritance, permeating and energizing what is inherited from father and mother. And even if we do not see today how the instincts and drives of individuality affect the physical body in a way that makes us ill or healthy, we would see this if we looked at what the person has been in his or her previous life.

If we recognize this, we can learn to see the passions and instincts and desires in the present life that originate from what we brought with us from these previous lives and that act as causes of illness in this present life, even if they were not acquired in this life.

And this is where the knowledge of the essence of the human being begins, as a proper basis for assessing the healing method.

Can we somehow see how the astral body indicates what it has to say in relation to what makes the physical body healthy or sick?

For example, someone has to raise a child... according to the child's nature, this or that is good, one has the stereotyped view. Instead of strict individualization, also with regard to health, one has the opinion: there are many illnesses, but only one health. But in truth, there are as many healths as there are people. Every person has their own health, their own conditions of being healthy. But with stereotyped concepts, you can ruin everything possible with the child. For example, the child does not want to eat this or that food. This is, of course, naughtiness, one thinks. But it would be much more correct to say: This is proof that sympathy and antipathy is nothing more than the astral body feeling: I must have this if I am to work in the right way on my physical body, and what the child rejects, it cannot use.

What the child's palate rejects or craves expresses what is healthy for it. It is therefore right to observe carefully what the child demands, what it is keen on. When does the astral body perceive something as pleasure, especially in childhood? When what it enjoys has in itself, as it were, the potential to be incorporated into the organism in a beneficial way. Only when something is already corrupted in the order of healthy human nature, then enjoyment is no longer a true guide... That what is healthy for him, he also likes, and what makes him sick, he does not like, that is the only measure of health, that there is an appropriate sense for everything we take into our organism. So it is a matter of making the consciousness of what is good for us as alive as possible within us, of making our astral body, the carrier of pleasure and desire, lively for what is healthy for our organism...

There are now means to achieve a great deal in this regard... Human nature differs from person to person because a different individuality permeates and energizes the exterior.

A case that occurred: there was a person who, from early childhood, had a terrible aversion to all meat; he could not smell meat, so to speak. He could not smell it, so he did not eat it. At first he was in a tolerant environment. But there were aunts and uncles who thought that not eating meat was completely perverse... And so the good man allowed himself to be persuaded to at least start with a little broth, then move on to veal and so on... But he also came to mutton... and he soon ended up with

severe encephalitis because it was absolutely impossible for this person's body to do what was necessary to digest meat using the powers within it. He was so constituted that he knew very well what was healthy for him from an early age...

But if the same food, which was the only right food for this person, were given to another, the latter could suffer the greatest harm from it...

All people must be considered as individuals. And there are countless people who, if they want to continue living as they are living, can no longer possibly become vegetarians without further ado.

It has been said that human nature is not capable of doing the work necessary to convert what we take in from plants into what the human organism needs. With plant-based nutrition, a kind of work must be done internally by the human being that he is unable to muster. The work that has to be done there is partly taken off his hands by the fact that he takes his nourishment from the animal kingdom, where some of this work has already been done and he now has less work to do. However, this does not apply to everyone, only to many people. For many, it would be unhealthy if they could not apply the strong forces of digestion and processing that are necessary to digest plant food...

To understand this, one has to embrace the radical difference between the plant and human kingdoms... the animal kingdom lies in the middle.

It is a contrast between humans and plants... we can characterize this contrast first by saying that something that is purely present in physical nature...

A human being breathes, he inhales the oxygen in the air and exhales carbon dioxide. The plant absorbs the carbon dioxide, breaks down the compound, takes the carbon it contains and uses it to build its organism out of inanimate, purely physical carbon and releases the oxygen again. This is the interaction between humans and plants. This expresses a spiritual interaction in an external parable. Behind the plant stands its spiritual, behind the human being his spiritual. You know that a plant cannot flourish when it is deprived of light. Look at it, how it withers away. That which the plant builds up from inanimate substances, it builds up under the influence of light... Light! How much we owe to it... we take from it as much as we need...

But we must not only see, also in the light, not only pay attention to the physical. In that which is physical in the light, there is also a spiritual element. Behind physical light there is also a spiritual element. This spiritual element, which flows towards us from the sun to the earth in the rays of light, is the same as that which lives in our astral body, that inner light that works and creates in us — in the spiritual light, the spiritual aura. They are nothing other than the spirit of the physical body, the invisible light that works in us as the astral body. And that is what is at work in us! Outside, the physical light of the sun is at work on the plants. And that is the peculiar relationship between the physical light outside, which works on the plants, causing them to grow and flourish... and the spiritual light that is in us as our astral body. That is the relationship, that they are opposed to each other...

That which builds up the plants is removed, decomposed, destroyed by the process that the spiritual light ignites in us. And our life in the physical body as a spiritual being could not exist if we did not, so to speak, set up processes of destruction in everything we take in. We remove what the plants have built up. We continue in the opposite way to what the plants have begun... Thus we are spiritually opposed to the plant. And what is given to us as food from the plant kingdom, that we in truth destroy...

Our thinking is in its physical expression a process of destruction. What we take in must be worn away again, must be shattered again. This is how we maintain an inner life...

What is given to us from the plant kingdom as food is given to us in a virgin state. What is given to us from the animal kingdom is not given to us in such a virgin state... Because the animal stands in between the plant and the human, the animal fulfills that which the human has to fulfill to a certain extent... ... already accomplishes to a certain extent what man would otherwise have to accomplish within himself... and man can only begin his own activity where that which he has received is located. He only gets what the animal has already made out of it...

Let us look at man; he is truly a microcosm, a summary of everything that is going on outside...

His nutritional process is what the expansive plant kingdom elevates and transforms so that this human body can become an instrument of consciousness. In this respect, it is a totality. For the spiritual scientist, the animal is nothing more than a one-sided development of human characteristics. Each animal, each animal species represents certain characteristics for the spiritual scientist, developed in a particular way...

All these characteristics, combined in harmony – the one diminished by the other, the one balanced by the other – give us the human being...

The animal performs the natural process to a certain one-sidedness... We acquire this one-sidedness when we take the no longer virgin food from the animal kingdom...

Now let's assume that we are really organized in such a way that we can muster the necessary strength to process plant food. We have this strong reservoir of strength within us, which is only used when we take plant food. What happens if we don't do it, if we don't carry out this transformation from the vegetable to the human level? Then the unused forces seek other outlets in our organism.

The French abbé I told you about had precisely such forces within him. They are there and they have to work, and if they cannot find a healthy outlet, they will eventually throw themselves at another field of activity. The abbé then died from the effects of the large forces that arose in this improper way.

Let us take, on the other hand, a different person, such as a bank manager, who knows nothing but his profession. If we were to expect him to eat a vegetarian diet, he would not be able to do so. He will not be able to sustain it. He cannot process the plant substances to the point where they can serve him for the functioning of his organism; he must let some of the work be done for him.

We can therefore also see an important difference and contrast between the way plant food and animal food affect people. What does a person who wants to digest plant food have to develop in themselves? What do they do when they eat plant food? They have to muster certain forces that work from below, from the plant. These are forces that are more at the center of his being than those he needs to process animal food. These are forces within him that no one can do for him. By accomplishing this internally, he also has an inner source of independence and strength. His inner life becomes more active and intense as a result. What he consumes from the plant kingdom does indeed make his inner life more active. However, this requires a more comprehensive spiritual life, one that is directed towards contemplation, towards an understanding of the great interrelationships of life... If a person then takes his nourishment from the animal kingdom, then this is only right if he does not have these independent powers. For the nourishment that a person takes from the animal kingdom, he will use inner powers that make him less independent, since he has some of the work done for him...

In spiritual terms, what comes from the animal kingdom stimulates what makes man strong and vigorous without his intervention.

For those who cannot draw strength and energy for life from within themselves, a plant-based diet will be of no use; they will only be weakened by it. They need to have their strength and powers given to them, so to speak, prepared by animal food.

From such contexts, we can easily understand how it comes about that peoples who live on a plant-based diet lead a life more devoted to contemplation... while those who eat animal products show more warlike qualities.

Thus, what must be considered a health issue and a nutritional issue at the same time is definitely linked to the individuality of the person, to what the person can muster internally. And we see in the person whether the person does not partly acquire strong powers of independence in his inner being through a plant-based diet...

Through plant nutrition, we see him acquiring all the forces he needs to become, so to speak, a comprehensive human being, to become a human being who can see the big picture of life. Through what he acquires from animal nutrition, we see him being led to the specialties...

Thus we see from the interaction... through what... the great questions of existence for all details of life are regulated... There we see, so to speak, man's inner nature expressing itself in such a way that there are strong forces within him... or that he must have these strong forces given to him... We see, so to speak, the astral body at work in him... and how this work must be if the balance in the human organism is to be restored...

And once we have understood this, we will no longer doubt that much, much depends on how we are able to act on the astral body... but not only on this, but also how we can act physically on the physical body and ethereally on the ethereal body...

A materialistic view will only want to have an effect on the physical... Let us take the case of a sick person. The materialistically thinking person will look at these symptoms of illness and he will count on this: in this or that area, there is this or that air, there are these or those conditions, which, like one physical on another physical, affect the sick organism...

Those who are grounded in spiritual science will know that in many cases this is a very erroneous conclusion. They will know that it must work more radically and thoroughly if the human being is placed where his inner experiences can be stimulated in the appropriate way, where he can be truly happy, can become truly harmonious within himself. In particular, with certain forms of illness, namely nervous disorders, it will be most important that we work directly on the astral body and through that which can stimulate strong forces in the astral body...

