The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday I drew attention to the way in which a man is able with the higher members of his being - his etheric body, astral body and ego—to leave his physical body; and I pointed out how, having left his physical body, he then makes his first steps in initiation, and learns that what we call man's spiritual activity does not come only with initiation but, in reality, is there all the time in everyday life.

We had particularly to emphasize that the activity which enters our consciousness through our thoughts actually takes its course in man's etheric body, and that this activity taking its course in man's etheric body, this activity underlying the thought-pictures, enters our consciousness by reflecting itself in the physical body. As activity it is carried on in soul and spirit, so that a man when he is in the physical world and just thinks—but really thinks, is carrying out a spiritual activity. It may be said, however, that it does not enter consciousness as a spiritual activity. Just as when we stand in front of a mirror it is not our face that enters our consciousness out of the mirror but the image of our face, so in everyday life it is not the thinking but its reflection that as thought-content is rayed back into consciousness from the mirror of the physical body. In the case of the will it is different.

Let us keep this well in mind—that what finds expression in thinking is an activity which actually does not enter our physical organism at all, but runs its course entirely outside it, being reflected back by the physical organism. Let us remember that as men we are actually in our soul-spiritual being all the time.

Now this is how it might be represented diagrammatically. If this (a) represents man's bodily being, in actual fact his thinking goes on outside it, and what we perceive as thoughts is thrown back. Thus, with our thinking we are always outside our physical body; in reality spiritual  knowledge consists in our recognizing that we are outside the physical body with our thinking.

It is different with what we call will-activity.  This goes right into the physical body. What we call will-activity enters into the physical body everywhere and there brings about processes; and the effect of these processes in man is what is brought about by the will as movement.

We can thus say: While living as man in the physical world there rays out of the spiritual into our organism the essential force of the will and carries out certain activities in the organism enclosed within the skin. Between birth and death we are therefore permeated by will-forces; whereas the thoughts do not go on within our organism but outside it. From this you may conclude that everything to do with the will is intimately connected with what a man is between birth and death by reason of his bodily organization. The will is really closely bound up with us and all expressions of the will are in close connection with our organization, with our physical being as man between birth and death. This is why thinking really has a certain character of detachment from the human being, a certain independent character, never attainable by the will.

Now for a moment try to concentrate on the great difference existing in human life between thinking and what belongs to the will. It is just spiritual science that is capable from this point of view of throwing the most penetrating side-lights on certain problems in life. Do we not all find that what can be known through spiritual science really confronts us in life in the form of questions which somehow have to be answered? Now think what happens when anyone goes to a solicitor about some matter. The solicitor hears all about the case and institutes proceedings for the client in question. He will look into all possible ingenious grounds—puts into this all the ingenuity of which he is capable—to win the case for his client. To win the case he will summon up all his powers of intelligence and reasoning.

What do you think would have happened (life will certainly give you the answer) had his opponent outrun the client mentioned and come a few hours before to the same solicitor? What I am assuming hypothetically often happens in reality. The solicitor would have listened to the opponent's case and put all his ingenuity into the grounds for the defense of this client—grounds for getting the better of the other man. I don't think anyone will feel inclined to deny the possibility of my hypothesis being realized.  What does it show however?

It shows how little connection a man has in reality with his intelligence and his reason with all that is his force of thought, that in a certain case he can put them at the service of one side just as well as of the other. Think how different this is when man's will-nature is in question, in a matter where man’s feelings and desires are engaged. Try to get a clear idea of whether it would be possible for a man whose will-nature was implicated to act in the same way. On the contrary, if he did so we should consider him mentally unsound. A man is intimately bound up with his will—most intimately; for the will streams into his physical organism and in this human physical organism, induces processes directly related to the personality.

We can therefore say: It is just into these facts of life which, when we think about life at all, confront us so enigmatically, that light is thrown by all we gain through spiritual science.  Ever more fully can spiritual science enlighten men about what happens in everyday life, because everything that happens has supersensible causes. The most mundane events are dependent on the supersensible, and are comprehensible only when these supersensible causes are open to our view.

But now let us take the case of a man going with his soul through the gate of death. We must here ask: What happens to his force of thinking and to his will-force? After death the thinking force can no longer be reflected by an organism such as we bear with us between birth and death. For the significant fact here is that after death this organism, everything present in us lying beneath the surface of our skin, is cast off. Therefore, when we have gone through the gate of death, the thinking cannot be reflected by an organism no longer there, neither can an organism no longer there induce inner processes. What the thinking force is continues to exist—just as a man is still there when after passing a mirror he is no longer able to see his reflection. During the time he is passing it his face will be reflected to him; had he passed by earlier the reflection would have appeared to him earlier. The thinking force is reflected in the life of the organism as long as we are on earth, but it is still there even though we have left our physical organism behind.

What happens then? What constitutes the thinking force cannot, in itself be perceived; just as the eye is incapable of seeing itself so also is the thinking, for it has to be reflected-back by something—and the bodily organism is no longer there. When a man has discarded his physical organism what will then throw back the thinking force for whatever the thinking force develops in itself as process? Here something occurs that is not obvious to human physical intelligence; but it must, be considered if we really want to understand the life between death and rebirth. This can be under stood through initiates' teachings. An initiate knows that even during life in the body knowledge does not come to him through the mirror of his body but outside it, that he goes out of his body and receives knowledge without it, that therefore he dispenses with his bodily mirrors. Whoever cultivates in himself this kind of knowledge sees that what constitutes the thinking force henceforward enters his consciousness outside the body; it enters consciousness by the later thoughts being reflected by those that have gone before.

Thus, bear this well in mind—when an initiate leaves his body, and is outside it, he does not perceive by something being reflected by his body, he perceives by the thinking force he now sends out being reflected by what he has previously thought. You must therefore imagine that what has been thought previously—not only because it was thought previously—mirrors back the forces developed by the thinking, when this development takes place outside the body.

I can perhaps put it still more clearly. Let us suppose that someone today becomes an initiate. In this state of initiation how can he perceive anything through the force of his thinking? He does this by encountering, with the thinking forces he sends out, what, for instance, he thought the day before. What he thought the day before remains inscribed in the universal cosmic chronicle—which you know as the Akashic record—and what his thinking force develops today is reflected by what he thought yesterday.

From this you may see that the thinking must be qualified to make the thought of yesterday as strong as possible, so that it can reflect effectively. This is done by the rigorous concentration of one's thought and by various kinds of meditation, in the way described from time to time in lectures about knowledge of the higher worlds. Then the thought that otherwise is of a fleeting nature is so densified in a man, so strengthened, that he is able to bring about the reflection of his thinking force in these previously strengthened and densified thoughts.

This is how it is also with the consciousness men develop after death. What a man has lived through between birth and death is indeed inscribed spiritually into the great chronicle of time. Just as in this physical world we are unable to hear without ears, after death we are unable to perceive unless there is inscribed into the world our life, with all that we have lived through between birth and death.  This is the reflecting apparatus.

I drew attention to these facts in my last Vienna cycle.¹ Our life itself, in the way we go through it between birth and death, becomes our sense-organ for the higher worlds. You do not see your eye nor do you hear your ear, but you see with your eye, you hear with your ear. When you want to perceive anything to do with your eye you must do so in the way of ordinary science. It is the same in the case of your ear. The forces a man develops between death and rebirth have the quality of always raying back to the past earth-life, so as to be reflected by it; then they spread themselves out and are perceived by a man in the life between death and rebirth.

From this it can be seen what nonsense it is to speak of life on earth as if it were a punishment, or some other superfluous factor in man’s life as a whole. A man has to make himself part of this earthly life, for in the spiritual world in life after death it becomes his sense-organ.

The difficulty of this conception consists in this that when you imagine a sense-organ you conceive it as something in space. Space, however, ceases as soon as we go either through the gate of death or through initiation; space has significance only for the world of the senses. What we afterwards meet with is time, and, just as here we make use of ears and eyes that are spatial, there we need temporal processes. These processes are those carried out between birth and death, by which the ones developed after death are reflected back. In life between birth and death everything is perceptible to us in space; after death everything takes its course in time, whereas formerly it was in space that we perceived it.

The particular difficulty in speaking about the facts of spiritual science is that, as soon as we turn our gaze to the spiritual worlds, we have really to renounce the whole outlook we have developed for existence in space; we must entirely give up this spatial conception and realize that there space no longer exists, everything running its course in time—that there even the organs are temporal processes. If we would find our way about among the events in spiritual life, we have not only to transform our way of learning; we must entirely transform ourselves, re-model ourselves, acquire fresh life, in such a way that we adopt quite a different method of conception. Here lies the difficulty referred to yesterday, which so many people shun, however ingenious for the physical plane their philosophy may be. People indeed are wedded to their spatial conceptions and cannot find their bearings in a life that runs its course entirely in time.

I know quite well that there may be many souls who say: But I just cannot conceive that when I enter the spiritual world this spiritual world is not to be there in a spatial sense.—That may be, but if we wish to enter the spiritual world the most necessary thing of all is for us to make every effort to grow beyond forming our conceptions as we do on the physical plane. If in forming our conceptions of the higher worlds we never take for our standards and models any but those of the physical world, we shall never attain to real thoughts about the higher worlds—at best picture thoughts.

It is thus where thinking is concerned. After death thinking takes its course in such a way that it reflects itself in what we have lived through, what we were, in physical earthly life between birth and death. All the occurrences we have experienced constitute after death our eyes and our ears. Try by meditating to make real to yourselves all that is contained in the significant sentence: Your life between birth and death will become eye and ear for you, it will constitute your organs between death and rebirth.

Now how do matters stand with the will forces? The will-forces bring about in us the life-processes within the limits of our body—it is our life-processes which they bring about. The body is no longer there when a man has gone through the gate of death, but the whole spiritual environment is there. True as it is that the will with its forces works into the physical organism, it is just as true that after death the will has the desire to go out from the man in all directions; it pours itself into the whole environment, in the opposite way to physical life when the will works into man. You gain some conception of this out—pouring of the will into the surrounding world, if you consider what you have to acquire in the way of inner cultivation of the will in meditation, when you are really anxious to make progress in the sphere of spiritual knowledge.

The man who is willing to be satisfied with recognizing the world as a merely physical one sees, for example, the color blue, sees somewhere a blue surface, or perhaps a yellow surface; and this satisfies the man who is content to stop short at the physical world. We have already discussed how, even through a true conception of art, we must get beyond this mere grasping of the matter in accordance with the senses; how when we must experience blue as if we let our will, our force of heart, stream out into space, and as if from us out into space there could shine forth towards what shines forth to us as blue something we feel like a complete surrender—as if we could pour ourselves out into space. Our own being streams into the blue, flows away into it. Where there is yellow, however, the being, the being of the will, has no wish to enter—here it is repulsed; it feels that the will cannot get through, and that it is thrown back on itself.

Whoever wishes to prepare himself to develop in his soul those forces which lead him into the spiritual world, must be able in his life of soul to connect something real with what I have just been saying. For instance, he must in all reality connect the fact that he is looking at a blue surface with saying: This blue surface takes me to itself in a kindly way; it lets my soul with its forces flow out into the illimitable. But the surface here, this yellow surface, repels me, and my soul-forces return upon my soul like the pricks of a needle. It is the same with everything perceived by the senses; it all has these differences of color. Our will, in its soul-nature, pours itself out into the world and can either thus pour itself out or be thrust back. This can be cultivated by giving the forces of our soul a training in color or in some other impression of the physical world. You will discover in my book "Knowledge of the Higher Worlds" how this may be done.

When, however, this has been developed, when we know that if the forces of the soul float away, become blue (becoming blue and floating away are one and the same thing), this means to be taken up with sympathy whereas becoming yellow is to be repelled and is identical with antipathy—well, then we have forces such as these within us. Let us say that we have experienced this coloring of the soul when we are taken up sympathetically and that we do not, in this case, confront a physical being at all, but that it is possible through our developed soul-forces for a spiritual being with whom we are in sympathy to flow into us. This is the way in which we can perceive the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies and the beings of the elemental world.

I will give you an example, one that is not meant to be personal but should be taken quite objectively. We need not develop merely through the forces in our color-sense, it is possible to do so through any forces of the soul. Imagine that we arouse in our self-knowledge a feeling of how it appears to our soul when we are really stupid or foolish. In everyday life we take no notice of such things, we do not bring them into consciousness; but if we wish to develop the soul we must learn to feel within us what is experienced when something foolish is done. Then we notice that when this foolish action occurs will-forces of the soul stream forth which can be thrown back from outside. They are, however, thrown back in such a way that on noticing the repulsion we feel we are being mocked at and scorned. This is a very special experience. When we are really stupid and are alive to what is happening spiritually we feel looked down upon, provoked.  A feeling can then follow of being provoked from out of the spiritual world. If we then go to someplace where there are the nature-spirits we call gnomes, we then have the power to perceive them. This power is acquired only when we perceive in ourselves the feeling I have just described. The gnomes carry-on in a way that is provoking, making all manner of gestures and grimaces, laughing, and so on. This is perceptible to us only if when we are stupid we observe ourselves. It is important that we should acquire inward forces through these exercises, that with our will forces we should delve deeply into the world surrounding us; then this surrounding world will come alive, really and truly alive.

Thus we see while our life between birth and death becomes an organ, an organ of perception, within the spiritual organism that we bear between death and rebirth, our will becomes a participator in our whole spiritual environment. We see how the will rays back in initiates (in the seeing of gnomes, for example) and in those who are dead. When gnomes are seen it is an example of this, out of the elemental world.

Now consider how there once lived a philosopher who in the second half of the nineteenth century had a great influence on many people, namely, Schopenhauer. As you know, he exercised a great influence both on Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. Schopenhauer derived the world—as others have derived it from other causes—from what he called conception, or representation, and will. He said: Representation and will are what constitutes the foundation of the world.

But—obsessed by Kant’s method of thinking—he goes on to say that representation are never more than dream-pictures and that it is impossible ever to come to reality through them. It is only through the will that we can penetrate into the reality of things—this is done by the will. Now Schopenhauer philosophises in an impressive manner about representation and will; and, if one may say so—he does this indeed rather well.  He is, however, one of those who I have likened to a man standing in front of a door and refusing to go through it. When we take his words literally—the world is representation, the world is a mere dream-picture—we have to forgo all knowledge of the world through representation and can then pass on to knowledge of the representations themselves, pass on to doing something in one's own soul with the representations—in other words to meditate, to concentrate. Had Schopenhauer gone a step further he would have reached the point of saying: "I must renounce representations! If a representation is something produced within me, I must put it to an inward use.’ Had he made this step he would have been driven to cultivate his representations, to work upon them in meditation and concentration.

When he says: The world is will—when, as in his clever treatise on the "Will in Nature", he goes on to describe this will in nature, he does not take his own proposition in earnest. In describing the will we seek the help of representations and he denies those all possibility of knowledge. This reminds us of Munchausen who to pull himself out of a bog catches hold of his own pigtail. What would Schopenhauer have been obliged to be if had taken in earnest his own words—the world is will? He would have had to say: Then we ought to pour out our will into the world; we must use our will to creep inside things. We must delve right into the world, send into it cur will, no longer taking the color blue as mere representation, but trying to perceive how the will sinks down into it; no longer thinking of our stupidity as a representation, but realizing what can be experienced through that stupidity.

You can see that here too it is possible to arrive at a description which needs only to be taken in earnest. Had Schopenhauer gone further he would have had to say: If the representation is really only a picture we represent to ourselves, then we must work upon it; if the will is really in the things, then we must go with it right into the things, not just describe how things have the will within them.

 You see here another example of how a renowned Philosopher of the nineteenth century takes men to the very gates of initiation, right up to spiritual science; and how this philosopher then does everything he can to close these gates to men. Where people really take hold of life they are shown on all sides that the time is ripe for picking the fruits of spiritual science—only things must be taken in earnest, deeply in earnest. Above all we must understand how to take people at their word. For it is not required of spiritual science to stand on its own defense. For the most part this is actually done by others, by its opponents, though they do not know this, have no notion of it.

Now consider a certain class of human beings to which very many in the nineteenth century belonged—the atomistic philosophers, those who conceived the idea that atoms in movement were at the basis of all the phenomena of life. They had the idea that behind this entire visible and audible world there was a world of atoms in movement, and through this movement arose processes perceived by us as what appears in our surroundings. Nothing spiritual is there, the spiritual is merely a product of atomic movement, and all—prevailing atomic activity.

Now how has the thought of these whirling atoms arisen? Has anyone seen them? Has anyone discovered them through what they have experienced or come to know empirically?  Were this the case they would not be what they are supposed to be, for they are supposed to be concealed behind empirical knowledge.  Had they any reality, by what means would they have to be discovered? Suppose the movement of atoms were there—the understanding cannot discover them in what is sense-perceptible. What would a man have to be in order to possess the right to speak of this world of atoms?  He would have to be clairvoyant; the whole of this atom-world would have to be a product of inner vision, of clairvoyance. The only thing we can say to the people who have appeared as the materialists of the nineteenth century is: There is no need for us to prove that there are clairvoyants for either you must be silent about all your theories, or you must admit that to perceive these things you are possessed of clairvoyant vision—at least to the point of being able to perceive atoms behind the world of the senses.  For if there is no such things as clairvoyance it is senseless to speak of this material world of atoms. If you find it a necessity to have moving atoms you prove to us that there are clairvoyant human beings. 

Thus we take these people seriously, although they do not take themselves seriously when they say things of this kind.  If Schopenhauer is taken in earnest we must come to this conclusion—“If you say the world is will and what we have in the way of representation is only pictures, you ought to penetrate into the world with your will, and penetrate into your thinking through meditation and concentration.  We take you seriously but you do not take yourselves so.” Strictly speaking, it is the same with everything that comes into question.

This is what is so profoundly significant in the world—conception of spiritual science, that it takes in all earnest what is not so taken by the others—what they skim over in a superficial way. Proofs are always to be found among the opponents of spiritual science. But people never notice that in their assertions, in what they think, at bottom they are at the same time setting at naught what they think. For the materialistic atomist, and Schopenhauer too, set a naught what they themselves maintain.

Schopenhauer nullifies his own system when he asserts: Everything is will and representation. The moment he is not willing to stop there, however, he is obliged to lead men onto the development of spiritual science. It is not we who form the world-conception of spiritual science; how then does this world-conception come into being? It enters the world of itself—is there, everywhere, in the world. It enters life through unfamiliar doors and windows; and even when others do not take it in earnest, it finds its way into men’s cultural life.

But there is still something else we can recognize if, through considerations of this kind we really have our attention drawn to how superficially men approach their own spiritual processes, and how little in a deeper sense they take themselves seriously—even when they are clever and profound philosophers. They weave as it were a conceptual web, but with it they shy away from really fulfilling the inner life’s work that would lead them to experience the forces upon which the world is founded. Hence we see that the centuries referred to yesterday, during which ordinary natural science has seen its great triumphs, have also been the centuries to develop in human beings the superficial thinking. The more glorious the development of science, the more superficial has become investigation into the sources of existence.

We can point to really shining examples of what has just been touched upon here. Suppose we have the following experience—a man, who has never shown any interest in the spiritual world undergoes a sudden change, begins to concern himself about the spiritual world and longs to know something about it. Let us suppose we have this experience after having found our way into spiritual science. What will become a necessity for us when we experience how a man, who has never worried about the spiritual world, having been immersed in everyday affairs, now finds himself at one of the crossroads of life and turns to the spiritual world? As spiritual scientists we shall interest ourselves about what has been going on in this man’s soul.  We shall try as often as possible to enter into the soul of such a man, and it will then be useful for us to know what has often been stressed here, namely, that the saying in constant use about nature making no sudden jumps is absolutely untrue. Nature does make sudden jumps.  She makes a jump when the green leaf becomes the colourful petal, and when she so changes a man who has never troubled himself about the spiritual world that he begins to interest himself in it, this too is like a sudden jump; and for this we shall seek the cause.  We shall make certain discoveries about the various spiritual sources of which we have spoken here, and see how anything of this kind takes place. 

When doing this we shall ask: How old was the man? We know that every seven years something new is born in the human being: From the seventh year on, the etheric body; from the fourteenth year on, the astral body, and so on.  We shall gather up all that we know about the etheric and astral bodies, taking this particularly from an inner, not an outer, point of view.  Then we shall be able to gain a good deal of information about what is going on in a human soul such as this.

It is also possible to proceed in another way.  We can become interested in the fact that men in ordinary life suddenly go over to a life concerned with spiritual truths, and the profundities of religion. Some men may look upon spiritual science as a foolish phantasy, and when we examine into what is going on in the depths of his soul it is possible for us to discover what makes him find it foolish. But we can then do the following. We write, let us say 192, or even more, letters to people whom we have heard about as having gone through a change of this kind. We send these letters to a whole continent, in order to learn in reply what it was that brought about this change in their life.—We then receive answers of the most diverse kind….someone writes: When I was fourteen my life led me into all manner of bad habits. That made my father very angry and he gave me a good thrashing; this it was which induced in me a feeling for the spiritual world.—Others assert that they have seen a man die, and so on. Suppose then that we get 192 answers and proceed to arrange them in piles—one pile for the letters in which the writers say that they have been changed by their fear of death or of hell; a second pile in which it is stated that the writers come across good men, or imitated them; a third pile—and so on. In piles such as these matters easily become involved and then we make an extra pile for other, egocentric motives.  Then we arrive at the following.  We have sorted the 192 letters into piles and have counted how many letters go into each one; then we are able to make a simple calculation of the percentage of letters in each pile. We can discover, for example, that 14 per cent of the changes come about through fear, either of death or of hell; 6 per cent come from egocentric motives; 5 per cent because altruistic feelings have arisen in the writers; 17 per cent of them are striving after some moral ideal—supposedly those belonging to an ethical society; 16 percent through pangs of conscience, 10 per cent by following teachings concerning what is good, 13 per cent through imitating other men considered to be religious, 19 per cent by reason of social pressure, the pressure of necessity and so forth.

Thus, we can proceed by trying with love to delve into the soul who confesses to a change of this kind; we can try to discover what is within the soul; and for this we have need of spiritual science.  Or we can do what I have just been describing. One who has done this is a certain Starbuck who has written about these matters a book which has aroused a good deal of attention. This is the most superficial exposition and the very opposite of all we must perceive in spiritual science.  Spiritual science seeks everywhere to go to the very root of things.  A tendency that has arisen to the materialistic character of the times is to apply even to the religious life this famous popular science of statistics.  For, as it has clearly pointed out, this means of research is incontrovertible. It has one quality particularly beloved by those people who are unwilling to enter the doors of spiritual science—it can truly be called easy, very easy.

Yesterday we dwelt on the reason for so many people being unwilling to accept spiritual science, mainly, its difficulty.  But we can say of statistics that it is easy, in truth very easy. Now today people go in for an experimental science of the soul; I should have to talk about this science at great length to give you a concept of it.  It is called experimental psychology; outwardly a great deal is expected from it.  I am going just to describe the beginning that has been made with these experiments. We take, let us say, ten children and give these ten children a written sentence—perhaps like this: M… is  g… by st… We then look at our watch and say to one of the children: “Tell me what you make of that sentence.” The child doesn’t know; it thinks hard and finally comes out with “Much is gained by striving.” Then it is at once noted down how much time it took the child to complete the sentence. Obviously there must be several sentences for effort has to be made to read them; gradually this will be done in a shorter space of time. Note is then made of the number of seconds taken by the various children to complete one of these sentences, and the percentages among the children are calculated and treated further statistically. In this way the faculty of adaption to outer circumstance and other matters, are tested.  This method of experimental psychology has a grand-sounding name, it is called “intelligence tests”; whereas the other method is said to be the testing by experiment of man’s religious nature.

My dear friends, what I have given you here in a few words is no laughing matter.  For where philosophy is propounded today these experimental tests are looked upon as the future science of the soul to a far greater extent than any serious feeling is shown, not for what we subscribe to here, but for what was formerly discovered by inner observation of the soul.  Today people are all for experiment.

These are examples of people’s experiments today and these methods have many supporters in the world.  Physical and chemical laboratories are set up for the purpose of these experiments and there is a vast literature on the subject.  We can even experience what I will just touch upon in passing.  A friend of ours, chairman of one of our groups, a group in the North, had been preparing his doctorate thesis.  It goes without saying that he went to a great deal of trouble (when talking to children one goes to a great deal of trouble to speak on a level with their understanding) to leave out of his thesis anything learnt from spiritual science. All that was left out.  Now among the examiners of the thesis there was one who was an expert in these matters, who therefore was thoroughly briefed in these methods; this man absolutely refused to accept the thesis. (The case was even discussed in the Norwegian Parliament.) Anyone who is an experimental psychologist is firmly convinced that his science of the soul is founded on modern science and will continue to hold good for the future.

There is no intention here of saying anything particular against experimental psychology. For why should it not be interesting once in a way to learn about it? Certainly one can do so and it is all very interesting. But the important thing is the place such things are given in life, and whether they are made use of to injure what is true spiritual science, what is genuine knowledge of the soul. It must repeatedly be emphasized that it is not we who wish to turn our back on what is done by people who in accordance with their capacities investigate the soul—the people who investigate what has to do with the senses, and like to make records after the fashion of those 192 replies. This indeed is in keeping, with men's capacities; but we must take into consideration what kind of world it is today in which spiritual science takes its place. We must be very clear about that.

I know very well that there are those who may say: Here is this man, now, abusing experimental psychology—absolutely tearing it to shreds! People may seek thus just as they said: At Easter you ran down Goethe's "Faust" here and roundly criticized Goethe. These people cannot understand the difference between a description of something and a criticism in the superficial sense; they always misunderstand such things. By characterizing them I am wanting to give them their place in the whole sphere of human life. Spiritual Science is not called upon to play the critic, neither can what has been said be criticism.

Men who are not scientists should behave in a Christian way towards true spiritual science.

Another thing is to have clear vision. Thus when we look at science we see how superficially it takes all human striving, how even in the case of religious conversion it does not turn to the inner aspect but looks upon human beings from the outside.

In practical life men are not particularly credulous. The statisticians of the insurance companies—I have referred to this before—calculate about when a man will die. It can be calculated, for instance, about when an 18-year-old will die, because he belongs to a group of people a certain number of whom will die at a certain age. According to this the insurance quota is reckoned and correctly assigned. This all works quite well. If people in ordinary life, however, wanted to prepare for death in the year reckoned as that of their probable death by the insurance company, they would be taken for lunatics. The system does not determine a man’s the length of life. Statistics have just as little to do with his conversion.

We must look deeply into all these things. Through them we strive for a feeling which has within it intuitive knowledge. It will be particularly difficult to bring to the world-culture of today what I would call the crown of spiritual science—knowledge of the Christ. Christ-knowledge is that to which—as the purest, highest and most holy—we are led by all that we receive through spiritual science. In many lectures I have tried to make it clear how it is just at this point of time that the Christ-impulse, which has come into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha, has to be made accessible to the souls of men through the instrument of spiritual science. In diverse ways I tried to point out clearly the way in which the Christ-impulse has worked. Remember the lectures about Joan of Arc, about Constantine, and so on. In many different ways I tried to make clear how in these past centuries the Christ-impulse has been drawn more into the unconscious, but how we are now living at a time when the Christ-impulse must enter more consciously into the life of man, and when there must come a real knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha. We shall never learn to know about this Mystery of Golgotha if we are not ready to accept conceptions of the kind touched upon at Eastertide²—about Christ in connection with Lucifer and Ahriman—and if we do not permeate these conceptions with spiritual science.

We are living in a terribly hard time, a time of suffering and sorrow. You know that for reasons previously mentioned I am not able to characterize this time; neither do I want to do so but from a quite different angle I will just touch upon something connected with our present studies.

This time of suffering and sorrow has wakened many things in human souls, and anyone living through this time, anyone who concerns himself about what is going on, will notice that today, in a certain direction, a great deepening is taking place in the souls of men. These human souls involved in present events were formerly very far from anything to do with religion, their perceptions and feelings were thoroughly materialistic. Today we can repeatedly find in their letters, for one thing, how because of having been involved in all the sorrowful events of the present time they have recovered their feeling for religion. The remarkable thing is that they begin to speak of God and of a divine ordering when formerly such words never passed their lips. On this point today among those people who are in the thick of events we really experience a very great religious deepening.

But one fact has justly been brought before us which is quite as evident as what I have now been saying. Take the most characteristic thing, in the letters written from the front, in which can be seen this religious deepening. Much is said of how God has been found again but almost nothing, almost nothing at all—this has been little noticed—of Christ. We hear of God but nothing of Christ.

This is a very significant fact—that in this present time of heavy trial and great suffering many people have their religious feeling aroused in the abstract form of the idea of God. Of a similar deepening of men's perception of the Christ we can hardly speak at all. I say “hardly", for naturally it is to be met with here and there, but generally speaking things are as I have described.  You can see from this, however, that today, when it behooves the souls of men  to look for renewed connection with the spiritual world, it is difficult to find the way to what we call the Christ-impulse, the Mystery of Golgotha.

For this, it is necessary for the human soul to rise to a conception of mankind as one great whole. It is necessary for us not merely to foster mutual interest with those amongst whom we are living just for a time; We should extend our spiritual gaze to all times and beings, to how as souls we have gone through various lives on earth and thorough various ages. Then there gradually arises in the soul an urgent need to learn how there exists in man a deepening and then an ascending evolution. In the evolution of Time we must feel one with all mankind; we must look back to how the earth came originally into being, focus our gaze on this ascending and descending evolution, in the centre point of which the Mystery of Golgotha stands; we must feel ourselves bound up with the whole of humanity, feel ourselves bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha. Today the souls of men are nearer the cosmos spatially than they are temporally, that is, to what has been unfolded in the successive evolutionary stages. We shall be led to this, however, when with the aid of spiritual science we feel ourselves part of man's whole course of evolution. For then we cannot do other than recognize that there was a point of time when something entered the evolution of mankind which had nothing to do with human force. It entered man's evolution because into it an impulse made its way from the spiritual world through a human body—an impulse present in the beginning of the Christian era. It was a meeting of heaven with the earth.

Here we touch upon something which must be embodied into the religious life through spiritual-science. We shall touch upon how spiritual science has to sink down into human feeling so that men come into a real connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, and find the Christ-impulse in such a way that it can always be present in them not only as a vague feeling but also in clear consciousness. Spiritual science will work. We have recognized and repeatedly stressed the necessity for this work. In reality, the fact of your sitting there is proof that all of you in this Movement for spiritual science are willing to put your whole heart into working together. When in the future hard times fall again upon mankind, may spiritual science have already found the opportunity to unite the deepening of men's souls not only with an abstract consciousness of God but with the concrete, historical consciousness of Christ.

This is the time, my dear friends, when perceptions, feelings, of a serious nature can be aroused in us and they should not avoid arousing in ourselves these serious, one might say solemn, feelings. This is how those within our movement for spiritual science should be distinguished from the people who, by reason of their karma, have not yet found their way into this Movement—that the adherents of spiritual science take everything that goes on in the world—the most superficial as also the profoundest—in thorough earnest.    

Just consider how important it is in everyday life to see that with our ordinary understanding bound up with our brain and with our reason we are outside what mostly interests us in ordinary physical experience, and that hence—as is the case with our hypothetical solicitor—we are strangers to our own thinking, strangers to ourselves. When we enter spiritual science, however, we develop a heart outside our body, as we said yesterday, and what we thoroughly reflect upon will once more be permeated by what is full of inner depth and soul. We can make use both of the understanding bound up with our body and of our reason, in various directions, only if we do not draw upon what unites us most deeply with the spheres in which we live with our thinking. Through spiritual science we shall draw upon this, and in what we think we shall become, with our understanding and with our reason, men of truth, men wedded to the truth; and life has need of such men. What we let shine upon us from the sun of spiritual science grows together with us because we grow together with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Then our thinking is not so constituted that like that solicitor we can apply it to either party in a legal case. We shall be men of truth by becoming one with those who are spiritual truth itself. By discovering how to grasp hold of our will in the way described today, we shall find our path into the very depths of things. This will not be by speaking of the will in nature as Schopenhauer did, but by living ourselves into things, developing our forces in them.

Here we touch upon something terribly lacking at the present time, namely, going deeply and with love into the being of things. This is missing today to such a terrible degree. I might say that over and over again one has to face, the bitter-experience in life of how the inclination to sink the will into the being of things is lacking among men.

What on the ground of spiritual science has to be over-come is the falsifying of objective facts; and this falsifying of objective facts is just what is so widespread at the present time. Those who know nothing of previous happenings are so ready to make assertions which can be proved false.

When a thing of his kind is said, my dear friends, is to be taken as an illustration, not as a detail without importance. But this detail is a symptom for us to ponder in order to come to ever greater depth in the whole depth that is to be penetrated by our spiritual movement. This spiritual movement of ours will throw light into our souls quite particularly when we become familiar with what today cannot yet be found even by those whose hearts are moved by the most grievous events of the times in which they are living, and who seek after the values of the spiritual world. Spiritual science must gradually build up for us the stages leading to an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha—an understanding never again to be lost. This Mystery of Golgotha is the very meaning of the earth. To understand what this meaning of the earth is, must constitute the noblest endeavor of anyone finding his way step by step into spiritual science.

• 1. see..{"The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and Rebirth."
• 2. (*see Festivals of the Seasons)

My dear friends, yesterday we were able to show how the intellect, all that is connected with the forming of our ideas and concepts, is in a certain way—especially in the case of Western thinking—set free from the inner upstreaming, the inner creating, and activity. We saw how through this fact man comes to the point of merely seeing images of something external in what he receives as concepts and ideas, and how he does not notice that at the same time as he is conceiving and thinking, something is also happening in him himself. An inner becoming is accomplished, an inner happening takes place. And I also referred yesterday to the polar opposite of this, namely, how the impulses of feeling and will are bewitched in the inner being of man, so that when he feels, when he brings his will into activity, he has the consciousness that he is then entirely and solely within himself, that he is concerned only with himself, and that what takes place in the impulses of feeling and will has nothing to do with anything in the outside world, in the cosmos. We believe that in our feelings we only bring to expression our inner life, we believe we are experiencing something which is connected only with this inner nature.

I have pointed out that this originates from the fact that certain spiritual beings of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi, at the time of the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun-evolution, did not take the step of separation, but remained, as it were, with the progressing Sun-evolution. What entered their destiny through their not having made this step of sharing in the Moon existence, they are now going through, in as much as they take part in our earthly existence. They interpenetrate us, interweave in us and shut off our feeling and our willing from the outer cosmic existence. They confine this feeling and willing of ours to our inner nature.

But now there arises through this, as you can readily imagine, a kind of pronounced separation between something in us that wishes to be confined to us ourselves, to live only within us as our impulses of feeling and willing, and something else which pays little heed to what is in us, and which are, far more turns outwards and tries to take a direction towards the external.

If we want to make a sketch of what this denotes we could perhaps say:

If this is the human being drawn schematically, we should first be concerned with our intellectual life (Diagram 1 yellow) which turns to the outer world and wishes to receive it and pays no attention to the fact that here within, it is raying out and continually calling forth our form. On the other hand we have an element of will and feeling here in the interior (violet), they radiate only within us and we are not aware that they now also go out into the cosmos, that they really bear something in them which is just as much derived from the cosmos as is the content of our thoughts.

There is, however, in us human beings a connection between these two centres within us. It is a connecting link (light red) but in ordinary life and existence it remains unknown, does not enter the consciousness. Man, in fact, experiences as his inner world, his feeling-and willing, and as his outer world his thinking, which leads over to perceptions, to the sense impressions. Thus, in ordinary life, the link between these two centres in us does not actually come to our consciousness. As a consequence of this, man can easily acquire the notion that truth is imparted to him from two sides, that he attains truth, or something like truth by observing the outer world through his senses, and then combining the observation with his intellect and so on.

Kant has examined this process of observation of the outer world and of the production of certain spheres of ideation on the basis of those observations. In his researches he found nothing to which one could come if one extended what tries to go out in the cosmos from the one centre. He came to a point where he asserted: ‘Yes, that (Drawing 1, yellow) must certainly go out to a ‘thing in itself,’ but one cannot find it.’ On the other hand he felt how from the inner being of man something thrusts up which lives in willing and feeling. But since the connection remained unknown to him there were two worlds for him; the world of the existing order and the world of the moral order. He only felt one thing to be clear. ‘Here, one does not come to anything at all. The thing in itself is nebulous, is unknown; but that which thrusts up as it were against man gives a certain inner compulsion.’ This Kant called the ‘categorical imperative,’ from which he derived all truths related to the inner nature—as he calls them: all higher truths of belief in contrast to the external truths, which, however, can tell nothing of the actual world.

We must, however, give our chief attention to this: that as a matter of fact, not merely through his own disposition, but because of his whole evolution during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon conditions, man thus shared in the separation which occurred in the Moon-evolution, and has therefore come to this dual partition and must experience it as a natural condition.

Now when we consider these matters still more closely, we come to an important and significant truth which is given us by Spiritual Science, on the ground of what has here been characterised. We can say; this state of our thinking, our intellect and conceptual life, is connected with the former separation of the Moon from the progressing Sun. The way in which we, as human beings, apprehend our thinking and conceiving is connected with the fact that certain Luciferic beings of the hierarchy of the Angels who, through what they had become, did not share in the return of the Moon to the Sun—that those are now living in our intellect, so that something Luciferic lives in our intellect and shuts us off from looking into the inner moving and forming. Thus Lucifer, as it were, dwells in our thinking.

What now is the essential character of this Luciferic influence? The essential is that we do not perceive what was established in us and developed by the normally progressive divine-spiritual beings but we perceive instead what has been made out of this normal evolution by Lucifer. And what is it for Lucifer himself, that what he should have experienced during the Moon-evolution, but did not, he now carries into the Earth-evolution, and in this evolution experiences for his own part what in that earlier time he did not share? What will be the nature of that which he must undergo during the Earth-evolution? I beg you to pay great attention to this, for it is full of importance, even if difficult. So what does Lucifer want? What do these Luciferic angels that are in our intellect want?

At that time they did not want to take the step of the union of the moon with the sun. Had they done so, they would, as it were, have united conceiving and thinking in the right way with human nature. This they did not do, so now they contribute nothing to it.

Now, however, during Earth-existence, they wish to do what they did not do formerly; they now wish to bind the intellect with the human being; they wish to do during the Earth-evolution what they ought actually to have done during the Moon-evolution. When you consider this earnestly you will understand that something of immense significance follows from it.

Had we not been misled by Luciferic beings in the way referred to, we should not relate thinking to ourselves as we do now, but we should look back to the Moon-evolution and say: ‘Long ages ago our thinking wished to unite with our inner being, wanted to belong to us.’ This we do not say, but instead: ‘We appropriate the thoughts of the world and now receive them within us.’ But that is sheer Luciferic temptation in the sense of the divine spiritual beings we should think: out there is extended the world of the senses as we see it; the moment we now pass over to thinking, we look back to the Old Moon-existence and attribute the whole earthly sense world to it.

The following is what we should experience: If we call that (see diagram) e earthly-perceived-sense world, we should then have the in us, i.e., the earth- contents, and we should not, as we do now, form concepts of the Earth-content, but we should say instead; All that we have in this way as earth-content, we relate to the ancient Moon,—and while we have sense-perceptions and the surroundings of earth appear to the senses there lights up in us the realisation that everything that lives and weaves upon earth, everything that exists and works and grows, appears upon the foundation of the old Moon existence.

There would light up something like a connection with a star apparently belonging to the past, but which was still there, living in our world of thought. We should feel in connection with the past existing in the present, and should see through the Luciferic deceptive picture which consists in this—that Lucifer holds before the shining Moon-existence a curtain, a veil, because at that time he omitted to unite himself with the Sun-existence. And he deceives us and makes us believe that what we ought to look upon as lighting up in us from the Old Moon-existence—that is from the eternally new Moon-existence is our thought-content, which is firmly established in us through our brain and rests within us as earthly men.

So through what has happened we have been shut off from that wonderful and mighty memory of the Old Moon. We do not see continually in the background, shining, as it were, into the nape of our neck, the explanation of all that the senses conjure up before us. We ought to go through the world, our senses turned outwards to sense-existence, and ought to feel as though our neck and the back of our head were shone upon by the ancient Sun and Moon-existence. And this would proffer the explanation of real, living concepts, concepts which are cosmic, and do not work into us from the external earthly objects.

Thus two world-pictures are projected through one another; the Earth-picture and the Moon-Picture. We ought to be able to hold them apart; the one, inasmuch as we turn our senses outwards, the other, inasmuch as we receive the shining from behind, and we ought to prevent their weaving into each other in our intellect. We cannot do this. Lucifer confuses the one with the other. Ideas, concepts, sense impressions, he mixes together, and philosophers have for a long time endeavoured to crack open a beautiful problem, which they call ‘antimony.’

You can refer to Kant: There on the one page you always have proofs brought forward, for instance, that the world is infinite as regards space; on the other page you have just as strict proofs advanced, that the world is not spatially infinite but is limited. For both there are equally conclusive proofs. They must be there, because the one point of view is just as true as the other, only one is the earth -view and the other the moon-view. To one who cannot hold them apart, they become insoluble contradictions, contradictions which cannot be solved in any case with earthly understanding. But we have seen that a still older kind of deviation from the forward course of evolution was that brought about by the spirits from the hierarchy of Archangeloi who live in our impulses of feeling and will. Therefore we can say: Lucifer through his existence shuts us off from the cosmos; he only allows us to feel the impulses of feeling and will which live in our inner nature. If he were not to shut us off like this, then, instead of feeling that will impulses and feeling arise as though from the subconscious inner being, man would be aware of all that shines into him, illumines him from the cosmos through the Sun-evolution. As man ought to be aware in his intellect of the Old Moon behind the ordinary sense-existence, so he ought to see behind his impulses of feeling and willing the radiating cosmic sun arise. In feeling and willing he should see—as the kernel in the fruit-the essence of the Sun shining through.

But we are shut off from this through Lucifer. We think that feeling and will are only something within us, we do not realise that they contain within them living sun-forces, sun-forces that are actually within them. If we were to feel these sun-forces, were we really to feel the spirit-light shining within feeling and will; then we should have an insight into the cosmos precisely through this lighting up of the spirit-light of the world. We should have a direct vision of the external through our inner nature. That has been destroyed for us through those Luciferic spirits who have an archangel nature and who did not share in the step of the separation of the Moon from the Sun. It had to be brought to us again through the coming of this cosmic sun-nature into the evolution of mankind. This cosmic Sun-nature came into earthly evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, that Mystery, the entire reality of which man must first of all accept in himself, must inwardly experience :Not I, but Christ in me.

And proceeding thence, more and more that inwardly shining, shaping force is formed in him. Cosmic light penetrates feeling and willing like the sunlight and unites itself with the intellectual life so that we attain a uniform cosmic picture by learning to allow the Christ-impulse to live, not only in feeling and willing, but to let it flow into the world of our concepts and understanding. Thus, instead of merely looking to Christ Jesus, a whole cosmology is really born for us, a Christened cosmology. We come to learn what the cosmos was before the Mystery of Golgotha, when the Christ was united with the Sun-nature outside the earth realm, and what the cosmos is after the Mystery of Golgotha, when the Christ is now no longer separated from the earthly aura, but lives on further within the aura of the earth. Only through first feeling ourselves to be identified with the Christ-impulse, regarding, as it were, this Christ-impulse as the centre from which, as shown yesterday, we can receive the continuous, the eternal, ever-enduring revelation,—only through this do we press forward increasingly to the possibility of attaining to a concrete Christianity, full of content, which will then be completely one with the content of spiritual science, even as regards cosmology.

Take the whole nerve- let me say -of Christology,—take what a man must really understand to comprehend Christology. Why do so many people not understand it? Why do they connect no right ideas with the Mystery of Golgotha? Because it is asking too much of them to describe as reality something which they are not otherwise accustomed to call real.

A sentence is to be found in a book of Haeckel's which reads something like this: ‘The Immaculate Conception is an impudent mockery of human reason.’ But why of human reason? Well, the next sentence reads: because in all other cases, in the animal and human kingdoms, it is not possible to observe such a birth. That is obviously a logical contradiction in itself.. For one ought to bring forward ground based not on observation but on reason. But just here again we encounter a fact of such a nature that it is incompatible with the ideas which man receives from external reality. All that man otherwise calls ‘real’ is incompatible, with the reality of this fact, with the whole fact of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus a man must grasp something that contradicts his ideas of reality. Now to those who approach more closely to Spiritual Science a way should open to ideas which permit an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. You see, in ordinary life and also in modern science what one observes with the outer senses is called real, or at least, something that is founded on reality. Real science rests upon what one observes by means of the senses. People endeavour, however, to make use of the senses for other purposes, they try to grasp everything after the manner of sense observation of external things. Biologists try to grasp the living being, the living organism as though it were only a complicated cooperation of purely mechanical forces, a complicated machine, since it is only a complicated machine that they can actually regard as a reality.

What actually lies behind this? What lies behind it is the fact that men call something real,—and indeed nowadays, throughout the whole of their life—which is not real at all, which is not in the least what it is said to be. Consider a corpse. Can you say that this corpse is the man? No, this disintegrating corpse is not the man, it is the form of man which is breaking in pieces. And so it is with the whole of outer nature. People investigate the inanimate, and have no idea that everything which is inanimate has once been alive. Men must find the transition from the concept of ‘inanimate nature’ to the concept of ‘Nature that has died,’ men must really grasp the fact that all inanimate things were once living and have died, that what we can find today as stone and rock was alive during the Moon age and has died, has become lifeless stone through a process such as that passed through by the human corpse.

If we were to grasp this actively, and look upon Nature as a corpse, then we should know that what we call existence is not something that contains existence, but rather something out of which existence has already fled. This is of infinite importance. Men do not realise that they cling to the inanimate, not realising that it is something that has died, and that they are trying to learn to understand the living through what has died.

When men look at the living organism that has not yet died, but lives before their eyes, and reduce it to a mechanism which is only an image of the dead, they are trying to understand and explain the living from the dead. That is the ideal and goal of the whole modern world concepts: to grasp the living out of what has died. Spiritual Science must take pains, always take pains to replace an understanding through the dead by an understanding through the living. The whole trend of modern science must disappear, since its only aim is to grasp the living through that which has died, not merely through the inanimate, the inorganic, but through what has died. This whole science must disappear. In its place must arise an understanding of the world out of the living. And of all the non-living, the inorganic at the present time, it must be realised that in the past it too was a living being. Had we not been luciferically hindered, from perceiving behind the sense impressions what has been characterised as the Moon existence, which stands behind them,—then we should realises there lies the corpse of what still appears to us from the Old-Moon. Just as on seeing a human corpse we remember how the man appeared as he was in life, how he went about and spoke with us, so, on looking at the earth we should look back on what it was when it was still alive during the Old-Moon existence.

It must be the earnest endeavour of Spiritual Science that we should be led out of the dead into the living; that must be an active, true goal although it may be difficult to attain; for all that is contained in our modern science touching a conception of the world is thoroughly foreign and hostile to such an aim. We must not deceive ourselves about this, but be quite clear that the world conception of modern science is absolutely opposed to it.

It will be intensely difficult to gain a living grasp of the cosmos in place of the dead one. But when we hold living ideas, then we shall no longer be wanting in an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. For we shall know that what, in general, is subject to death, is derived from the Moon-existence, but that the Christ is from the Sun-existence. He held back in order to bring to us the Sun-element again. He has nothing to do with all the concepts that are lifeless, but will replace them by living ones. Therefore it is necessary to unite with Him in a living way, not through a dead science. Therefore it is necessary to recognise that only under specially abnormal conditions, could that which cannot die, cannot become dead, enter into the earthly course.

When one studies the special connection which the Christ Being had during the three years with the body of Jesus of Nazareth, one comes to realise that actually, in the different members which were united through the inter-connection of the two Jesus boys, through the fact that Zarathustra lived in the Nathan Jesus, something entirely special was created (I have already referred to this in other lectures), something which, during those three years made this whole body different from an ordinary human body. An ordinary human body is actually not the same as this body was already—and through the particular kind of union throughout the three years with the Zarathustra-being still- remained different from other earthly bodies. As the earth began to recapitulate the Moon-existence, there remained behind, as I have explained, that essential substance which then appeared in the Luke Jesus, the Nathan Jesus boy; something which had not entered into death, or passed through the illusion of earthly death, which in the course of earthly phenomena was reserved for Christ Jesus, this held back. This was in Christ Jesus, and guided him through these three years and through death,—through the Maya of death, in a different way from other human beings.

This extraordinarily central phenomenon of earthly evolution must, however be understood, must be really grasped, as standing outside everything that is derived solely from the Moon-existence, it must be understood as being inwardly connected with the regularly progressive Sun-existence. Nor, therefore, after the Mystery of Golgotha had been accomplished, could this Christ-Being be dependent on anything which is derived, only from the Moon-existence, derived, that is, from a Moon which had separated from the Sun, when during this separation Luciferic beings had taken part in the splitting off, but not in the reunion.

The Christ-Being remains completely untouched by all that is in the earth through this aberration from Luciferic spirits. He would immediately have been affected by it had He been incorporated in an ordinary human body. Hence He could only appear physically upon earth through these special and abnormal occurrences, not covered by earthly laws. And since this Being had taken possession of an earthly body through the Mystery of Golgotha, He is now upon earth spiritually and not subject to those laws which came into earth-existence through the Moon evolution. These are the laws of Space and Time.

Space and Time ... I have already indicated in Occult Science (as you will find in the passages there) that it is difficult to form a picture of the ancient Saturn and Sun conditions, because one must leave out the concepts of space and time. What one pictures as space and time in regard to this ancient existence, is only an analogy, only an image, does not as yet correspond with reality. The concepts of space and time have no reality if applied earlier than the Moon-existence. One cannot use this concept for the previous conditions of evolution. But that which comes through the Christ into the spatial-temporal is likewise not bound up with the laws of space and time. Therefore a genuine Spiritual Science recognises it as the greatest imaginable error to suppose that the Christ, as He is united now with earth-existence, could appear before mankind spatially limited in one single human being. It would be the gravest misapprehension of the Christ to assert that there could be a re-embodiment of Christ at the present day, and that if He perhaps wished to speak in the future to—let us say—a person in Europe and then to someone in America, He would have to take train and steamer and thus travel from Europe to America. That will never happen. He will always be raised above the laws of space and time. And we must conceive of His appearance in the 20th century as being raised above these laws. Never could the Christ, rightly understood, be embodied in a single human being.