Thus, if someone develops those strong forces within themselves that are developed through plant nutrition, it can be a good remedy for even severe damage to the organism. What works internally, when the inner forces that... must process the virgin plant food, can eliminate serious damage.

You can see from a person whether he also takes the trouble to convert the plant nutrients, in which there is little fat, into fat through his own inner powers, or whether he prefers to have it taken from him by enjoying animal fat... to develop those strong powers within him that make him independent... in other words, whether the person is not too lazy to contribute a little to his own fattening... this looks out of the eye whether it happens or not...

The one who does not overfeed himself with animal fat will also find within himself the possibility of developing the strong forces within him, and these are more and more inclined towards the spiritual...

And now there is a great, comprehensive law... that says: Everything that a person enjoys and looks at only as sensuality, that affects the withering, dying forces within him... and everything that he looks at as spiritual, that affects the invigorating, healing powers of a person... And vice versa, anyone who wants to help themselves in this direction can do so by eating enough plant-based food in addition to meat, and this can help in terms of awakening interest in the supernatural world...

Anyone who is willing to do something to prepare his own fat from low-fat plant foods will be able to become much more spiritual than someone who gets all his fat from animals...

A grotesque confirmation arises from the following incident. There is a so-called nudist culture in Berlin. Someone went there initially out of purely artistic interest, wanted to see what it was like and let the audience and what was presented there take effect on them. Then this person quickly ran away. It was a strange audience, almost all old men...

Where one actually assumes that the sensual has an effect on the sensual, there is an attraction to what is dying in life. And those who merely seek the sensual as sensual will be able to see that the dying parts of their being are particularly affected... whereas the spiritual interest... will particularly affect the germinating, growing parts of the human being.

Spiritual research begins to give people something that is certainly not as comfortable as just describing something... and also not as comfortable as listening to a lecture where images are projected onto a screen. You don't need to do much inwardly.

Spiritual science speaks of the supernatural, and that cannot be taken in as comfortably. It appeals to something in human nature, to which he must work, to which he must put the most active forces within him into cooperation... This spiritual science thus goes directly to the spiritual... to the paths of the soul... It is not there for the eyes... And no one claims that the concepts and ideas of spiritual science are real in the sense that they are tangible. In this sense, they are not supposed to be true. But what is hardly known today in wide circles, these so-called unreal ideas, what are they? These are precisely the healthy, the strong ideas, which, if they only work sufficiently in human nature, are at the same time the strong, the vigorous and effective ideas that make us healthy right into the etheric body.

When spiritual science guides us... it evokes ideas in us that have a healing effect from within in the most eminent sense... organic substance in such a way that it has already left its origins, so to speak, and cannot be repaired by itself again... The higher we ascend in the hierarchy of organisms...

Where internal forces are to be developed for recovery, the strongest force is that which flows out of the spirit of the human being, which is directed towards rejuvenation and growth, and the one who appeals to these forces also has a good foundation in the sense of health... the strong forces within are unleashed up to the higher realms of the health issue... Hardly a beginning has been made though...

We understand little more than a physical effect on the person... Here spiritual science is called upon to address the issue of health in such a way that remedies are found and are available that do not just work on the physical level but directly on the spiritual, that is, on the astral; and that work to restore physical health indirectly through the astral. Here indeed Theosophy has a great task. It will be able to solve it, because it can penetrate deeply into the life that surrounds us daily, into the life of the healthy and the sick person.

And here it is truly to be welcomed with great satisfaction that a good start has been made on the basis of the theosophical research, in that Dr. Peipers in Munich is applying a kind of color therapy that is thoroughly based on the theosophical view, on spiritual science... the secrets of color, its deeper spiritual foundations, have been divined.

Here one does not think of the physical effects... not the light works in these things, the color must first become an idea, must first shine and light up in the astral body... as a color idea, via the detour of the astral body, they work out into the periphery... Even if this can initially only be used for certain forms of illness, a start has been made...

And this theosophical current will, in these and many other things, by penetrating into the depths of things, still create many things of which today's materialistic mind has no dreams. Whatever one may say... the truth, the truth of the spiritual, will prevail. So... few points of view that are connected with this subject. It will have been shown to you how, on the one hand, spiritual science can never be one-sided...

Let us assume that someone has a migraine. What does he take? Migränin, for example. That is nothing! Or some other remedy is prescribed for him. But perhaps he does not have time to do everything that is prescribed for him... It is quite possible for a person to be so strong that he can bear it well if his physical organism is treated physically in certain areas.

But the problem can only be solved on an individual basis. Through a deeper knowledge of human nature, we will come to realize that there is a basis in spiritual science itself for evoking healthy urges and healthy instincts... that spiritual life is what...

Behind all matter lies spirit... and that which shows itself as content... in matter is only an expression of spiritual processes... The same applies to food: it should taste good, because the fact that it tastes good is an expression of the fact that it fits into the organism in a healthy and harmonious way.

In this way, spiritual science will enable you to stimulate feelings and instincts in a healthy way, and the result will be that those who study the spiritual wisdom will become healthy...

Just as the animals graze outside in the meadow and find the right thing in their instincts... so will spirituality and spiritual science, on a higher level, once again implant in man that which shows him, in full consciousness, what serves him, what is healthy for him... so that spiritual science itself is a great healing agent, a great healing agent... because it brings him the right knowledge for what is individually necessary for him in one case or another.

Recognizing illness in its relationship to the human being as a whole will help to bring about knowledge in this field too, and so Hyrtl, who... something very beautiful when he said from his experience:... Only the doctor can recognize illnesses... and he meant: The other is more difficult, he meant: You can't always help if you can recognize illnesses, only the one who knows what helps can heal... Only the one who is able to look deeply, very deeply into the foundations of human nature, can know what helps.

Answering questions [excerpts]

Question: [Not reported.]

Answer: It is important to distinguish between the irregularities that have arisen from external damage and against which he has at most the means to correct through the inner powers within the person, and between internal diseases... an external damage, a broken leg for example... But it is the same if, for example, any harm is done inside the stomach by unsuitable food.... just as little as with a broken leg can such external damage be treated from the astral body... It is nevertheless important that more is said about recovery from within the person than about forms of illness... more about the ways to recovery than about diseases.

Question: [Not handed down.]

Answer: [...] Feuerbach said: Man is what he eats. This is true if he uses the means to get higher by the nature of his food ... He should eat so that he is not what he eats.

During each winter in the past years, I was allowed to give a lecture here on a spiritual-scientific topic. The local friends have also requested such a lecture for this year. And it will seem understandable that in these difficult, fateful and destiny-bearing times, such a reflection may lead to that which fills us all deeply, deeply in our hearts and souls. Our thoughts and feelings are directed towards the East and the West, to where the great events of our time are unfolding in such a significant, grand, powerful, and painful way; where the fate of humanity is not discussed with words, but with deeds, which find expression in courage, confidence, bravery, in death and suffering, but also in all the uplifting sacrifices that are so abundant in the time when something so significant is also happening for our Central European humanity.

What can be stimulated in our present time regarding the relationship between the European national souls may be the subject of today's spiritual scientific reflection. It may be the subject of this reflection in the way that spiritual science can illuminate these very conditions. This spiritual science, which has indeed found little, truly little, favor and acceptance among the majority of contemporary people, but which, for those who are imbued with its innermost meaning, its innermost spirit, presents itself that it must take its stand for the whole movement for the whole life of the human spirit in the cultural movement for the present and the near future, just as the scientific movement for several centuries has taken its stand in cultural life. And it is precisely in the face of the deeply moving questions of life that spiritual science must prove itself.

Among the concepts that have provoked the most ridicule and opposition in my first fundamental spiritual science book - in my “Theosophy” - is the concept of the folk soul not as an abstraction, as a mere idea and sum of characteristics that hold a group of people together, but as a real, active being. We have already reached a point where the habits of thought that have been formed over centuries no longer want to go along with spiritual science.

Just as human beings, as the highest of earthly beings, stand in relation to the entities of the other natural kingdoms, just as the entities of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms find their physical, sensory culmination in the human being, so spiritual science must show - however unusual it may be for present-day ideas - that the realms of beings are not limited to the visible, that there are other realms above the human being, which cannot be reached with the mind that is bound to our brain, or with our physical, sensory eyes and ears, but which can be reached with what Goethe called spiritual vision, spiritual eyes and ears. This is not said comparatively, but to express something that is as certain for anthroposophy as, for example, the biological results are for the external science.

Spiritual science says that the way a person, with their soul, faces the things and entities of external nature, and how they form concepts and ideas about them, so there are truly real spiritual beings, invisible to the physical eye, above the human being, and for these beings, the human being with their soul is as much a thought, as it is an idea, as the objects of external nature are for the human being. Thus we are permeated and held by these spiritual beings. And to one of the next classes of these beings, spiritual science must count what for many is only the coincidence of the characteristics of a people: the folk souls.

What matters is the relationship of the folk soul to the individual human soul. Spiritual science does not look at the soul like popular psychology. It regards it not as a product of the outer organization, but as the real creator of the outer organization. And not to make an easy classification, but out of the nature of things, the spiritual scientific researcher distinguishes three essential parts of the soul with the same justification - only of course transferred to another area - as one distinguishes in the rainbow spectrum the red color on one side, the green in the middle, and then the blue color. And just as one cannot grasp the interaction of light and colors without taking this structure, which is most clearly seen in the rainbow spectrum, so one cannot understand the human soul without the threefold nature that we describe as the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul. Just as the rainbow has the color red on one side, so the human being has the sentient soul on one side; in the middle, the human being has the mind or emotional soul; and just as the rainbow has the color blue, so the human being has the consciousness soul. As I said, this does not arise from arbitrariness, from a desire to classify, but is connected with the innermost nature of the soul.