It would therefore be or rather it is a blow in the face of genuine Spiritual Science, wherever it is asserted that there could ever be a human re-embodiment of Christ Jesus.¹ But with this, it is also shown that Christology, that which the Christ really is, has nothing to do with any divisions of man and mankind.

We see there, my dear friends, a way open: how the cosmic, the sun-nature comes again into our whole human race, how again the sun-nature, lost through Lucifer, rises in our feeling and willing, how it rises again through the Christ in our feeling and will how from there it can take hold of our intellect. That is the way which all spiritual understanding of the world must take in the future. But for a long time there will be errors and mistaken paths; for—I have often stressed it—only slowly and gradually can the Mystery of Golgotha in its depths find its way into the whole course of humanity's evolution. Only quite slowly and gradually can that come about. And inasmuch as it is gradually accomplished, more and more, it will create an accord between man's, intellectuality and his feeling and willing. That will increasingly fill out the human being with an inner Man, with a second man.

In man as he is without this filling out through the Christ Impulse, the head&'s inner nature, one might say, is hidden. If a man feels his head, he has headache; the inner quality is physically completely veiled as regards the head. Man carries the head about with him in normal life without actually feeling it, he makes use of it for registering external impressions.

The other part of man, which is at the same time the seat of the world of lower desires, this is within us; this to begin with, takes up nothing from outside, lives in itself. And the Jahve-God has concealed in a world of law not entering human consciousness, all that lives down below, as the sum total of man's desire world, so that the Luciferic rumblings or egotism, do not become too great. Through Lucifer we should really only be organised as Earthly men, to use our lower nature—disregarding the intellect -solely and only for ourselves. We should develop not a single altruistic instinct but purely egoistic instincts. There would be in the world no natural foundation for love. The human being would merely use the instincts that live in his lower nature, for manifesting himself in the world, for putting himself into the picture. Hence this lower nature has been rendered dim and dulled by the Jahve Godhead.

The Jahve Godhead himself lives in this lower nature and implants the instinct of love and altruism, but of a kind more or less unconscious for ordinary human life. These instincts and impulses have to become conscious again through the Impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha. But in this whole unconsciousness of the desire world something of a twofold nature lies concealed. In the first place, the connection of the intellect, of the conceptual with the desire world remains in the subconscious. But nevertheless it works upwards, works definitely upwards and it works upwards through the fact that something enters which I have already often explained.

This whole desire world, which is actually an egotistic world belonging only to the human being, can, as it were emancipate itself from the Jahve Godhead living in it. Then it works upward, but—unconsciously and without man's knowledge—it presses through and interpenetrates the conceptual world with its imaginations. Then man becomes clairvoyant, that is to say, he his visions. He experiences as Imaginations all that lives in his desire world. In reality he only experiences his desire world; it shows itself to him as the Imaginative world. But since in this whole desire world of ours only the cosmos lives—though veiled from man—the Imaginations which rise up from his desire world like a mirage conjure up for him a complete cosmos. He can now experience a whole Cosmos, which Consists of nothing but that down below where the fire of the lower desires burns. This fire of the lower instincts then shoots upwards, and now a cosmos arises, here above in the intellectual system. This is essentially the process of self- mediumship. The medium who becomes a medium through his own desires and instincts succumbs to these processes. Such mediums are usually very proud of their Imaginations. They look down with arrogance upon those people who have no Imagination, whereas those in their turn can often very well see that such Imaginations, as are from time to time described as marvellous pictures are nothing more than what boils and bubbles in the instincts and in the digestive processes and loses its way upwards as cosmic images. It rises as a mist into the world of concepts and takes on the form of false cosmic pictures, expressing itself through these.

But the effect of this duality of human nature can appear in yet another way. For let us suppose that a second man meets the first man, a second who is naturally, as human being so constituted that his inner nature of willing and feeling hides the cosmos, and his intellectuality hides his own inner self. (Diagram II. Man) (Pg. 17)

Now let us suppose that such a second man, by means of various processes of which we have still to speak, came to the point of having more or less consciousness. Thus here would be man #1 and man # 2 (Pg 17) had reached a consciousness of this relation (Diagram II, Light red).

Now let us suppose that this man (II) was not disposed to employ all that came to him through such a consciousness in the pure sense of a universal and Christianized spiritual science, but that he had his own particular aims in the world. Let us suppose that this man belonged to a region which had framed a special world-concept in the course of historical development, and he had grown up within this region with such a world conception; and let us suppose that he had special, egoistic grounds to impose it upon the world quite intensively. The true occultist as we know has no other desire than to make valid that which can benefit all men; he has no lust of domination; but let us suppose that such a man II had a desire of power, and wished to make the world-conception of a limited territory dominate in other territories. Now if he simply goes ahead and represents in his own way the world concept that he wished to make dominant the following will happen: Some will believe him others will not believe him. Those who are of different opinion will not believe him, will repulse him- we know from experience how European missionaries are often repulsed by other races if they say things that these people do not understand or have no intention of understanding—another way. Since this whole process is a conscious one, he has the power of working upon another person e.g., upon Man #1 (Diagram Pg 2) and if he does not work merely through his intellect, but through his whole personality, he can act upon the intellect of the other.

Now if the other man is so organized that he has mediumistic tendencies—i.e., can receive something in an abnormal way—and so simply accepts it as truth because it is advanced by the second then there streams from the second into the first man the world concept held by the second, and the first allows it to pass through his unspoiled intellect if then the former appears before mankind, what is now presented comes out in quite a different way. People would notice in the case of man # 2 that acts purely on his own behalf in the world, and he has the power of clothing in an intellectual system what arises out of his inner being, for what he gives out is his own position. The ego of man #1 has not got it as its own possession but takes it from the other as something objective and advocates it with his intellect in such a way—since it is not his own personally—as to give it a more universal character. It seems to come from the unspoiled intellect of man #1 as if it were a universal truth. Here you have the facts as to how, from a certain grey or black direction, one-sided information is carried into the world. The particular one-sided grey or black spiritual-scientists do not bring it to the world by standing up and presenting their views, but they pour them into a mediumistic person. This person takes them over, passes them on and lets them work upon other people through their intellect. Hence such grey or black spiritual scientists often remain in the background as Mahatmas, and those who stand before the world speak of the Mahatma standing behind them, and what they proclaim is given out as a communication of the Mahatma.

This phenomenon leads up to much that has happened in a terribly psychologically-tragic way, one night call it, in the case of poor H.P. Blavatsky, who in the most eminent sense of the word, was a mediumistic personality. Her intellect was, however, never adequate to examine what was passed over to her by people who were not always honourable, but who could work precisely through Madame-Blavatsky. These persons concocted things which were not always irreproachable; in an egoistic sense and through the mediumistic intellect of Blavatsky they made this into something which then worked on people in a suggestive way. To those, however, who wish to take their stand honourably on the ground of spiritual science, quite definite rules and regulations of conduct are inseparable from it.

You see, from all that has now been expounded, that under all circumstances, when it is a question of spreading spiritual science, one sentence must hold good. It is obvious that anything coming from some kind of mediumism is interesting and significant, for it comes, of course, out of another world, but it must never be taken just as it stands. Otherwise it will fare with humanity as it did in the whole development of spiritism in the second half of the 19th century.

The whole development of the movement in the second half of the 19th century was really undertaken from a certain side in order to test men and ascertain how ripe they were to recognize not only the material sense world which men perceive with their senses lives around them, but also a spiritual world; for the modern material world concept of the 19th century had, under Ahrimanic suggestion, brought wide-spread belief in the sense word as the only existence. Already in the middle of the 19th century, it was a great question among occultists as to whether they should oppose this whole spiritistic movement. It was decided at the time not to not to oppose it, for it was assumed—though this was short-sighted—that when men saw how all sorts of things came from the spiritual world through the medium, they would most certainly bethink themselves that there were actually things and forces in the world which worked from one to another in a spiritual way. Instead of this the whole spiritistic movement plunged into a very egoistic materialistic channel. The majority of mediums everywhere said that they were in contact with this or that deceased person. They brought to light all sorts of things inasmuch as they said: this or that soul who died here or there communicated one thing or another through the medium. To be sure they brought to light very many things. But in far the greater number of cases a colossal error lay at the root of their claims. For if we imagine here the medium as Man 1, we have to imagine the experimenter or hypnotizer, i.e., the one who arranged everything, as Man 2.

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Now in every man whilst he is alive here, all that is his dead part is already in him. But that reverberates below; during the waking day life it reverberates below in the sense perceptions. The dead part of man rumbles below in the sense perceptions. Now imagine the following: The medium is there, the experimenter also is there; he passes over to the medium or to whatever else may be manifesting in the arrangements, that which is actually pulsating in his own sense impressions, and often in his lower instincts and will reappear one day when he himself dies. Truths may be contained in all this, but one must understand the whole nature of what arises; one must not listen to the medium when he asserts that what comes to him by revelation is a communication from the departed.

The people who did not immediately offer resistance to spiritism, said to themselves: what it is will soon be evident. They wanted to know whether the working upon the medium of the living, of what lives in the embodied person, was really furthered. The mediums completely misunderstood this, always believing that they stood in connection with the departed. So we see how mediumism certainly formed a connection with the other world, though a deceptive one. Lucifer is not somehow driven away from the path of normality to mediumism but he is drawn in still more, the deception becomes still greater. What is in the inner being is not set free and distributed in the cosmos, but what is within spreads out like a mist in the conceptual world and becomes an imaginative world. What is in man's inner being can proceed from himself or rise up within him through the influence of another person.

But out of this will follow an infinitely significant and important law for the spread of spiritually scientific truth and for work in the stream of spiritual science. One should take care that all direct belief in a man's authority must be the less, the more this person shows marks and traces of mediumship. The more such a person comes and says; ‘I have received this or that as an impression somewhere or other,’ yet is not fully conscious of this and cannot furnish proof, all the less is there authority in his mediumship.

Therefore when H.P. Blavatsky brought certain teachings into the world, one had of necessity to say: This personality shows strong evidences of mediumship, and so it is impossible to credit her with authority, or at least only in a very slight degree. Authority must dwindle in proportion as the person shows traces of mediumship.

In the same way, it is an axiom, so to speak, in the spreading of the truths of spiritual science, that in this spreading there must never be any kind of appeal, when the truths are made public, to unnamed Masters or Mahatmas. No matter how many unnamed Beings and personalities stand behind such a movement, that which has significance as proceeding from such Beings is only significant for the one who directly confronts them; it is his affair whether he believes in them or not, and whether he can prove that they are worthy of trust. But it can never be his business when he is making public statements to claim that he has had it from unnamed Masters or Mahatmas, (in a small circle, if someone simply says... ‘This or that was said to me and I believe it,’ that is different, those are things that pass from one personality to another). The moment, however, that it becomes a question of presenting a teaching to the world, then the one who represents it must himself accept the responsibility for it. And only he who makes it clear though the type of man he is, that he does not appeal to unreal or unknown Mahatmas when he wishes to substantiate what he is propagating but who rather makes it intelligible and obvious that he, as personality, standing there on the physical plane, takes complete responsibility for his teaching, only he is living up to his full duty. And one who cannot do this, can refer to someone to be found by name on the physical plane, or who, if he is dead, can be found among the dead by historical paths.

It is therefore most important for the transmission of teachings that the one who communicates them with his own personality, as he stands there in the physical world, should accept full responsibility for the teachings, and must not appeal to unknown Masters. And those who spread the teachings further, may also only appeal to living personalities, who as physical persons are prepared to take full responsibility for their teachings. This gives a sure and certain way for dissemination of the teaching to a wider circle, but gate and door are barred against all persons unnamed and to all hints and allusions. Whoever asserts that he has received this or that from here or there, from unknown masters or from the dead (through which one can so regale oneself on one's own arrogance) against him is door and gate locked. For in spreading spiritual science the question is to know the path taken by the threads of confidence which lead to its original sources.

Hence, it was wrong when, in the so-called Theosophical Society one began to found certain society procedures on the utterances of unknown Mahatmas. That ought never to have been done. For anything that takes place and is propagated on the physical plane, a physical personality is answerable, as much as when teachings are circulated. He who spreads the teachings of another, has equally to show that he appeals, not to some unknown powers or impulses found along mediumistic paths, but to historical or living personalities. This means that he appeals to those who show the whole method of entry of spiritual truth into the physical world, who moreover, take full responsibility for their teachings and also show through their conduct that they take that responsibility. That is it above all! It is this latter above all!

These are two very important rules. The first is that we must possess the feeling that authority vanishes, if mediumism arises in the communication of the statements of personalities, and the second is that responsibility is never laid upon beings who are introduced to the world as unknown. One can, of course, speak of such unknown beings, but one must not appeal to them as authorities. That is a very different matter.

I only wished to place these indications before you today, since it is important to have the right feeling as to how the whole spirit and nature of the strivings of spiritual science should live in us. We must stand within this movement in the right way, otherwise the spiritual science movement will be immeasurably injured by being mixed up with unclear, mediumistic things, with appeals and references to all sorts of Mahatmas and beings who stand behind it. Everything that those standing in the movement so much enjoy shrouding in the magic breath of mystery (although it really proceeds from sense-instincts)—all this must be gradually ejected, otherwise we shall really not make progress in the sphere of spiritual science.

If every impact of a disordered gastric juice with the walls of the stomach causes an impetus that arises as a mist into the intellect and manifests there in the form of an Angel-Imagination, and the person in question then tells his fellow-men about this angel, that can of course make a very fine story! But what is instigated through this sort of thing only causes injury to the spiritual-scientific movement, endless injury. For the important part about these things is that they not only cause injury through what is said, but also through what they are—for they are, in fact, realities. The moment that one puts a false garment on them, one makes them appear before the world in a false form.

Obviously no one would make a special impression if he were to say: ‘I have had something going wrong in the stomach. The action of my gastric juices upon the stomach walls has appeared to me as an Angel.’ Anyone speaking thus would make no particular impression on his fellow-men; if, however, he were to leave out the first part, he would make a strong impression. It is extraordinarily important for people to have a thorough knowledge that this can happen. Naturally one cannot distinguish straight away between a true Imagination and a false one; but neither is it necessary to bring one's Imaginations immediately to people's notice. All that must be taken thoroughly into account. It is necessary, really earnestly necessary, to consider how the spreading of the spiritual science outlook can best take place in the world. We have had, up to now the instrument of the Society, no doubt too, in the future of our Anthroposophical Society we shall have it. But we must really so conceive of this Anthroposophical Society—or speaking more loosely—of our standing within the movement of Spiritual Science, that we shall consider in what way it is an instrument for something that is to take place spiritually in the whole earthly evolution.

You see, my dear friends, it happens all too often that one may become a member of the Anthroposophical Society, and yet carry into that Society all the various habits, inclinations, sympathies and antipathies that one had before becoming a member, and continue to exercise them. It is necessary to think this over. I have therefore today made the subject of our studies something that closely concerns us and that is real—and that is: how it is possible for imposters to appear who want to make propaganda for some one-sided world concept and make use of a mediumistic personality in order to introduce this one-sided world concept to the world. Just as the one who appeared in the place of the Master Kut-Humi stood there as an imposter and implanted a one-sided world concept in Blavatsky, so also was it possible for people not to see that behind her stood a grey magician who was in the pay of a narrowly circumscribed human society, and wished to promulgate a definite human world conception.

This is something very, very real, and shows us how keenly we must be on the watch when it is a matter of fostering and cultivating this sublime treasure of spiritual science, so necessary to mankind. One must strive for honesty—really into the inmost fibres of feeling; naturally faults may arise—but one must strive for the purest integrity. One must not, through laziness, be quickly satisfied that one can believe in anyone who gives one something of value, but must test every step, prove whatever comes to light. That is absolutely essential. It is a reality, not a mere theory, that steams into mankind in this spiritual science. Human evolution receives something actual and real through what steams into mankind through the world concept of Spiritual Science.

We must therefore become conscious that we must take a different stand on earth from that otherwise taken when we do not ally ourselves to such a Spiritual-Science stream.

• 1. This had to be especially emphasised in view of the propaganda of ‘The Star in the East.’

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.

You will have gathered from the remarks I have made during the last two days that there is a fundamental change in the inner constitution of the human being at every single stage of his life. Today, certainly, modern psychologists and physiologists also take this into account. They too reckon with these changes which take place in the course of life, firstly up to the change of teeth, then up to puberty, and again from puberty into the twenties. But these differences are more profound than can be discovered by means of the methods of observation customary today, which do not reach far enough, however excellent they may be. We must take a further step and examine these differences from aspects demanded by spiritual science. You will hear many things that are already familiar to you, but you must now enter more deeply into them. Even when the child enters this world from the embryo condition, that is, to take an external characteristic, when he adapts himself to the outer process of breathing, even then, physiologically speaking, he is not yet received directly by the outer world, for he takes the natural nourishment of the mother's milk. He is not nourished as yet by what comes from the outer world, but by what comes from the same source as the child himself. Now today people study the substances they meet with in the world more or less according to their external, chemical, physical properties only and do not consider the finer attributes which they possess through their spiritual content. Nowadays everything is considered in this way. Such methods are not to be condemned; on the contrary they should be recognised as justified. Nevertheless because the time came when man was concerned only with the outer aspects of things, aspects which could not be so regarded in earlier civilisations, he has now reached a point of extreme externalisation. If I may make a comparison, things are observed today in some such way as this. We say: I look upon death, upon dying; plants die, animals die, human beings die. But surely the question arises as to whether dying, the passing away of the various forms of life with which we come in contact, is in all three kinds of living beings the same process, or whether this only appears outwardly to be so. We can make use of the following comparisons: If I have a knife there is a real difference whether I cut my food with it, or whether I use it for shaving. In each case it is a knife, but the properties of “knife” must be further differentiated. Such differentiation is in many cases not made today. No differentiation is made between the dying of a plant, an animal or a man.

We meet the same thing in other domains too. There are people who in a certain way want to be philosophers of nature, and because they aim at being idealistic, even spiritual, they assert that plants may well have a soul; and they try to discover in an external way those characteristics of plants which seem to indicate that they have certain soul qualities. They make a study of those plants which, when they are approached by insects, tend to open their petals. The insect is caught, for it is attracted by the scent of what is in the plant. Such a plant is the Venus Flytrap. It closes its petals with a snap and the insect is trapped. This is considered to be a sort of soul quality in the plant. Well, but I know something else which works in the same way. It is to be found in all sorts of places. The mouse, when it comes near, feels attracted by the smell of a dainty morsel; it begins to nibble, and—hey presto! snap goes the mousetrap. If one were to make use of the same thought process as in the case of a plant, one might say: the mousetrap has a soul.

This kind of thinking, however, although quite legitimate under certain conditions never leads to conclusions of any depth, but remains more or less on the surface. If we wish to gain a true knowledge of man we must penetrate into the very depths of human nature. It must be possible for us to look in a completely unprejudiced way at things which appear paradoxical vis-à-vis external methods of observation. Moreover it is very necessary to take into consideration everything which, taken together, makes up the entire human organisation.

In man we have, to begin with, the actual physical organism which he has in common with all earthly beings and particularly with the mineral kingdom. In man, however, we have clearly to distinguish between his physical organism and his etheric organism. The latter he has in common only with the plant world, not with the minerals. But a being endowed only with an etheric organism could never experience feeling, never attain to an inner consciousness. For this again man has his astral organism, which he has in common with the animal world. It might appear that this is an external organisation, but in the course of these lectures we shall see how inward it can be. In addition to this man still has his ego-organisation, which is not to be found in the animal world and which he alone possesses among earthly beings. What we are here considering is in no sense merely an external, intellectual pattern; moreover, in speaking, for instance, of an etheric or life-body, this has no connection whatever with what an outmoded natural science once called “life-force,” “vital-force” and so on. On the contrary, it is the result of observation. If, for instance, we study the child up to the age of the change of teeth, we see that his development is primarily dependent on his physical organism. The physical organism must gradually adapt itself to the outer world, but this cannot take place all at once, not even if considered in the crudest physical sense. This physical body, just because it contains what the human being has brought with him out of the spiritual world in which he lived in pre-earthly existence, cannot forthwith assimilate the substances of the outer world, but must receive them specially prepared in the mother's milk. The child must, so to say, remain closely connected with what is of like nature with himself. He must only gradually grow into the outer world. And the conclusion of this process of the physical organism growing into the outer world is indicated by the appearance of the second teeth at about the seventh year. At approximately this age the child's physical organism completes the process of growing into the world.

During this time, however, in which the organisation is chiefly concerned with the shaping and fashioning of the bony system, the child is only interested in certain things in the outer world, not in everything. He is only interested in what we might call gesture, everything that is related to movement. Now you must take into account that at first the child's consciousness is dream-like, shadowy; to begin with his perceptions are quite undefined, and only gradually do they light up and gain clarity. But fundamentally speaking the fact remains that during the time between birth and the change of teeth the child's perception adheres to everything in the nature of gesture and movement and does so to such an extent, that in the very moment when he perceives a movement he feels an inner urge to imitate it. There exists a quite definite law of development in the nature of the human being which I should like to characterise in the following way.

While the human being is growing into the physical, earthly world, his inner nature is developing in such a way that this development proceeds in the first place out of gesture, out of differentiation of movement. In the inner nature of the organism speech develops out of movement in all its aspects, and thought develops out of speech. This deeply significant law underlies all human development. Everything which makes its appearance in sound, in speech, is the result of gesture, mediated through the inner nature of the human organism.

If you turn your attention to the way in which a child not only learns to speak, but also learns to walk, to place one foot after the other, you can observe how one child treads more strongly on the back part of the foot, on the heel, and another walks more on the toes. You can observe children who in learning to walk tend to bring their legs well forward; with others you will see that they are more inclined to hold back, as it were, between two steps. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch a child learning to walk. You must learn to observe this. But it is more interesting still, although much less attention is paid to it, to see how a child learns to grasp something, how he learns to move his hands. There are children who, when they want something, move their hands in such a way that even the fingers are brought into movement. Others keep their fingers still, and stretch out their hands to take hold without moving the fingers. There are children who stretch out their hand and arm, while keeping the upper part of the body motionless; there are others who immediately let the upper part of the body follow the movement of arm and hand. I once knew a child who, when he was very small and his high-chair was placed at a little distance from the table on which stood some dish he wished to get at, proceeded to “row” himself towards it; his whole body was then in movement. He could make no movements at all without moving his whole body.

This is the first thing to look out for in a child; for how a child moves reveals the most inward urge of life, the primal life impulse. At the same time there appears in the child's movement the tendency to adapt himself to others, to carry out some movement in the same way as his father, mother or other member of the family. The principle of imitation comes to light in gesture, in movement. For gesture is what appears first of all in human evolution, and in the special constitution of the physical, soul and spiritual organism of man gesture is inwardly transformed; it is transformed into speech. Those who are able to observe this know without any doubt that a child who speaks as though the sentences were hacked out of him is one who sets his heels down first; while a child who speaks in such a way that the sentences run one into the other tends to trip on his toes. A child who takes hold of things more lightly with his fingers has the tendency to emphasise the vowel element, while a child who is inclined to stress the consonants will bring his whole arm to his aid when grasping something. We receive a very definite impression of a child's potentialities from his manner of speaking. And to understand the world, to understand the world through the medium of the senses, through the medium of thought, this too is developed out of speech. Thought does not produce speech, but speech thought. So it is in the cultural development of humanity as a whole; human beings have first spoken, then thought. So it is also with the child; first out of movement he learns to speak, to articulate only then does thinking come forth from speech. We must therefore look upon this sequence as being something of importance: gesture, speech, thought, or the process of thinking.

All this is especially characteristic in the first epoch of the child's life, up to the change of teeth. When little by little the child grows into the world during the first, second, third and fourth years of life, he does so through gesture; everything is dependent on gesture. Indeed, I would say that speaking and thinking take place for the most part unconsciously; both develop naturally out of gesture, even the first gesture. Therefore speaking approximately we can say: From the first to the seventh year gesture predominates in the life of the child, but gesture in the widest sense of the word, gesture which in the child lives in imitation. As educators we must keep this firmly in mind for actually up to the change of teeth the child only takes in what comes to him as gesture, he shuts himself off from everything else. If we say to the child: Do it like this, do it like that, he really does not hear, he does not take any notice. It is only when we stand in front of him and show him how to do it that he is able to copy us. For the child works according to the way I myself am moving my fingers, or he looks at something just as I am looking at it, not according to what I tell him. He imitates everything. This is the secret of the development of the child up to the change of teeth. He lives entirely in imitation, entirely in the imitation of what in the widest possible sense comes to meet him from outside as gesture. This accounts for the surprises we get when faced with the education of very young children. A father came to me once and said, “What shall I do? Something really dreadful has happened. My boy has been stealing.” I said, “Let us first find out whether he really steals. What has he done?” The father told me that the boy had taken money out of the cupboard, had bought sweets with it and shared them with the other boys. I said “Presumably that is the cupboard out of which the boy has often seen his mother taking money, before going shopping; he is quite naturally imitating her.” And this proved to be the case. So I said further, “But that is not stealing; that lies as a natural principle of development in the boy up to the change of teeth. He imitates what he sees; he must do so.” In the presence of a child therefore we should avoid doing anything which he should not imitate. This is how we educate him. If we say: You should not do this or that, it does not influence the child in the slightest degree up to the change of teeth. It could at most have some effect if one were to clothe the words in a gesture, by saying: Now look, you have just done something that I would never do!—for this is in a way a disguised gesture.