Let us first take the sentient soul: just as the red part of the spectrum primarily contains warmth, so the sentient soul contains more of the desires, the passions, the passionate forces of the soul, but at the same time, when the soul goes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, [withdraws into] that which are the eternal forces of the soul, which mysteriously hide behind the drives, the passions, the desires, which at the same time are what imprints the soul with the eternal character. But what exists in the soul as the mediation of the eternal self of the human being with the temporal-spatial human being corresponds to the green color, which primarily serves the light, just as the mind serves the spiritual, mediating the human being's relationship to his eternal and temporal.

And the consciousness soul is what consumes the eternal between birth and death to work on the temporal; it is most turned towards the material world. The consciousness soul is what contains the soul powers that are least carried through the gate of death, that are least connected to the eternal self of man.

In all that we distinguish as nuances of the soul life, the actual I of the human being lives as light lives in the nuances of the spectrum. As there is light in every color, so there is I in every part of the human soul; but at the same time, what permeates the human being like an invisible entity passes through the I into the soul's members: the soul of the people to which he belongs. The relationship between the national soul and the individual human soul varies greatly, and nations differ according to the nature of the relationship between the national soul and the individual human soul. There is not enough time in the world if I were to attempt to develop in full, on the basis of spiritual scientific research, the nature of the relationship between the national soul and the human soul. A comparison can be enlightening here, but it should be more than just a comparison; it should give a genuine spiritual-scientific result.

If we look at a person in relation to the mineral, plant and animal world, we can distinguish three types of people. Firstly, there are people whose whole being is inclined only towards the external sense world, who cannot sharply concentrate their attention on something that withdraws from the sense world, who always need the impression of the outside world. They fall into indifference and inattention when they are supposed to have ideas that do not adhere to the outside world.

There is another relationship to the environment that we encounter more in inward-looking, sensible natures, who go through the world in such a way that their senses are little attracted by external nature, who produce inwardly, who bring forth from the life of the soul what they experience. They go through the world of the senses raving and dreaming. These are very different types of people because the soul relates to itself and to the outer world in different ways.

A third type is the one who has placed himself in history primarily through the representative of Germanness, through Goethe. A great thinker of his time called his thinking “representational thinking”. By this he meant that Goethe had the peculiarity of being just as oriented towards sensual things as he was, and that he could immerse himself in the spiritual that he was able to experience in and with things. The ideas of “spirit and body” were intimately interwoven in his soul. His thinking was objective and did not stray far from the objects, and when it did go to the objects, it did not stray from itself.

Corresponding to this threefold relationship of man to the world around him, we also have three types of relationship of the folk soul to the individual human soul. For just as the human being relates to nature, so the folk soul relates to the individual human soul. There are folk souls that relate to individual souls in such a way that they are completely devoted to the individual human beings, as it were, that they completely slip into them and permeate them, that the individual soul is something that is the imprint of the folk soul.

This is the preferred relationship for the souls that inhabit the west and south of Europe: the French, Italian and British people. The relationship is different for the Russian people. There we find that the folk soul remains, as it were, above the individual souls, that it does not enter into the being of the individual human being, which is expressed by the fact that the Russian people still have today - like a cloud spreading over the whole nation - the Byzantine religion, which does not connect with the individual soul. Such is the relationship of the folk soul to the individual Russian person.

[Where, as in Western Europe, the national soul takes hold of the individual souls, it dominates the individual souls so that the individual soul is something like an imprint of the national soul. Just as the national soul in the West is within the individual soul, so the relationship of the Russian national soul is such that it does not descend.

Like the person who lives only in his or her own soul, the national soul does not descend to the individual soul; the national soul, as it were, raves over the people. The Russian souls are not seized by the folk soul, but rather they are in anarchic confusion. Even when one thinks of the excellent representatives of the Russian people, of Tolstoy and so on, one sees how the folk soul hovers over them like a cloud and that the individual soul forces are not seized by it, but are in anarchic confusion.

Let us now turn to the center of Europe: here we find such a relationship between the soul of the people and the individual soul that we can compare this relationship with Goethe's objective thinking. We have the soul of the people lovingly and intimately entering into the individual souls and yet, at the same time, rising above itself and being transported into the spiritual worlds in order to draw new strength and carry it down from the spiritual worlds. We have here the life of the soul of the people above the human being in the spiritual heights, and then again in the individual human souls.

One can say: When you look at the people of Western Europe, a particular soul force is always taken hold of and ruled by the folk soul: in the Italians, the sentient soul; in the French, the mind or mind soul; in the British, the consciousness soul. All the qualities that the members of these nations have [precisely as members of these nations] immediately become clear and understandable when viewed from this perspective of the nature of the facts, which can be found through spiritual science. How powerfully passionate, how completely immersed in instinct, all of Italian life appears, right up to the greatness of Dante, who drafted his Divine Comedy from the images of the sentient soul. The Italian people become understandable when one knows that it is the folk soul that takes hold of the sentient soul here.

The French nation becomes understandable when one recognizes that the folk soul directly takes hold of the intellectual soul. I read how a psychological society in a German city tried to explain the French national character. The result was: That is their mathematical disposition. This disposition becomes immediately understandable when one knows that the folk soul directly takes hold of the powers of the intellectual soul. Everything in this western nation is illuminated when one knows that it tends to take things in such a way that, despite all striving for personal freedom and national freedom, it is inwardly dogmatized and systematized to the point of artistic activity, to the point of the details of artistic activity. And we also find the other side there. I would like to say the negative pole of the dogma: that is criticism, the dissolving element. On the one hand, the rational soul wants to see everything in a system of dogmas, and if it cannot, it rebels against it, and so we have either dogmatism or Voltairism. The starting point of Descartes' philosophy is doubt down to the last detail. You can understand what is happening in the French people if you know this.

I note that a number of prominent figures are sitting here who know that I have been dealing with these things for years and that they have not been formulated by the occasion of the present. But I believe that they can be enlightening for what we are now experiencing, which is so great, so meaningful and so painful.

Now to the consciousness soul. The part that is most inclined towards the outer life and carries least into the eternal part of the human being is the consciousness soul, and in the British people it is most seized by the folk soul. The character of the British people as a trading nation and also the character of Shakespeare immediately becomes clear. For what is his greatness based on? That he has portrayed the individual human being in such a sharp characteristic, that they stand firmly on the physical plane, that he characterizes them in what does not pass through the gate of death. He is so great because he has succeeded in characterizing so sharply what is human in man that is not eternal about them, but what they develop for the physical world between birth and death.

Now, the German national soul, or, as I could also say, Central European culture, is characterized by the fact that it does not take hold of the soul directly, but descends to the soul and takes hold of it in its entirety, as it were with that which flows from the sources of the spiritual world, for it has the gift of withdrawing into the spiritual worlds and drawing strength from there. Hence the peculiarity of the German soul to experience that which has the power of the eternal, which directly flows from the eternal into the individual souls. The individual soul must be able to feel that something in your soul lives through the national soul, which sinks into you, which is carried into you, and through which you are directly connected to what lives in spiritual heights. Hence the idealism, hence the ever-rejuvenating power of the German national soul.

One can go through the products of German intellectual life and obtain the evidence that, in contrast to other nations, the German has this peculiar relationship to the folk soul: not the individual soul elements are seized, as in the western and eastern nations of Europe, but the ego, of which the German seems to be less developed. One is a Briton, a Frenchman; a German is to be made.

It is an ideal because not a single power of the soul, but the whole soul is seized in the most profound life in the constant emergence of the different sides. Let us look back to the times when Christianity penetrated into the young, developing Germanic nation. How was it received? We can see this from the Old High German poem “Heliand”. What the individual - here the poet of “Heliand” - feels about the events, his personal experience, is directly related to the forces that surround him. What was only handed down to the Romans is reborn from the youngest germinal forces of the poet.

And in other poems we find how Christianity not only becomes part of the German people, but is born out of the individual human being, as it becomes a personal matter for the individual. It is the soul of the people that does not allow what comes to the people to grow old, but rejuvenates it so that it lives like a plant in the soul and rises again.

Furthermore, we see how a world view develops in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries that is called German mysticism, for example in the works of Tauler, Meister Eckhart, the unknown author of Theologia Deutsch, and so on. We see how the minds work in a peculiar way, how they relate to the spiritual world. The mystic Eckhart is convinced that the spiritual world must be experienced directly in the soul, that it must be left entirely to itself, that it must not move out of its own arbitrariness, but must give itself to the forces that are weaving and ruling through the world. Then something ignites in it, which is a spark, but in this spark lives God, the divine weaving and being.

The place where God lives within, [where Christ is born within, which suffers] and dies when the individual soul goes the way of suffering and passion, / gap in the text] is where Meister Eckhart coined the word “Gemüt”. In the mind, the world is spiritually revived, and it is aware that what a person thinks, the Godhead thinks, what a person feels, the Godhead feels, what a person wills, the Godhead wills, if only he gives himself to his God. There we have something of the intimate coexistence of the individual with the German folk soul.

And in the author of Theologia Deutsch we find a rejuvenation of the German Weltanschauung through a rhythmic beat of the life of the German national soul with the individual representatives of the German national soul. What in earlier times led to the resurrection of the life of Jesus, as if Jesus had wandered through Germany's countryside with his disciples as his servants, which so personally depicted the life of Jesus, which rejuvenated Christianity, that rejuvenates the worldview in German mysticism. And it is wonderful how deeply the German national soul intervenes in personal life! This becomes clear when we look at one of the disciples of mysticism, at Angelus Silesius, when we share a saying of this mystic, one of the deepest of the numerous sayings:

I neither die nor live. God Himself dies in me,

And what I am to live, He also lives for and for.

Oh, what depths, we say, only in relation to the thought of immortality! He who has done this feels the ruling divinity. When I die, it is just as much an act of the divinity as when I live, it is the divinity that lives in me. By letting God experience death in me, I am aware of my immortality.

One can say: such ideas of immortality, which point to an immortal power in the human soul that is not grasped by reflecting on what lies beyond death, but is already grasped by it in life, are demonstrated by Jakob Böhme, the simple cobbler from Görlitz, the profound philosopher, who was fully inspired by the German folk spirit. He directed his enlightened gaze to that which is of the divine worlds in his own soul. He saw the courage of human striving on earth in the fact that the individual human soul, which is otherwise given over to emotional impressions, to those of the intellect and so on, always knows itself connected with its immortal core, with that which lives in death, that knows how to die by living out of direct knowledge.

Jakob Böhme's goal was to experience death directly in earthly life, and that this is the seed for the experiences of life. An expression that appears to be the utterance of the German national soul through a single person is the following:

He who does not die before he dies,

He perishes when he dies.

Those who do not grasp during their lifetime what lives in the soul as an immortal and thus pass through the gate of death, those who do not grasp death as the source of spiritual life, perish when they die. We see the highest philosophical view, but one that is also imbued with elemental soul power, rising to the highest heights of the spiritual.

When we see such figures of German nationality before our minds, we perceive how the German national soul has a rejuvenating effect again and again, so that it must always take hold of spirit and soul as a fresh germ in order to go up the whole ladder, to go to the highest heights of spiritual fruit.

And after the scorching and burning devastation of the Thirty Years' War, we see the German soul's strength once again intervening in the life of the people.

This is also the case with Herder, who provided a broad overview in his “History of Mankind”, encompassing the entire nature of the soul, from the most elementary soul forces to the highest philosophical powers. There are many, many ways in which the soul of a nation lives in Goethe's soul. It is remarkable that we realize that in turn a poetic work could arise in him that could not have arisen within any other culture. If the German folk soul has the peculiarity of grasping not the individual soul forces but the whole soul, then it grasps the immortal in the mortal, and the personality becomes the bearer of the eternal. Therefore, Goethe's “Faust” could only arise within German culture. It contains everything in the human soul, all the striving for the very beginnings of spiritual life, which are consciously sought again after all tradition has been cast off. How is this presented?

Let us compare how the German soul power inspires the German people in relation to the French people. In both, the Greek is reviving. But how does it revive with the French poets? It is studied, the rules are adopted and so on. But how is it with Goethe? Even in “Iphigenia” the Greek is not adopted, but reborn anew, rejuvenated. And in “Faust” we have the union with what he regarded as Greek: Helen is reborn for Faust. He becomes young in order to unite with the representative of Greek culture. Faust, who has grown old, throws off the old and seeks the rejuvenating potion. What is historically given must be brought into connection with Faust in a rejuvenated form. This demands the full strength, the rejuvenating strength of the German national soul.

We can trace it everywhere in all the details of German intellectual life! This is what comes to consciousness through an immersion in the substance of the German national soul. One sees, feels and senses an ever-renewing power in it. However present culture may change, this renewing power will remain, because its magic breath will be breathed again and again in different epochs. This is a peculiarity of Central European culture. This hope and confidence, which immediately becomes strength, is the basis not for superficial but for profound optimism in the German, which is also connected to idealism in all philosophies. Whoever is truly capable of approaching what the German national soul has produced cannot despair of humanity, but always comes to a belief in humanity, and indeed to a spiritual belief in humanity.

This becomes very significant when one looks at spirits who turn their gaze to humanity in search of something that can give good hope for the further development of man, and who can find nothing, who believe that European culture has died out. No one can regard European culture as having grown old; they can understand the relationship between the soul of the people and the individual German soul. Anyone who considers European culture to be old does not understand that.

That is why we have a Russian intellectual who has searched for what can make humanity happy and cannot find anything that has grown out of this culture of the national soul. He looks everywhere and finds nothing. I am talking about Herzen, the great Russian who became so small in his own eyes when he wanted to understand Central European culture. The following saying of Herzen immediately sheds light on the way the Eastern European, anarchic soul views desolation where flourishing life can be seen by those who can understand Central European soul life. He enters into an intellectual alliance with an Englishman, with Stuart Mill, and says:

Mill is not exaggerating when he speaks of the narrowing of the mind, of the constant flattening of life, of the reduction of life to commercial culture. He says that England will become like China, and we add that England will not be alone.

That is what Herzen says, who has no understanding for what must fill the Central European with the highest vitality. And further he says:

Perhaps a coincidence will save us from Chinese desiccation.

If he had understood Goethe, such a statement would be impossible! Further Herzen says:

Where is the highest thought, that is, hope, which hardens the hearts so that they feel neither pain nor suffering. Look around you, what can uplift the hearts.

That the same force that brought forth the highest poetic and philosophical blossoms in Goethe is the same force that today brings forth countless victims, victims of death and suffering, that is what presents itself to us at the same time from the whole context of German life.

And has German life always been so misunderstood in the world as it is now, when it is being shouted at from all sides that it is a life of “barbarians”? Not only is Central Europe being surrounded like a large fortress with the intention of starving it out, no, it is also being scolded and reviled from all sides. Here and there, friendly voices are raised, for example, by a Romanian who exclaims:

All those who have studied in France and lived among the French people have rushed to fill the columns of newspapers with all kinds of praise. Why don't you, who have enjoyed German hospitality, respond to these people by saying that these barbarians have the best schools, clinics, universities and so on? That you were welcomed everywhere with open arms! Why don't you respond by saying that these barbarians, who were your teachers, are incapable of committing such crimes? [Why don't you respond?

These voices were not always so rare. It is uncomfortable for a Central European to characterize the German essence in value judgments. What I have said, I know, is as certain a result of spiritual scientific research as the laws of the solar spectrum are a scientific research result. But it is uncomfortable for a German to make value judgments about the German character, so let us first hear from others. First Emerson, the great American teacher. In his reflections on Goethe, he wrote as if there were some awareness of how the German national character relates to the individual soul, and of the difference between Eastern and Western Europe:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of its conviction. In France, one is already delighted to see brilliant ideas going wherever they may. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts will take them. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind has neither the French liveliness nor the Englishman's understanding, honed for practicality, nor, finally, the American

— as I said, an American writing in English —

All he has is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands that a writer stand above things and simply express himself. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it advocate? What is the man's opinion? Where does it come from? Where does he get all these thoughts?

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

The Germans think for Europe.

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

There is something alive in these words that can seem like an echo of what can arise from the intimate association of the soul of the people with the individual human being. And Emerson continues:

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

You could say: Well, that was said by Emerson, who lived far away in America. We have had to listen to it: the Germans who live now are not the same as they were. Even the French philosopher Bergson said how the Germans have become mechanical. It is strange how, in this day and age, a man who wants to be a philosopher wants to come to his judgment: He certainly longs for judgment! He knows that Germans have had great thoughts. He seems to feel that when cannons and rifles are turned against Germans from all sides, they should then recite poems by Novalis or Goethe in response.

Strange logic is going around the world today. When people say, “Who wanted this war,” and the English, French, and Russians claim, “We didn't want it,” one could say, “Yes, we believe that too!” But it does not depend on what one says, but on whether one can say the relevant thing. If five people stand threateningly around a house, and the person who lives in it sees this and tells them to go away, and they then, because they do not leave, are beaten up by them, the five can also say: “We did not want the beating!”

One cannot say that Emerson's judgment of the German “barbarians” is already outdated, but one would think that those who have immersed themselves in German intellectual substance can judge better.

A few years before the war, a book was published by an Englishwoman entitled “Eight Years in Germany”. She visited German schools, clinics and so on and, having got to know the German character, wrote the following:

We read a lot about the new Germany and the new German spirit. Is what exists now the mature work of generations? Blinded by the splendor of Germany's wealth, we are inclined to forget that it has never occupied any place but the very forefront except for prosperity. In literature, it has always provided the impetus; in science, it has always shone; in music, it has always dominated.

And now the following. I don't know if she would have written it now, but about two years before the war she did:

Forty years ago Germany was fighting for her existence, and she is still fighting for it today. It is entirely wrong to believe that Germany has already reached her zenith. She is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals, whose power and experience was gained generations ago. [...]

On every border and across the water, opponents sit, commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, to pounce on it and bring it down.

The reasons why the German national character is so little understood can be grasped. Something can penetrate into the West from the German soul — less so into the East — but it is repelled in the West because it does not want to know anything about the dogmatic character of what wants to live actively in the whole soul. There is a certain understanding, but at the same time a reluctance to let it grow completely into the soul.

About a year and a half before the outbreak of the war, lectures were held in Manchester. They have been published and were very interesting, and the scholars explain in the preface why they are holding them: English journalists should be better informed about German conditions. About the immediate present, the scholar Herford said that on the whole it is out of the question that the creation of the German Reich has been beneficial to peace. [Gap in the text] History should be something more than a cinematograph and shed the higher light on things:

On the whole and in the big picture, there is no question

- it says -

that the establishment of the German Reich has been beneficial to world peace. This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is fitting for her to let the light of the past shine on the present confusion, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For if we look to the past, we find that our ancestors looked at France with far greater fear than the wildest rabble-rousers today fear Germany. And the fear of our ancestors had good reason. [...] So, to sum up, it can be shown that the founding of the German Empire was an asset for Europe and therefore also for Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866-1871 once and for all put an end to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the hitherto unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed an inducement to war which in earlier centuries had so often tempted into the wrong channels; they put the German people in a position to develop their hitherto stunted political abilities, and they helped to establish on a firm basis a new European system that has preserved the peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved at a single blow what Great Britain, despite all her expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to accomplish, namely, to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a great war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

When one is confronted with these things and wonders what lies in the souls of those who wrote them, one must have some understanding of the peculiarity of the European national psyche to grasp why one can understand [it] so little outside of Germany. Only enlightened minds can do that.