It comes to this: with our whole manhood we should fully understand how up to the change of teeth the child is an imitating being. During this time there is actually an inner connection between the child and his environment, between all that is going on around him. Later on this is lost. For however strange and paradoxical it may sound to people today, who are quite unable to think correctly about the spirit, but think always in abstractions, it is nevertheless true that the whole relationship of the child to gesture and movement in his surroundings has an innate religious character. Through his physical body the child is given over to everything in the nature of gesture; he cannot do otherwise than yield himself up to it. What we do later with our soul, and still later with our spirit, in that we yield ourselves up to the divine, even to the external world, as again spiritualised, this the child does with his physical body when he brings it into movement. He is completely immersed in religion, both with his good and his bad qualities. What remains with us as soul and spirit in later life, this the child has also in his physical organism. If therefore the child lives in close proximity with a surly, “bearish” father, liable to fall into rages, someone who is often irritable and angry, expressing uncontrolled emotions in the presence of the child, while the inner causes of such emotions are not as yet understood by the child, nevertheless what he sees, he experiences as something not moral. The child perceives simultaneously, albeit unconsciously, the moral aspects of these outbreaks, so that he has not only the outer picture of the gesture, but also absorbs its moral significance. If I make an angry gesture, this passes over into the blood organisation of the child, and if these gestures recur frequently they find expression in his blood circulation. The child's physical body is organised according to the way in which I behave in his presence, according to the kind of gestures I make. Moreover if I fail in loving understanding when the child is present, if, without considering him I do something which is only suitable at a later age, and am not constantly on the watch when he is near me, then it can happen that the child enters lovingly into something which is unfitted for his tender years, but belongs to another age, and his physical body will in that case be organised accordingly. Whoever studies the whole course of a man's life from birth to death, bearing in mind the requirements of which I have spoken, will see that a child who has been exposed to things suitable only to grown-up people and who imitates these things will in his later years, from the age of about 50, suffer from sclerosis. One must be able to examine such phenomena in all their ramifications. Illnesses that appear in later life are often only the result of educational errors made in the very earliest years of childhood.

This is why an education which is really based on a knowledge of man must study the human being as a whole from birth until death. To be able to look at man as a whole is the very essence of anthroposophical knowledge. Then too one discovers how very strong the connection is between the child and his environment. I would go as far as to say that the soul of the child goes right out into his surroundings, experiences these surroundings intimately, and indeed has a much stronger relationship to them than at a later period of life. In this respect the child is still very close to the animal, only he experiences things in a more spiritual way, in a way more permeated with soul. The animal's experiences are coarser and cruder, but the animal too is related to its environment. The reason why many phenomena of recent times remain unexplained is because people are not able to enter into all the details involved. There is, for instance, the case of the “calculating horses” which has made such a stir recently, where horses have carried out simple arithmetical operations through stamping with their hooves. I have not seen the famous Elberfelder horses, but I have seen the horse belonging to Herr von Osten. This horse did quite nice little sums. For instance Herr von Osten asked: How much is 5 + 7? And he began to count, beginning with 1, and when he got to 12 the horse stamped with its foot. It could add up, subtract and so on. Now there was a young professor who studied this problem and wrote a book about it which is extremely interesting. In this book he expounds the view that the horse sees certain little gestures made by Herr von Osten, who always stands close to the horse. His opinion is that when Herr von Osten counts 7 + 5 up to 12 and the horse stamps when the number 12 is reached, this is because Herr von Osten makes a very slight gesture when he comes to 12 and the horse, noticing this, duly stamps his foot. He believes that it can all be traced back to something visible. But now he puts a question to himself: “Why,” he says, “can you not see this gesture which Herr von Osten makes so skilfully that the horse sees it and stamps at the number 12?” The young professor goes on to say that these gestures are so slight that he as a human being cannot see them. From this the conclusion might be drawn that a horse sees more than a professor! But this did not convince me at all, for I saw this wonder of an intelligent horse, the clever Hans, standing by Herr von Osten in his long coat. And I saw too that in his right-hand pocket he had lumps of sugar, and while he was carrying out his experiments with the horse he always handed it one lump after another, so that feeling was aroused in the horse associating sweet things with Herr von Osten. In this way a sort of love was established between Herr von Osten and the horse. And only when this is present, only when the inner being of the horse is, as it were, merged into the inner being of Herr von Osten through the stream of sweetness that flows between them, only then can the horse “calculate,” for it really receives something—not through gesture, but through what Herr von Osten is thinking. He thinks: 5 + 7 = 12, and by means of suggestion the horse takes up this thought and even has a distinct impression of it. One can actually see this. The horse and his master are in a certain way merged in feeling one into the other: they impart something to one another reciprocally when they are united through the medium of sweetness. So the animal still has this finer relationship to its environment, and this can be stimulated from outside, as, in this case, by means of sugar.

In a delicate way a similar relationship to the outer world is still present in children also. It lives in the child and should be reckoned with. Education in the kindergarten should therefore never depend on anything other than the principle of imitation. The teacher must sit down with the children and just do what she wishes them to do, so that the child has only to copy. All education and instruction before the change of teeth must be based on this principle.

After the change of teeth all this becomes quite different. The soul life of the child is now completely changed. No longer does he perceive merely the single gestures, but now he sees the way in which these gestures accord with one another. For instance, whereas previously he only had a feeling for a definite line, now he has a feeling for co-ordination, for symmetry. The feeling is awakened for what is co-ordinated or uncoordinated, and in his soul the child acquires the possibility of perceiving what is formative. As soon as this perception is awakened there appears simultaneously an interest in speech. During the first seven years of life there is an interest in gesture, in everything connected with movement; in the years between seven and fourteen there is an interest in everything connected with the pictorial form, and speech is pre-eminently pictorial and formative. After the change of teeth the child's interest passes over from gesture to speech, and in the lower school years from seven to fourteen we can work most advantageously through everything that lies in speech, above all through the moral element underlying speech. For just as the child before this age has a religious attitude towards the gesture which meets him in the surrounding world, so now he relates himself in a moral sense—his religious feeling being gradually refined into a soul experience—to everything which approaches him through speech.

So now, in this period of his life, one must work upon the child through speech. But whatever is to work upon him in this way must do so by means of an unquestioned authority. When I want to convey to the child some picture expressed through speech, I must do so with the assurance of authority. I must be the unquestioned authority for the child when through speech I want to conjure up before him some picture. Just as we must actually show the little child what we want him to do, so we must be the human pattern for the child between the change of teeth and puberty. In other words, there is no point whatever in giving reasons to a child of this age, in trying to make him see why we should do something or not do it, just because there are well-founded reasons for or against it. This passes over the child's head. It is important to understand this. In exactly the same way as in the earliest years of life the child only observes the gesture, so between the change of teeth and puberty he only observes what I, as a human being, am in relation to himself. At this age the child must, for instance, learn about what is moral in such a way that he regards as good what the naturally accepted authority of the teacher, by means of speech, designates as good; he must regard as bad what this authority designates as bad. The child must learn: What my teacher, as my authority, does is good, what he does not do is bad. Relatively speaking then, the child feels: When my teacher says something is good, then it is good; and if he says something is bad, then it is bad. You will not attribute to me, seeing that 30 years ago I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom a point of view which upholds the principle of authority as the one and only means of salvation. But through the very fact of knowing the true nature of freedom one also knows that between the change of teeth and puberty the child needs to be faced with an unquestioned authority. This lies in the nature of man. Everything is doomed to failure in education which disregards this relationship of the child to the unquestioned authority of the personality of the teacher and educator. The child must be guided in everything which he should do or not do, think or not think, feel or not feel, by what flows to him, by way of speech, from his teacher and educator. At this age therefore there is no sense in wanting to approach him through the intellect. During this time everything must be directed towards the life of feeling, for feeling is receptive to anything in the nature of pictures and the child of this age is so constituted that he lives in the world of pictures, of images, and has the feeling of welding separate details into a harmonious whole. This is why, for instance, what is moral cannot be brought to the child by way of precept, by saying: You should do this, you should not do that. It simply doesn't work. What does work is when the child, through the way in which one speaks to him, can feel inwardly in his soul a liking for what is good, a dislike of what is bad. Between the change of teeth and puberty the child is an aesthete and we must therefore take care that he experiences pleasure in the good and displeasure in what is bad. This is the best way for him to develop a sense of morality.

We must also be sincere, inwardly sincere in the imagery we use in our work with the child. This entails being permeated to the depths of our being by everything we do. This is not the case if, when standing before the child we immediately experience a slight sense of superiority: I am so clever—the child is so stupid. Such an attitude ruins all education; it also destroys in the child the feeling for authority. Well then, how shall I transform into a pictorial image something that I want to impart to the child? In order to make this clear I have chosen the following example as an illustration.

We cannot speak to the child about the immortality of the soul in the same way as to a grown-up person; but we must nevertheless convey to him some understanding of it. We must however do so in a pictorial way. We must build up the following picture and to do this may well take the whole lesson.

We can explain to the child what a butterfly's chrysalis is, and then speak in some such words as these: “Well, later on the finished butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. It was inside all the time only it was not yet visible, it was not yet ready to fly away, but it was already there inside.” Now we can go further and tell him that in a similar way the human body contains the soul, only it is not visible. At death the soul flies out of the body; the only difference between man and butterfly is that the butterfly is visible and the human soul is invisible. In this way we can speak to the child about the immortality of the soul so that he receives a true picture of immortality and one suited to his age. But in the presence of the child we must on no account have the feeling: I am clever, I am a philosopher and by no means of thought can I convince myself of the truth of immortality; the child is naive, is stupid, and so for him I will build up the picture of the butterfly creeping out of the chrysalis. If one thinks in this way one establishes no contact with the child, and then he gets nothing whatever from what he is told. There is only one possibility. We must ourselves believe in the picture, we must not want to be cleverer than the child; we must stand in the presence of the child as full of belief as he is. How can this be done? An anthroposophist, a student of spiritual science knows that the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis is actually a picture of the immortality of the human soul placed into the world by the gods. He can never think otherwise than that the gods inscribed into the world this picture of the emerging butterfly as an image of the immortality of the human soul. In all the lower stages of the process he sees the higher processes which have become abstract. If I do not get the idea that the child is stupid and I am clever, but if I stand before the child conscious that this actually is so in the world and that I am leading him to believe in something which I too believe with all my heart, then there arises an imponderable relationship between us, and the child makes real progress in his education. Then moral imponderabilia continually enters into our educational relationship. And this is the crux of the matter.

When we are quite clear about this we shall, out of the whole nexus of our studies, come to see how we can find the right approach to an instruction which is truly educational, an education which really instructs. Let us take an example. How must the child learn to read and write? There is actually a great deal more misery connected with this than one usually imagines, though human intellectualism is far too crude to perceive it. One recognises that learning to read and write is a necessity, so it follows that the child must at all costs be drilled into learning reading and writing. But just consider what this means for a child! When they are grown-up, people have no inclination to put themselves in the child's place, to imagine what he undergoes when he learns to read and write. In our civilisation today we have letters, a, b, c and so on; they are there before us in certain definite forms. Now the child has the sound a (ah, as in father). When does he use it? This sound is for him the expression of an inner soul experience. He uses this sound when he is faced with something which calls up in him a feeling of wonder, of astonishment. This sound he understands. It is bound up with human nature. Or he has the sound e (eh, as in they). When does he use this? He uses it when he wants to show he has the feeling: “Something has come up against me; I have experienced something which encroaches on my own nature.” If somebody gives me a blow, I say e (eh).¹ It is the same with the consonants. Every sound corresponds to some expression of life; the consonants imitate an outer, external world, the vowels express what is experienced inwardly in the soul. The study of language, philology, is today only approaching the first elements of such things.

Learned scholars, who devote themselves to research into language, have given much thought to what, in the course of human evolution, may have been the origin of speech. There are two theories. The one represents the view that speech may have arisen out of soul experiences in much the same way as this takes place in the animal, albeit in its most primitive form—“moo-moo” being the expression of what the cow feels inwardly, and “bow-wow” what is experienced by the dog. And so, in a more complicated way, what in man becomes articulated speech arises out of this urge to give expression to inner feelings and experiences. In somewhat humorous vein this is called the “bow-wow theory.” The other point of view proceeds from the supposition that in the sounds of speech man imitates what takes place in the outer world. It is possible to imitate the sound of a bell, what is taking place inside the bell: “ding-dong—ding-dong.” Here there is the attempt to imitate what takes place in the outer world. This is the basis for the theory that in speech everything may be traced back to external sounds, external event. It is the “ding-dong theory.” So we have these two theories in opposition to one another. It is not in any way my intention to make fun of this, for as a matter of fact, both are correct: the “bow-wow” theory is right for the vowel element in speech, the “ding-dong” theory for the consonantal element. In transposing gestures into sounds we learn by means of the consonants to imitate inwardly outer processes; and in the vowels we give form to inner experiences of the soul. In speech the inner and the outer unite. Human nature, itself homogeneous, understands how to bring this about.

We receive the child into the primary school. Through his inner organisation he has become a being able to speak. Now, suddenly he is expected to experience—I say experience deliberately weighing my words, not recognise, experience—a connection between astonishment, wonder, (ah) and the demonic sign a. This is something completely foreign to him. He is supposed to learn something which he feels to be utterly remote, and to relate this to the sound “ah.” This is something outside the sphere of a young child's comprehension. He feels it as a veritable torture if at the very outset we confront him with the forms of the letters in use today.

We can, however, remember something else. The letters which we have today were not always there. Let us look back to those ancient peoples who had a picture writing. They used pictures to give tangible form to what was uttered, and these pictures certainly had something to do with what they were intended to express. They did not have letters such as we use, but pictures which were related to their meaning. Up to a certain point the same could be said of cuneiform writing. These were times when people still had a human relationship to things, even when these were fixed into a definite form. Today we no longer have this, but with the child we must go back to it again. We must of course not do so in such a way that we study the cultural history of ancient peoples and fall back on the forms which were once used in picture writing; but we must bring all our educational fantasy into play as teachers in order to create the kind of pictures we need. Fantasy, imagination [The German phantasie is often more equivalent to the English imagination than to fantasy. In this lecture the latter is probably more appropriate.] we must certainly have, for without it we cannot be teachers or educators. And so it is always necessary to refer to the importance of enthusiasm, of inspiration, when dealing with some characteristic feature of anthroposophy. It never gives me any pleasure, for instance, when I go into a class in our Waldorf School and notice that a teacher is tired and is teaching out of a certain mood of weariness. That is something one must never do. One simply cannot be tired, one can only be filled with enthusiasm. When teaching, one must be absolutely on the spot with one's whole being. It is quite wrong to be tired when teaching; tiredness must be kept for some other occasion. The essential thing for a teacher is that he learns to give full play to his fantasy. What does this mean? To begin with I call up in the child's mind something that he has seen at the market, or some other place, a fish for example. I next get him to draw a fish, and for this I even allow him to use colours, so that he paints as he draws and draws as he paints. This being achieved I then let him say the word “Fish,” not speaking the word quickly, but separating the sounds, “f-i-ssh.” Then I lead him on so that he says only the beginning of the word fish (f...) and gradually I transfer the shape of the fish into a sign that is somewhat fish like, while at the same time getting the child to say f ... And there we have it, the letter “f!”

Or I let the child say Wave (W-a-v-e) showing him at the same time what a wave is (see sketch). Once again I let him paint this and get him to say the beginning of the word—w—and then I change the picture of a wave into the letter w.

Continuing to work in the same way I allow the written characters gradually to emerge from the painting-drawing and drawing-painting, as indeed they actually arose in the first place. I do not bring the child into a stage of civilisation with which as yet he has nothing in common, but I guide him in such a way that he is never torn away from his relationship to the outer world. In order to do this there is no necessity to study the history of culture—albeit the writing in use today has arisen out of picture-writing—one must only give free play to one's fantasy, for then one brings the child to the point at which he is able to form writing out of this drawing and painting.

Now we must not think of this only as an ingenious and clever new method. We must value the fact that the child unites himself inwardly with something that is new to him when his soul activity is constantly stimulated. He does not “grow into it” when he is pushed, so that he is always coming into an unfamiliar relationship with his environment. The whole point is that we are working on the inner being of the child.

What is usually done today? It is perhaps already somewhat out-of-date, but not so long ago people gave little girls “beautiful” dolls, with real hair, dolls that could shut their eyes when one laid them down, dolls with pretty faces and so on. Civilisation calls them beautiful, but they are nevertheless hideous, because they are inartistic. What sort of dolls are these? They are the sort which cannot activate the child's fantasy. Now let us do something different. Tie a handkerchief so that you have a figure with arms and legs; then make eyes with blobs of ink and perhaps a mouth with red ink as well; now the child must develop his fantasy if he is to imagine this as having the human shape. Such a thing works with tremendous living force on the child, because it offers him the possibility of using his fantasy. Naturally one must do this first oneself. But the possibility must be provided for the child, and this must be done at the age when everything is play. It is for this reason that all those things which do not stimulate fantasy in the child are so damaging when given as toys. As I said, today these beautiful dolls are somewhat out-dated, for now we give children monkeys or bears. To be sure, neither do these toys give any opportunity for the unfolding of a fantasy having any relationship to the human being. Let us suppose that a child runs up to us and we give him a bear to cuddle. Things like this show clearly how far our civilisation is from being able to penetrate into the depths of human nature. But it is quite remarkable how children in a perfectly natural, artistic way are able to form imaginatively a picture of this inner side of human nature.

In the Waldorf School we have made a transition from the ordinary methods of teaching to what may be termed a teaching through art, and this quite apart from the fact that in no circumstances do we begin by teaching the children to write, but we let them paint as they draw, and draw as they paint. Perhaps we might even say that we let them splash about, which involves the possibly tiresome job of cleaning up the classroom afterwards. I shall also speak tomorrow about how to lead over from writing to reading, but, quite apart from this painting and drawing, we guide the child as far as possible into the realm of the artistic by letting him practise modelling in his own little way, but without suggesting that he should make anything beyond what he himself wants to fashion out of his own inner being. The results are quite remarkable. I will mention one example which shows how something very wonderful takes place in the case of rather older children.

At a comparatively early age, that is to say, for children between ten and eleven years old, we take as a subject in our curriculum the “Study of Man.” At this age the children learn to know how the bones are formed and built up, how they support each other, and so on. They learn this in an artistic way, not intellectually. After a few such lessons the child has acquired some perception of the structure of the human bones, the dynamic of the bones and their interdependence. Then we go over to the craft-room, where the children model plastic forms and we observe what they are making. We see that they have learned something from these lessons about the bones. Not that the child imitates the forms of the bones, but from the way in which he now models his forms we perceive the outer expression of an inner mobility of soul. Before this he has already got so far as to be able to make little receptacles of various kinds; children discover how to make bowls and similar things quite by themselves, but what they make out of the spontaneity of childhood before they have received such lessons is quite different from what they model afterwards, provided they have really experienced what was intended. In order to achieve this result, however, these lessons on the “Knowledge of Man” must be given in such a way that their content enters right into the whole human being. Today this is difficult.

Anyone who has paid as many visits to studios as I have and seen how people paint and model and carve, knows very well that today hardly any sculptor works without a model; he must have a human form in front of him if he wishes to model it.

This would have had no sense for a Greek artist. He had of course learned to know the human form in the public games, but he really experienced it inwardly. He knew out of his own inner feeling—and this feeling he embodied without the aid of a model—he knew the difference between an arm when it is stretched out or when, in addition, the forefinger is also extended, and this feeling he embodied in his sculpture. Today, however, when physiology is taught in the usual way, models or drawings of the bones are placed side by side, the muscles are described one after another and no impression is given of their reciprocal relationship. With us, when the children see a vertebra belonging to the spinal column, they know how similar it is to the skull-bone, and they get a feeling for the metamorphosis of the bones. In this way they enter livingly right into the different human forms and so feel the urge to express it artistically. Such an experience enters right into life; it does not remain external.

My earnest wish, and also my duty as leader of the Waldorf School, is to make sure that wherever possible everything of a fixed nature in the way of science, everything set down in books in a rigid scientific form should be excluded from class teaching. Not that I do not value science; no one could value science more highly. Such studies can be indulged in outside the school, if so desired; but I should be really furious if I were to see a teacher standing in front of a class with a book in his or her hand. In teaching everything must come from within. This must be self-understood. How is botany taught today for instance? We have botany books; these are based on a scientific outlook, but they do not belong to the classroom where there are children between the change of teeth and puberty. The perception of what a teacher needs in the way of literature must be allowed to grow gradually out of the living educational principles I shall be speaking about here.

So we are really concerned with the teacher's attitude of mind, whether in soul, spirit and body he is able to relate himself to the world. If he has this living relationship he can do much with the children between the change of teeth and puberty, for he is then their natural and accepted authority. The main thing is that one should enter into and experience things in a living way and carry over into life all that one has thus experienced. This is the great and fundamental principle which must form the basis of education today. Then the connection with the class will be there of itself, together with the imponderable mood and feeling that must necessarily go with it.

Answers to a Question

Question: There are grown-up people who seem to have remained at the imitative stage of childhood. Why is this?

Dr. Steiner: It is possible at every stage of human development for someone to remain in a stationary condition. If we describe the different stages of development, adding to today's survey the embryonic stage, and continuing to the change of teeth, and on to puberty, we cover those epochs in which a fully developed human life can be formed. Now quite a short time ago the general trend of anthroposophical development brought it about that lectures could be held on curative education, with special reference to definite cases of children who had either remained backward or whose development was in some respect abnormal. We then took the further step of allowing certain cases to be seen which were being treated at Dr. Wegmann's Clinical-Therapeutic Institute. Among these cases there was one of a child of nearly a year old, about the normal size for a child of this age, but who in the formation of his physical body had remained approximately at the stage of seven or eight months embryo. If you were to draw the child in outline with only an indication of the limbs, which are somewhat more developed, but showing exactly the form of the head, as it actually is in the case of this little boy, then, looking cursorily at the drawing, you would not have the faintest idea that it is a boy of nearly a year old. You would think it an embryo, because this boy has in many respects kept after his birth the embryonic structure.

Every stage of life, including the embryonic, can be carried over into a later stage; for the different phases of development as they follow one after the other, are such that each new phase is a metamorphosis of the old, with something new added. If you will only take quite exactly what I have already said in regard to the natural religious devotion of the child to his surroundings up to the change of teeth, you will see that this changes later into the life of soul, and you have, as a second attribute the aesthetic, artistic stage. Now it happens with very many children that the first stage is carried into the second, and the latter then remains poorly developed. But this can go still further: the first stage of physical embodiment can be carried over into each of the others, so that what was present as the original stage appears in all the later stages. And, for a superficial observation of life, it need not be so very obvious that an earlier stage has remained on into a later one, unless such a condition shows itself particularly late in life. Certain it is however that earlier stages are carried over into later ones.

Let us take the same thing in a lower kingdom of nature. The fully grown, fully developed plant usually has root, stalk, with it cotyledon leaves, followed by the later green leaves. These are then concentrated in the calyx, the petals, the stamen, the pistil and so on. There are however plants which do not develop as far as the blossom, but remain behind at the stage of herbs and other plants where the green leaves remain stationary, and the fruit is merely rudimentary. How far, for instance, the fern has remained behind the buttercup! With the plant this does not lead to abnormality. Man however is a species for himself. He is a complete natural order. And it can happen that someone remains his whole life long an imitative being, or one who stands in need of authority. For in life we have not only to do with people who remain at the imitative stage, but also with those who in regard to their essential characteristics remain at the stage that is fully developed between the change of teeth and puberty. As a matter of fact there are very many such people, and with them this stage continues into later life. They cannot progress much farther, and what should be developed in later years can only do so to a limited extent. They remain always at the stage where they look for the support of authority. If there were no such people, neither would there be the tendency, so rife today, to form sects and such things, for sectarian associations are based on the fact that their adherents are not required to think; they leave the thinking to others and follow their leaders. In certain spheres of life, however, most people remain at the stage of authority. For instance, when it is a question of forming a judgment about something of a scientific nature people do not take the trouble to look into it themselves, but they ask: Where is the expert who must know about this, the specialist who is a lecturer at one of the universities? There you have the principle of authority. Again in the case of people who are ill the principle of authority is carried to extremes, even though here it may be justifiable. And in legal matters, for instance, nobody today will think of forming an independent judgment, but will seek the advice of a solicitor because he has the requisite knowledge. Here the standpoint is that of an eight or nine year old child. And it may well be that this solicitor himself is not much older. When a question is put to him he takes down a lawbook or portfolio and there again you have an authority. So it is actually the case that each stage of life can enter into a later one.