One mystic who has written beautiful things should also be mentioned. He confessed that he had great experiences with three mystics. One of them is Novalis, who gained so much from his intimate contact with the German folk soul. He uses beautiful words to characterize him. He says: “So much is going on on earth that can only interest earthly souls, such as what Shakespearean characters do. But if other beings from other planets could look down, what could interest them?” And he wonders if there is something that can interest other spirits as well, and in Novalis' writings he finds something that interests not only earthly souls but also beings that come down from heavenly heights. What the human soul can hardly bring forth in words is what he speaks of, what one would rather remain silent about, where true nature begins. He says:

But if he needed other proof, it would

— that is, presumably, the soul —

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

This is how this enlightened spirit assessed Novalis. Who is it that speaks in this way? Is it someone who calls to account the self-righteous critics who are now railing against German “barbarism”? Is it someone who will take a stand against words such as:

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

The words written by the enlightened man about Novalis are by Maeterlinck. And the words about the bawler are also by him. We are now experiencing such things; they characterize our time directly through themselves, without the need to add anything in particular.

The lectures mentioned, which were held in Manchester, have been published and also translated into German. In the preface there are some words that can also be read in English:

The source of the stream of his intellectual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient Greece, the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany today is to a great extent concrete and practical.

The one saying this is Lord Haldane.

If we consider how different the European center and the European east must be in terms of the overall character of the people, it can be understood that a powerful confrontation was bound to occur there. This confrontation was seen by people who wanted to see clearly. Today we hear from all sides: The Germans wanted this war. Who wanted it, who, because of the special character of their national aspirations, had to want it for a long time, was always seen by reasonably enlightened minds. A man who is not particularly inclined towards Germanic nature writes:

As for me, I am in no doubt that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic worlds is imminent, that it will be ignited either by the Orient, especially Turkey, or by the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps by both, and that Russia will take the lead in it on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spewing fire and flames against Germany. [...] The German press is already sounding its warning cries. It has been a long time since Russia gathered itself after the Crimean War, and it seems that it is now considered appropriate in St. Petersburg to take up the Oriental question again.

If, according to the more pompous than true expression, the Mediterranean Sea should once become “a French lake”, Russia has the even more positive intention of making a Russian lake out of the Black Sea and a Russian pond out of the Sea of Marmara. That Constantinople must become a Russian city and Greece a direct vassal state of Russia is a fixed goal of Russian policy, which finds its levers of support in the common religion and in Pan-Slavism.

Thus, the minds that wanted to see it, saw how the forces at work in Europe gradually brought about this time. This was written in 1870!

The antagonism between Eastern Europe and Central Europe has always been there, so that the logic of the question, “Who wanted this war?”, is the flimsiest, because the people, whose soul hovers like a cloud over it, has a desire for expansion, and because there is not the slightest understanding for what has been achieved in Central Europe. It was received in Russia, but the way it happened is again quite characteristic.

It is true, as Herman Grimm says, that the Englishman Mr. Lewes wanted to write an important book about Goethe. But he only told of a man who happened to be born in Frankfurt am Main and happened to die in Weimar, who had this and that experience and wrote these and those works. But the soul of Goethe does not live in it, because his soul slips through his fingers. He only sees what he can dogmatize; he only sees the Goethe that stands firmly on the ground – the dates of birth and death and so on. He knows the titles of the works and so on. But what Goethe really was, that he was the representative of the dialogue between the individual German and the German national soul, he does not sense.

Just as the phenomenon has the effect in the West that the inner passions rebel against it and translate it into the rough, but into the dogmatic, so that which is directly experienced by the Germans has the same effect in the East – as I said, they have often willingly accepted it – in the East it becomes a web of thought. Because the Russian feels that it must be carried up into the cloud that hovers over him, it becomes ghostly, shadowy.

Even the great philosopher Soloviev floats in this cloud. He borrowed his generous philosophy from German culture – but what lives with full life in the German soul seems ghostly to him, and it causes the confusedly fluttering thoughts that the German, who is accustomed to the intimate association with the folk soul, cannot follow as an image of truth. One must even experience it, [that an intellectual in Russia makes Goethe] into a ghost in yet another way, one who, however, once called another people “barbarians” before the war: Mereschkowski. He speaks of Herz's last vision of death:

The last vision of death in Herz is - Russia as a “land of free life” and the Russian peasant community as the savior of the world. He exchanged his old love for a new faith, but it seems that he realized in the last hour that this last faith was also an illusion. Even if faith deceived him, love did not deceive him; there was a certain correct outlook in his love for Russia: not the peasant community, but the Christian community will perhaps in truth become the faith that the young barbarians are to bring to ancient Rome.

So he says from the heart.

Meanwhile, however, he dies - without any faith: Farewell, corrupt Rome! ... Farewell, native land!

But let no one be deceived by what he says about Goethe in his latest book; the whole of Goethe has become a spectre there. That he does not understand the soul of the people, which has rejuvenated everything, that he cannot look at what Goethe is as a force of the soul of the world, is shown by the fact that he says that he dares to say such words of Goethe as:

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

That about the “Faust” poet!

One understands what needs to be understood in the middle of Europe, and the extent of the understanding that is shown for the German national soul from both the left and the right speaks for this. One day, world history will not only be judged by archives, by what has been printed and written, but also by more subtle characteristics! It was actually with a heavy heart, through tears, through inner tears, that I realized something like an image in front of my soul, the way the forces of Europe stand, because it is so far from the original forces through which the individual outgrows the cosmos.

It is precisely [what that alliance of grand duchy and mendacious Pan-Slavism has done] to the Russian people that this image stands before me. We saw those first August days approaching. I will mention only three images from that time: In Central Europe, the Reichstag. Something characteristic is heralding the coming deeds; it is a purest expression of something infinitely youthful in the forces of the German national soul: the people are silent! There is something monstrous about this. Let us look instead to the west, to the French parliament; look at the speeches that have been made there, and how all these speeches flow out of the power of tyranny. And then we turn to Russia, where we are accustomed to seeing the best of the Russian man in silence: in the Duma, speeches rush, and they all talk in such a way that the words are phrases and everything looks like an arranged theatrical performance of speeches.

And so the European powers confront each other, and I am aware of the objectivity in which I have painfully allowed them to affect my soul. The silence in the middle is a symptom of something that is connected with the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul; from epoch to epoch, it has held dialogues with the most outstanding representatives of Germanness, and the most beautiful products can be traced back to this. The striving of the German people for the spirit has also been carried out in what has happened in our time.

That has always been the nature of German striving. But if you look at it and try to discern the fundamental character, you have to say: this German spirit has not yet exhausted the forces and possibilities for development that lie within it. The soul of the German nation has a rejuvenating power and will always rejuvenate it again and again. How rejuvenating is Fichte's philosophy! Like a stream of folk lore, it flowed into the times of “Speeches to the German Nation”. What brings his ideas to life in a strange and symbolic way is what a new education wants to give people as reality. Fichte knows how reluctant people are to accept the new, and needs a peculiar comparison. It is highly characteristic of his way of thinking.

But spiritual science, from which the attitudes flow that can be used to understand the conditions of the soul of the people, wants to be an active science that courageously and bravely extracts its results. It speaks of the eternal, not merely in abstract words, but as it speaks when the human spirit lives from incarnation to incarnation, so it speaks as it must speak today, about the rejuvenating powers of the German national soul.

Fichte says:

Time appears to me as an empty shadow, which stands over its corpse, from which an army of diseases has just driven it, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the formerly so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the deceased has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm breath of love; friendly voices of the sisters already greet her and welcome her; she is already stirring and expanding within her in all directions, to develop the more glorious form to which she is to awaken; but she has no feeling for these airs or hearing for these voices, or, if she had, she is absorbed in pain over her loss, with which she believes she has lost herself at the same time.

We can have confidence in the successful striving of the German spirit towards intellectual life, because we see what the German spirit has achieved. This is in the process of becoming and is not yet complete. It is as much a germ as it is a fruit. No matter how unintelligently people speak about Germany, it is not complete and must carry its inner strength out into the world. It is this strength that it has to defend. The time for what the German spirit has to defend will be seen to come. It may be expected. The souls who make the sacrifice of death today will, when those born later understand what the national soul can be for the German individual, they will be able to look down in the days to come on a time that will transform into [human salvation] and progress that which has been bought with such great sacrifices, [with courageous but painful sacrifices]. Truly recognizing the driving forces, it may be said that the German spirit has not reached perfection but will continue to develop:

The German spirit has not reached perfection
What it is to create in the world's becoming.
He lives hopefully in future worries,
He hopes for future deeds full of life; -
In the depths of his being, he feels mightily
Hidden things that must still mature and work.
How can, in the power of the enemy,
The wish for its end may uncomprehendingly revive:
As long as life reveals itself to him,
That holds him in the roots of being, creating?

Our present age, inartistic as it is, shows little awareness of the fact that recitation stands midway between speaking, or reading, which are not artistic, and artistically developed singing. In many circles there is a feeling that really anyone can recite – and this, of course, is not unconnected with the fact that in these same circles everyone flatters himself that he can also write poetry. It would not so easily enter anyone's head that someone could be a musician, or a painter, without having previously undergone any sort of artistic training. When we consider current views on the art of recitation, we are obliged to admit that, just as in people's ideas about the real nature of poetry, there is also a certain lack of clarity as to the nature of the art of recitation. As to how this art of recitation must use its instrument – the human voice in connection with the human organism – even for this there is no clear understanding. This is undoubtedly connected with the fundamental absence, in our present age, of any earnest feeling for the true nature of poetry. There is no doubt that poetry stands in a relationship with the whole being of man quite different to that of ordinary prose, of whatever kind this may be; everything that man must recognize as that higher world to which he belongs with the soul and spiritual parts of his being poetry must also stand in a certain connection with all this. Along with the lack of clarity which gradually invaded ideas concerning man's relationship with the super-sensible world, there also came about another partial lack of clarity, concerning man's relationship with that world which is expressed in the art of poetry. I should like to draw attention to two facts – things which resound to us from ancient times, though from quite different peoples, with quite differently evolved characters.

One fact, though one which today is passed over so lightly, is something to which Homer, the great writer of Greek epic, draws our attention at the beginning of both his poems: namely, that what he wished to convey to the world as his poetry did not come from himself.

‘Sing, O Muse, of the anger of Peleus' son Achilles ...’

It is not Homer, but the Muse who is singing. Our age can no longer take this seriously – for the understanding that lies hidden behind the opening of the Homeric poem had, in fact, already been extinguished by the eighteenth century, with its intellectual conceptions. When Klopstock began his Messiah, he did indeed look at the beginning of the Homeric poems; but in this respect he lived entirely in abstract ideas, intellectualistic ideas, and these could only lead him to say: the Greeks still believed in gods, in the Muses – modern man can replace this only by his own immortal soul. Thus, Klopstock begins with the words:

‘Sing, immortal soul, of sinful man's redemption.’

Now this opening of the Messiah, for anyone who can see into these things, is a document of the very greatest significance. And in the nineteenth century, too, all feeling had been completely lost for what Homer meant to convey – that when I reveal myself in poetry, it is really something higher that is revealed in me: my “I” withdraws, my ego withdraws, so that other powers make use of my speech-organism; divine-spiritual powers make use of this speech-organism in order to reveal themselves. One must, therefore, regard what Homer placed at the opening of his two poetic creations as something worthy of more serious consideration than is usually accorded to such things today.

It is remarkable how something similar, and yet quite different, resounds to us from a certain period in the development of Central Europe, a period to which the Nibelungenlied points – although it was not written down until a later date. This begins in a manner similar to, yet quite different from Homer:

‘To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told’

“In olden maeren” – what are maeren, for those who still have a living feeling and perception for such things? I cannot go into all this in detail, but I need only allude to the real meaning of this expression, maer – Nachtmar (nightmare): for this same expression is used to describe certain dreams which are caused by being oppressed, as it were, by an Alp – by a nightmare. In this nightmare, this Alp, we have the last atavistic traces of what is indicated in the Nibelungenlied, when it says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told…”; something is here related which does not come out of normal day-time ego-consciousness, but from a kind of perception which proceeds in the manner of the consciousness we possess in an especially vivid dream such as the nightmare, the maeren. Here again our attention is directed not to ordinary consciousness, but to something which is revealed, through ordinary consciousness, from super-sensible spheres. Homer says: “Sing, O Muse, of the anger of Peleus' son Achilles ...”; and the Nibelungenlied says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told.” What is referred to in the first instance? To that which is, in reality, brought forth by the Muse, when she makes use of the human organism, begins to speak through the human organism, to vibrate musically; our attention is directed to something musical which permeates the human being, and which speaks from greater depths than are reached by his ordinary consciousness. And when the Nibelungenlied says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told …” – it is something which permeates human consciousness as a perception similar to seeing, as something like visual perception, to which we are referred. The Nibelungenlied indicates something plastic and formative, something imaginative; in the Homeric epic we are given something musical. Both, however, from different sides, show us what wells up in poetry from the profounder depths of human nature, something which takes hold of the human being and finds utterance through him. One must have a feeling for this, if one is to experience the way in which true declamation gives expression in poetry, and takes hold of the human instrument of speech – though, as we shall see later, this involves the entire human organism.

The manner, the whole way in which a human being is built up is an outcome of the forces of the spiritual world. And again, the whole manner in which a human being is able to bring his organism into movement when he declaims or recites poetry – this, too, must be the result of a spiritual force holding sway in the human organism. One must learn to trace this working of the spirit in the human organism when the art of poetry is expressed through recitation or declamation. Declamation then becomes what the human organism can be, when it is tuned in the most various ways. In order to gain a practical, artistic realization of these things in some detail, we would now like to show you what must live in declamation when something more of the nature of folk-poetry, or folk-song, is taken into consideration; we shall then proceed to something which is more definitely art – poetry. We hope to show you how fundamentally different the effect of declamation must be, depending on whether it sounds forth from those depths of human nature from which earnestness, or tragedy, resound; or whether it comes from those surface realms of the human organization from which gaiety, satire and humour emanate. Only when we have learned to apprehend these things quite concretely today will I permit myself to give certain intimations of the connection between poetry and recitation and declamation. From these, we will then show how there results an exact method of educating oneself in artistic recitation and declamation.

We will ask Frau Dr. Steiner to declaim a poem of Goethe: a folk-poem in its whole tone and mood – Goethe's “Heidenröslein”.

HEIDENRÖSLEIN

Sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehn,

Röslein auf der Heiden,

War so jung und morgenschön,

Lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn,

Sah's mit vielen Freuden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Knabe sprach: Ich breche dich

Röslein auf der Heiden,

Röslein sprach: Ich steche dich,

Dass du ewig denkst an mich,

Und ich will's nicht leiden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Und der wilde Knabe brach

's Röslein auf der Heiden;

Röslein wehrte sich und stach,

Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach,

Musst' es eben leiden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[Comparable in English in many respects is:

MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;

Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;

My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go. –

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North;

The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth:

Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,

The hills of the Highlandsfor ever I love. –

Farewell to the mountains high cover'd with snow;

Farewell to the straths and green valleys below:

Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;

Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods. –

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

My heart's in the Highlandsa-chasing the deer:

Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;

My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go. –

Robert Burns (1759-1796.]

We will now ask Frau Dr. Steiner to recite to us “Erlkönigstochter”, which gives opportunity for a quite special style in the rendering of folk-poems.

Herr Oluf reitet spät und weit,

Zu bieten auf seine Hochzeitleut':

Da tanzten die Elfen auf grünen Land,

Erlkönigs Tochter reicht ihm die Hand.

‘Willkommen, Herr Oluf, was eilst von hier?

Tritt her in den Reihen und tanz mit mir.’ –

‘Ich darf nicht tanzen, nicht tanzen ich mag,

Frühmorgen ist mein Hochzeittag.’ –

‘Hör’ an, Herr Oluf, tritt tanzen mit mir,

Zwei güldne Sporen schenk' ich dir;

Ein Hemd von Seide, so weiss und fein,

Meine Mutter bleicht's im Mondenschein.’ –

‘Ich darf nicht tanzen, nicht tanzen ich mag,

Frühmorgen ist mein Hochzeittag.’ –

‘Hör’ an, Herr Oluf, tritt tanzen mit mir,

Einen Haufen Goldes schenk' ich dir.’ –

‘Einen Haufen Goldes nahm’ ich wohl;

Doch tanzen ich nicht darf, noch soll.’

‘Und willt, Herr Oluf, nicht tanzen mit mir,

Soll Seuch' und Krankheit folgen dir.’ –

Sie tät einen Schlag ihm auf sein Herz,

Noch nimmer fühlt er solchen Schmerz.

Sie hob ihn bleichend auf sein Pferd:

‘Reit heim zu deinem Bräutlein wert.’

Und als er kam vor Hauses Tiir,

Seine Mutter zitternd stand dafür.

‘Hör’ an, mein Sohn, sag’ an mir gleich,

Wie ist dein' Farbe blass und bleich?’ –

‘Und sollt’ sie nicht sein blass und bleich?

Ich traf in Erlenkönigs Reich.’ –

‘Hört an, mein Sohn, so lieb und traut,

Was soll ich nun sagen deiner Braut?’ –

‘Sagt ihr, ich sei im Wald zur Stund’,

Zu proben da mein Pferd und Hund.’ –

Frühmorgen als es Tag kaum war,

Da kam die Braut mit der Hochzeitschar.

Sie schenkten Met, sie schenkten Wein.

‘Wo ist Herr Oluf, der Bräutigam mein?’ –

‘Herr Oluf, er ritt in Wald zur Stund’,

Er probt allda sein Pferd und Hund.’ –

Die Braut hub auf den Scharlach rot,

Da lag Herr Oluf, und er war tot.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803).

[Comparable in style in English is:

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has wither'd from the Lake,

And no birds sing.

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel's granary is full,

And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever dew;

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful – a faery's child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She look'd at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long;

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna dew,

And sure in language strange she said –

‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her elf in grot,

And there she wept and sigh'd full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep

And there I dream'd – Ah! woe betide!

The latest dream I ever dream'd

On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

Who cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid darning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge has wither'd from the lake,

And no birds sing.

John Keats (1795-1821).]

Now we will present Goethe's two poems “Olympos” and “Charon”, where we shall find an opportunity to demonstrate recitation or declamation as the case may be. In the Poem “Olympos”, which is drawn more from the pictorial element, we have the art of declamation; while the more metrical “Charon” is drawn more from the musical element.

OLYMPOS

Der Olympos, der Kissavos,

Die zwei Berge haderten;

Da entgegnend sprach Olympos

Also zu dem Kissavos:

‘Nicht erhebe dich, Kissave,

Turken – du Getretener.

Bin ich doch der Greis Olympos,

Den die ganze Welt vernahm.