The Anthroposophical Society should really only consist of people who are outgrowing authority, who do not recognise any such principle but only true insight. This is so little understood by people outside the Society that they are continually saying: “Anthroposophy is based on authority.” In reality the precise opposite is the case; the principle of authority must be outgrown through the kind of understanding and discernment which is fostered in anthroposophy. The important thing is that one should grasp every scrap of insight one can lay hold of in order to pass through the different stages of life.

• 1. In English we tend to prefix an aspirate to the vowel, saying “Ha” when something astonishes us, or “Heh” when something impinges on us, e.g. “Heh, stop it!”

Arising out of yesterday's lecture a further question has been put to me in connection with our subject and I should like to deal with it here. The question is this: “With reference to the law of imitation in a child's movements I regard as important an explanation of the following fact. My grandfather died when my father was between eighteen months and two years old. When he was about forty-five my father visited one of my grandfather's friends who was astonished at the similarity of all my father's movements and gestures with those of my grandfather. What was the cause of this, seeing that owing to my grandfather's early death there could hardly be any question of imitation!”

So a man died when his son was between eighteen months and two years old and long afterwards, when the latter was in his 45th year, he heard from this friend, who was in a position to know, that as late as his 45th year he still imitated, or rather had the same gestures as his father.

Of course we are dealing here with matters of such a nature that it is scarcely possible to do more than give certain guiding lines, omitting detailed explanations. Unfortunately our courses of lectures are short, and the theme, if it were to be gone into fully, would need many lectures and ample time, six months for instance, or even a whole year. Very many questions are therefore likely to arise, and it may well be possible to answer these if they are brought forward. I must however point out that owing to the limited time at our disposal a certain lack of clarity will inevitably arise and this could only be cleared up if it were possible to enter fully into every detail. With reference to the question which has been put I should like to interpolate the following remarks.

If we take the first epoch of a child's life, that is, the time between birth and the change of teeth, the organisation of the child is working and developing in such a way that those predispositions are incorporated into the organism which I described yesterday as consisting of walking, which includes the general orientation of the human being, of speaking and thirdly of thinking.

Now this is how things follow one another. Between the first and seventh year of life the child is so organised that he is mainly concerned with gesture; between approximately the seventh and fourteenth year he is concerned with speech, as I explained yesterday; and, again speaking approximately, between his fourteenth and twenty-first year he is so organised that he is mainly concerned with thinking. What thus makes its appearance in the course of twenty-one years is however already taking shape as predisposition in the first period of life, between birth and the change of teeth. In so far as the assimilation of gesture is concerned, and this includes walking freely in space without need of support, so that the arms and also the muscles of the face can move in an expressive way—in other words a general orientation, finding a living relationship with gesture and movement—all this is developed mainly in the first third of these years, that is to say in the first 2⅓ years. The main development of the child during this time lies in the unfolding and building up of gesture. The gestures then continue to develop, but in addition something more intimate and inward is now impressed into the speech organism. Although the child has already uttered a few words nevertheless the experience of speech as predisposition takes place after 2⅓ years. The actual experience and feeling for speech is fully developed between the seventh and fourteenth year, but as predisposition it is there between 2⅓ and 4⅔ years old. Naturally all this must be taken as an average. From then on the child develops the faculty of experiencing inwardly the first beginnings of thought. What unfolds and blossoms later, between the 14th and 21st year is already developing germinally between 4⅔ and 7 years old. The forming of gestures continues of course throughout these years, but other faculties enter in. We see therefore that in the main we have to place the time for the unfolding and forming of gestures right back to the first 2½ years. What is gained during this time lies deepest. This is only natural, for we can well imagine how fundamentally the principle of imitation works in the very first years of life.

If you take all this together you will no longer find anything astonishing in what gave rise to the question that has been put here. The grandfather died when the father was between 1½ and 2 years old. Now this is precisely the time in which the forming of gesture is working most deeply. If the grandfather died then, the gestures the child imitated from him made by far the deepest impression. That is in no way altered by what may have been imitated later from other people. So just this particular case is extraordinarily significant when we consider it in detail.

We tried yesterday to explain how in the second period of life, between the change of teeth and puberty, the child in the course of his development experiences everything that finds its expression through speech, in which the self-understood authority of the teacher and educator must play its part. The intercourse between teacher and child must be of such a kind that it works in a pictorial, imaginative way. And I pointed out how at this age one cannot approach the child with moral precepts but can only work effectively on his moral nature by awakening in him such feelings as can be awakened by pictures: so that the child receives pictures described by his teacher and educator, who is also his model. These work in such a way that what is good pleases him and what is bad gives him a feeling of distaste. Therefore at this preparatory or elementary school age morality must be instilled in pictorial form by way of the feelings.

I explained further how writing must be brought to the child in a pictorial way and I showed how the forms of the letters must be developed out of the drawing-painting and the painting-drawing. Of all the arts this must be cultivated first, for it leads the child into civilisation. Everything which introduces the child at the very outset into the forms of the letters, which are completely strange to him, is quite wrong from an educational point of view; for the finished forms of the letters used in our present day civilisation work on the child like little demons.

Now in an education built up on a knowledge of man, learning to write must precede learning to read. If you want to come near to a child of this age, immediately after the change of teeth, you must as far as possible approach the whole being of the child. The child when occupied in writing does at least bring the whole of the upper part of the body into activity; there is an inner mobility which is quite different from when only the head is kept busy learning the forms of the letters. The emancipated, independent faculties of the head can only be made use of at a later age. For this reason we can make a transition by allowing the child also to read what he has written. In this way an impression is made on him.

By carrying out our teaching in this way at the Waldorf School it transpired that our children learn to read somewhat later than others; they even learn to write the letters a little later than children in other schools. It is necessary however, before forming a judgment in regard to this to be able really to enter into the nature of man with understanding. With the limited perception and feeling for a knowledge of man usual at the present day, people do not notice at all how detrimental it is for the general development of the human being if, as a child, he learns too early things so remote from him as reading and writing. Certainly nobody will experience any deficiency in his capacity to read and write, whose proficiency in these arts is attained somewhat later than others; on the other hand everyone who learns to read and write too early will suffer in this very respect. An education based on a knowledge of man must from the very beginning, proceed out of this ability to read human evolution and by understanding the conditions of life help the child in furthering the development of his own nature. This is the one and only way to a really health-giving education.

To gain deeper insight we must enter somewhat into the being of man. In man we have in the first place his physical body which is most intensively developed in the first epoch of life. In the second epoch the higher, finer body, the etheric body, develops predominantly. Now it is a matter of great importance that in this study of man we should proceed in a truly scientific way, and we must conjure up the same courage as is shown today in other branches of science. A substance showing a definite degree of warmth, can be brought into a condition in which that warmth, hitherto bound up with substance, becomes freed. It is liberated and then becomes “free” warmth. In the case of mineral substances we have the courage to speak scientifically when we say that there is “bound” warmth and “free” warmth. We must acquire the same courage when we study the world as a whole. If we have this courage then the following reveals itself to us in regard to man.

We can ask: Where are the forces of the etheric body in the first epoch of life? During this time they are bound up with the physical body and are active in its nourishment and growth. In this first epoch the child is different from what he becomes later. The entire forces of the etheric body are at first bound up with the physical body. At the end of the first epoch they are freed to some extent, just as warmth becomes free from the substances with which it was formerly bound up. What takes place now? Only a part of the etheric body is working after the change of teeth in the forces of growth and nourishment; the freed part becomes the bearer of the more intensive development of the memory, of qualities of soul. We must learn to speak of a soul that is “bound” during the first seven years of life and of a soul that has become free after the 7th year. For it is so. What we use as forces of the soul in the second seven years of life is imperceptibly bound up with the physical body during the first seven years; this is why nothing of a psychic nature becomes body free. A knowledge of how the soul works in the first seven years of life must be gained from observation of the body. And only after the change of teeth can any direct approach be made to what is purely of a soul nature.

This is a way of looking at things which leads directly from the physical to the psychological. Just think of the many different approaches to psychology today. They are based on speculation pure and simple. People think things over and discover that on the one hand we have the soul and on the other hand the body. Now the following question arises: Does the body work on the soul as its original cause, or is it the other way round? If they get no further either way, they discover something so extraordinarily grotesque as psychophysical parallelism, the idea of which is that both manifestations run parallel, side by side. In this way no explanation is given for the interaction of one with the other, but one speaks only of parallelism. This is a sign that nothing is known about these things out of experience. Out of experience one would have to say: In the first seven years of a child's life one perceives the soul working in the body. How it works must be learned through observation, not through mere speculation. Anthroposophy as a means of knowledge rejects all speculation and proceeds everywhere from experience, but of course from physical and spiritual experience.

So in the second period of life, in the time between the change of teeth and puberty the etheric body of man is our chief concern in education. Both teacher and child need above all those forces which are working in the etheric body, for these release the feeling life of the child, not yet judgment and thought. Deeply embedded in the nature of the child between the change of teeth and puberty is the third member of the human being, the astral body, which is the bearer of all feeling life and sensation. During this second period of life the astral body is still deeply embedded in the etheric body. Therefore, because the etheric body is now relatively free, we have the task to develop it in such a way that it can follow its own tendencies, helped and not hindered by education. When can it be so helped? This can happen when in the widest possible sense we teach and educate the child by means of pictures, when we build up imaginatively and pictorially everything that we wish him to absorb. For the etheric body is the body of formative forces; it models the wonderful forms of the organs, heart, lungs, liver and so on. The physical body which we inherit acts only as a model; after the first seven years, after the change of teeth, it is laid aside, and the second physical body is fashioned by the etheric body. This is why at this age we must educate in a way that is adapted to the plastic formative forces of the etheric body.

Now, just as we teach the child by means of pictures, just as, among other things, he learns to write by a kind of painting-drawing—and we cannot introduce the child too early to what is artistic, for our entire teaching must be permeated with artistic feeling—so must we also bear the following in mind. Just as the etheric body is inseparably associated with what is formative and pictorial, so the astral body, which underlies the life of feeling and sensation, tends in its organisation towards the musical nature of man. To what then must we look when we observe the child? Because the astral body between the change of teeth and puberty is still embedded in the physical and etheric bodies every child whose soul life is healthy is inwardly deeply musical. Every healthy child is inwardly deeply musical. We have only to call up this musicality by making use of the child's natural liveliness and sense of movement. Artistic teaching therefore must, from the very beginning of school life, make use both of the plastic and pictorial arts and also of the art of music. Nothing abstract must be allowed to dominate; it is the artistic approach which is all-important, and out of what is artistic the child must be led to a comprehension of the world.

But now we must proceed in such a way that the child learns gradually to find his own orientation in the world. I have already said that it is most repugnant to me if I see scientific text books brought into school and the teaching carried out along those lines. For today in our scientific work, which I fully recognise, we have deviated in many respects from a conception of the world which is in accordance with nature. We will now ask ourselves the following question, bearing in mind that in the course of discussion other things may have to be added. At about what age can one begin to teach children about the plant world?

This must be done neither too late nor too early. We must be aware that a very important stage in a child's development is reached between the 9th and 10th year. Those who see with the eye of a teacher observe this in every child. There comes a time in which the child, although he does not usually express it in words, nevertheless shows in his whole behaviour that he has a question, or a number of questions, which betray an inner crisis in his life. This is an exceptionally delicate experience in the child and an exceptionally delicate sense for these things is necessary if one is to perceive it. But it is there and it must be observed. At this age the child learns quite instinctively to differentiate himself from the outer world. Up to this time the “I” and the outer world interpenetrate each other, and it is therefore possible to tell the child stories about animals, plants and stones in which they all behave as though they were human beings. Indeed this is the best approach, for we should appeal to the child's pictorial, imaginative sense, and this we do if we speak about the kingdoms of nature in this way. Between the 9th and 10th year however the child learns to say “I” in full consciousness. He learns this earlier of course, but now he does so consciously. These years, therefore, when the consciousness of the child is no longer merged with the outer world, but when he learns to differentiate himself from it, are the time when we can begin, without immediately renouncing the pictorial element, to lead the child to an understanding of the plant world, but to an understanding imbued with feeling.

Today we are accustomed to look at one plant alongside of another, we know their names and so on; we do this as though the single plant was there for itself. But when we study the plant in this way, it is just as if you were to pull out a hair, and forgetting that it was on your head examine it for itself, in the belief that you can know something about its nature and life-conditions without considering it as growing out of your head. The hair only has meaning when it is growing on the head; it cannot be studied for itself. It is the same with the plant. One cannot pull it up and study it separately, but one must consider the whole earth as an organism to which the plants belong. This is actually what it is. The plants belong to the entire growth of the earth, in the same way as the hairs belong to our head. Plants can never be studied in an isolated way, but only in connection with the whole nature of the earth. The earth and the world of plants belong together.

Let us suppose that you have a herbaceous plant, an annual, which is growing out of the root, shooting up into stalk, leaves and flowers, and developing the fruit which is sown again in the following year. Then you have the earth underneath, in which the plant is growing. But now, think of a tree. The tree lives longer, it is not an annual. It develops around itself the mineralised bark which is of such a nature that pieces of it can be broken off. What is this in reality? The process is as follows: If you were to pile up around a plant the surrounding earth with its inherent forces, if you were more or less to cover it with earth, then you would bring this about in an external, mechanical way, through human activity. Nature however does the same thing by wrapping the tree round with the bark; only in this case it is not completely earth. In the bark there is a kind of hill of earth, the earth heaps itself up. We can see the earth flourishing and growing when we see the growing tree. This is why what surrounds the root of the plant must most certainly be reckoned as belonging to it. We must regard the soil as belonging to the plant.

Anyone who has trained himself to observe such things and happens to travel in a district where he notices many plants with yellow flowers will at once look to see what kind of soil it is. In such a case, where specifically many yellow flowers are to be seen, one is likely to find, for instance, a soil which is somewhat red in colour. You will never be able to think about the plant without taking into consideration the earth in which it grows. Both belong together. And one should lose no time in accustoming oneself to this; as otherwise one destroys in oneself a sense for realities.

A deep impression was made on me recently, when at the request of certain farmers, I gave an agricultural course, at the end of which a farmer said: Today everybody knows that our vegetables are dying out, are becoming decadent and this with alarming rapidity. Why is this? It is because people no longer understand, as they understood in bygone days, as the peasants understood, that earth and plants are bound together and must be so considered. If we want to foster the well-being of our vegetables so that they flourish again we must understand how to treat them in the right way, in other words, we must give them the right kind of manure. We must give the earth the possibility of living rightly in the environment of the plant roots. Today, after the failure of agricultural methods of development, we need a new impulse in agriculture based on Spiritual Science. This will enable us to make use of manure in such a way that the growth of plants does not degenerate. Anyone as old as I am can say: I know how potatoes looked 50 years ago in Europe—and how they look today! Today we have not only the decline of the West in regard to its cultural life, but this decline penetrates deeply also into the kingdoms of nature, for example, in regard to agriculture.

It really amounts to this, that the sense for the connection between the plant and its environment should not be destroyed, that on school outings and similar occasions die plants should not be uprooted and put into specimen containers and then brought into the classroom in the belief that thereby something has been achieved. For the uprooted plant can never exist just for itself. Today people indulge in totally unreal ideas. For instance they look upon a piece of chalk and a flower as having reality in the same sense. But what nonsense this is! The mineral can exist for itself, it can really do this. So the plant also (they say) should have an independent existence;

but it cannot, it ceases to be when it is uprooted from the ground. It only has earthly existence when it is attached to something other than itself, and that other only has existence in so far as it is part of the whole earth. We must study things as they are in their totality, not tear them out of it.

Almost all our knowledge based on observation teems with unrealities of this kind. This is why Nature Study has become completely abstract, although this is partly justified, as with the theory of relativity. Anyone, however, who can think in a realistic way cannot allow abstract concepts to run on and on, but notices when they cease to have any relationship with what is real. This is something he finds painful. Naturally you can follow the laws of acoustics and say: When I make a sound, the transmission of this sound has a definite speed. When I hear a sound anywhere, at any particular place, I can calculate the exact time its transmission will take. If now I move, no matter at what speed, in the direction the sound is travelling, I shall hear it later. Should my speed exceed the speed of the sound I shall not hear it at all; but if I move towards the sound I shall hear it earlier. The theory of relativity has its definite justification. According to this, however, we can also come to the following conclusion: If I now move towards the sound more quickly than the sound travels, I shall finally go beyond it, so that I shall hear the sound before it is made! This is obvious to anyone able to think realistically. Such a person also knows that logically it is absolutely correct, wonderfully thought out, to say that a clock (to take the famous comparison of Einstein) thrown with the speed of light into universal space and returning from thence, will not have changed in any respect. This can be wonderfully thought out. But for a realistic thinker the question must necessarily arise: What will the clock look like on its return? for he does not separate his thinking from reality, he remains always in the sphere of reality.

This is the essential characteristic of Spiritual Science. It never demands a merely logical approach, but one in accordance with reality. That is why people today, who carry abstractions even to the splitting of hairs, reproach us anthroposophists with being abstract, just because our way of thinking seeks everywhere the absolute reality, never losing the connection with reality, although here certainly the spiritual reality has to be included and understood. This is why it is possible to perceive so clearly how unnatural it is to connect plant study with specimens in a container.

It is therefore important when introducing the child to plant study that we consider the actual face of the earth and deal with the soil and plant growth as a whole, so that the child will never think of the plant as something detached and separate. This can be unpleasant for the teacher, for now he cannot take the usual botany books into class with him, have a quick glance at them during the lesson and behave as though he knew it all perfectly. I have already said that today there are no suitable botany text-books. But this sort of teaching takes on another aspect when one knows the effect of the imponderable and when one considers that in the child the subconscious works still more strongly than in older people. This subconscious is terribly clever and anyone able to perceive the spiritual life of the child knows that when a class is seated facing the teacher and he walks up and down with his notes and wants to impart the content of these notes to the children, they always form a judgment and think; Well, why should I know that? He doesn't even know it himself! This disturbs the lesson tremendously, for these feelings rise up out of the subconscious and nothing can be expected of a class which is taught by someone with notes in his hand.

We must always look into the spiritual side of things. This is particularly necessary when developing the art of education, for by doing so we can create in the child a feeling of standing firmly and safely in the world. For (in lessons on the plant) he gradually grasps the idea that the earth is an organism. And this it actually is and when it begins to become lifeless we must help it by making the right use of manure. For instance, it is not true that the water contained in the air is the same as that in the earth below. The water below has a certain vitality; the water above loses this vitality and only regains it when it descends. All these things are real, absolutely real. If we do not grasp them we do not unite ourselves with the world in a real way. This then is what I wished to say in regard to the teaching about the world of plants.

Now we come to the animal world and we cannot consider the animals as belonging to the earth in the same way. This is apparent from the mere fact that the animals can move about; in this respect they are independent. But when we compare the animals with man we find something very characteristic in their formation. This has always been indicated in an older, instinctive science, the after-effects of which still remained in the first third of the 19th century. When however a modern man with his way of looking at things reads the opinions expressed by those philosophers of nature who, following old traditions, still regarded the animal world in its relation to the human world, these strike him as being utterly foolish. I know that people have hardly been able to contain their laughter when in a study circle, during the reading from the nature philosopher, Oken, the following sentence occurred: “The human tongue is a cuttlefish.” Whatever could he have meant? Of course in actual fact this statement of Oken's can no longer be regarded as correct, but it contains an underlying principle which must be taken into account. When we observe the different animal forms, from the smallest protozoa up to the fully developed apes, we find that every animal form represents some part of the human being, a human organ, or an organic system, which is developed in a one-sided way. You need only look at these things quite crudely. Imagine that the human forehead were to recede enormously that the jaw were to jut right out, that the eyes were to look upwards instead of forwards, that the teeth and their whole nexus were also to be formed in a completely one-sided way. By imagining such an exaggerated, one-sided development you could get a picture of a great variety of mammals. By leaving out this or that in the human form you can change it into the form of an ox, a sheep and so on. And when you take the inner organs, for instance those which are connected with reproduction, you come into the region of the lower animals. The human being is a synthesis, a putting together of the single animal forms, which becomes softer, gentler, when they are united. The human being is made up of all the animal forms moulded into one harmonious structure. Thus when I trace back to their original forms all that in man is merged together I find the whole animal world. Man is a contraction of the whole animal world.

This way of looking at things places us with our soul life once more in a right relationship to the animal world. This has been forgotten, but it is nevertheless true; and as it belongs fundamentally to the principles of evolution it must again be brought to life. And, after having shown the child how the plant belongs to the earth, we must, in so far as it is possible today, proceed at about the nth year to a consideration of the animal world; and we must do this in such a way that we realise that in its various forms the animal world belongs, strictly speaking, to man himself. Think how the young human being will then stand in his relation to animal and plant. The plants go to the earth, become one with the earth; the animals become one with him! This gives the basis for a true relationship to the world; it places man in a real relationship to the world. This can always be brought to the child in connection with the teaching matter. And if this is done artistically, if we approach the subject in a living way, so that it corresponds with what the child in his inner being is able to grasp, then we give him living forces with which to establish a relationship to life. Otherwise we may easily destroy this relationship. But we must look deeply into the whole human being.

What really is the etheric body? Well, if it were possible to lift it out of the physical body and so impregnate it that its form were to become visible—then there would be no greater work of art than this. For the human etheric body through its own nature and through what man creates within it, is at one and the same time both work of art and artist. And when we introduce the formative element into the child's artistic work, when we let him model in the free way I described yesterday, we bring to him something that is deeply related to the etheric body. This enables the child to take hold of his own inner being and thereby place himself as man in a right relationship to the world.

By introducing the child to music we form the astral body. But when we put two things together, when we lead what is plastic over into movement, and when we form movements that are plastic, then we have eurythmy, which follows exactly the relationship of the child's etheric body to his astral body. And so now the child learns eurythmy, speech revealing itself in articulated gestures, just as he learned to speak quite naturally in his earlier years. A healthy child will find no difficulty in learning eurythmy, for in eurythmy he simply expresses his own being, he has the impulses to make his own being a reality. This is why, in addition to gymnastics, eurythmy is incorporated into the curriculum as an obligatory subject from the first school years right up into the highest classes.

So you see, eurythmy has arisen out of the whole human being, physical body, etheric body and astral body; it can only be studied by means of an anthroposophical knowledge of man. Gymnastics today are directed physiologically in a one-sided way towards the physical body; and because physiology cannot do otherwise, certain principles based on life-giving processes are introduced. By means of gymnastics, however, we do not educate the complete human being, but only part of him. By saying this nothing is implied against gymnastics, only in these days their importance is over-estimated. Therefore in education today eurythmy should stand side by side with gymnastics. I would not go as far as a famous physiologist did, who once happened to be in the audience when I was speaking about eurythmy. On that occasion I said that as a means of education gymnastics are over-rated at the present time, and that a form of gymnastics calling on the forces of soul and spirit, such as is practised in eurythmy side by side with the study of eurythmy as an art, must be introduced in addition to gymnastics as usually understood. At the end of my lecture the famous physiologist came up to me and said: Do you say that gymnastics may have their justification as a means of education because physiologists say so? I, as a physiologist, must say that gymnastics as a means of education are nothing less than barbarism! You would certainly be very astonished if I were to tell you the name of this physiologist. At the present time such things are already apparent to people who have some right to speak; and we must be careful not to advocate certain things in a fanatical way without a full knowledge of what is involved. To stand up fanatically for certain things is utterly out of place in connection with the art of education, because here we are dealing with the manifold aspects of life.

When we approach the other subjects which children have to be taught and do so from the various points of view which have here been considered, we come first to the years during which the child can only take in the pictorial through his life of feeling. History and geography, for instance, must be taught in this way. History must be described pictorially; we must paint and model with our words. This develops the child's mind. For during the first two stages of the second main epoch of life there is one thing above all to which the child has no relationship and this is what may be termed the concept of causation. Before the 7th year the child should most certainly not go to school. [i.e. to school as distinguished from a kindergarten.] If we take the time from 7 to 9⅓ years old we have the first subdivision of the second main epoch; from 9⅓ to 11⅔ years old we have the second stage and from 11⅔ until approximately the age of 14 we have the third stage. During the first stage of this second main epoch the child is so organised that he responds immediately to what is pictorial. At this age therefore we must speak as one does in fairy-tales, for everything must still be undifferentiated from the child's own nature. The plants must speak with one another, the minerals must speak with one another; the plants must kiss one another, they must have father and mother, and so on. At about 9⅓ years old the time has come which I have already characterised, when the ego begins to differentiate itself from the outer world. Then we can make a more realistic approach in our teaching about plants and animals. Always, however, in the first years of life history must be treated in fairy-tale, mythical mood. In the second subdivision of this longer epoch, that is to say, from 9⅓ until 11⅔ years old, we must speak pictorially. And only when the child approaches the age of 12 can one introduce him to the concept of causation, only then can one lead over to abstract concepts, whereby cause and effect can be allowed to enter in. Before this time the child is as inaccessible to cause and effect as anyone colour blind is to colours; and as an educator one often has absolutely no idea how unnecessary it is to speak to the child about cause and effect. It is only after the age of 12 that we can speak to him about things which today are taken for granted when looked at from a scientific point of view.