Zwei und sechzig Gipfel zähl ich

Und zweitausend Quellen klar,

Jeder Brunn hat seinen Wimpel,

Seinen Kämpfer jeder Zweig.

Auf den höchsten Gipfel hat sich

Mir ein Adler aufgesetzt,

Fasst in seinen mächt'gen Klauen

Eines Helden blutend Haupt.’

‘Sage, Haupt! wie ist's ergangen?

Fielest du verbrecherisch?’ –

Speise, Vogel, meine Jugend,

Meine Mannheit speise nur!

Ellenlänger wächst dein Flügel,

Deine Klauen spannenlang.

Bei Louron, in Xeromeron

Lebt' ich in dem Kriegerstand,

So in Chasia, auf'm Olympos

Kämpft’ ich bis ins zwölfte Jahr.

Sechzig Agas, ich erschlug sie,

Ihr Gefild verbrannt’ ich dann;

Die ich sonst noch niederstreckte,

Türken, Albaneser auch,

Sind zu viele, gar zu viele,

Dass ich sie nicht Ahlen mag;

Nun ist meine Reihe kommen,

Im Gefechte fiel ich brav.

CHARON

Die Bergeshöhn, warum so schwarz?

Woher die Wolkenwoge?

Ist es der Sturm, der droben kämpft,

Der Regen, Gipfel peitschend?

Nicht ist's der Sturm, der droben kämpft,

Nicht Regen, Gipfel peitschend;

Nein, Charon ist's, er saust einher,

Entführet die Verblichnen;

Die Jungen treibt er vor sich hin,

Schleppt hinter sich die Alten;

Die Jüngsten aber, Säuglinge,

In Reih' gehenkt am Sattel.

Da riefen ihm die Greise zu,

Die Junglinge, sie knieten:

‘O Charon, halt! halt am Geheg,

Halt an beim kühlen Brunnen!

Die Alten da erquicken sich,

Die Jugend schleudert Steine,

Die Knaben zart zerstreuen sich

Und pflücken bunte Blümchen.’

Nicht am Gehege halt’ ich still,

Ich halte nicht am Brunnen;

Zu schöpfen kommen Weiber an,

Erkennen ihre Kinder,

Die Männer auch erkennen sie,

Das Trennen wird unmöglich.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[A similar contrast is presented within the work of Donne, between the vivid, declamatory style of “The Sunne Rising” and the more sustained, metrical “Elegie: His Picture”:

THE SUNNE RISING

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?

Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide

Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,

Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,

Call countrey ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,

Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.

Thy beames, so reverend and strong

Why shouldst thou thinke?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,

But that I would not lose her sight so long:

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,

Whether both the ‘India's of spice and Myne

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.

Aske for those Kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

She'is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is.

Princes doe but play us; compar'd to this,

All honor^'s mimique; All wealth alchimie.

Thou sunne art halfe as happy’as wee,

In that the world's contracted thus;

Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee

To warme the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art every where;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.

ELEGIE: HIS PICTURE

Here take my Picture; though I bid farewell,

Thine, in my heart, where my soule dwels, shall dwell.

‘Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more

When wee are shadowes both, than 'twas before.

When weather-beaten I come backe; my hand,

Perhaps with rude oares torne, or Sun beams tann'd,

My face and brest of hairecloth, and my head

With cares rash sodaine stormes, being o'rspread,

My body'a sack of bones, broken within,

And powders blew staines scatter'd on my skinne;

If rivall fooles taxe thee to 'have lov'd a man,

So foule, and course, as, Oh, I may seeme then,

This shall say what I was: and thou shalt say,

Doe his hurts reach mee? doth my worth decay?

Or doe they reach judging minde, that hee

Should now love lesse, what hee did love to see?

That which in him was faire and delicate,

Was but the milke, which in loves childish state

Did nurse it: who now is growne strong enough

To feed on that, which to disused tasts seemes tough.

John Donne (1573-1631).]

We will now pass on to a more highly-wrought verse-form – the sonnet; and sonnets by Hebbel and Novalis will now be recited.

DIE SPRACHE

Als höchstes Wunder, das der Geist vollbrachte,

Preist ich die Sprache, die er, sonst verloren

In tiefste Einsamkeit, aus sich geboren,

Weil sie allein die andern möglich machte.

Ja, wenn ich sie in Grund und Zweck betrachte,

So hat nur sie den schweren Fluch beschworen,

Dem er, zum dumpfen Einzelsein erkoren,

Erlegen wäre, eh' er noch erwachte.

Denn ist das unerforschte Eins und Alles

In nie begrifftnem Selbstzersplitt‘rungsdrange

Zu einer Welt von Punkten gleich zerstoben:

So wird durch sie, die jedes Wesenballes

Geheimstes Sein erscheinen lässt im Klange,

Die Trennung vollig wieder aufgehoben!

Friedrich Hebbel (1813-1863).

ZUEIGNUNG

I

Du hast in mir den edeln Trieb erregt,

Tief ins Gemüt der weiten Welt zu schauen;

Mit deiner Hand ergriff mich ein Vertrauen,

Das sicher mich durch alle Stürme trägt.

Mit Ahnungen hast du das Kind gepflegt,

Und zogst mit ihm durch fabelhafte Auen;

Hast als das Urbild zartgesinnter Frauen,

Des Jünglings Herz zum höchsten Schwung bewegt.

Was fesselt mich an irdische Beschwerden?

Ist nicht mein Herz und Leben ewig dein?

Und schirmt mich deine Liebe nicht auf Erden?

Ich darf fier dich der edlen Kunst mich weiten;

Denn du, Geliebte, willst die Muse werden, –

Und stiller Schutzgeist meiner Dichtung sein.

II

In ewigen Verwandlungen begrusst

Uns des Gesangs geheime Macht hienieden,

Dort segnet sie das Land als ew'ger Frieden,

Indes sie hier als Jugend uns umfliesst.

Sie ist's, die Licht in unsre Augen giesst,

Die uns den Sinn für jede Kunst beschieden,

Und die das Herz der Frohen und der Müden

In trunkner Andacht wunderbar geniesst.

An ihrem vollen Busen trank ich Leben:

Ich ward durch sie zu allem, was ich bin,

Und durfte froh mein Angesicht erheben.

Noch schlummerte mein allerhöchster Sinn;

Da sah ich sie als Engel zu mir schweben,

Und flog, erwacht, in ihrem Arm dahin.

Novalis (1772-1801).

[The following three poems show some characteristics of the English sonnet:

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET

The poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;

That is the Grasshopper's – he takes the lead

In summer luxury, – he has never done

With his delights; for when tired out with fun

He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills

The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,

And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,

The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

John Keats

SONNET

O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray

Warbl'st at Eve, when all the Woods are still,

Thou with fresh hope the Lovers heart dost fill,

While the jolly hours lead on propitious May,

Thy liquid notes that close the eye of Day,

First heard before the shallow Cuckoo's bill,

Portend success in love; O if Jove's will

Have linkt that amorous power to thy soft lay,

Now timely sing, ere the rude Bird of Hate

Foretell my hopeless doom in som Grove ny:

As thou from year to year hast sung too late

For my relief; yet hadst no reason why:

Whether the Muse or Love call thee his mate,

Both them I serve, and of their train am I.

John Milton (1608-1674).

SONNET

\

My galy charged with forgetfulnes

Thorrough sharpe sees in wynter nyghtes doeth pas

Twene Rock and Rock; and eke myn ennemy, Alas,

That is my lorde, sterith with cruelnes;

And every owre a thought in redines,

As tho that deth were light in suche a case.

An endles wynd doeth tere the sayll apase

\

Of forced sightes and trusty ferefulnes.

A rayn of teris, a clowde of derk disdain,

\

Hath done the wered cordes great hinderaunce;

\

Wrethed with errour and eke with ignoraunce.

The starres be hid that led me to this pain;

\

Drowned is reason that should me consort,

And I remain dispering of the port.

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542).]

And now, in order to show how another, the very opposite mood must be drawn from quite different realms of the human organization when this serves as the instrument for poetry and declamation, we will end with something humorous and satirical – choosing a poem by Christian Morgenstern.

ST. EXPEDITUS

Einem Kloster, voll von Nonnen,

waren Menschen wohlgesonnen.

Und sie schickten, gute Christen,

ihm nach Rom die schönsten Kisten:

Äpfel, Birnen, Kuchen, Socken,

eine Spieluhr, kleine Glocken,

Gartenwerkzeug, Schuhe, Schürzen...

Aussen aber stand: Nicht stürzen!

Oder: Vorsicht! oder welche

wiesen schwarzgemalte Kelche.

Und auf jeder Kiste stand ‘Espedito’, kurzerhand.

Unsre Nonnen, die nicht wussten,

wem sie dafür danken mussten,

denn das Gut kam anonym,

dankten vorderhand nur IHM,

rieten aber doch ohn’ Ende

nach dem Sender solcher Spende.

Plötzlich rief die Schwester Pia

eines Morgens: Santa mia!

Nicht von Juden, nicht von Christen

Stammen diese Wunderkisten –

Expeditus, o Geschwister,

heisst er und ein Heiliger ist er!

Und sie fielen auf die Kniee.

Und der Heilige sprach: Siehe!

Endlich habt ihr mich erkannt.

Und nun malt mich an die Wand!

Und sie liessen einen kommen,

einen Maler, einen frommen.

Und es malte der Artiste

Expeditum mit der Kiste. –

Und der Kult gewann an Breite.

Jeder, der beschenkt ward, weihte

kleine Tafeln ihm und Kerzen.

Kurz, er war in aller Herzen.