This makes it essential to wait until about the 12th year before dealing with anything that has to do with the lifeless, for this involves entering into the concept of causation. And in the teaching of history we must also wait until about this age before passing over from a pictorial presentation to one which deals with cause and effect, where the causes underlying historical events have to be sought. Before this we should only concern ourselves with what can be brought to the child as having life, soul-imbued life.

People are really very strange. For instance, in the course of cultural development a concept has arisen which goes by the name of animism. It is maintained that when a child knocks himself against a table he imagines the table to be alive and hits it. He dreams a soul into the table, and it is thought that primitive people did the same. The idea is prevalent that something very complicated takes place in the soul of the child. He is supposed to think that the table is alive, ensouled, and this is why he hits it when he bumps up against it. This is a fantastic notion. On the contrary those who study the history of culture are the ones who do actually “ensoul” something, for they “ensoul” this imaginative capacity into the child. But the soul qualities of the child are far more deeply embedded in the physical body than they are later, when they are emancipated and can work freely. When the child bumps against a table a reflex action is set up without his imagining that the table is alive. It is purely a reflex movement of will, for the child does not yet differentiate himself from the outer world. This differentiation first makes its appearance at about the 12th year when a healthy child can grasp the concept of causation. But when this concept is brought to the child too early, especially if it is done by means of crude external methods, really terrible conditions are set up in the child's development. It is all very well to say that one should take pains to make everything perfectly clear to a child. Calculating machines already exist in which little balls are pushed here and there in order to make the operations of arithmetic externally obvious. The next thing we may expect is that those of the same frame of mind will make moral concepts externally visible by means of some kind of machine in which by pushing something about one will be able to see good and evil in the same way as with the calculating machines one can see that 5 plus 7 equals 12. There are, however, undoubtedly spheres of life in which things cannot be made externally apparent and which are taken up and absorbed by the child in ways that are not at all obvious; and we greatly err if we try to make them so. Hence it is quite wrong to do as is often attempted in educational books and make externally apparent what by its very nature cannot be so treated. In this respect people often fall into really frightful trivialities.

In the years between the change of teeth and puberty we are not only concerned with the demonstrably obvious, for when we take the whole of human life into consideration the following becomes clear. At the age of 8 I take in some concept, I do not yet understand it fully; indeed I do not understand it at all as far as its abstract content is concerned. I am not yet so constituted as to make this possible. Why then do I take in the concept at all? I do so because it is my teacher who is speaking, because the authority of my teacher is self-understood and this works upon me. But today we are not supposed to do this; the child is to be shown what is visual and obvious. Now let us take a child who is taught everything in this way. In such a case what a child experiences does not grow with his growth, for by these methods he is treated as a being who does not grow. But we should not awaken in the child ideas which cannot grow with him, for then we should be doing the same thing as if we were to have a pair of shoes made for a three-year-old child and expect him to wear them when he is 12. Everything in the human being grows, including his power of comprehension; and so the concepts must grow with him. We must therefore see to it that we bring living concepts to the child, but this we can only do if there is a living relationship to the authority of the teacher. It is not achieved if the teacher is an abstract pedant who stands in front of the child and presents him with concepts which are as yet totally foreign to him. Picture two children. One has been taught in such a way that he takes in concepts and at the age of 45 he still gives things the same explanation that he learned when he was 8 years old. The concept has not grown with the child; he paid careful attention to it all, and at 45 can still explain it in the same way. Now let us take a second child who has been educated in a living way. Here we shall find that just as he no longer wears the same size shoes as he did when he was 8 years old, so at a later age he no longer carries around with him the same concepts that he learned when he was 8. On the contrary; these concepts have expanded and have become something quite different. All this reacts on the physical body. And if we look at these two people in regard to their physical fitness we find that the first man has sclerosis at the age of 45, while the second has remained mobile and is not sclerotic. How great do you think the differences are which come to light between human beings? In a certain place in Europe there were once two professors of philosophy. One was famous for his Greek philosophy; the other was an old Hegelian, an adherent of the school of Hegel, where people were still accustomed to take in living concepts, even after the age of 20. Both were lecturers at the same university. At the age of 70 the first decided to exercise his right to retire on a pension, he felt unable to continue. The second, the Hegelian professor, was 91 and said: “I cannot understand why that young fellow is settling down to retirement already.” But the conceptual life of this second professor had retained its mobility. People criticised him for this very reason and accused him of being inconsistent. The other man was consistent, but he suffered from sclerosis!

There exists a complete unity in the child between the spiritual and the bodily, and we can only deal rightly with him when we take this into consideration. Today people who do not share the views of materialists say that materialism is a bad thing. Why? Many will say that it is bad because it understands nothing of the spiritual. This, however, is not the worst, for little by little people will become aware of this lack, and as a result of the urge to get the better of it they will come to the spiritual. The worst thing about materialism is that it understands nothing of matter! Look into it yourselves and see what has become of the knowledge of the living forces of man in lung, liver and so on under the influences of materialism. Nothing is known about how these things work. A portion is removed from the lung, the liver and so forth and this is prepared and examined, but by means of present-day scientific methods nothing is learned of the spirit working actively in the human organs. Such knowledge can only be gained through spiritual science. The material reveals its nature only when studied from the aspect of spiritual science. Materialism has fallen sick, and the cause of this sickness is above all because the materialist understands nothing of matter. He wants to limit himself to what is material but he cannot penetrate to any knowledge of what is material in a real sense. In saying this I do not mean the “thought-out” material, where so and so many atoms are supposed to dance around a central nucleus: for things of this kind are not difficult to construct. In the earlier days of the Theosophical Society there were theosophists who constructed a whole system based on atoms and molecules; but it was all just thought out. What we have to do now is to approach reality once again. And if one actually does this one has a feeling of discomfort when one is supposed to grasp some concept which is entirely devoid of reality. One experiences pain when, for instance, someone propounds a theory such as this: Fundamentally it is one and the same thing whether I drive my car to a town, or whether the car stands still and the town comes to me. Certainly things of this kind are justified when looked at from a certain point of view. But drawn out to the extent that occurs today among those who hold completely abstract opinions, they impoverish the entire life of the human soul. And anyone who has a sense for such things experiences great pain in regard to much of what people think today, which works so destructively on teaching methods. For instance, I see the tendencies of certain methods applied already to little children in the kindergarten, who are given ordinary cut-out letters and then learn to pick them out of a heap and put them together to form words. By occupying the child in this way at such an early age we are bringing him something to which as yet he has absolutely no relationship. When this happens to him the effect is the same as if in real thinking one were to say: I was once a man who still had muscles, skin and so on; now I am merely a skeleton. So it is today under the influence of this propensity for abstractions in the spiritual life of mankind: one sees oneself suddenly as a skeleton. With such an outlook, however, which is the bare skeleton of reality, we cannot approach the child in education.

Because of this I wanted to show today how everything depends on the teacher approaching life in a true and living way.

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.

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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.

Our end-of-year festival will begin with Frau Dr. Steiner giving us a recitation of the beautiful Norwegian legend of Olaf Åsteson, of whom we are told that at the approach to Christmas he fell into a kind of sleep which lasted for thirteen days; the thirteen holy days that we have explored in various ways. In the course of this sleep he had significant experiences, that he was able to narrate when he awoke.

During these past days we have examined various things that make us aware that the spiritual-scientific outlook gives us a new approach to an understanding of gems of wisdom which, in past times, people realised belonged to spiritual worlds. Time and again we shall encounter this prehistoric knowledge of the spiritual worlds in one instance or another, and we shall continually be reminded that what was known in former ages, was due to the fact that the human being was so organised at that time that he had the kind of relationship with the whole of the cosmos and its happenings that we would now call being immersed with his human microcosm in the laws or the activities of the macrocosm, and that in this process of immersion in the macrocosm he was able to experience things that deeply concern the life of his soul, but which are hidden from him as long as he lives as microcosm on the physical plane and is equipped only with a knowledge given him by his senses and an intellect bound to the senses.

We know that only a materialistic outlook can believe that man is the only being in the world order equipped with thinking, feeling and willing, whereas a spiritual point of view must acknowledge that just as there are beings below the human level, there are also beings above the human stage of thinking, feeling and willing. The human being can live his way into these beings when, as microcosm, he immerses himself in the macrocosm. However, in this case we should have to speak of the macrocosm not only as a macrocosm of space, but as if the course of time were of significance in cosmic life. Just as in order to kindle the light of the spirit within him when he wants to descend into the depths of his own soul, man has to shut himself off from all the impressions his environment can make on his senses and has, as it were, to create darkness round him by closing off his sense perception, likewise the spirit we can call the spirit of the earth has to be shut off from the impressions of the rest of the cosmos. The outer cosmos has to have least effect on the earth spirit if the earth spirit is to be able to concentrate its forces within. For then the secrets will be discovered that man has to discover in conjunction with the earth spirit, because the earth has been separated as earth from the cosmos.

The time when the outer macrocosm exercises the greatest effect on the earth is the time of the summer solstice, midsummer. And many accounts of olden times connected with festive presentations and rituals remind us that festivals like these take place at the height of summer; that in the midst of summer, the soul, in letting go the ego and merging with the life of the macrocosm, surrenders in a state of intoxication to the impressions from the macrocosm.

On the other hand, the legendary or other kind of presentations of that which could be experienced in olden times remind us that when impressions from the macrocosm have least effect on the earth, the earth spirit, concentrated within itself, experiences within the eternal All, the secrets of the earth's life of soul, and that if man enters into this experience at the point of time when the macrocosm sends least light and warmth to the earth, he learns the most holy secrets. This is why the days around Christmas were always kept so sacred, because whilst man's organism was still capable of sharing in the experience of the earth, man could meet the spirit of the earth during the point of time when it was most concentrated.

Olaf Åsteson, Olaf the son of earth, experiences various secrets of the cosmic All whilst he is transported into the macrocosm during the thirteen shortest days. And the nordic legend which has recently been extricated from old accounts, tells of these experiences Olaf Åsteson had between Christmas and New Year up till the 6th January. We often have reason to remember this former manner in which the microcosm took part in the macrocosm, and we can then take these things further. First of all, however, let us hear the legend of Olaf Åsteson, the earth son, who during the time in which we are now, experienced the secrets of cosmic existence in his meeting with the earth spirit. Let us listen to these experiences.

The Dream Song

I

Come listen to my song!
The song of a nimble youth.

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

II

He laid him down on Christmas Eve
And soon lay deeply sleeping.
Nor could he awaken
Until the people went to church
Upon the thirteenth day.

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

He laid him down on Christmas Eve
And he slept long indeed!
He could not awaken
Until the bird was on the wing
Upon the thirteenth day.

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

Olaf could not awaken
Until the sun shone o'er the peaks
Upon the thirteenth day.
Then saddled he his nimble horse
And rode in haste to the church.

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

The priest was at the altar
Reading holy mass
When Olaf alighted at the gate
To tell the many dreams
That had passed through his soul
When he did sleep so long.

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

Then old and young they all gave heed,
To Olaf's words they harkened
That told them of his dreams

Of Olaf Åsteson will I sing,
Who lay and slept so long.

III

‘I laid me down on Christmas Eve
And soon lay deeply sleeping.
Nor could I awaken
Before the people went to church
Upon the thirteenth day.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I was borne up into the clouds
Thrown down to the ocean's depths,
And whosoever will follow after
Good cheer he will not find.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I was borne up into the clouds
Then hurled into murky swamps,
And I saw the horrors of hell
And also heaven's light.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I had to go through deep, dark clefts
Where heaven's rivers rushed and roared.
The power to see them was not mine
Yet I could hear their roaring.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

My coal-black horse he did not neigh,
Nor did my good hounds bark,
The bird of morning did not sing
For a wonder lay on all.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I had to travel in spiritland
Through stretch on stretch of thorny heath,
My scarlet mantle was torn to shreds
The nails of my feet likewise.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

Then I came to the Gjallar Bridge
Suspended in the windblown heights,
Studded it is with rich red gold
And the nails thereon have sharp points.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

The spirit snake he struck at me
The spirit hound bit me,
And lo! the bull did bar the way.
These are the three beasts of the bridge,
Most wicked are they all.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

The hound he is a snappish beast
The serpent waits to strike,
The bull is ready to attack!
And no one may pass o'er the bridge
Who will not honour truth!

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I passed o'er the Gjallar Bridge
On dizzy heights and narrow.
I who had waded in the swamps . . . .
Behind me now they lie!

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

I had waded in the swamps
There seemed no foothold I could find
As I passed o'er the Gjallar Bridge
Earth did I feel within my mouth
As the dead who lie in their graves.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

To the waters then I came,
’Twas where the icy masses gleamed
Like unto flames of blue. . . .
And God did guide me in my steps
That I did not come close.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

So I went on the wintry way
And saw on my right hand:
Like unto paradise it was,
Light shining far and wide.

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

God's Holy Mother then I saw
Amidst most wondrous glory!
‘Now take thy way to Brooksvalin,
the place where souls are judged!’

The moon shone bright
And all the paths led far away.

IV

In other worlds I tarried then
Through many nights and long;
And God alone can know
The suffering I saw there—

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

I could see a young man
Who in life had killed a child.
Now he must carry him always
And stand in mud to his knee

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

Also I saw an old man
Wearing a cloak of lead;
Thus was he punished,
The miser on earth,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

And men appeared before me
Wearing apparel of fire;
So does their dishonesty
Weigh on their poor souls

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

Children I also saw,
Glowing coals beneath their feet,
In life they did their parents ill,
Now must their spirits feel it

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

And to a house I had to go
Where witches toiled in blood;
This was the blood of those
Who had enraged them whilst on earth,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

Now there came riding from the North
Wild hordes of evil spooks,
Led by the Prince of Hell,

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

This horde riding from the North
Was the wickedest ever seen;
And the Prince of Hell rode out in front,
And he rode on his coal-black steed

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

Yet now came a host from the South
Bringing holy calm,
And at their head rode Saint Michael
At the side of Jesu Christ

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

The souls weighed down by sin
Had to tremble in anguish and fear!
Their tears ran down in streams
To hear of their wicked deeds

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

Michael stood in majesty
And weighed the souls of men
Upon his heavenly scales,
And near him, judging, stood
The Lord of Judgment, Jesu Christ

In Brooksvalin, where souls
World judgment undergo.

V

Blessed is he who in earthly life
Gives shoes unto the poor;
He does not need, with naked feet,
To walk on the heath of thorn.

Thus speaks the Balance,
And World truth
Sounds forth in spirit heights.

Blessed is he who in earthly life
Unto the poor gave bread!
For nothing of harm can come to him
From the hounds of spiritland.

Thus speaks the Balance,
And World truth
Sounds forth in spirit heights.

Blessed is he who in earthly life
Gave corn unto the poor!
The horns of the bull are no threat to him
When he crosses the Gjallar Bridge.

Thus speaks the Balance,
And World truth
Sounds forth in spirit heights.

Blessed is he who in earthly life
Unto the poor gives clothes!
He need not fear the freezing wastes
Of ice in Brooksvalin.

Thus speaks the Balance,
And World truth
Sounds forth in spirit heights.

VI

And young and old they all gave heed,
To Olaf's words they harkened
That told them of his dreams.
You have slept long indeed. . . .
Awaken now, O Olaf Åsteson!

My dear friends, we have just heard how Olaf Åsteson fell into a sleep that was to reveal to him the secrets of worlds that are hidden from the world of the senses and ordinary life on the physical plane. This legend brings us tidings of ancient knowledge and insight into the spiritual worlds, which we shall regain once more through what We call the spiritual-scientific world outlook.

You have often heard the words that are included in all proclamations concerning the human soul's entry into the spiritual world, namely, that man beholds the spiritual world only when he experiences the gates of death and then enters into the elements. This means that the elements of earth existence do not surround him in the way they do in ordinary life on the physical plane, in the form of earth, water, air and fire, but that he is lifted above this sensory exterior of the elements and enters into what these elements really are when you know their true nature, where beings exist that have a relationship with man's soul experience.

We could feel that Olaf Asteson experienced something of this descent into the elements when we come to the part where Olaf reaches the Gjallar Bridge and crosses over it on to the paths of the spiritual world that all led far away. What a vivid description we are given of his experience as he descends into the element of earth. It is described in such detail that he tells us he himself feels earth in his mouth like the dead who lie in their graves. And then there is a clear indication of his going through the element of water, and of all that can be experienced in the watery element when one also experiences its moral quality. Then he also indicates how man meets with the elements of fire and of air.

All this is described in a wonderfully graphic way and centred in the experience of the human soul meeting the secrets of the spiritual world. The legend was found at a later date; it was collected at the place where it lived orally among the people. Parts of the legend in their present form are no longer the same as in the original. No doubt the graphic description of the experiences in the earth realm originally came first and then the experiences in the realm of water. And the experiences in the realms of air and of fire were no doubt far more differentiated than they are in the feeble after-echo that we have today, and which was found centuries later.

The conclusion was undoubtedly also much more impressive and less sentimental, for in its present form it does not in the least remind us of the sublime language of olden times, nor of the capacity to raise one on to a superhuman plane that used to exist in folk legends. The present conclusion merely moves on on a human level, and the reason why it is moving is purely because of its connection with such deep secrets of the macrocosm and of human experience.

If we rightly understand the season of the year in which we now are, we have a strong urge to remember the fact that humanity used to possess a knowledge—even if it was less defined and clear-cut—that has been lost and which has to be regained. And the question can arise in us, that as we surely recognise today that that particular kind of knowledge has to return if mankind is to be made whole, then should we not consider it one of our most urgent tasks to do everything we can to bring knowledge like that into the culture of the present?

Many things will have to happen in order for this change to come about in the right way, in what I would like to call the feeling content of man's world conception. One thing will be particularly necessary—I say one, for it is one among many, but you can only take one at a time—it will be essential for human souls to acquire on the basis of our spiritual-scientific world conceptual stream, reverence and devotion for what was known in ancient times in the old manner about the deep secrets of existence. People must arrive at the feeling that during the materialistic age they have neglected the development of this reverence and devotion.

We must get the feeling of how dried-out and empty this materialistic age is, and how proud of our intellectual knowledge mankind was in the first centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, in face of the revelations of ancient religion and knowledge handed down from former times, which, when approached with the necessary reverence, truly give us the feeling that they contain the most profound wisdom. Fundamentally speaking we have no reverence for the Bible nowadays, either! Disregarding the kind of atrocious modern research that tears the whole Bible to shreds, we have merely to look at the dry and empty way we approach the Bible today armed, as it were, only with the knowledge of the senses and ordinary intellectual powers, and at the way we can no longer muster a feeling for the tremendous greatness of human perception that comes to meet us in some of its passages. I would like to refer to a passage from the second Book of Moses, chapter 33, verse 18:

And Moses said to God, ‘I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.’

And the Lord said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy.’

But then the Lord said, ‘Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.’

And the Lord said, ‘Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock:

And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I shall put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:

And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.’

If you gather together various things we have taken up in our hearts and souls during the years we have been working with spiritual science and then approach this passage, you can have the feeling that infinite wisdom is speaking to us there and how, in the materialistic age, human ears are so deaf that they hear nothing of the infinitely deep wisdom that comes to us from this passage. I would like to take this opportunity to refer you to a booklet that has been published under the title Worte Mosis by Bruns Publishing Co. in Minden, Westphalia, because certain things out of the five Books of Moses have been translated better in this booklet than in other editions. Dr. Hugo Bergmann, the publisher of Worte Mosis, has taken a lot of trouble over the interpretation.

The fact that man, if he wants to penetrate to the spiritual world, has to acquire a totally different relation to the world than that which he has to the sense world, has often been stressed. Man has the sense world all about him. He looks at the sense world and sees it in its colours and forms and hears its sounds. The sense world is there, and we are in the midst of it, feeling its influence, perceiving it and thinking about it. That is how we relate to the sense world. We are passive and the sense world, as it were, works its way into our souls. We think about the sense world and make mental images of it.

Our relationship is quite different when we penetrate into the spiritual world. One of the difficulties consists in getting the right idea of what a person experiences when he enters the spiritual world. I have attempted to characterise some of these difficulties in my booklet Die Schwelle der geistigen Welt (‘The Threshold of the Spiritual World’). We make mental images of the sense world and we think about it. If we go through all a person has to go through if he wants to follow the path of initiation, something occurs that can be described like this: We ourselves relate to the beings of the higher hierarchies in the same way as the things around us relate to us; they make a mental image of us, they think us. We think the objects around us, the minerals, plants and animals; they become our thoughts, whereas we are the conceptions, thoughts and perceptions of the spirits of the higher hierarchies. We become the thoughts of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on. They take us in, in the same way as we take in the plants, animals and human beings. And we must feel their sheltering protection when we say, ‘The beings of the higher hierarchies think us, they make mental images of us. These beings of the higher hierarchies take hold of us with their souls’. In fact we can actually picture that when Olaf Asteson fell asleep he became a mental image of the spirits of the higher hierarchies, and in the course of his sleep these beings of the higher hierarchies experienced what the beings of the earth spirit were experiencing (these are, of course, a plurality for us). And when Olaf Asteson sinks back into the physical world he remembers what the spirits of the higher hierarchies experienced in him.

Let us imagine for a moment that we are setting out on the path of initiation. How can we relate to the spiritual world, which is a host of spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, into which we wish to enter? How can we relate to them? We can appeal to them and say ‘How can we enter into you, how do you reveal yourselves to us?’ And then, when we have acquired an understanding of the different kind of relationship the human soul has to the higher worlds, there will sound forth to us, as it were from the spiritual worlds, ‘You cannot perceive the spiritual world the same way as you perceive the sense world, the way the sense world appears before you and impinges on your senses. We must think you, and you must feel yourself in us. You must feel the kind of experience in you which a thought you think in the sense world would have if it could experience itself within you. You must surrender yourself to the spiritual world, then the beings of the higher hierarchies who can reveal themselves to you will enter into you. This will stream into your soul and live within it, bringing grace, in the same way as you live in your thoughts when you think about the sense world. If the spiritual world wishes to favour you and have compassion on you, it will fill you with its love!’

But you must not imagine that you can approach spiritual beings in the same way as you approach the sense world. Just as Moses had to creep into the cave, you must go into the cave of the spiritual world. You have to put yourself there. Like a thought lives in you, you must be taken up into the life of the spiritual beings. You yourself must live as a universal thought in the macrocosm. To have experiences there of your own accord is not possible during earthly life between birth and death, but only after you have passed through death. No one can experience the spiritual world in this way before he has died, yet the spiritual world can come close to you, bless you and fill you with its love. And if after, or whilst you are within the spiritual world, you develop your earthly consciousness, the spiritual world will shine into this consciousness.

Just as when an object is outside us we confront it, and when it enters our consciousness it is inside us, the soul of man is within the cave of the spiritual world. The spiritual world passes through him. Here, man confronts things. When man enters the spiritual world the beings of the higher hierarchies are behind him. There, he cannot see their face, just as a thought cannot see our face when it is within us. Our face is in front and the thoughts are behind, so they cannot see our face. The whole secret of initiation is concealed in the words Jehovah speaks to Moses.

And Moses said to God, ‘I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.’

And the Lord said, ‘I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy.’

But then the Lord said, ‘Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me, and live.’—Initiation does indeed bring you to the Gate of Death.

And the Lord said, ‘Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock:

And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I shall put thee in a cleft of rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:

And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.’

It is the opposite of the way we perceive the sense world. You must muster a lot of the spiritual-scientific effort you have developed over the years, in order to encounter a revelation like this with the right kind of reverence and devotion. Then human souls will gradually acquire more and more of this feeling of reverence towards these revelations; and this reverence, this devotion, is among the many things we need in order that the change we have been speaking of can come about in mankind's spiritual culture.

The time when the macrocosm sends down least influence to the earth, the days from Christmas over New Year until roughly the 6th of January, can be a suitable time not only for remembering the facts of spiritual knowledge, but also for remembering the feelings we have to develop as we take up spiritual science. We are really and truly taken up again into the life of the spirit of the earth, together with whom we form a whole, and in which ancient clairvoyant knowledge lived, as this legend of Olaf Åsteson shows us. Humanity in the materialistic age has in many ways lost this reverence and devotion for spiritual life. It is most essential to see to it that this reverence and devotion come back, for without them we shall not develop the mood to approach spiritual science in the right way. Unfortunately the mood with which spiritual science is spproached to start with is still the same mood we have for ordinary science. A thorough change will have to come about in this respect.

Having lost the understanding for the spiritual world, mankind has also lost the proper relation to the being of man, to humanity. The materialistic world conception produces chaotic feelings about universal existence. These chaotic feelings about the world and humanity were bound to come in the age of materialism. Think of a time—and this is our time, the first centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch—when people no longer had any real awareness that the being of man is threefold: a bodily nature, soul and spirit. For it really is like that. The threefold nature of man, which, to us, is one of the basic elements of spiritual science, was something that people did not have the slightest notion of from the first four centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch right into our time. Man was just man, and any talk of membering his being in the way we do into body, soul and spirit was considered complete nonsense.