II

Da auf einmal, neunzehnhundert-

fünf, vernimmt die Welt verwundert,

dass die Kirche diesen Mann

fürder nicht mehr dulden kann.

Grausam schallt von Rom es her:

Expeditus ist nicht mehr:

Und da seine lieben Nonnen

längst dem Erdental entronnen,

steht er da und sieht sich um –

und die ganze delt bleibt stumm.

Ich allein hier hoch im Norden

fühle mich von seinem Orden,

und mein Ketzergriffel schreibt:

Sanctus Expeditus – bleibt.

Und weil jenes nichts mehr gilt,

male ich hier neu sein Bild: –

Expeditum, den Gesandten,

grüss’ ich hier, den Unbekannten

Expeditum, ihn, den Heiligen,

mit den Assen, den viel eiligen,

mit den milden, weissen Haaren

und dem fröhlichen Gebaren,

mit den Augen braun, voll Güte,

und mit einer grossen Düte,

die den uberraschten Kindern

strebt ihr spärlich Los zu lindern.

Einen güldnen Heiligenschein

geb’ ich ihm noch obendrein

den sein Lacheln um ihn breitet,

wenn er durch die Lande schreitet.

Und um ihn in Engeiswonnen

stell’ ich seine treuen Nonnen:

Mägdlein aus Italiens Auen,

himmlisch lieblich anzuschauen.

Eine aber macht, fürwahr,

eine lange Nase gar.

Just ins ‘Bronzne Tor’ hinein

spannt sie ihr klein Fingerlein.

Oben aber aus dem Himmel

quillt der Heiligen Gewimmel,

und holdselig singt Maria:

Santo Espedito - sia!

Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914).

[An excerpt from “The Rape of the Lock” shows the great English satirist in a comparatively rare mood of good humoured and friendly mocking. It comes from Canto II:

But now secure the painted vessel glides,

The sun-beams trembling on the floating tides;

While melting music steals upon the sky,

And soften'd sounds along the waters die;

Smooth flow the waves, the Zephyrs gently play,

Belinda smil'd, and all the world was gay.

All but the Sylph – with careful thoughts opprest,

Th' impending woe sat heavy on his breast.

He summons strait his Denizens of air;

The lucid squadrons round the sails repair:

Soft o'er the shrouds aerial whispers breathe,

That seem'd but Zephyrs to the train beneath.

Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold,

Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold;

Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight,

Their fluid bodies half dissolv'd in light.

Loose to the wind their airy garments flew,

Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew,

Dipt in the richest tincture of the skies,

Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes,

While ev'ry beam new transient colours flings,

Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings.

Amid the circle, on the gilded mast,

Superior by the head, was Ariel plac'd;

His purple pinions op'ning to the sun,

He rais'd his azure wand, and thus begun.

Ye Sylphs and Sylphids, to your chief give ear,

Fays, Fairies, Genii, Elves, and Daemons hear!

Ye know the spheres and various tasks assign'd

By laws eternal to th' aerial kind.

Some in the fields of purest Aether play,

And bask and whiten in the blaze of day.

Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high,

Or roll the planets thro' the boundless sky.

Some less refin'd, beneath the moon's pale light

Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night,

Or suck the mists in grosser air below,

Or dip their pinions in the painted bowl

Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main,

Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain.

Others on earth o'er human race preside,

Watch all their ways, and all their actions guide:

Of these the chief the care of Nations own,

And guard with Arms divine the British Throne.

Our humbler province is to tend the Fair,

Not a less pleasing, tho' less glorious care;

To save the powder from too rude a gale,

Nor let th' imprison'd essences exhale;

To draw fresh colours from the vernal Flow'rs;

To steal from rainbows e'er they drop in show'rs

A brighter wash; to curl their waving hairs,

Assist their blushes, and inspire their airs;

Nay oft, in dreams, invention we bestow,

To change a Flounce, or add a Furbelow.

This day, black Omens threat the brightest fair

That e'er deserv'd a watchful spirit's care;

Some dire disaster, or by force, or slight;

But what, or where, the fates have wrapt in night.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)]

Now the art of recitation must undoubtedly follow the poetry. Recitation introduces the human element into poetry, for the human organization itself furnishes the instrument of artistic expression. How this instrument is used in singing and in recitation – that is something which has indeed been much investigated: we have already taken the opportunity here of pointing out, in response to certain questions, how many methods (one method after another!) exist in our present age, to singing and recitation. For in a certain sense we have entirely lost the deeper, inner relationship between poetic utterance or expression and the human organization. I will take as_. a starting-point next today something apparently quite physiological – and next time, after our detour through physiology, we shall be able to show you what poetry, as expressed in recitation and declamation, really demands.

Let us look first at something which has been frequently mentioned during the lectures of the last few days: the human rhythmic system. The human being is organized into the system of nerves and senses – the instrument for the thought-world, for the world of sense-representations, and so on; the rhythmic system – the instrument for the development of the feeling world, and for all that is mirrored from the feeling-world and plays into the world of mental representations; and the metabolic system – through which the will pulsates, and in which the will finds its actual physical instrument. [Note 4]

First, let us look at the rhythmic system. In this rhythmic system, two rhythms interpenetrate each other in a remarkable way. In the first place, we have the breathing-rhythm. This is essentially regular – though everything living is different in this respect, and it varies from individual to individual – so that in the case of healthy people, we are able to observe 16-19 breaths per minute. Secondly, we have the pulse-rhythm, directly connected with the heart. Naturally, when we take into account that in this rhythm we are dealing with functions of a living being, again we cannot cite any pedantic number; but, generally speaking, we may say that the number of pulse-beats per minute, in a healthy human organism, is approximately 72. Hence we can say that the number of pulse-beats is about four times the number of respirations. We can thus represent the course of the breath in the human organism, and how while we take one breath, the pulse intervenes four times. Now let us devote our minds for a moment to this interaction of the pulse-rhythm and the rhythm of the breath to this inner, living piano (if I may so express myself) where we experience the pulse rhythm as it strikes into the course of the breathing-rhythm. Let us picture the following: one breath inhaled and exhaled; and a second inhaled and exhaled; and, striking into this, the rhythm of the heart. Let us picture this in such a way that we can see that in the pulse-rhythm, which is essentially connected with the metabolism, which touches on the metabolic system, the will strikes, as it were, upwards; thus we have the will-pulses striking into the feeling-manifestations of the breath-rhythm. And let us suppose that we articulate these will-pulses, in such a way that we follow the will-pulses in the words, inwardly articulating the words to ourselves. Thus we have, for instance: long, short, short; long, short, short; long, short, short – one breath-stream; then we make a pause, a kind of caesura, we hold back; then, accompanying the next drawing of the breath, we have the heart-rhythm striking into it: long, short, short; long, short, short; long, short, short.

¾ È È ¾ È È ¾ È È || ¾ È È ¾ È È ¾ È È ||

Then, when we allow two breaths to be accompanied by the corresponding pulse-beats, and between them we make a pause, a pause for breath – we have the hexameter. [Note 5] We can ask: what is the origin of this ancient Greek verse metre? It originated from the harmony between blood-circulation and breathing. The Greek wished to turn his speech inward, so that, having suppressed his “I”, he orientated the words according to the pulse-beats, allowing these to play upon the stream of breath. Thus he brought his whole inner organization, his rhythmic organization, to expression in his speech: it was the harmony between heart-rhythm and breath-rhythm that resounded in his speech. To the Greek, this was more musical – as if it resounded up from the will, resounded up from the pulse-beats into the rhythm of the breath.

You know that what remained as the last, atavistic remnant of the old clairvoyant images – the Alp, the nightmare – found expression in pictures, and is connected with the breathing-process: and there is still a connection between the pathological form of the Alpdruck and breathing.

Now let us assume – for me it is more than an assumption – that in those primaeval times when his experience was more closely connected with the internal processes, man went out more with the breath; the movement was more from above downwards. And then he put into one breath:

¤ ¤ ¤

‘To us in olden maeren'

Again, three high-tones: three times the perception of how the pulse beats into the breathing, and how this brings to expression an experience that is more visual, finding expression in the light and shade of the language, in the high and low tones. In the Greek we have something metrical long, short, short; long, short, short; long, short, short; whereas in the Nordic verses we have something with more declamatory impetus – high-tone and low-tone:

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

‘To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

Of praise-deserving heroes, of labours manifold ...'

It is the interaction of the breathing-rhythm and the rhythm of the heart, the rhythm of the pulse. Just as the Greek experienced a musical element and expressed this in metre, so the Nordic man experienced a pictorial element, which he expressed in the light and shade of the words, in the high-tones and low-tones. But there was always the knowledge that one was submerged in a state of consciousness where the “I” yielded itself up to the divine-spiritual being which reveals itself through the human organism – which forms this human organism so that it may be played upon as an instrument through the pulsation of the heart, through the breathing-process, through the stream of exhaled and inhaled breath:

È ¾ È ¾ È ¾ È || ¾ È ¾ È ¾

You know that many breathing-techniques have been discovered, and much thought given to methods of treating the human body to facilitate correct singing or recitation. It is much more to the point, however, to penetrate the real mysteries of poetry and recitation and declamation: for both of these will proceed from the actual, sensible-super-sensible perception of the harmony between the pulse, which is connected with the heart, and the breathing-process. As we shall see next time, each single verse-form, each single poetic form including rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, may be understood when we start from a living perception of the human organism, and what it does when it employs speech artistically. This is why it was quite justified when people who understood such things spoke, more or less figuratively, of poetry as a language of the gods: for this language of the gods does not speak the mysteries of the transient human “I”; it speaks in human consciousness, speaks musically and plastically the cosmic mysteries – it speaks when the super-sensible worlds play, through the human heart, upon the human breath.