You might imagine that these things are valuable only in the sphere of knowledge, but that is not so. They are important not only as knowledge, but for the whole manner in which man faces life. In the fourth century of modern times, or, as we say in our language, during the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period, three great words came to the fore in which people saw, or at least endeavoured to see, the essence of human striving on earth. Important though these words are, what made them significant was the fact that they appeared at a time when mankind knew nothing of the threefold nature of man. Everyone heard of liberty, equality and fraternity.

It was a profound necessity that these words were heard at a certain time in modern civilisation. People will only really understand these words when the threefold membering of the human being is understood, because until then they will not realise the significance these words can have with regard to man's real being. Whilst these words are being approached with the sort of chaotic feelings that are engendered by the thought that man is man, and the threefold membering of man is nonsense, human beings will find no guidance in these three words. For the three words, as they stand, cannot be directly applied to one and the same level of human experience. They cannot be. Simple considerations which do not perhaps occur to you because they seem too simple for such weighty matters, can go to show that if they are taken on the same level, what these three words mean can come into serious conflict.

Let us start by looking at the realm where we find fraternity in its most natural form. Take human blood relationship, the family, where there is no need to instil brotherly love because it is inborn, and just think how it warms the heart to see real genuine brotherhood among a family, to see everyone united in a brotherly way. And yet—without losing any of the wonderful feeling we can have about this brotherly love—let us have a look at what can happen to a family fraternity just because of this brotherliness. Brotherliness is justified within a family, yet a member of a family can be made unhappy by it, and can long to get away from it because he feels he cannot develop his own soul within the family fraternity and must leave it in order to develop in freedom. So we see that freedom, the unfolding in freedom of the life of the soul, can come into conflict with even the best-meant brotherliness.

Obviously a superficial person could maintain that it is not proper brotherliness if it does not agree with a person's freedom. But people can say anything they like. No doubt they can say that everything agrees with everything else. I recently saw a thesis in which one of the articles that had to be proved was that a triangle is a quadrangle. You can of course plead for a thing like that, you can even prove exactly that a triangle is a quadrangle! And you can also fully prove that fraternity and freedom are compatible. But that is not the point. The point is that for the sake of freedom many a realm of brotherliness has to be—and in fact is—forsaken. We could give further examples of this.

If we wanted to count up the discrepancies between fraternity and equality it would take us a long time. Obviously we can say in abstracto that everyone can be equal, and can show that fraternity and equality are compatible. But if we take life seriously it is not a question of abstractions but of looking at reality. The moment we realise that the human being has a bodily nature that lives on the physical plane, a soul nature that actually lives in the soul world, and a spiritual nature that lives in the spiritual world, we have the right perspective for the connection between these profound words. Brotherliness is the most important ideal for the physical world, freedom is for the soul world, and insofar as man enters into the realm of the soul we ought to speak of the freedom of the soul, that is, of the kind of social conditions that fully guarantee the soul its freedom. If we bear in mind that in order to develop the spirit and enter spirit land we, that is, each one of us, has to strive for spirit knowledge from our own point of view, we shall soon see where we would get with our spiritual conceptions if each one of us only went his own way and we all filled ourselves with a different content.

As human beings we can only find one another in life if we seek the spirit, each one for himself, yet can arrive at the same spiritual content. We can speak of the equality of spiritual life. We can speak of fraternity on the physical plane and with regard to everything that has to do with the laws of the physical plane and which affects the human soul from the physical plane; liberty with regard to all that comes to expression in the soul in the way of laws of the soul world; equality with regard to everything that comes to expression in the soul in the way of laws of the spirit land.

So you see, a Cosmic New Year must come about, where there will be a sun that will increase in power to give warmth and to radiate light: a sun that must bring light-filled warmth to many a thing that lived on during the age of darkness, yet was not understood. It is characteristic of our time that many a thing is striven for and expressed in words, yet is not understood.

This, too, can bring us to feel reverence and devotion for the spiritual world. For if we ponder on the fact that many people strove for fraternity, liberty and equality in the fourth century of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and uttered these words without understanding them properly, it is possible for us to see an answer to the question, ‘Where did these words come from?’ The divine-spiritual universal order implanted them into the human soul at a time when we did not understand them, in order that key words of this kind might lead us on to true universal understanding. We can notice the wise guidance in world evolution even in things like this. We can observe this guidance everywhere, whether in past ages or in more recent times, observing that often we do not notice until afterwards that something we did previously was actually wiser than the wisdom we had at our command at the time. I drew attention to this at the very beginning of my book, The Spiritual Guidance of Man.

However, if you look, for instance, at the fact that in world evolution, in the evolution of man, a part is played by directional words that can only gradually be understood, you might be reminded of an image we can use when we want to characterise this period of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch that is drawing to a close. In many respects it can really be compared with the season of Advent where the periods of daylight grow shorter and shorter. And now in our time, when we can begin to have knowledge of revelations of the spiritual worlds again, evolution is entering the phase that we can picture as the days growing longer and longer, and we can speak of this season really being comparable to the thirteen days and to the time of increasing daylight.

But it goes deeper than this. It would be absolutely wrong if we were only to find bad things to say of the materialistic age of the past four centuries. Modern times were ushered in by the great discoveries and inventions that are called ‘great’ in the materialistic age, sailing round the world, for instance, discovering lands that were not previously known and starting to colonise the earth. That was the beginning of materialistic civilisation. And then the time gradually came when people were almost stifled by materialistic civilisation. The time arrived when all our spiritual forces were applied to understanding and grasping material life. Insights, understanding and visions of the spiritual world existing in ancient knowledge were forgotten more and more, as we have seen.

Yet it is wrong to have nothing but bad things to say about this age. It would be far better to put it this way: ‘The human soul has been thinking materialistically and founding a materialistic science and culture in the part of it that is awake, but this human soul is a totality.’ If I wanted to put it schematically I could say that one part of the human soul founded materialistic civilisation. This part was inactive before that, and people knew nothing about external science and outer material life; at that time the spiritual part was more awake. (He did a drawing.) During the past four centuries the part of the soul was awake that founded materialistic civilisation, and the other part was asleep. And, in truth, during the age of materialistic culture, the seeds were being sown in the sleeping parts of the soul for the forces we can now develop in humanity to bring us to spirituality again. During these centuries mankind was really an Olaf Asteson as far as spiritual knowledge was concerned. That really was so. And humanity has not yet woken up! Spiritual science must awaken it. A time must come when both old and young must hear the words that are being spoken by the part of the human soul that was asleep in the age of darkness.

The human soul has slept long indeed, but world spirits will approach and call to it, ‘Awaken now, O Olaf Asteson!’—Only we have to prepare ourselves in the right way, so that it does not happen that we are faced with the call, ‘Awaken now, O Olaf Åsteson!’ and have not the ears to hear it. That is why we are engaged in spiritual science, so that we shall have the ears to hear, when the call to be spiritually awake sounds in human evolution.

It is a good thing if man remembers sometimes that he is a microcosm and that he can be receptive to certain experiences if he opens himself to the macrocosm. As we have seen, the present season is a good one. Let us try to make this New Year's Eve a symbol for the New Year's Eve that has to come to mankind in earth evolution, a New Year's Eve that will herald a new era bringing ever more light, soul light, vision, knowledge of what lives in the spirit and which can stream and flow into the human soul from out of the spirit. If we can bring the microcosm of our experience on this New Year's Eve into connection with the macrocosm of human experience over the whole earth, we shall then have the kind of feelings we ought to experience, sensing as we do the dawning of the great new Cosmic Day of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, at whose beginning we stand, and the midnight of which we want to understand worthily.

The Dream Song: Draumkvaedet, see collection Norske Folkeviser, edited by Thorwald Lammers, Kristiania 1910, by Aschehoug & Co.

Rudolf Steiner spoke about the Norwegian Dream Song of Olaf Asteson on 1st January 1912, 7th January 1913 and 31st December 1914, and his talks were always accompanied by Marie Steiner-von Sivers reciting the Dream Song. These three lectures or addresses were put together as a volume and published in 1958 as an enlarged new edition of the lecture ‘Cosmic New Year’. Ingeborg Möller-Lindholm, the Norwegian poetess (1878–1964), drew Rudolf Steiner's attention to the old legend, and it is largely due to her initiative that this extraordinary folk epic has acquired such an important place in the anthroposophical movement. Through her help we are in a position to include in this edition the notes she made of her conversation with Rudolf Steiner. We have also included in the references, several points from a lecture Ingeborg Möller-Lindholm gave on the Dream Song of Olaf Asteson, which she kindly put at our disposal in translation, and which we have attributed accordingly.

---

Notes on the Dream Song by IngeborgMöller-Lindholm of Lillehammer

In June 1910 Dr Steiner held a cycle of lectures in Oslo entitled The Mission of the Individual Folk Souls in Relation to Teutonic Mythology. As I lived in Oslo and had a large room at my disposal, I invited to tea about forty anthroposophical friends who had come to Oslo for this occasion. Dr Steiner and Frau Marie Steiner had also agreed to come. I asked Dr Steiner the previous day whether he could tell us something about the unusual Norwegian folk epic, ‘The Dream Song of Olaf Åsteson’. Rudolf Steiner smiled amiably and said he would first have to have read or heard it. I saw the point of this. Then he himself made the suggestion that he should arrive the next day an hour before the other guests, so that I could read the song to him and make a rough translation. And that is what happened.

While I read it to him, Dr Steiner sat with his eyes closed and listened intently. He was obviously deeply affected by the unusual content of the song. After tea the Dream Song was read out in Norwegian by a member of the Society, whereupon Dr Steiner gave a short but moving lecture on the song. In particular he dwelt on the fact that these events took place during the time of the twelve holy nights when extraterrestrial influences are at their strongest. He also gave special mention to the name of Olaf Asteson. Olaf or Olcifr means the ‘one left behind’ after his predecessors have gone. He is the one who passes on the blood of the father of the generations. Ast means love; so he is ‘the Son of Love’.

Dr Steiner asked me to translate the song into German. He himself did not know Norwegian, let alone the old dialect in which the Dream Song had been written down, and which was difficult even for modern Norwegians. To begin with I made the excuse that I did not have a sufficient command of the German language to convey the wonderful musical rhythm. Dr Steiner said that did not matter, I should just translate the song literally word for word, so that he could get an exact picture of the content. I did this in the course of the autumn and sent him the translation, which was very prosaic and in many respects extremely inadequate. Later on Rudolf Steiner put the song into its own characteristic rhythms and gave several lectures on it. It was also used for eurythmic presentation, especially at Christmas time.

Dr Steiner told me in 1913 that I should not think that Olaf the Saint was the original Olaf Åsteson. (St. Olaf, a Norwegian king, died in 1035 at the battle of Stiklestad, championing the cause of Christendom.) There had been several people with the name of ‘Olaf Åsteson’, said Dr Steiner. It was a kind of mystery title.

Dr Steiner was in Norway again after the First World War, in 1921 and 1923. On these occasions he stayed with engineer Ingero. Mrs Ragnhild Ingero, who died a few years ago, told me that Dr Steiner had talked to her about the Dream Song. He had meanwhile gone into it further and discovered new things. One of these was that the song was much older than people believed. It originated about 400 AD. At that time there was a great Christian initiate in this country. He founded a mystery school in Southern Norway; the place was not mentioned. His mystery name was Olaf Asteson, and the song describes his initiation. Originally, so Dr Steiner says, the song was much longer and had twelve sections, one for each sign of the zodiac. The song describes Olaf Asteson's journey through the whole zodiac and what he saw and experienced there. Today we only have fragments of the original song. The aforesaid mystery school continued into the early Middle Ages. The leader was always called Olaf Åsteson

Dr Steiner said that in course of time he would publish these facts and other important things connected with the song. However he did not want to do this until he had found certain external proofs of his findings. He thought he would be able to find these . But the burning of the Goetheanum, excessive work and finally illness and death prevented this intention being realised. Now these indications are all we have.

I have given much thought to these findings of Dr Steiner's and have come to the conclusion that this mystery school was possibly in Skiringssal. This place is or rather was in Vestfold, a region in south-western Norway. In old legends it has always been described as a holy place. Vikings who died on foreign soil wished to be buried in Skiringssal. There was also a kaupang there (market). Archaeologists are excavating things at present which they assume to be remains of this market. Up to now, though, nobody has been able to prove conclusively where Skiringssal is. At the time of the mystery school it lay on the coast; however loam deposits have now ‘pushed’ the place further inland. Skiringssal means ‘The Hall of Purification’. Skim means baptism or purification (old Norwegian)

Where did the first Olaf Asteson come from? It has been historically proved that Irish-Scottish monks were in this country long before Christianity was officially introduced. According to legend, Joseph of Arimathea came to the British Isles as early as the first century AD, and began his missionary work there. There have been mystery centres in Ireland since very early times. The tribes on the neighbouring islands were heathen. The Irish-Scottish Church, also called the Culdee Church, arose as a result of the confluence of the work of the Christian missionaries and ancient Druid wisdom. It flourished in many places as early as 300 to 400 AD. There were churches, schools and monasteries, despite the fact that these were always under attack from powerful heathen tribes of the neighbourhood. Many priests and monks died a martyr's death. This Culdee Church was based in particular on the Gospel of St. John and the preaching of the apostle John. It was like the first communities of Christians and contrasted strongly with the Petrine or Roman Catholic Church. But the latter was victorious. The Culdee Church was destroyed and dissolved in the year 664 AD. It sent a lot of missionaries to various European countries both before and after being externally destroyed. This Church was definitely of an esoteric nature. Many things suggest that the first Olaf Asteson was a representative of this spiritual stream.

‘Among these Norwegian people, who still possess many things in their popular tongue that approach very closely the threshold of occult secrets, possibilities existed for souls to remain connected longer with everything living and working behind outer material phenomena,’ said Rudolf Steiner in his lecture on Olaf Asteson in Berlin on 7th January 1913, in Der Zusammenhang des Menschen mit der elementarischen Welt (Man's Connection with the Elemental World), GA 158, 1970.

Introduction

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In 1923 Rudolf Steiner gave a series of lectures at a Summer School in Penmaenmawr, which have since been published under the title The Evolution of Consciousness. These lectures formed the main event of the School, but there were other activities as well. Steiner had brought with him a group of Eurythmists and a performance was arranged in spite of the inadequacy of the stage and its equipment. On the day before the performance he gave the introduction to this new art of movement, which appears in the following pages.

Eurythmy differs from other arts of movement in that it is an interpretation of speech as well as of music. Steiner here deals principally with the interpretation of speech, perhaps because he considered that his audience would be most interested in this aspect of Eurythmy. But he always regarded it as essential that in a performance there should be the interpretation of speech as well as of music.

The performance at Penmaenmawr was followed by others in London, and gradually sufficient interest was aroused to promote the building of a small theatre to be dedicated to the development of Eurythmy, the Rudolf Steiner Hall, in Park Road, Baker Street, now the location of the London School of Eurythmy.

Steiner would have been profoundly happy to see the development of this new art since his death. Performances at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, now include the interpretation of whole symphonies, in which different Eurythmists, or groups of Eurythmists, interpret the parts of the different instruments. On that great stage, with its superb lighting, Eurythmy can be seen in its highest development. But there are flourishing Schools of Eurythmy in other centres as well, and recently a Congress of Eurythmists held at the Goetheanum was attended by over six hundred Eurythmists from every part of the world. Eurythmy also plays a vital part in the Rudolf Steiner Schools and Curative Homes which have been established in nearly all European countries, as well as in the Americas and the Southern hemisphere. But Steiner always emphasised (as he does in the Introduction) that educational and curative Eurythmy cannot exist without the establishment of Eurythmy as an art in its own right, just as painting, sculpture and music exist as arts in their own right, although they may be used educationally in schools and institutions.

This Introduction anticipates some of the difficulties which the newcomer may experience with an art of movement based on new and profound considerations as to the nature of man. It gives a comprehensive picture of the whole field of Eurythmy and of the need for such an art in the modern world.

A. C. Harwood, 1967

Eurhythmy has grown up out of the soil of the Anthroposophical Movement, and the history of its origin makes it almost appear to be a gift of the forces of destiny. In the year 1912 the Anthroposophical Society lost one of its members, the father of a family, and as a result it was necessary for his daughter to choose a profession, a profession, however, which could be found within the field of Anthroposophical activity. After much thought it seemed possible to make this the opportunity for the inauguration of a new art of movement in space, different from anything which had arisen up to that time.

And thus, out of the teaching given to this young girl, there arose the very first principles and movements of Eurythmy.

Eurythmy must be accounted one of the many activities arising out of the Anthroposophical Movement, which have grown up in such a way that their first beginnings must be looked upon as the result of the workings of destiny. I spoke some days ago about the forms of the pillars of the Goetheanum, and mentioned how I had stood before these pillars, and realised that through artistic activity they had gained a life of their own, and had developed quite different qualities from those with which they had originally been endowed. The same may be said about the art of Eurythmy.

This is always the case when one draws upon the creative forces of nature, either in one's work as an artist or in any other form of human activity. Just as the creative forces of nature draw upon the inexhaustible source of the infinite, so that it is always possible to perceive in something which has come to fruition much more than was originally implanted in it, so is it also when artistic impulses unite themselves with the mighty creative forces of nature. In such a case the artist is not merely developing some more or less limited impulse, but he reaches the point when he makes of himself an instrument for the creative powers of the universe, so that very much more grows out of his activity than he could originally have intended or foreseen.

At the time of which I speak, Eurythmy was studied only by a very few people. At the beginning of the war, (the first world war) Frau Dr. Steiner undertook their further training, and from that time on Eurythmy became more and more widely known, and its artistic possibilities very much enriched. The art of Eurythmy, as we know it today, has developed out of the first principles which were given in the year 1912. The work since then has been carried on without interruption; but Eurythmy is still only in its first beginnings, and we are working unceasingly towards its further development and perfection.

I am, however, convinced that Eurythmy bears within it infinite possibilities, and that, in the future, when those who were responsible for its inauguration must long have left their work in other hands, Eurythmy will develop further until it is able to take its place as a younger art by the side of those other arts having an older tradition.

No art has ever risen out of human intention intellectually conceived, neither can the principle of imitating nature ever produce an art. On the contrary, true art has always been born out of human hearts able to open themselves to the impulses coming from the spiritual world, human hearts which felt compelled to realise these impulses and to embody them in some way in external matter.

It can be seen how, in the case of each separate art—architecture, for example, sculpture, painting or music—certain spiritual impulses were poured into humanity from higher worlds. These impulses were taken up by certain individuals specially fitted to receive them, and in this way, through human activity, pictures of the higher worlds were reflected in the physical world; and the various arts came into being.

It is true that the arts, in the course of their further development, have for the most part become naturalistic, and have lost their connection with the impulses which originally inspired them, a mere imitation of external nature taking their place. Such imitation, however, could never be the source of any true art.

To-day, when a sculptor or painter wishes to represent the human figure, he does so by studying and working from a model. It can, however, easily be shown that the art of sculpture, which reached its zenith during the civilisation of ancient Greece, did not arise through the artist working from a model, and in his way more or less imitating the external impressions of the senses, but at that time, when the plastic art of Greece was in full bloom, man was still to some extent aware of the etheric body—which contains within it the formative forces and the forces of growth. At the height of Greek civilisation man knew how to make use of the etheric body when bringing an arm or hand, for instance, into a certain attitude, and the position and arrangement of the muscles were an actual experience to him. He had an inner understanding of the possibilities of movement in the arm and hand, of the possibilities of muscular expansion and contraction. And he was able to bring this inner experience to physical expression, making use of physical materials.

Thus the Greek sculptor incorporated into matter a real, inward experience, not merely the external impression of the eye. He did not say to himself: the lines go in this or that direction, and then proceed to embody in plastic form the perceptions of his physical senses; but for him it was indeed an actual inward experience which he re-created out of the creative forces of nature, and entrusted to external physical matter.

This is true of every form of art. There have always been, and will always be, in the course of human evolution on the earth, epochs during which art is at its height, during which influences from the spiritual worlds penetrate more easily into the souls of men than at other times, urging them to turn their gaze towards the spiritual worlds and to carry down from thence living spiritual impulses. This is how every true art is brought to birth.

Such periods of civilisation are always followed by others of a more naturalistic tendency, in which certain arts often attain to a greater external perfection than they had possessed at an earlier stage; but this perfection bears within it traces of decadence, whereas in their beginnings, these arts were permeated with a more vital, a more powerful and enthusiastic spiritual impulse. At that earlier stage they had not yet lost their true reality; their technique was the outcome of man's whole being. It was not a merely external, traditional technique, but was based on the body, soul, and spirit of man.

The realisation of this fact of human evolution might well give one courage to develop ever further and further this art of Eurythmy, which has been borne on the wings of fate into the Anthroposophical Movement. For it is the task of the Anthroposophical Movement to reveal to our present age that spiritual impulse which is suited to it.

I speak in all humility when I say that within the Anthroposophical Movement there is a firm conviction that a spiritual impulse of this kind must now, at the present time, enter once more into human evolution. And this spiritual impulse must perforce, among its other means of expression, embody itself in a new form of art. It will increasingly be realised that this particular form of art has been given to the world in Eurythmy.

It is the task of Anthroposophy to bring a greater depth, a wider vision and a more living spirit into the other forms of art. But the art of Eurythmy could only grow up out of the soul of Anthroposophy; could only receive its inspiration through a purely Anthroposophical conception.

It is through speech that man is able to reveal his inner being outwardly to his fellow-men. Through speech he can most easily disclose his inmost nature.

At all periods of civilisation, in a form suited to the particular epoch, side by side with those arts which need for their expression either the external element of space or the external element of time, accompanying and completing these, we find that art which manifests itself through speech—the art of poetry.

The art of speech—I purposely use the expression ‘the art of speech,’ to describe poetry, and the justification for doing so will appear later—is more comprehensive and universal than the other arts, for it can embody other forms of art within its own form. It can be said that the art of poetry is an art of speech which in the case of one poet works more plastically, and in the case of another more musically. Indeed one can go so far as to say that painting itself can enter into the art of poetry.

Speech is a universal means of expression for the human soul. And one who is able to gaze with unprejudiced vision into the earliest times of human evolution on the earth, can see that in certain primeval languages a really fundamental artistic element entered into human evolution. Such primeval languages were, however, to a far greater degree than is the case with modern languages, drawn out of the whole human organisation.

When one investigates without prejudice the course of the evolution of man, one discovers certain ancient languages which might almost be likened to song. Such singing was, however, enhanced by accompanying movements of the legs and arms, so that a kind of dancing was added. Especially was this the case when a dignified form of expression was sought, the form of some ritual or cult.

In those primeval times of human evolution the accompanying of the word which issued forth from the larynx with gesture and movement was felt to be something absolutely natural. It is only possible to gain a true understanding of what lies behind these things, when one realises that what otherwise appears only as gesture accompanying speech can gain for itself independent life. It will then become apparent that movements which are carried out by the arms and hands, from the artistic point of view can be not merely equally expressive, but much more expressive than speech itself.

It must be admitted that such an unprejudiced attitude with regard to these things is not always to be found. One often observes a certain antipathy towards the accompanying of speech by gesture. Indeed, I myself have noticed that certain people even go so far as to consider it not in very good taste when a speaker accompanies his discourse with pronounced gesture. As a result of this the habit has grown up, and is by no means unusual at the present day, of putting one's hands in one's pockets when making a speech. I must say that I have always found this attitude most unsympathetic.

It is a fact that the inmost nature of the human being can be revealed most wonderfully through movements of the arms and hands. My fingers often itch to take up my pen and write an essay on the philosopher, Franz Brentano, a dear friend of mine who died some years ago. I have already written a good deal about him, but I should much like to write yet another essay, based on what I shall now relate.

When Franz Brentano mounted the platform and took his place at the lecturer's desk he was himself the embodiment of his entire philosophy, the spiritual content of which called forth such deep admiration when clothed in philosophical terms and concepts.

Brentano's philosophy, in itself, was far more beautiful than his own description of it. All that he could say in words was revealed through the way in which he moved his arms and hands while speaking, through the way in which he held out the piece of paper containing the notes of his lecture. It was a very remarkable type of movement, and its most striking characteristic was, that by means of this piece of paper, and, indeed, by his whole attitude, he gave the impression of imparting something of great significance, while at the same time preserving an appearance of unconcern. So that in the course of one of his lectures one could see his entire philosophy expressed in these gestures, which were of the most manifold variety.

What is especially interesting about Franz Brentano is the fact that he founded a psychology in which he departs from the theories of all other psychologists, Spencer, Stuart Mill and others, by refusing to include the will among the psychological categories. I am acquainted with all that Franz Brentano brought forward to substantiate this theory of his, but I found nothing so convincing as the way in which he held his piece of paper. The instant he began to make gestures with his hands and arms, all trace of will disappeared from his whole bearing as a philosopher, while feeling and idea revealed themselves in the most remarkable manner. This preponderance of idea and feeling, and the disappearance of will, underlay every movement which he made with his hands. So that one day I shall really find myself compelled to write an essay: The Philosophy of Franz Brentano, as revealed through his Gesture and Bearing. For it seems to me that much more was expressed in these gestures than in any philosophical discourse on the subject.

Those who enter deeply and without prejudice into this matter will gradually realise that the breath which we expel from our lungs, our organs of speech and song, when vocalised and given form by means of the lips, teeth and palate, is really nothing else than gesture in the air. Only in this case these air-gestures are projected into space in such a way that they conjure up sounds which can be heard by the ear.

If one succeeds, with true sensible-super-sensible vision, in penetrating into the nature of these air gestures, into all that the human being actually does when he utters a vowel or consonant sound, when he forms sentences, uses rhyme and rhythm, the Iambic, for instance, or the Trochee—when one penetrates into these gestures of the air, the thought arises; alas, the languages of modern civilisation have indeed made terrible concessions to convention. They have become simply a means of expression for scientific knowledge, a means of communicating the things of everyday life. They have lost their primeval spirituality.

Civilised language bears out what has been so beautifully expressed by the poet: “Spricht die Seele, so spricht ach schon die Seele nicht mehr.” (“Alas, when the soul speaks, in reality it speaks no more.”)

Now all that can be perceived by super-sensible vision, all that can thus be learned about the nature of these forms and gestures of the air, can be carried into movements of the arms and hands, into movements of the whole human being. There then arises in visible form the actual counterpart of speech. One can use the entire human body in such a way that it really carries out those movements which are otherwise carried out by the organs connected with speech and music. Thus there arises visible speech, visible music—in other words, the art of Eurythmy.

When one brings artistic feeling to the study of the nature of speech, one finds that the individual sounds form themselves, as it were, into imaginative pictures. It is necessary, however, entirely to free oneself from the abstract character which language has taken during the so-called advanced civilisation of the present day. For it is an undeniable fact that modern man, when speaking, in no way brings his whole human being into activity.

True speech, however, is born from the whole human being. Let us take any one of the vowels. A vowel sound is always the expression of some aspect of the feeling life of the soul. The human being wishes to express what lives in his soul as wonder—Ah. Or the holding himself upright against opposition—A; or the assertion of self, the consciousness of ego-existence in the world—E. Or again he wishes to express wonder, but now with a more intimate, caressing shade of feeling—I.

The character of the sounds is of course slightly different in the different languages, because each individual language proceeds from a differently constituted soul-life. But every vowel sound does in its essence express some shade of the feeling-life of the soul; and this feeling only has to unite itself with thought, with the head system, in order to pass over into speech.

What I have said about the vowel sounds of speech can be applied equally to the tones of music. The various sounds of speech, the use of idiom, the construction of phrases and sentences—all these things are the expression of the feeling-life of the soul.

In singing also the soul life expresses itself through tone.

Let us now consider the consonants. The consonants are the imitation of what we find around us in external nature. The vowel is born out of man's inmost being; it is the channel through which this inner content of the soul streams outwards. The consonant is born out of the comprehension of external nature; the way in which we seize upon external things, even the way in which we perceive them with the eyes, all this is built into the form of the consonants. The consonant represents, paints, as it were, the things of the external world. In earlier times the consonants did actually contain within themselves a kind of imaginative, painting of what exists in external nature.

Such things are, certainly, dealt with by many students of the science of language, but always in a one-sided manner. For instance, there exist two well-known theories with regard to the origin of language—the Ding-Dong theory and the Bow-Wow theory—which have been set forth by investigators who are, as a matter of fact, absolutely lacking in any real understanding of their subject, but belong to that type of person who is constantly originating all sorts of scientific theories. The Ding-Dong theory is based upon the assumption that, as in the case of the bell—to take an extreme example—so within every external object there lies some sort of a sound, which is then imitated by the human being. Everything is included in this theory of imitation; and it has been named the Ding-Dong theory after the sound made by the bell, which is perhaps its most striking example. The idea is, that when one says the word “wave,” one is imitating the actual movement of the waves—which is, indeed, perfectly true in this instance.

The other theory, the Bow-Wow theory, which could equally well be called the Moo-Moo theory, is one which assumes that speech in the first place arose from the transformation and development of the sounds of animals. And because one of the most striking of these sounds is “Bow-Wow,” this theory has been called the Bow-Wow theory.

Now all these theories do actually contain a certain element of truth. Scientific theories are never without some foundation. What is remarkable about them is that they do always contain say, a quarter, or an eighth, or a sixteenth, or a hundredth part of the truth; and it is this fraction of the truth, put forward as it is in a very clever and suggestive manner which deceives people. The real truth is that the vowel arises from the soul-life, and the consonant out of the perception and imitation of the external object. The human being imitates the external object through the way in which he holds back the stream of the breath with his lips, or gives it shape and form by means of the teeth, tongue and palate. While the consonants are formed in this way, by the fashioning of gestures in the air, the vowel sounds are the channel through which the inner soul-life of the human being streams outwards.

The consonants give plastic form to what is to be expressed.

And in the same way as the single sounds are formed, the single letters, so are sentences also formed, and poetic language becomes actual gesture in the air. Modern poetry, however, shows very clearly how the poet has to struggle against the abstract element in language.

As I have already said, our soul-life does not in any way flow into the words which we speak; we do not enter into the sounds of speech with our inner being. How few of us really experience wonder, amazement, perplexity, or the feeling of self-defence simply in the vowel sounds themselves. How few of us experience the soft, rounded surface of certain objects, the thrusting hammering nature of others, their angular or undulating, their velvety or prickly qualities, as these are expressed by the different consonants. And yet all these things are contained in speech.

If we follow the successive sounds as they occur in a single word, entering into the real nature of this word as it originally arose out of the whole being of man, then we can experience all possible shades of feeling, the ecstasy of joy, the depths of despair; we can experience the ascending and descending of the whole scale of the human emotions, the whole scale of the perception of external things.

All that I have been describing can be conjured up in imaginations, in the same way as speech itself once came forth from the world of imagination. One who has this imaginative vision perceives how the E sound (as in me). always calls up in the soul a certain picture, a picture which expresses the assertion of self and shows how this self-assertion must be expressed through the stretching of the muscles, in the arm for example. Should anyone be able to use his nose in a skilful manner, he could also make an E with his nose! An E can also be shown by the direction of the glance of the eye; but because the arms and hands are the most expressive part of the human body, it is more natural to make an E with the arms and it has a more beautiful effect. But the essential thing is that the stretched, penetrating feeling should really come to expression in E.

If we utter the sound A, (as in mate) and take this out-going stream of the breath as the prototype for the Eurythmic movement, we find that this breath stream reveals itself to our imagination as flowing in two crossed currents. This is how the Eurythmic movement for A is derived. All these movements are just as little arbitrary in their nature as are the sounds of speech, or the tones of music.

There are many people who are inclined to say that they have no wish for anything so hard and fast, that there should be more ways than one of expressing any particular sound in movement. They feel that the movements should arise quite spontaneously out of the human being. If, however, one desires such absolute spontaneity, one should carry this desire into the realm of speech itself, and declare that there should be no German, French, or English language to interfere with the freedom of the human being, but that each individual should feel himself at liberty to express himself by means of other sounds if he should so choose. It would be just as rational to say that the freedom of the human being is hindered through the fact that he must perforce speak English, or some other language.

But the existence of the different languages in no way interferes with human freedom. On the contrary, man could not express beauty in language, if language were not already there to be used by him as an instrument, and in the same way beauty can only be expressed in the movements of Eurythmy through the fact that Eurythmy actually exists. Eurythmy in no way infringes upon human freedom. Such objections really arise from lack of insight.

Thus Eurythmy has come into being as a visible language, using as its instrument the arms and hands, which are undeniably the most expressive part of the whole human organism.

To-day it would really be possible to come to an understanding of these things by purely scientific means. Science, however, although on the right path with regard to much of the knowledge it has acquired, knows about as much of this matter as someone with a veal cutlet on his plate knows about a calf—namely, the most insignificant fraction! Scientists know that the centre of speech lies in the left region of the brain, and that this is connected with what the child acquires for himself by means of movement of the right arm. In the case of left-handed people the centre of speech is situated in the right side of the brain.

One might almost say that the scientist has no knowledge of the calf in its entirety, but is only acquainted with the veal cutlet! Thus he is aware only of the merest fraction of the whole connection between the life-processes in one or other arm and the origin of speech.

The truth is that speech itself arises out of those movements of the human limb system which are held back, and do not come to full expression. There could be no such thing as speech were it not for the fact that, during the natural course of his early development, the child has inherent within him the instinct to move his arms and hands. These movements are held back and become concentrated in the organs of speech; and these organs of speech are in themselves an image of that which seeks outlet in movements of the arms and hands, and in the accompanying movements of the other limbs.

The etheric body—I can, after what you have heard in the morning lectures, (published as The Evolution of Consciousness.) speak to you quite freely about the etheric body—the etheric body never uses the mouth as the vehicle of speech, but invariably makes use of the limb-system. And it is those movements made by the etheric body during speech which are transferred into the physical body. Of course you can, if you choose, speak quite without gesture, even going so far as to stand rigidly still with your hands in your pockets; but in that case your etheric body will gesticulate all the more vigorously, sheerly out of protest!

Thus you can see how, in very truth, Eurythmy is drawn out of the human organisation in just as natural a way as speech itself.

The poet has to fight against the conventionality of speech in order to be able to draw from speech that element which could make of it a way leading to the super-sensible worlds. Thus the poet—if he is a true artist, which cannot be said of most of those people whose business it is to manufacture poems—does not over-emphasise the importance of the prose content of the words he uses. This prose content only provides him with the opportunity for expressing in words his true artistic impulse. Just as his material—the clay or the marble—is not the chief concern of the sculptor, but rather the inspiration which he is striving to embody in form, so, the chief concern of the poet is the embodiment of his poetic inspiration in sounds which are imaginative, plastic and musical.

And it is this artistic element which must be brought out in recitation and declamation.

In our somewhat inartistic age, it is customary in recitation and declamation to lay the chief stress on the prose content of a poem. Indeed, in these days, the mere fact of being able to speak at all is looked upon as sufficient ground for becoming a reciter. But the art of recitation and declamation should rank as highly as the other arts; for in recitation and declamation there is the possibility of treating speech in such a way that the hidden Eurythmy lying within it, the imaginative, plastic, coloured use of words, their music, rhythm and melody, are all brought to expression. When Goethe was rehearsing his rhythmic dramas, he made use of a baton just as if he were the conductor of an orchestra; for he was not so much concerned with the merely prosaic content of the words, but with the bringing out of all that lay, like a hidden Eurythmy, in their construction and use.

Schiller, when writing his most famous poems, paid little heed to the actual sense of the words. For instance he wrote, “Das Lied von der Glocke” (The Song of the Bell), but, as far as the prose content of the words is concerned, he might just as well have written a completely different poem. Schiller first experienced in his soul something which might be described as a vague musical motif, a sort of melody, and into this melody he wove his words, like threaded pearls.

Language is truly poetic only in so far as it is used musically, plastically, or only in so far as it is filled with colour.

Frau Dr. Steiner has given many years to the development of this special side of the art of recitation and declamation. It is her work which has made it possible to bind together into one artistic whole, much in the same way as the various instruments of an orchestra, the picture presented on the stage by the “visible speech” of Eurythmy and with what is expressed through a truly Eurythmic treatment of speech, a truly Eurythmic recitation and declamation. So that, on the one hand, we have the visible speech of Eurythmy, and, on the other hand, that hidden Eurythmy which lies, not in tone-production alone, but in the whole way in which speech and language are treated. As far as the artistic element of poetry is concerned, the point is not that we say: “The bird sings,” but that, paying due regard to what has gone before and to what is to come, we say with enthusiasm, for instance: “The bird sings,” or, again, in a more subdued tone of voice, at a quite different tempo: “The bird sings.” [The reader must imagine the difference of tone which Rudolf Steiner gave to these repetitions of Der Vogel singt.] Everything depends on giving due form and shape to the words and sentences. And it is just this which can be carried over into Eurythmy, into our whole conception and treatment of Eurythmy.

For this reason we must put before ourselves as an ideal this orchestral ensemble, this interplay between the visible art of Eurythmy and the art of recitation and declamation.

Eurythmy cannot be accompanied by the ordinary conventional recitation, which is so well liked to-day. It would be impossible to do Eurythmy to such an accompaniment, because it is the soul-qualities of the human being which must be given expression here, both audibly through speech, and visibly through Eurythmy.

Eurythmy can be accompanied, not only by recitation and declamation, but also by instrumental music. But here it must always be borne in mind that Eurythmy is music translated into movement, and is not dancing in any sense of the word. There is a fundamental difference between Eurythmy and dancing. People, however, often fail to make this distinction when seeing Eurythmy on the stage, owing to the fact that Eurythmy uses as its instrument the human body in motion. I myself know of a journalist—I am not personally acquainted with him, but his articles have been brought to my notice—who, writing on Eurythmy, says: “It cannot be denied that, when one witnesses a demonstration of Eurythmy, the performers on the stage are continually in motion. Eurythmy must, therefore, be looked upon as dancing, and must be judged accordingly.” Now I think it will be admitted that what we have seen here of Tone-Eurythmy, of this visible singing, accompanied as it is by instrumental music, is clearly to be distinguished from ordinary dancing. Tone-Eurythmy is essentially not dancing, but is a singing in movement, movement which can be carried out either by a single performer, or by many together.

Although the movements of the arms and hands may be accompanied and amplified by movements of the other parts of the organism—the legs, for instance, or the head, the nose, ears, what you will—nevertheless these movements should only be used to strengthen the movement of the hands and arms in much the same way that we find means of emphasising and strengthening the spoken word. If we wish to admonish a child we naturally put our reproof into words, but at the same time we assume an expression suitable to the occasion! To do this electively, however, a certain amount of discretion is required, or we run the risk of appearing ridiculous. It is the same with regard to Eurythmy. Movements of a type approaching dancing or mime, when they are added to the essentially Eurythmic movements, are in danger of appearing grotesque; and, if made use of in an exaggerated manner, given an appearance of crudity, even of vulgarity. On the other hand purely Eurythmic movements are the truest means of giving outward and visible expression to all that is contained in the human soul.

That is the essential point—that Eurythmy is visible speech, visible music. One can go even further and maintain that the movements of Eurythmy do actually proceed out of the inner organisation of man. Anyone who says: “As far as I am concerned, speech and music are all-sufficient; there can surely be no need to extend the sphere of art; I, for my part, have not the slightest wish for Eurythmy”;—such a man is, of course, perfectly right from his particular point of view. There is always a certain justification for any opinion, however conventional or pedantic. Why should one not hold such opinions? There is certainly no reason why one should not—none at all; but it cannot be said that such a standpoint shows any really deep artistic feeling and understanding. A truly artistic nature welcomes everything that could possibly serve to widen and enrich the whole field of art.

The materials used in sculpture—the bronze, clay and marble—already exist in nature, and yield themselves up to the sculptor as the medium of his artistic expression; this is also true of colour in the case of the painter. When, however, in addition to all this, the movements of Eurythmy, drawn forth as they have been from the very fount of nature and developed according to her laws—when such movements arise as a means of artistic expression, then enthusiasm burns in the soul of the true artist at the prospect of the whole sphere of art being thus widened and enriched.

From a study of the Eurythmy models or wooden figures, very much can be learned about the individual movements. [Rudolf Steiner here refers to a series of coloured wooden figures illustrating the fundamental Eurythmy gestures.] Here it is only possible to give some indication of what underlies these wooden figures, and of all that can be revealed by them with regard to the nature and character of the various movements. These models are intended to represent the fundamental laws of Eurythmy which are carried over into the actual movements themselves. Every Eurythmic movement may be looked upon as being of a threefold nature; and it is this threefold aspect which is embodied in the models. In the first place there is the movement as such; then there is the feeling which lies within the movement; and lastly there is the character which flows out of the soul-life, and streams into the movement.

It must, however, be understood that these wooden models have been designed in a quite unusual manner. They are in no way intended to be plastic representations of the human form. This comes more within the sphere of the sculptor and the painter. The models are intended to portray the laws of Eurythmy, as these are expressed through the human body. In designing them the point was not in any way to reproduce the human figure in beautiful, plastic form. And, in witnessing a Eurythmy demonstration, anyone who would regard beauty of face as an essential attribute of an Eurythmist, is labouring under a delusion as to the nature of Eurythmy. Whether the Eurythmist is beautiful or not beautiful, young or old, is a matter of no consequence. The whole point is whether the inmost nature of the Eurythmist is carried over into, and expressed through, the plastic form of the movements.

Now if we look at the Eurythmy model for H, for instance, the question might naturally arise: “In what direction is the face turned? Do the eyes look upwards or straight ahead?” But that is not the first thing to be considered. In the first place we have, embodied in the model as a whole, the movement as such, that is to say, the arm movements or the movements of the legs. Secondly, in the draping of the veil, in the way the veil is held, drawn close to the body, or thrown into the air, or allowed to fall again or to fly out in waves—all this gives the opportunity for adding to the more intellectual expression of the soul-life, as this is shown through the movement, another quality of the soul-life, that of feeling.

At the back of the models there is always an indication of what the different colours are intended to represent. In the case of all the models certain places are marked with a third colour, and this is intended to show where the Eurythmist, in carrying out the particular movement, should feel a definite tension of the muscles. This tension can be shown in any part of the body. It may have to be felt in the forehead, for instance, or in the nape of the neck, while in other places the muscles should be left in a state of complete relaxation. The Eurythmist experiences the movements quite differently according to whether they are carried out with relaxed muscles or with the muscles in a state of tension; whether the arm is stretched out more or less passively, or whether there is a conscious tension in the muscles of the arm and hand; whether, when bending, the muscles which are brought into play are stretched and tense, or whether the bending movement leaves the muscles comparatively inactive. Through this consciously experienced tension of the muscles, character is brought into the movement.

In other words: there lies in the whole way in which the movement, as such, is formed, something which might be described as being the expression of the human soul, as manifested through visible speech. The actual spoken words, however, also have nuances of their own, their own special shades of feeling; for instance, fear may be expressed in a sentence, or joy, or delight; all these things can be shown by the Eurythmist in the way in which he or she carries out the movements. The manipulation of the veil—the way in which it floats, the way in which it is allowed to fall—all this provides a means whereby these feelings can be brought to expression in Eurythmy. So we see how the movement, when accompanied by the use of the veil, becomes permeated with feeling, and how, when there is added a conscious tension of the muscles, the movement acquires character as well as feeling. If the Eurythmist is able to experience this tension or relaxation of the muscles in the right way, a corresponding experience will be transmitted to the onlooker, who will himself feel all that lies in the visible speech of Eurythmy as character, feeling and movement.

The whole artistic conception of these models, both as regards their carving and their colouring, is based on the idea of separating the purely Eurythmic element in the human being from those elements which are not so definitely connected with Eurythmy. The moment a Eurythmist becomes conscious of possessing a charming face, in that moment something is introduced into Eurythmy which is completely foreign to its nature; on the other hand, the knowledge of how to make conscious use of the muscles of the face does form an essential part of Eurythmy. For this reason, the fact that many people prefer to see a beautiful Eurythmist on the stage, rather than one who is less beautiful, shows a lack of true artistic judgment. The outward appearance of a human being when not engaged in Eurythmy should not in any way be taken into consideration.

These models, then, have been designed in such a way that they portray the human being only in so far as he reveals himself through the movements of Eurythmy.

It would indeed be well if, in the whole development of art, this principle were to be more generally adopted—I mean the principle of putting on one side everything which does not definitely belong to the sphere of the art in question, everything which cannot be expressed through the medium of this art and which does not strictly come within the range of its possibilities. A distinction should always be made, particularly when dealing with an art such as Eurythmy, which reveals so directly, so truly and so sincerely, the life of the human being in its threefold aspect of body, soul and spirit—a distinction should always be made between what can legitimately be revealed through the medium of any particular art and what does not lie within its true scope.

Whenever I have been asked: “Up to what age can one do Eurythmy?”—my answer has always been: There is no age limit. Eurythmy can be started at the age of three and can be continued up to the age of ninety. The personality can find expression through Eurythmy at each and every period of life, and through Eurythmy the beauty of both youth and age can be revealed.

All that I have said up to this point has reference to Eurythmy purely as an art, and, indeed, it was along purely artistic lines that Eurythmy was developed in the first instance. When Eurythmy was inaugurated in 1912 there was no thought of its developing along any but artistic lines, no thought of bringing it before the world in any other form.

But some little time after the founding of the Waldorf School, it was discovered that Eurythmy can serve as a very important means of education; and we are now in a position to recognise the full significance of Eurythmy from the educational point of view. In the Waldorf School, (The original Waldorf School in Stuttgart of which Steiner was educational director.) Eurythmy has been made a compulsory subject both for boys and girls, right through the school, from the lowest to the highest class; and it has become apparent that what is thus brought to the children as visible speech and music is accepted and absorbed by them in just as natural a way as they absorb spoken language or song in their very early years. The child feels his way quite naturally into the movements of Eurythmy. And, indeed, in comparison with Eurythmy, the other forms of gymnastics have shown themselves to be of a somewhat one-sided nature. For these other kinds of gymnastics bear within them to some extent the materialistic attitude of mind so prevalent in our day. And for this reason they take as their starting point the physical body. Eurythmy takes the physical body into consideration also; but, in the case of Eurythmy, body, soul and spirit work harmoniously together, so that here one has to do with an ensouled and spiritualised form of gymnastics. The child feels this. He feels that each movement that he makes does not arise merely in response to a physical necessity, but that every one of his movements is permeated with a soul and spiritual element, which streams through the arms, and, indeed, through the whole body. The child absorbs Eurythmy into the very depths of his being. The Waldorf School has already been in existence for some years, and the experience lying behind us justified us in saying that in this school unusual attention is paid to the cultivation of initiative, of will—qualities sorely needed by humanity in the present day. This initiative of the will is developed quite remarkably through Eurythmy, when, as in the Waldorf School, it is used as a means of education. One thing, however, must be made perfectly clear, and that is, that the greatest possible misunderstanding would arise, if for one moment it were to be imagined that Eurythmy could be taught in the schools and looked upon as a valuable asset in education, if, at the same time, as an art it were to be neglected and underestimated. Eurythmy must in the first place be looked upon as an art, and in this it differs in no respect from the other arts. And in the same way that the other arts are taught in the schools, but have an independent artistic existence of their own in the world, so Eurythmy also can only be taught in the schools when it is fully recognised as an art and given its proper place within our modern civilisation.

Shortly after the founding of the Waldorf School, a number of doctors having found their way into the Anthroposophical Movement, there arose the practice of medicine from the Anthroposophical point of view. These doctors expressed the urgent wish that the movements of Eurythmy, drawn as they are out of the healthy nature of the human being, and offering to the human being a means of expression suited to his whole organisation—that these movements should be adapted where necessary, and placed at the service of the art of healing. Eurythmy, from its very nature, is ever seeking for outlet through the human being. Anyone who understands the hand, for example, must be aware that it was not formed merely to lie still and be looked upon. The fingers are quite meaningless when they are inactive. They only acquire significance when they seize at things, grasp them, when their passivity is transformed into movement. Their very form reveals the movement inherent within them. The same may be said of the human being as a whole. What we know under the name of Eurythmy is nothing else than the means whereby the human organism can find healthy outlet through movement. So that certain of the movements of Eurythmy, though naturally differing somewhat from the movements which we use in Eurythmy as an art, and having undergone a certain metamorphosis, can be made use of and developed into a Curative Eurythmy. This Curative Eurythmy can be of extreme value in the treatment of illness, and can be applied in those cases where one knows the way in which a certain movement will react upon a certain organ with beneficial results.

In this domain also we have had good results among the children of the Waldorf School. But it is of course necessary that one should possess a true insight into the nature of the child. For instance, a child may have certain weaknesses and be generally in a delicate state of health. Such a child is then given those particular movements likely to assist in the re-establishment of his health. And along these lines we have indeed had the most brilliant results. But this, as also the educational side of Eurythmy, is entirely dependent on the successful development of Eurythmy as an art.

It must frankly be admitted that Eurythmy is still at a very early stage of its development; a beginning, however, has certainly been made, and we are striving to make it ever more and more perfect. There was a time, for instance, when we had not as yet introduced the silent, unaccompanied movement of the Eurythmist at the beginning and end of a poem. Such movement is intended to convey in the first instance an introductory impression, and, in the second, an impression reminiscent of the content of the poem. At that time also there were no effects of light. The lighting in varied tones and colours has not been introduced with a view to illustrating or intensifying any particular situation, but is in itself actually of a Eurythmic nature. The point is not that certain effects of light should correspond with what is taking place on the stage at a given moment, but the whole system of lighting, as this has been developed in Eurythmy, consists of the interplay between one lighting effect and another. Thus there arises a complete system of Eurythmic lighting which bears within it the same character and the same shades of feeling as are being simultaneously expressed on the stage in another way through the movements of the Eurythmists, or the Eurythmist, as the case may be.

And so, as Eurythmy develops and attains to ever greater perfection, very much more will have to be added to the whole picture of Eurythmy as this is presented on the stage, very much will have to be added to all that we can now see when witnessing a Eurythmy demonstration.

I could indeed speak about Eurythmy the whole night through, carrying on this lecture without a break into the lecture of tomorrow morning. I am afraid, however, that my audience would hardly benefit by such a proceeding, and the same certainly applies to any Eurythmists who may be present! The great thing is that all I have said to-day in this introductory lecture will be practically realised for you tomorrow, when you witness the performance; for a practical demonstration is, after all, where art is concerned, of more value than any lecture.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.